f o r e w o r d




Issue XVI: Spill

Careful, don't drop this six-pack.

Two. This issue inducts neophytes into the spread cabal: Justin Parinello and Liz Worth. Just out of his teens of writing, publishing, and doing the rounds of open mic gigs, Parinello infuses this recital chamber with an otherwise seasoned soul's notices. Liz Worth emerges here from the agitations of her bad dreams, quite composed rather to tell all about it in clinically sharp poetic cogitations.

Plus two. Next up are already card-carrying spreadniks: Irene Koronas and Michael Paul-Anthony. Irene Koronas's pieces have twice before registered—on spread xi (score) and spread vii (coil)—in this subterranean art and lit folio in progress, transmitting this time around a slap at the poetic trade. In this spread, Paul-Anthony adds to his intitial brooding prose offering---on spread xv (hit)---a trim verse entry, although no less heavy on self-vetting to overcome the humdrum

Finally, just slipped in the rogue's gallery are the usual gruesome twosome: Rosendo M. Makabali and Titus Toledo. Makabali, ever the compliant, uncomplaining accomplice or snitch, recites his pacific code of secrecy or foil to a testimony. While Toledo, in verse noir, spills the beans to taste, stirring a psycho murder plot (pot) as required, right down to eschewing the howl for a hardboiled scowl.



















p o e t r y




Justin Parrinello


Parisian Cerebrum

Her shoulders, when viewed through an infrared lens,
mimicked the frail battle shimmy of savage devilfish
swindlers two-fold; tempting but disposable,
whimsical with weakness, and furious like bleeding cuticles on a dying shrine carpenter.
Dancing illegally and fed sinking teeth and circular saw secretions with cannibals,
we were left suffering to our own devices,
stained in charming marble nurseries by the reflective river currents
of mercurial transcendence and self-enlightenment.
We were clothed by the Parisian sun---scintillating satisfaction,
warmth from embrace, divine and inerrant.
Loosening her sandals with rose water, she drew an orgasmic
bath where she revealed to me the nature of her scales and the
penalty for denying the thick leech costumes of sensory deprivation.
Death in the afternoon
was always suitable, and we'd shamble
effortlessly unto bearded-Mary mezzanines, perching against
elderly banisters unctuous with sulfur and petrol from Molotov cocktails.
We'd spend our mornings overlooking intersections overloaded with possessed life-contestants,
rabid for parking spaces and monitored overhead like squirming
infants by officious overlord executives---sucking for dear life the vaporous aura of vintage macanudos.
Good food fulfilling free love for drama queens, free of consequence,
plunderers took turns playfully nibbling the wrinkled gizzards of disintegrating coffin-dodgers.
My sisters would draw straws to have at the hog-tying of dimpled
cheesecake dolls, the Cadillac of kidnap, and 5th grade procreation.
Fat on plasma in July, we were knee deep in the open sore syndrome of blackmail,
Trading shark tank pyrotechnics for kissing booths...
Unconcerned with petty repercussions, I withdrew from the dharma façade
of protests and excrement and fastened my beloved valentine
in soft brown rope. Stuck in a trunk, pleading in common decibels,
all the while makeshift gags disguised selfless saboteurs self-mutilating.
She would carry on ordinarily, a stunning mutt with long wasp legs
sheathed in the shadow of nylon fibers; rendered as useless as her
voice in the lame shore of bastard percussion.
All the while makeshift gags disguised the delicious skills of freckled jailbait,
pinkish with spunk and puckish with minion pubescence.
The scalpel ballet was revisited in ether dreams in the form of oozing pineal glands,
and the convulsion of eyelids engaged in the hollow optic mantra of our forefathers.
The wretched dessert nap left us feeling fatigued with scabbed knees,
betwixt the finer flesh of fractured thighs and languid human windmills.
Alas! Balloon tanks against raw nerves, sharpened slits gasping to the
hum of amphibian banter.
Serpentine nails slither to bind my shallow meat
like the rod of Hermes on a Kaleidoscope holiday;
all the while makeshift gags disguise the parisian cerebrum lurking
in sane but visceral sight.


