NAP

LILY DUFFY

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:12:30 -0400

I HAVE A TWIN HER NAME IS COME BACK

This is not a laxity this is
talk-learning. On a path I blinked
a few times and then what. Nausea.
Excellent bite-reception while
buckling my Indoors Harness, talking shit
to a mirror like, you want
sassy I got sassy and then immediately
more nausea. When I am making
elaborate hand gestures which incorporate
my overnight bag you need to
back up. If someone doesn’t take me
back to the mall in
the next thirty minutes I am going to
actually swallow this animatronic
keychain.

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JOSHUA YOUNG

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:49:09 -0400

SPACE AGE MOM

we time-traveled back into ourselves,
or we told ourselves we could, but when the dust
liquefied, we drank rust-water.
hey, staircase. hey, mother.
the intervention unravels into piano-banging
& empty makers fifths. you want me
to stop all that yelling, but your wrist
shrinks in my palm, & i will retreat into the car.
bothell darkens & in the storage space
i sort through the last couple years—boxes
of glassware, wine, bicycles, bags of hangers—
i attach moments to everything i touch.
in the kitchen you are making microwavable
cake & filling the water jug.

thestorythief.tumblr.com

NATHAN KEMP

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:31:46 -0400

CORN HYBRIDS

We went to Nebraska.
I successfully created
a new corn hybrid
and when I tried to tell
you, you had gone away.

I saw a corn farmer trapped
in his combine harvester
and all I could do was sell
him on the idea of my hybrid.
His legs were covered in blood.

‘Can you call for help?’ he said.
I wanted to go home to you
but I couldn’t find where you
called home. I imagined the lab
filled with cross-breeds, beakers.

You were there once, cutting
your palm open with a smashed
graduated cylinder. I never saw
you again after they took you away.
Are you okay? Are you with me?

It is September and the crop
is almost ready. I peer through my
glasses at the stalks I created.
I see a corn earworm crawling
on a husk and wonder if it’s you.

nathanckemp.wordpress.com

JULES ARCHER

Tue, 07 May 2013 05:33:03 -0400

ONE OF THOSE KIDS

She rents an apartment on Cook Avenue, above a Korean market. During the day, her hair reeks of MSG and seaweed. She only bothers washing it once a week because she likes how it smells. She wraps it up in a towel, turban-style and lets it ferment. The neighbors on her block know her and call her, “ja-gi-ya”, offer her kimchi and rice.

On weekends, she goes to her parents’ house to do laundry. She’s one of those kids. Traipsing back and forth with the basket of washables, plates of leftovers, and un-forwarded mail. She drinks black coffee with her father and practices coin tricks with her mother. They huddle together, over the doily-soaked card table, laughing, trading secrets and swapping silver into palms.

Nights, she rolls her stockings up to knobby knees, stretching the elastic garter tight around her thigh. The snap of it quickens her pulse. It’s not a job, she tells people, it’s a ‘hobby.’ A way to show off her craft to those who appreciate. She chooses them right too; the men in the front row, fingernails chewed down to the quick. On the stage, she bends, a 90-degree angle, flashing pink panties and running her hands down the fronts of her shins. Tonight, the fishnets will leave their little x’s across the white flesh of her naked legs.

She dates them to gauge them. The way they grip her face when going in for a kiss. Never use her first name. She always stays over and sleeps in too late. She likes their 1000-thread sheet count and spa showerheads. She takes the cab fare they leave her in the mornings but walks home instead, passing the money off to the homeless vet on the corner of Cook. On her way back to her apartment, she stops by Mr. Lee’s and he shows her his knots.

He has stopper knots and loop knots but what she’s really interested in are the ones that bind. Tight and taught. She loves the smell of the natural rope too; its musky scent and bristly tendrils that scrape her wrists. The old Korean practices on her, winding the coils around and around, pulling the ends tight. She can never break the bonds. Mr. Lee leans close and laughs, smelling of short rib. He lets her out and lets her keep the rope.

She leaves her bedroom windows open. Waits for it to rain and practices her knots. Fingers flying, she crosses and uncrosses, tucking the working ends under each other, lacing back and forth until she pulls, tightening into a finished, knotted square.

When she gets good she takes them back to her place.

He slaps her ass but she doesn’t giggle. Instead, she crawls out from under the snow bank of comforter. I’m just not a girl at a bar, she says to the man. His eyes get wide when she brings out the rope she keeps under her pillow, coiled up like a snake. Hold still, she says, straddling the man’s waist, I need practice.

