Today, Nicole Walker responds to Lia Halloran painting A Militant Homosexual, Self Portrait age 10 (after David Wojnarowicz, One Day This Kid…)

Under Water

My daughter Zoe starts Kindergarten tomorrow. They’re going to read Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? I told her to let some of the other kids try to figure out the words. She can’t read yet but she’s memorized the words to Eric Carle’s book. I can just see her in the sing song voice “I see a golden fish looking at me” before the teacher even turns the page. I ask her to wait a minute while the other kids sound out fish. Not everyone knows the letter f makes an f sound. Let everyone have a turn. I like to think that I can mete out justice from here, my house two miles away. I like to think that if she is on the playground and asks if she can play hopscotch and the other kids say no that she will just go play with someone else rather than stand off the side, staring at the girls trying to plumb their meanness, trying to comprehend just how much space and time she takes up, how much she should ask for and how much she deserves.
There’s a reason the world is shrinking. All the mothers in the land thinking, my kid tossed the hoppy taw on the number 7. My kid owns the number 7, say the mothers. She can hop all over this sidewalk chalk. Move off, move off other girls, is what the mothers say. My girl needs whatever she gets as she hops, hobbled, over the numbers one through 6, then again onto 8, 9, 10.
It appears there is not enough room on the hopscotch for everyone. The asphalt tips sideways, laden with all the mother-heavy little girls. The playground bulges like a tsunami. The floods wash over them. The water turns septic. The fields have eroded and there’s nothing to eat except the extra-evident way the playground girls turn and toss and jump like they’re the only girls in all the world.

Nicole Walker is the author of This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street Press, 2010). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Bellingham Review, Fence, Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Crazyhorse, among other places. She is currently Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at Northern Arizona University.

Tomorrow, Joe Biel responds to Nicole Walker‘s piece.

Today Artist Lia Halloran responds to Steve Fellner’s poem “Three Blocks from the Mosque.”

Lia Halloran, A Militant Homosexual, Self Portrait age 10 (after David Wojnarowicz, One Day This Kid…), 2010, ink on drafting film,17″ x 14″

Lia Halloran, A Militant Homosexual, Self Portrait age 10 (after David Wojnarowicz, One Day This Kid…) detail, 2010, ink on drafting film,17″ x 14″

Poet and Nonfiction Writer Steve Fellner responds to Kimberly Brooks’ painting.

Three Blocks from the Mosque

The protesters liked to watch TV even though it always made them angry.

There were the social agitators pushing away at the edges until borders and boundaries were meaningless. Life and death; chastity and lust; this country and the next.      The pro-choice activists.     The militant homosexuals.     Illegal immigrants. Then there were the pelicans that got some oil on their fine feathers.      The protesters liked birds as much as anyone else.     They would define themselves as pro-birds.      Birds were good things.      Their kids seemed to like them.     They flew in the air quite nicely.      But still.     They were birds, after all.

No point in getting themselves worked up about those things.   Not today anyway. They already knew what they were protesting today: the mosque to be built three blocks from the site.   The holy site.    The site where it all had happened. Three blocks.    The protesters could remember back in the day when the foreigners understood what the word foreigner meant.    It meant: away from.    It meant: I will keep my distance.    It meant: I know you may come to realize I’m a good person as long as I don’t step foot on your land.   Somehow over the years the foreigners lost a sense of who they are.

Three blocks.   No way now would the protesters come to realize the foreigners were good people.    They blew their chance.

Three blocks.    A lot can happen in three blocks.    The protesters knew that.   That’s what got them off the couch and into the streets. That’s why after all these years they finally got cable.    They didn’t want to miss their favorite shows: re-runs of I Love Lucy and CNN.

Three blocks.     So much could happen in three blocks.     One of the protester’s teenage boy went astray and helped robbed some liquor store.     The police nabbed him after he ran three blocks. Some other protester had a heart attack while out jogging. &nbsp ; No one was around.      For three blocks he crawled on the ground until a car stopped and helped him out.     Some time ago a monsoon had swept down during a parade, and everyone was so sad.     The floats drifted only three blocks before everything fell apart.    It was like the whole world was contained in three blocks.

And maybe it was. Maybe the earth was flat.     Then again, maybe it wasn’t. Did it matter?     What mattered was that it felt like the world was three blocks long.    On a flat, dull surface.      Ornamented with homosexuals, badly-dressed activists, and self-pitying birds.

