Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Painted Bride Quarterly

We kick off this episode with some riffing on Hallmark movies and a suspension of Jason’s voting rights. No worries, though! The two poems under discussion are by a former student of Jason’s and it comes clear pretty quickly that we’re all fans. Don’t listen to this episode for the suspense, but for the delicious delve into narrative possibility and how poetry is wonderfully suited to keeping the door open long after a poem ends. Indented lineation and how it can affect a poem’s pacing gets some attention, as does the sensory tease of wonderfully selected symbolism and imagery. We also touch on the implication of the reader in a poem where the speaker is still working things out. In this film-tinged discussion, Kathy reminds us that a sweet ending can hit the spot, Sam confesses to thinking a lot about “Baby Boom”, Dagne owns up to seeing Raiders of the Lost Art eleven times when it was first released, Jason pays homage to Diane Keaton and Liza Minelli, and Isabel poses a question that underscores our theme of narrative possibility.
 
Some links we think you’ll like:
Whisky & Rum in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ThirstMag.com
How Baby Boom Set the Template for Future Movies About Working Mothers, Vulture
 
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Samantha Neugebauer, Isabel Petry, Dagne Forrest
 

 
Georgia M. Brodsky is a recent graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives south of Boston, near the ocean, with her partner and their daughter.
 
The Tavern
 
After I cracked the 6-ball off the table,
he offered to teach me
to drive stick in the parking lot.
 
Before: whiskey
in no-one’s-joking-sized
shot glasses, the kind
 
the cool girl in Indiana Jones throws back
then stacks like a champ
while men fall off their stools
 
around her. Heavy glasses.
No windows. Just the door
to the lot, to the harbor
 
eventually, where earlier that day
I’d seen a girl my age
with a pocketknife, cleaning a fish.
 
She’d plucked the eyes out,
let them sit
on the ground staring up
 
like a figment in Charlie Kaufman’s
dreams. Every story is a version
of something else.
 
I followed him to his car. I didn’t.
I laughed and touched his arm. I balled
my hands into fists. My body
 
felt something was wrong. I felt
nothing. It always turns out alright
in the end. It never does.
 
I’m the girl who climbed
into the truck and the one
who got home safe. I taught myself
 
how to drive stick and how to run
the table. I’m the girl in the harbor.
All eyes.
 
At the Raw Bar, Housing Three Dozen Oysters for our Eighth Anniversary
 
We’re not in it for the sex,
if that’s what you’re thinking.
And besides, I’m not the kind
of person who shucks and tells.
That was a joke. But it’s exactly
what I’m talking about.
I’m the kind who makes jokes
when something matters too much.
 
We’re not in it for the sex.
It’s more about what happens
after the shell unlatches:
brine, salt, alive, pulling us in
by the shirt, shaking us
and putting us down as if
tentacles had launched out
from under the ice.
 
That wasn’t a metaphor
for our relationship. I’m honest
to God talking about oysters:
the knock-back, the vinegar zip,
extra lemon on the side.
A feeling like our bodies could turn
back into fish. A speedboat
revving from zero to sixty, that’s how
it felt to throw down my first
Mookie Blue after nine
pregnant months. Forget forks
or sauce or napkins. If every drop
of oyster liquor doesn’t make it
to your mouth, you shouldn’t
even be here, and by here,
I mean sitting across the bar,
gaping at us, saying, wow,
that’s a lot of oysters,
or standing on the shores
of an oyster farm, complaining
that the wind’s too cold.
 
Am I getting any closer
to explaining myself?
When we first met, he traced
his finger along the coves
of Maine’s coast, a chart
of waterways and kayak routes,
I swear, the only freshman
with a map of water pinned
to his dorm room wall, and
t

