Our rapid fire expose of outsider writer talent! A rapidly rotating lit-zeen of poetry, prose and more! For general questions, queries etc, contact our Little John of the lit world , Pat King.
Matthew Dickman is a poet in rare company. He has actually been published in The New Yorker. But today Matthew is most excited to start a new job as a prep cook. A job that includes health insurance!
ROMA
Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, you know, the way bodies do after spending the afternoon having sex on an old couch while responsible people are suffering with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries. He had that look vegetables get in really nice grocery stores where the tomatoes aren’t just red they’re goddamn red! He was like that. Like a glowing, off-the-vine-Roma sitting in his living room picking pineapple off a Hawaiian pizza and telling me about his father who was a real mother fucker. I ask him if he still loved his dad, or if he loved him more now that he is dead. Sure, he says, I love anything that’s dead. Someone’s hand floats up onto the beach while the body is still lost below the current, a vase of lilacs turned brown, the black archipelago of mourners marching up the hill. My neighbor is there to greet each of them with a box of chocolates and a barbershop quartet in the background. When my father died, he says opening a beer, he was no longer my father. He was no longer a man. It’s easy to love things when they’re powerless, like children and goldfish. This is the way with enlightened people. They say things that are so infuriatingly simple when the world is not. So I put down my Pepsi and pull out the big card. What about Hitler? I ask. You can’t love Hitler! My neighbor puts a piece of pineapple on his tongue like a sacrament, sucks the juice out of it, chews it up, then turns his head slow like a cloud and says I can love anybody I feel like loving. And I say that’s ridiculous. And he says what’s ridiculous is that you don’t. And there he is again, shining in the grocery store, pulling the bow off the heart-shaped candies and putting one softly into his father’s mouth.
Although we at The Guild of Outsider Writers do not consider ourselves to be publishers, and although we do not consider our website to be a zine, we do enjoy featuring authors from time to time.
We recently opened poetry submissions. Three of our editors reviewed each entry, and these are the best of the offering we received. I hope you will enjoy them as much as we do.
Giddy nomad with hidden word diamonds under his enchanted wrap, A smile from madness and joy as blue as eyes, as blue as glass as blue as skies, as green as mystic shroud and tattered needles tipping the inkwell of a daydream.
(Life Sketches in Blue; Chapter I: Since Adam's Fall)
It is time to raise the knife: to let run the blood of the hare warm from throat over clenching hand and down to thirsting chill spring earth below.
It is her time, and our time to honor her: Eostre, whose name in Northumbria is Eastre, true goddess of this equinox.
Unto her, now, this wicked and most holy day, robbed and vandaled from her by fool, foreign, funereal cult, set in sin against her and all that is sacred, ordained, and good.
Unto her, now, this wicked and most holy day, reclaimed and resurrected.
What is it with you people who don’t understand the senseless slaughter of animals? What is it with you people who don’t want to wear fur? I want to fuck you in fur. Kill me a Kennedy; that’s my idea of foreplay. Bring me his fucking pig-faced mick head on a silver platter- No, better yet: Aynsley makes these plates, 22-karat gold and blue Cobalt- Fuck the silver; bring me his head on one of those. Wear your diamond-seamed stockings, special shoes from Brazil. I’ll see you there. I’ll see you there.
I, with a knife to the throat of Cybele, lie beneath the sky of spring, awaiting night and the sapphire light of stars whose birth was hers, my mother’s, own. Her eyes are unafraid, as I feared they would be; and the tide of her breath, which was once my own, within the April of her breast and the April of her neck, governs more than does my hand the stillness of the blade; and her blood is my blood, and the blade is the blade of that which is between us, alone, and in the end governed neither by hand nor by breath but only by what the sapphire light of this her evening has ordained.
Nick Tosches is the author of books and of “breath from dead places”. He has written for Creem, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Penthouse, Playboy, and many other publications. He lives in what used to be New York City.
The poems I, WITH A KNIFE TO THE THROAT OF CYBELE and MY KIND OF LOVING have been taken from CHALDEA and I DIG GIRLS, (CUZ Editions 1998). Both titles can be heard on BLUE EYES AND EXIT WOUNDS, the author’s Spoken Word CD collaboration with Hubert Selby, Jr. You may learn more of Nick Tosches and his collection of work via MYSPACE and his WEBSITE.
-Melissa Hansen
Books by Nick Tosches (but not limited to):
COUNTRY (1977) HELLFIRE (1982) UNSUNG HEROES OF ROCK 'N' ROLL (1984) POWER ON EARTH (1986) CUT NUMBERS (1988) DINO: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992) TRINITIES (1994) CHALDEA (1999) THE DEVIL AND SONNY LISTON (2000) THE NICK TOSCHES READER (2000) WHERE DEAD VOICES GATHER (2001) THE LAST OPIUM DEN (2002) IN THE HAND OF DANTE (2002)
Spoken Word & Music:
BLUE EYES AND EXIT WOUNDS (1998) Spoken Word CD w/Hubert Selby, Jr.
NICK & HOMER (1998) Music CD w/Homer Henderson FUCKTHELIVINGFUCKTHEDEAD (2004) Spoken Word and Music CD Track “WILD LEAVES” w/Patti Smith FOR THE TAKING (2006) Spoken Word and Music CD
Click below to learn more about OW's first book and the winner of the Jack Micheline Memorial Award.
About OW!
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