The rope’s thick between her fingers.

julesjustwrite.com

I FALL IN LOVE WITH EVERY ATTRACTIVE WOMAN I MEET

Sun, 05 May 2013 23:14:25 -0400

I FALL IN LOVE WITH EVERY ATTRACTIVE WOMAN I MEET BY DILLON J. WELCH

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LEIF HAVEN

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:23:06 -0400

THE CORPSE OF OUR SEPARATE YOUTHS

What do you call a jar of salsa with a thumb in it?
You can call it whatever you want but to me it

only means my wedding night. I wore a dress
made of reeds. We canoed down the burning Susquehanna.

We paddled the corpse of our separate youths into a new life
together. You never mentioned that you were the pigeon man.

Oh my god, look at the air. There isn’t much time
put the reactor core under your shirt. We’ve only got

one chance.

leifhaven.com

NAP 3.3

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:19:46 -0400

NAP 3.3 WITH POETRY AND FICTION BY CEMENT POND, L.L.C., SARAH JEAN GRIMM, KATY GUNN, NICOLAS JAMES HAMPTON, ANNALEESE JOCHEMS, DANIEL SCOTT PARKER, URSULA VILLARREAL-MOURA, & DILLON J. WELCH.

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SARAH JEAN GRIMM

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:20:00 -0400

UNTITLED AGAIN

The sun through your window imitates a Rothko painting I think I saw once. The sun paints in panels too. The sun uses broad brushstrokes. The sun is a plagiarist.

After Rothko, children can’t color rectangles in school the same way any more. Coloring outside the lines is still OK and considered a sign of also thinking outside the lines, but it’s like how after Magritte you start seeing bowler hats everywhere, and men smoking pipes wearing bowler hats, and men smoking pipes wearing bowler hats while eating apples.

Fruit never means just fruit. It almost always means something else. It almost always means sex. And to take a bite of fruit is a violent thing. You can go to prison for enjoying fruit too much.

What I mean to say is, you’re a real peach. You go be a peach and I will be a set of teeth and the sun can be the sun and I will lick you good luck every morning because it’s hard to be a peach out there.

www.sarahjeangrimm.com

THE NAME IS SUGAR

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:42:50 -0400

THE NAME IS SUGAR BY DAVID TOMALOFF

NAP PRINTABLE MICRO CHAPBOOK DOWNLOAD W/ INSTRUCTIONS

NAP presents a downloadable micro print chapbook for you to assemble and read.

CEMENT POND, L.L.C.

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:25:51 -0400

#21- BLUE SUNSHINE

This town made famous by a mass vibration of squash in the field. I have never doubted my life was blessed. You remember the tone that summons the bats, but “[t]here is no way to stop the drum circle without inviting retaliation,” so we dangled our legs over the pit, played games from before the war. “The earth wants to hear some Moon Mullican.” I am proud I said this and will not back down. “Though what’s the point of playing fantastic blues if it can’t include your eyes, the child trapped in the orgone box accumulating an outsized life force?” Once, I tried to live in a temporary shelter in your yard. Cut fox weevils from under my skin with a penknife. You came out to say your bedroom is spectral: there’s a diorama where the Monitor still battles the Merrimac along the rivers of toothpaste, without loss of blood or armor. “The bobcat is still out here, asleep in an iron lung under endless stars.”

#22-TIRE SWING+GASOLINE+CLOUDS

People struggle to believe there’s a voice still trapped in the ice. They heard someone was running topless down the street, but are disappointed it’s me. You have a secret “but it’s not about me; it’s about me getting from one story to another.” Anyway, it works. A raven lands on your shoulder and no one asks if it’s your familiar. The houses are turning dark. “Spengler said the west is doomed, but what about the peasant dances, the guys selling stereos out of car trunks?” We survived the night, stepping over working girls blindfolded on the lawn. They were showing a movie on a bedsheet: a fleshy periscope surfaces on Killer Lake, blinks at us, and disappears. “No name for what follows, just glottal sighs, the audience holding hands.” “On our street,” you said “the truth is not a fog, but steam from coins burning in the fountain.” We sit through long flashes of silence, then a beautiful woman dressed as Melville begins talking about the sea.