Watchers  
     Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.  
     The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.  
     There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.  
     Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?”  Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch that mattered. If no one watched, who would believe she could endure that much discomfort?  
     Nobody is watching now, so Zany grips a dining table leg and pulls it toward her, or tries to. It’s hard to budge through Mom’s junk piles, plus the weight of the extra leaf Dad inserted when Aunt Vi and Cousin Lester moved in after their apartment collapsed. Aunt Vi brought cans of flowery air freshener to hide the hoard smell—rotten food and cat piss. They don’t own a cat.  Lester, sixteen, bought a box of rubble-rescued books.  
     “You better be setting the table!” Mom calls through the screen.  
     Zany hates Mom’s manly haircut and has said so. “It’s Gig’s turn!”  
     Overhead, Gig stomps the floor in the bedroom they now share. Aunt Vi got Zany’s attic where Mom’s hoard had been disallowed, but it’s begun trickling up. “No, it’s not!” Gig’s transistor blares louder.  
     “Zany!” Mom calls. “I swear to God! And close those drapes!”  
     Mom can’t stand looking at the neighbor’s wall she could reach across and touch, but Zany craves fresh air, as fresh as Pittsburgh air can be. Plus, she likes counting the yellow bricks Andy Warhol surely counted when this was his childhood home, the dining room his make-shift sickroom when he suffered St. Vitus Dance. Zany is certain his bed would have been right here by the window where he could see a hint of sky if he cricked his neck just right. She lies in his echo and imagines the day she’ll appear at his Factory door in New York City and say: “I used to live in your house.” Andy will enfold her in his translucent arms before ushering her inside, not to act in his films or screen print his designs, but to be his equal. Partner, even. Zany just has to determine her own art form. It sure won’t be cutting fruit cans into flowers like Warhol’s mother did for chump change.  
     Zany’s legs start the herky-jerky Vitus dance as if she’s running toward that Factory dream. Her pelvis and hips quake. The one free arm. The back of her head jitters against the floor. It’s a familiar thrum even Aunt Vi and Lester are accustomed to now. Mom yells: “Stop that racket!” She mutters to Vi: “We never should have bought this place.” 
     A kitchen timer dings and Aunt Vi comes in to disarm it. Her cooking is better than Mom’s, and Vi wears an

Well, this could be awkward: when we last featured a story on the podcast a year ago, it also focused on parasocial relationships and included masturbation! This time around, we are again in deft hands. Marie Manilla’s short story “Watchers”, set in 1968 Pittsburgh with both the steel mills and Andy Warhol as vital elements, is replete with narrative and thematic echoes that satisfy and leave us wanting more at the same time. Tune in for this lively discussion which touches on budding creative and identity-based aspirations, celebrity, performance art, pain in public and private, and much more. Give it a listen -- you know you want to! (Remember you can read or listen to the full story first, as there are spoilers! Just scroll down the page for the episode on our website.)
 
(We also welcome editor Lisa Zerkle to the table for her first show!)
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest
 
Listen to the story Watchers in its entirety (separate from podcast reading)
 
Parasocial relationships
https://mashable.com/article/parasocial-relationships-definition-meaning
 
Andy Warhol’s childhood home in Pittsburgh (the setting of this story)
http://www.warhola.com/warholahouse.html
 
“History” article about Andy Warhol’s shooting by Valerie Solanas
https://www.history.com/news/andy-warhol-shot-valerie-solanas-the-factory 
 
I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996 film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Shot_Andy_Warhol   
 
** Fun Fact 1: the original poster for the 1996 film hangs in Jason's apartment.
 
** Fun Fact 2: the actor who portrayed Valerie Solanas in “I Shot Andy Warhol”, Lili Taylor, is married to three-time PBQ-published author Nick Flynn.
 
Nick Flynn’s author page on PBQ
http://pbqmag.org/tag/nick-flynn/
 
Dangerous Art: The Weapons of Performance Artist Chris Burden
https://www.theartstory.org/blog/dangerous-art-the-weapons-of-performance-artist-chris-burden/

In her fiction and essays, West Virginia writer Marie Manilla delights in presenting fuller, perhaps unexpected, portraits of Appalachians, especially those who live in urban areas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Marie’s books include The Patron Saint of Ugly, Shrapnel, and Still Life with Plums: Short Stories. She lives in Huntington, her hometown, with her Pittsburgh-born husband, Don.
 
Instagram and Facebook: @MarieManilla, Author website 
 
Watchers  
     Zany lies amid clutter on the floor beneath the dining room windows hugging her bandaged arm. She huffs loudly enough to reach the front porch where Mom and Aunt Vi imbibe scotch. Vi still isn’t used to afternoon drinking. They can’t hear Zany over the Krebbs’ crying baby on the other side of the duplex wall. Stupid baby. Plus Zany’s little sister overhead dancing to the transistor radio, rattling the light fixture dangling from the ceiling.  
     The fingertips on Zany’s bandaged arm are cold and maybe even blue. This is slightly alarming. She considers running to Mom but knows better. Take the damn thing off then, Mom will say.  
     There’s nothing wrong with Zany’s arm, but that isn’t the point. At breakfast, without preamble, she wound an Ace bandage from her palm to her armpit. The family no longer asks what she’s up to. Last week during Ed Sullivan she sat at her TV tray dripping candle wax over her fist. Aunt Vi blinked with every splat, but Mom only said: “If you get that on my rug I’ll take you across my knee. I don’t care how old you are.” Zany is thirteen.  
     Week before, Zany taped a string of two-inch penny nails around her throat at the kitchen table where Dad rewired one of Mom’s salvaged lamps. “Why don’t you do that in your room?”  Dad didn’t like sharing his workspace. Zany shrugged and the nail tips jabbed her collarbones.  She could have done it in her room, but doing the thing wasn’t the point. It was having someone watch

