Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile Painted Bride Quarterly

We just had to start this episode with a reassurance that everyone was dressed, which you’ll understand as soon as you read or listen to “Pneuma”, the poem by BJ Soloy that kicks everything off. The bonkers energy of a country and a world overflowing with bad news and tragedy is juxtaposed with some very real tenderness and self reflection in two astounding pieces by Soloy. These astutely paced poems are brimming with the overwhelm of modern life while threading in historical references (Brown vs. Board of Education, Troost Avenue, and scud missiles, for starters).
 
Some other links we think you’ll like:
Sapphic stanzas
Marion's IMDB credit
 
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Dagne Forrest, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Isabel Petry

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography and other disaster songs (Slope Editions, 2019), and Selected Letters, a chapbook out with New Michigan Press. He lives and dies in Des Moines, home of the whatever.
 
Pneuma
 
Put your pants back on, America.
It’s four in the morning & also
 
five, three, & two, simultaneously,
you big lug. Plus, there’s snow. 
 
In this light, really any light,
my nose looks like a tired potato
 
got punched in its mute mouth.
With any light on, I want to see other people
 
when I look in the mirror, when I slouch
in this bathroom booth where I hope to die
 
on the shitter, like an American,
like one of yours. Clinton, TN is any other frowsy town
 
with a cock & balls scribbled on its playground slide
& square pitbulls straining at their chains. 
 
America, I came to bed late as always.
You roll over, softly surprised & then delighted, 
 
offering, “I forgot where I was.” I’m yawning,
breathing just to get oxygen on this fire. 
 
 
Well, tonight is not the only place I am
tonight. Beyond me & between me
light bulbs hiccup & burble 
 
& a frenzied squirrel loses its map
of maples & restarts. Maybe we ought to 
take what we’ve still got & laminate it in frost 
 
& then salt & then the gold leaf over spring’s pat rapture.
 
There are things I’ve learned already this young
soft year I don’t know what to do with: one 
gets a pregnancy test when in the ER
 
for their attempt on their own life. What to name that baby? 
 
I worry I’m doing this wrong. I’ve got beans soaking, sharps 
& meds hidden, the last dank well swill of our bank account 
miraculously transformed into boxed wine. Winter’s here 
 
with its expressive eyebrows & doomed neighborhood cats 
under every car. You yawn so I kiss you & you taste better 
than free food, but you can’t sleep & I try to stay up reading 
 
but layers of exhaustion—wet blankets on this piss whisper 
of a fire—keep accumulating. I worry you’ll do it right next time 
& I’m still attached to this day of ours, whatever day it is.
Benesh
 
It’s been a long night & your mouth already tasted like rain an hour ago. Writing
often of the sky instead of tasting it, I look to the sconces & the sconces
look fake & their light looks fake & I have authentic responses to both,
which is how storms start. As seasons
 
 
digest themselves (a short talk on short talks), holiday cards become
less applicable & so more affordable & Fox 8 or whatever news vans circle
the weather or immanent site of tragedy tourism. Some nights I go out & walk
the sidewalk in socks or bare feet
 
 
longer than I’d meant to & notice the crystal glass & homely bends
& feel deeply the Troost neighborhood. My ears circle in on themselves, stereo
sinkholes, by which I mean I’m eavesdropping & I’m sorry. I’ve had bad teeth forever
& so got online & bought God’s vibrator
 
 
as a toothbrush & sunburned my mirror & stood boldly before the middle-aged self.
White as I am, I trust most the islands that kill their first tourists.

Our first order of business was debating lifestyle choices in NY vs. Philly, after which we dug into two wonderfully different poems by Glenn Shaheen. “Imago” plunged us into an elegaic interrogation of modern life, identity, and poetics framed by both the real world and open world gaming. With Glenn’s poem as our guide we roamed wide, touching on gaming terminology, Bey’s “Single Ladies” and 2008 as the last year of optimism, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Shakespeare’s “filthy” Sonnet 135, and the ageless concern over the shelf life of language in poems and artistic works. The circular format of short, interlinked stanzas in the second poem, “Power and Punish”, introduced a real change in tone in the discussion. Frankly, we wondered if the poem’s format and approach would allow us to discuss it. We were delighted to discover it was possible, if different – but hey, you be the judge!
 
Some links we think you’ll like:
 
NPC (Non Player Character) on WikiHow
 
Beyoncé - Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
 
Michel Foucault on the Panopticon Effect, Farnham Street blog
 
At the table: Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Isabel Petry

Glenn Shaheen lives in Houston and is the biggest Star Trek fan you’ll ever meet.

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.