cement.pond.llc@gmail.com

NICOLAS JAMES HAMPTON

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:12:27 -0400

YOUR IDEA OF COMMUNICATION IS SAILING TO THE SOUND OF NO ONE DRIVING AWAY

And now, for my next trick, I will play back the punctuation you built in a bottle while
drunk and broken on a model gravel driveway I left as a tiny oceanliner’s maiden voyage
leaves you and that bottle in your wild hand to sail to some deserted island of lost memories

and perhaps entertaining such running recursive thoughts in writing is a writer’s attempt
at avoiding writing, only leaving the Ars Unpoetica to cryptically underdetail disamibiguities
as though the only truth in any sharp piece of art is the truth that art can’t tell you, truthfully

reaching through this bottleneck with cold hooks on long rods, dressing you in tornness
and jeans and a ragged tank top, topping your small plastic figure off with a miniature bottle
of the same bottle of El Toro you’re drowning in, the same bottle I built this diorama in

as my tweezers reach inside again, placing a grain of sand for each and every rock
of gravel in this speck-like facsimile of what used to be our driveway, your driveway, or
some guy’s driveway we rented from somebody, that driveway you screamed couldn’t be

my fucking driveway, and as these statements and the Droste effect are cheap products of
vanity, creations using the same careful hooks and cold rods as their creators, I place myself
next to you in a badass leather jacket with my leg halfway over the hog for posterity

because, in reality, I was really wearing skinny jeans with a matching jacket and
never have I ever owned a motorcycle, but I did once, when I was younger, kinda
make a moped look the same as a sorta small Harley if seen with a slight bent, like a ship

inside a bottle breaking, or a diorama of Hiroshima built into the hanger of Enola Gay,
or a gift shoppe you have to walk through to exit Macy’s, or some other Russian doll type
emptiness we sell in America where the corporations eat their own tails and I digress

from my digressions shattered in these bottles and back to the bottle swinging in your hand
while wondering what else that bottle’s breaking, what titanic cracks running through it and
your body, what has left its unsinkable across sea gravel lining your belly, what recursive art

commemorates leaving, what genetic memories don’t ask or speak but scream symphonies
of whimpering, a choir of cribs dreaming of careers in interior designing a better broken home
as his tires peel out on a thousand tiny shards of driveway and glittering split-leveled bottles

for little soprano girls are barely heard in the back of the bottle in your hand, and funny how
I echo in this bottle belonging to you dad, funny how I can’t recall this beginning, funny how
snakes were present before we entered eden, and funny who we find coiled before the quince

drops a mild disagreement over all those soon to be global thermal nuclear gift shops and all
Barbies cloister inside themselves as Kens leave them in Macy’s with nothing and I, inside all
these bottles, drop this bottle and somewhere in Mexico the whole goddamn El Toro Factory

shatters into a thousand tiny plastic red hats and long rods with tiny hooks pull out of
our world broken where a bomb dropped and we watch a thousand paper cranes unfolding
God’s self-consuming hand finally pouring our tiny ship of ghosts into a giant sea. Tada!

njhampton.weebly.com

KATY GUNN

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:43:00 -0400

BARRETTE

Scout Helena coughs up river pebbles. They glisten with river slime and body slime in her hands. Body slime as some of us know is called mucous. A call is made for Scouts who display the Junior First Aid badge. Is it bleeding? Have we applied pressure? Is the wound dirty with sticks or mud? It is dirty with stupid pebbles, says the head First Aid Scout Percelle. It is not a nice thing to say. The situation shows bad emotional and physical health within the Troop, which is two strikes for everybody.

In the daily arguments, six Junior Scouts break the Girl Scout Law before Scout Angela, that Scout voted most likely to lead an expedition, throws her largest ribbon barrette on the ground in protest and says ‘everybody’ has the stupidest nose and we should have ‘purified’ the water.

PERMISSION

On the open eyes hike Scout Laurie finds a wedding ring. Scout Bella finds twelve wine cooler bottles without caps and a Virginia Slims box without Virginia Slims. It is too bad Scout Bella did not find the bottle caps, or we could have made magnets, belts, bracelets, sculptures, or earrings to wear with our guardians’ permission.

Scouts Ruthie and Shelley find a plastic bag full of Get Moving! badges with only the Camper badges already earned. Brownie Scout Shelley climbs up a tree with the bag in her teeth because she wants a little respect around here. It is a tough life in the wilderness and nobody gets everything they want! we shout up the tree. Scout Bella yells that Scout Shelley should stop being a damn bitch, but we all agree that was a little out of line and Scout Bella has to stand on a pine stump for five minutes with her arms horizontal. She gets an Independence badge just like everybody else when we knock the bag down, though, because it is a damn tough life and we all deserve a taste of the sauce.

katygunn.blogspot.com

URSULA VILLARREAL-MOURA

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 23:49:00 -0400

DAILY DICTIONARIES

Over tacos, Zach tells us he won the 7^th grade spelling bee with lingerie. That word catapulted him from picked-on pipsqueak to winner extraordinaire. His wife bristles a little at his history, raking a metal fork up and down her napkin like she’s revving up a wind-up car.