Dear Slushies, we have a confession. The first draft of these show notes included references to Wawa, Jason's sweet tooth, the relative repulsiveness of hot milk shakes, and professional wrestling. But then we realized that approach eclipsed what this episode illuminates: the poetic trend of self-reflexive gestures like the one we just made, confessing that this isn't the first draft! Listen in as we discuss Krysten Hill's poem "Are We Still Good?" The poem challenges us to think about analogy, metaphor, and narrativity. How poets can stage the occasion for a speaker's confessional reflection via the spark of a story plucked from our information dense mediascape -- revealing what it means to feel terror when that terror might otherwise be dismissed. How does she do this? Manatees and memes, silence, and a meta-textual turn. Enjoy!
 
PS Samantha also references this great essay by John Shoptaw on eco poetry. Dig in!
 
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Samanatha Neugebauer

 
Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series, Poetry Magazine, PANK, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Winter Tangerine Review,Rust + Moth and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, 2023 Vermont Studio Center Residency, and 2024 SWWIM Residency.
Author website
 
Are We Still Good?
 
According to officials, the animal does not appear to be seriously injured.
Someone adds in the comments that, Obviously, it was just a joke. 
Calm down, Liberals. Highlights the part in the article where 
the man’s name was scraped onto algae growing on its skin.
From what they could see, nothing was truly threatened. 
The sea cow was probably too dumb and fat to feel anything. 
I think of all the ways cruelty begins as a joke until 
it chooses to finish what it started. The friend I’d known for years
didn’t stop when I asked and asked again. I thought maybe he didn’t hear me.
Later, he told our mutual friend that, Things just got out of hand.
I thought she knew I was just playing. I remember when I was sure he heard me, 
I recognized  it was my fear that made him smile so loud. Still, I attempt 
to explain the surprise. At least I didn’t die there, I tell myself. Even here, 
I wrote that as the first line of this poem and buried it. Anyways,
he had work in the morning, offered to drive me home.
I didn’t have to walk back to my dorm in the snow. I laughed 
at everything he said on the way and tried not to let him see 
my hands shake when I took the gum he offered me. He asked, 
Are we still good? I chewed my tongue, relieved that I could
do something else with my mouth until he parked, unlocked 
the door to let me out. I thanked him. I was so scared that I didn’t run.

Episode 123: The Catholic Episode
 
Dear Slushies, we have a confession. We love being close readers as much as we love being close listeners. And if you are a fan of this podcast, we know the same is true for you. We’re delighted to consider Charlie Peck’s poems “Cowboy Dreams” and “Bully in the Trees” in this episode. We’re talking about unreliable narrators, homeric epithets, dramatic enjambments, and the difference between small “c” catholicism and capital “C” Catholicism. Confession and exultation, Slushies! Floating signifiers and The Sopranos. It’s a doozy! We hope you love listening in as much as we loved considering Charlie Peck’s poems for PBQ. 
 
(Oh, and we excitedly celebrate Jason’s fifth collection launching in April, Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire!)
 
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samanatha Neugebauer

 
Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. His first collection, World’s Largest Ball of Paint, is the winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press and is forthcoming April 2024.
 
Twitter: @chip_nutter
 
Cowboy Dreams
 
Winedrunk along the river on a Tuesday,
boy howdy, my life. I ignore another
call from my mother because today 
is about the matted grass and the skipping trout.
When my brother jumps companies
after the Christmas bonus, it’s Ruthless.
When I pillage the family silver
to slick forty bucks at a pawn shop, 
It’s time you start thinking about recovery.
Instinct makes me wreck anyone who comes 
too close. You ever snapped a dog’s
stick just to watch his ears drop? I’m Catholic
with how quick I loose my tongue to confess, 
my guilt just a frequency my ears quit hearing. 
One snowy May in the Colorado mountains, I stripped 
to my underwear and raised my pack to wade
the glacial river. Dried by a fire with a pot
of beans. All night I dreamt of my lasso
and revolver, riding the hot-blooded horse
alone across the plains, no one in sight to hurt.