Dress Up Like Mommy Day

All in black plastic trash bags!
Fried chicken eating
strings around each tooth pulling,
doll feeding,
sneezing,
sniffling,
shadow puppets piece of mind.
In black plastic trash bags floating up the beck between the tawny hemispheres of your head.
Norman Rockwell wants his mind's-eye's back!
Gift-wrapped and captivating ears, nose, and throat.
Uranian presence at birth supposedly denotes you had postnasal drip while probing through a social simulation of a very secretive history where you were somebody feared and/or loved by the consumer public of the 7th planet from the sun.
Got driver-ant's in your sugar cereals---skuzzy stratospheric rangers despoiling prefab constellations,
it's all part of your persistent doodling alien panoramas of imaginary worlds.
Look at your ripped jeans, designer haircut, gym pass, emergency taurine soft-drinks...
No tulips worth your time will grace anyone of interest's gardens.
All hip with your 8-pack, goddamn parkour---Social Engineer!
Christmas strings bring out all your chiseled features in anomalous bicycle traffic.
Gridlocked baby-boomer's daft have got a four pack of smart drinks, they'll work late into the night.
Middle sex-educated pain in the ass with your soy threads and solar-powered mailbag.
Drops of cherry codeine in this swollen vanilla malt;
Gargling peroxide in dumb Ouranos sunrise-to-sunset, winter kill in vaulted sky
('s the ultimate high.)
Sore throat and halitosis don't mind, calamine along your stocky forearms and over the tops of your slippery
jailbird's hands... There's so much sumac where the pharmies go.
Depending upon the population density---others avoid, you know you're their whore!
Sprockets in the freewheel; engine driven rearing up and boxing your core with its front paws.
We all got company cars, stamped pens, decals, drug samples, bumper stickers,
and a directional prosthesis modification, so we might attempt to spider-walk up the walls.
It was solacing to know that if we got our limbs caught in a trunk latch or trash compacter
we could detach them like spare-part-puzzle pieces with a joint manipulation.
"How much can you bench?!"
Distended,
Becalmed,
Fainthearted,
Balmy inside,
Your fragile little boy-like body beneath the shambles of a school desk during a fire drill.
"How strong are you?"
Trilled some 9-foot siafu spewing groundward from the bile hydrants to take back what was always theirs.
We'll surely pay the price tonight cause someone careless lost the drain plugs!
I dropped a goldenrod tablet of antacid into the chipped crystal community drinking receptacle.
It was full to the rim at the time with room temperature pickling brine,
all the brutes went boozing in the pools we used to baptize in.
I put on some fire engine red peep-toe platform pumps,
followed by an ultra-smooth seamless low-rise scalloped thong with hearts and halos.
Brand new cross-braced garters clasping my somber ruffle-top thigh-highs.
I wore a bubblegum pink, 100% cotton baby doll camisole over a supernatural brassiere
(both of which bunny-hugged my hairy manly chest as if there were no tomorrow).
You got the nitty-gritty on dress up like mommy day,
playing footsy in the hot tub is just prefect for the Wednesday night fever.
In a "Hole In Juan," I am Jehovah!
Salt and pepper hair introducing the lobe.
From behind the divider, she threw over the edge of the rice-paper screen each article of clothing in chronological order.
Pant suit, then lingerie, then skin, muscle tissue...
Her circulatory system matched the curtains and added a certain ambiance that would put Martha Stewart to shame.
Beatniks reciting Man-gina Monologues in interzone coffee shops or not,
Evian spelt backwards is still naïve.


Widow

Single Monday morning, single mother motor-oiled.
Swapping scrambled eggs, careful and attentive love,
the big cracked coffeepot, newspaper inked semicolon
and the words "they said nothing before the" on her thumb.
45 years young and it's finally promising to give you what you've wanted.
Furthest reaches, louder echoes for indentured servitude.
God what you wouldn't do for a baby's lips around your left and idle nipple.
All the things we do to kill the time while the rain is pouring down.


—Justin Parrinello is nineteen years old and has been writing for about eight years under the pseudonym Ludovico De Medici. In February of 2004 he began reading his work publicly at open-microphones and getting features around the Hudson Valley area in New York State. Parrinello has self-published many books, the latest of which, entitled Bodies/Galimatias, he released March 3rd, 2008. He hosts Poetry Night at the Muddy Cup Coffeehouse in Poughkeepsie, New York every 4th Friday of the month. He has never won a major award or contest, but is very dedicated to the craft of poetry. In 2007 he established the Type-Kallitri Artisans Guild to unite unusual under-the-radar visual and literary artists in the interest of creative pursuits. He often refers to his work as "Avant-Garde Surrealist Yonderboy Verse," or something like that.










Liz Worth


. Sequence Of Equation

    i.