Zach continues painting the picture. He was wearing oiled cowboy boots and emerald green Girbaud jeans as he stood in front of the student body, trembling, spelling. While his tattooed hands gesticulate in excitement, I remember my own Girbauds, purchased at Dillard’s and brought home in a crinkly brown bag.

Before the win, Zach says he was trailer park trash, but his mom insisted people would respect them if he won. She quizzed him daily with dictionaries until he could spell hundreds of words. At their kitchen table, he prepared for the verbal tsunami, knee-high in words like rhinestone, maneuver, handkerchief, encyclopedia, and chauffeur.

When the local newspaper interviewed him afterward, asking what it felt like to win, he crunches a taco shell and says he called the entire ordeal euphoric. For weeks he bargained in championship jargon, but no one at school dared shit-talk him. No adolescent arms launched rocks at his family’s trailer home.

@Ursulaofthebook

DANIEL SCOTT PARKER

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:55:00 -0400

SLEEPING BEAUTY [FULL MOVIE] IS AVAILABLE AT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_qf8IPTq0o

You are swimming in a swimming pool deep in the woods.
You have been underwater for years. You have been
underwater for so many years that your daughter has grown
up, married Freddie Prinze, Jr., and moved to Akron to open
an IKEA. All the walls of the pool are made of glass. When
you swim close to one, you can see your reflection. That’s
when you see someone behind you in a swimming pool next
door, because there are no trees in these woods, there are
only swimming pools. You swim to the other side and see
that it is an old lady. ‘I need to talk to you,’ you try and say to
her through the glass, but she is dead. ‘What can you tell me
about souls?’ you ask, inspecting your fingertips for wrinkles.
When I pull you up out of the water, it’s like you don’t even
recognize me. ’What the hell are you doing?!’ you scream.
‘It was never supposed to happen like this,’ I say.

danielsparker.tumblr.com

IF THERE IS TO BE A ZEITGEIST GOING FORWARD, I IMAGINE IT TO BE FOCUSED ON ATTEMPTS AT IMMORTALITY, AND THE WAYS WE ERASE OURSELVES FOR IMMORTALITY, AND THE WAYS WE RECORD OURSELVES RECORDING OURSELVES

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:09:33 -0400

IF THERE IS TO BE A ZEITGEIST GOING FORWARD, I IMAGINE IT TO BE FOCUSED ON ATTEMPTS AT IMMORTALITY, AND THE WAYS WE ERASE OURSELVES FOR IMMORTALITY, AND THE WAYS WE RECORD OURSELVES RECORDING OURSELVES

A CORRESPONDENCE

BY JAMES TADD ADCOX & ROBERT KLOSS

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ANNALEESE JOCHEMS

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:59:00 -0400

WHEN I RUN I AM A WILD CONFUSED GOOSE

my nose does not comply with any kind of symmetry and when i smile
my face becomes a pizza of nose and yellow teeth.

if you pick off and throw away the nose
all you’re left with is teeth,
sorry

if there were rose petals
i would squash them,
but that’s irrelevant because there are no rose petals.

i am a goose with my feet on fire.
i am in the ocean, in the bog and in the forest,
i will trape mud all through your house.

i am the weeds suffocating your garden.
i am the dancing of the deranged.

this is not about skin that feels like talcum powder
because talcum powder is not skin.

this is how much blood can rush to a person’s head in thirty seconds.

annaleesej@hotmail.co.nz

DILLON J. WELCH

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 23:32:50 -0400

YAHOO ANSWERS TELLS ME EVERYTHING WILL PROBABLY BE OKAY

This morning I pricked the center
of my palm on a bent nail, watched a small
track of blood run through a smaller
crack in my hand like a snake in a skinny
trench. Tadd, 15, from Texas
says he stepped on shattered glass
when he was sinking
his feet into mud at the lake. He says it stung
for a minute, then the pain subsided.
I’m wondering how long it takes
for a supernova to burn
out, & Tadd is sitting in some mud
in his memories & worrying
about soles. Maria
from Vermont thinks that pain
is just pent up
kinetic energy. She thinks anguish
is hallucination, thinks ‘fuck it &
strap a bandage on that bitch.’
Tadd remembers a time
when he was six & singing
karaoke to his dog. He says his dog
could never really understand the lyrics
but loved to listen anyway. His ears
would perk up like hoisted
flags. Like the raised blades
of a disposable razor. Like
a little sailboat expanding
its collapsed body, saying ‘hello wind, hello
sun, hello shards
of glass beneath mud.’