Bully in the Trees
 
Indiana cornfields leave so much 
   to be desired, and lately I’ve desired nothing
 
but clean sheets and pretzel bread. For a decade
   I was ruthless, took whatever I wanted:
 
last donut in the office breakroom, merged
   lanes out of turn. I stole my roommate’s 
 
change jar, sat on the floor of a Wells Fargo
   rolling quarters to buy an eighth. In this new year,
 
I promise I’ll stop being the loudest in the room
   like a bear ravaging a campsite just to be the bully
 
in the trees. For so long I thought my cruelty
   was the world’s fault, my stubbed toe blamed
 
on the coffee table’s leg, not my stumbling in the dark.
   Throwing every fish back to the river 
 
doesn’t forgive the hooked hole I caused.
   Once, I undressed a woman in the giraffe enclosure,
 
but maybe that was a Soprano’s episode. Once,
   my life was so ordinary I replaced it
 
with the things I saw on television. I ate fifty
   hard-boiled eggs. I robbed the bank and screamed
 
Attica! I stood in the trees cuffing the Nebraska
   suburb and watched my mother set the table
 
through the window. A porcelain plate at each chair.
   My ordinary life stranged by the window frame.
 
If I fall asleep before the credits, let me dream the rest.
   My pockets are empty, but the metal detector still shrieks.

Dearest Slushies, we’re so happy to be back in the saddle! We took a mini-hiatus and return with this episode devoted to the poems of Jodi Balas. You’ll hear us mull over her artful use of concrete poetry and dive deep into her thinking about poetry, the body, and NFTs. How does a poem’s form entwine with its image system in order to serve its sense? How is taste also (always) about power? All of these questions are wrapped in a glittering cascade of editorial acumen and quirky dishing: Listen as Dagne explains the difference between NFTs and Cryptocurrency, reminding us of Rattle’s prescient issue dedicated to NFT poets. Or let us know what you think: should “mini cocktails” ever be a thing for happy hours? Is “drinkable” ever a compliment? Can we make a meme of Jason’s seductive eyebrow skills? In addition to the following links you might dig–  NFTs explained in 5 Minutes & Brit Bennett’s “Ain't That Good News”-- we invite you to contemplate the ritual of champagne sabering (if you try this in your backyard, shout “Poetry!”) With best wishes for a happy new year from the Slush Pile Crew.
 
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Samanatha Neugebauer

 
Jodi Balas is a neurodivergent poet from Northeast Pennsylvania. A lover of words (salacious, being a favorite – it just rolls off the tongue), her poetry has been accepted in Hole in the Head Review, Wild Roof Journal, Humana Obscura, Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. Jodi’s poem, “His mouth, mine” was selected as a finalist for the 2023 River Heron Review poetry prize and her poem, “Bone Density” won the 2023 Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Award judged by Danusha Lameris. Jodi is in the process of developing her first chapbook to market to the poetry world. You could follow her musings on Instagram @jodibalas_

WALKING TO SURRENDER
 
The ghost at my side,   the knife in my coat pocket      hanging on the coat rack. I         yield to morning in apprehension            almost every morning. I’m               hardening, becoming the                   weight of two dead trees. A                     spool of thread wound so tight,                         it’s hard to find the starting                           point - the dull tip of a needle is                        useless. I try and unknot the                     shoelace from yesterday, the                   muscle of memory below the ribs               and figure out which direction I’m             headed or which route is correct for         my mental state I’ve been trying       to correct but cannot correct   until I surrender entirely to the blinding wave of fear.

MY BODY AS AN NFT
Allow me to unshackle your wrists, bring you up off your knees & up to speed. Call me a good investment, the originalcopy. Non-refundable, metallic over bone, wire over skin – untethered,the virtual sin. You cannot use me in some side hustle, sleight of hand deal. I am my own creator. Watch how I catapult through your veins and rush you faster than a thief with a shank. Electric/cryptic#mytongueisdigitalweightBegging for a bit of action you’re not sure how to obtain. Tell me, is there mutual interest? I cantell you that I’m priceless. Watch closely before I become a liability, before your pockets explode, before the scales begin to re-balance themselves.