Parasitical, it slid under the membranes
Of my scalp, left a slow cold sludge:
The coating of nausea.
This is how I wake
To the metallic taste of nightmares
Rimming my lips,
Like I've been licking knives,
Except that my skin should be in spirals
When instead it's only heavy,
Hungover from blades between bones.
Hand to hair, give it a tug,
Pull out the lethargy and escape from the
Soft confines of the sheets.
Scrape back the morning with
Muted screams tattoed to lids of fire.
Gag and spit
Before the emergence of contractions
Across the pupils.

    ii.

The gases of a dead dream are composed of
This embryonic equation:
(MAJOR Arcana) x 3 : (minor Arcana) = 9fits9fits9fits.
They enter the skull through
Cerebral hemorrhages, grow translucent legs
By the thousands, with dull amber eyes of diviners
That memorize these labyrinthine dispersions.
Whether this is a state of being
Is a debate that goes like this:
It's tepid stress and leaves
The inside of the cheek with a taste
Only for bile.
This neural din is
A solar consciousness,
The sundering of all points of corrosion.

    iii.

(dream sequence, exhibit A.)
Your mouth: an intestinal cavity.

    iv.

Crippled, this innate filth
Covers the caffeine membranes, scars like stains
That make up the skeletal arsenal
Of this cerebellum, which I
Poke holes through with all those liquids
That glint like a dragon's eye and tranquilize,
Cauterize with organized inversions.
These arterial branches are
Test patterns, the schema of adorning myself
With remnants of the dead,
Charting this operation interlaced with symmetry.
The subconscious fights to abate, satiate.

    v.

(dream sequence, exhibit B.)
This is the pressure of what's inside.


—Liz Worth writes about her nightmares. Sometimes she writes about other things, too. In 2008, she completed the forthcoming oral history Treat Me Like Dirt, which documents the beginnings of the Toronto punk scene. It made her realize she does not want to live in the future.












Irene Koronas


write by numbers

1

do it yourself kits
anyone can write---just pick up a pen
turn on the computer
self-help poetry
writing is the path to recovery
no need for discipline, hours
years, devotee, this pursuit
can be yours in just a matter of days

2

concerned with immortality?
here is a host of discoveries
we can train you to be a poet
through books and images
what we believe beauty is
is often difficult
to ascertain
your own opinion
your own view point
let us help you
just scan the information below
for the correct subject
and in the second column
choose from the words listed
the banal reflections:
mountains
flowers
people

3

no quick pity to wipe away excuses
the lingering singe of before
all the above is yours for just 2,304 dollars
ladies and gentlemen, we boastfully
sell the best kit ever assembled


—Irene Koronas is a US-based multimedia artist who writes poetry and essays after hours of earning money doing something else.












Michael Paul-Anthony


Sleepless Night & Living Bad Dreams

Here in this basement I try to write a song.
Remember who I am, and something went wrong .

Here, memories float like plankton in an endless sea,
Unbending horizons giving depth to the yet to be.

Fortune telling ghosts and holy hosts;
The blood on my palms I fear the most.

In this plentiful land I have no abundance;
The worth and excitment are reduced to redundance.

My pimpled face swells unmercifully red;
One must quiet down the scatter in the head.

Down here the weight of life is so real,
I would like to lie down untill my next meal.

Do you know what it's like to recoil from time?
To feel the burden of freedom and all that is mine ?

With no one to tell me, "You are my love"?
Nay, that word is too deceitful.

These basement noises
Are keeping me up.

But I am not so weak that I cannot stand alone;
And I need not rely on someone to phone.

Yet, I cannot sit still, so I pick up a pen---
I write for my sake and I'll do it again.


—Michael Paul-Anthony hails from Canada. He might be happy to read emails sent to amajominor@yahoo.com.ca












Rosendo M. Makabali


Accomplice

I may seem inanimate to you
The less of me to disparage, eh?
Proceed with what it is you are at
Or up to, I am not about to
Squeak or squeal; you will find no better
Witness, I am as dull as they come
Just let me sleep through a perfect crime


—Rosendo M. Makabali laments the impending demise of geocities and, along with it, the mass extermination of splendid thousands of free-hosted lit and art websites.












Titus Toledo


Luna C Major

They never found the bodies because,
according to him, he ate them all.

They never found the bones of the bodies he said he ate because,
according to him, the dog ate them.

They never found the dog who, according to him,
ate the bones of the bodies he said he ate because

he said he ate the "poor little thing."

He said.

But they did find the dog, and inside the dog, they found his ring.


—Titus Toledo is author of Mantra.X, among other precarities. As of this writing, he digs crispy begukan, code art, semiotics, guerrilla marketing, and Slaraffenland (in that order).