YAHOO ANSWERS EXPECTS NOTHING, GETS NOTHING IN RETURN

BeanMama22 asks the internet
if a stillborn baby can feel itself dying
before its death. She says she needs
to know, can’t sleep at night thinking that
the lump in her gut knew of shared
pain, communal psychosis, a staggered
set of breaths & the stagnant
heart of another. BeanMama22
is clutching to the paneling on each side
of the webpage. She sees ads for electronic
cigarettes & facial scrubs. She pulls
another clump of hair from the base
of her scalp. Tim from Los Angeles
says that stillborns experience next
to nothing before death, that their bodies
are merely vessels of little electrical
firings. He surrounds the phrase
with quotation marks:
“little electrical firings.”
BeanMama22 remembers a still
life painting she saw when she lived
in the city. She remembers the peach walls
of a nursery, a cradle & mobile—all calm
& unmoving. She imagines sitting
on the floor in that room, the carpet
meshing to meet the shape
of her weight. ‘There’s meaning
in this,’ she thinks, as she pushes
the cradle with the base
of her knuckles.

YAHOO ANSWERS EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLOOD & WINE

“How do you get blood stains out of curtains?”
- Mike, 44, Kansas

Mike, 44, from Kansas says he was out for a bite
with his wife. He says the wait wasn’t too long &
the surf & turf was subpar. He says it was oily—
the surf—& that last time he checked, fish wasn’t
supposed to be oily. Mike, 44, from Kansas says
that the drive home was short, says they took
a back road from the restaurant, a slight right
at the laundromat. He says he took a handful
of dinner mints because he likes to keep them
in a bowl on the counter at home. He says that
one time,
his wife suggested they buy a bag
of dinner mints from the grocers. He says she
doesn’t suggest much anymore.
Mike, 44,
from Kansas thinks that red meat is for men,
but seafood is for gentlemen. He thinks that
the ocean’s spritz can reach as far inland
as it wants, that geographical limitations
don’t exist & that people only cite them
because they’re too lazy to make a break
for the nearest coast.
Mike’s wife told him
once that Cleveland is closer than Daytona.
She said that it’s nice there, in Cleveland. She said
her family has lived there for years & that she’d
love to see her old house, the knots in the wooden
steps, the screened-in porch where scraps of limp
moths lie in compliance.

When Mike, 44, from Kansas asks for a glass
of red wine, he pictures the beaches & the sun
peeling his skin back,
inch
by inch.

ratrapss.tumblr.com

TWILIGHT ZONE BY CAROLYN DECARLO & JACKSON NIEUWLAND

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 23:02:51 -0400

TWILIGHT ZONE BY CAROLYN DECARLO & JACKSON NIEUWLAND

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NAP 3.2

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:39:00 -0400

POETRY AND FICTION BY CASSANDRA DE ALBA, ZOE DZUNKO, CHRIS EMSLIE, ANNIE HARTNETT, MARK SEIDL & LAURA STRAUB.

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LAURA STRAUB

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:29:23 -0400

KE$HA, I HOPE YOUR SKULL IS MADE OF SUGAR

When Ke$ha comes to your home, she brings you homemade salted caramels delicately portioned and individually wrapped in wax paper. They are so beyond professional in appearance you will think twice about asking her where she bought them. But Ke$ha didn’t buy them, she made them for you. Other things that Ke$ha has made include potato chip caramel bars, banana pudding cups (with toffee crumbs), brownies with vanilla fudge in the middle, shortbread cups filled with orange pudding and topped with chocolate, and a deep dish chocolate chip cookie pie. Ke$ha could make any cookie of the Girl Scout’s menagerie. You are constantly amazed by Ke$ha’s small frame surrounded by so many confections. You are filled with envy of her unicorn hair. You think that maybe if Keebler elves exist they wouldn’t be elves at all, but instead just one Ke$ha in a tree humming love songs to herself mixing shortbread dough with a large wooden spoon.

laurastraub.virb.com