You had to move the mosque.     There was no choice.      The mosque was an endpoint.     An endpoint is a limitation.   The world shouldn’t be limited to a mere three blocks.    It needed to go on and on and on.    It needed to stretch out far enough to circle back on itself, so the world was round and ready, ready and open to be cut and measured for appropriate boundaries.

Artist Kimberly Brooks responds to Alison Hawthorne Deming‘s poem.

Kimberly Brooks, Chains for Alison, 2010, gouche on paper, 9″ x 12″

Alison Hawthorne Deming responds to Don Barchardy’s portraits.

THE MIRROR

Once I had a cat who studied himself
in the mirror. He didn’t know
what it was in there staring back at him
but he couldn’t stop looking
because the face never turned away
and eyes meeting eyes
want more seeing. It’s already dark.
No moonlight. No whippoorwill–
the bird that tormented my childhood
refusing to take on the night
without incessant song. That bird
must have been the size of a fire hydrant,
something alarming anyway, I thought then,
but learned later it was just a pip
of feathered life with a voice
insistent as the news, that continuity
of disaster and argument to which
we all belong–bomb in recruiting office,
stoning in public square, crude oil
in everyone’s hair, to mosque or not
to mosque. Don’t turn away. It’s just
the brute world that will outlive us,
the lean hard muscle of it
flexing. But the birds
don’t belong, they are settling
into the night, their feathered quilts
ready-made. Some of them
are rising out of their bodies, whole
categories of bodies, and into
the being of non-being where of course
we’re all headed after a few more parties
and fixations of eyes upon eyes. But first
who doesn’t want to make something
of it, the clutch of childhood’s
solitary rages and the way the face
begins to cave in on itself with age
so that it looks like an Arizona landscape,
all contour and defile, telling the outcome
of its story to everyone, leaving out
a few details, so that a person might stare at
himself and say, Don’t I know you from
somewhere? You look so familiar and yet . . .

Today, Don Barchady responds to Nicole Walker’s poem “Stealing Shells.”

Don Bachardy, Untitled (For Rebecca and Nicole,) 2010, Acrylic on Paper, Aprox. 24″ x 36″
Self Portrait painted over earlier painting.

Don Bachardy, Untitled (For Rebecca and Nicole,) 2010, Acrylic on Paper, Aprox. 24″ x 36″
Self Portrait painted over earlier painting.

Don Bachardy, Untitled (For Rebecca and Nicole,) 2010, Acrylic on Paper, Aprox. 24″ x 36″
Self Portrait painted over earlier painting.

Nicole Walker responds to Rebecca Campbell‘s Photo Collage.

Stealing Shells

My friend Craig
once wrote a poem
about hermit crabs. Hermit crabs,
he argued, are travelers, making home
in someone else’s leftovers.
How lonely their moving.
How smooth their tomb.
How fragile the flesh
between calvings.

The crabs want shells like girls
with openings broken as cage
doors, as fragile
as ribs, ones they can interpret
anything as a possible welcome.

What is it like to fight the sea
and the sand for a little bit of real
estate? Renters forever on slick beach
front property. It’s hard enough to walk across
foot-sinking shoreline. But try following a trail
over green ferns onto leaves whose sharp,
periwinkle edges only appear
to be attached to anything earthbound and solid.

We like to pretend our bodies are our own
but then the world keeps reminding us
in each edge of flick of cartilage,
through each calcium carbonate crash,
that the grass feels compelled
to stake a claim in us, that pink skin
is rubbed red with a rock scrape. The world
shares our body, making it of use, making its
home in the folds of skin and crevices.

Who knew a weird little bug,
little pink writhing naked thing,
would signal our salvation
saying move after move–
Our bodies. They come back.

Today, artist Rebecca Campbell responds to writer Kellie Wells “Turncoat.”

Rebecca Campbell, Girl Wanted, , 2010, Photo Collage,12″ x 8″

Today, writer Kellie Wells responds to Artist Iva Gueorguieva

Turncoat

The thing about the body is that it operates much like a telephone and can therefore be answered when it jingles, ring-ring reverberant breasts! It can be ignored, the head cradled, line dead as Latin. It can certainly be used to cadge money. If you raise the red flag, it can be mailed home, with or without the proper attire. And if the flesh is plentiful, as it is in some parts of the world, as it is in certain months, in certain climates, it can be colonized easy as any moon. It can even be boarded up to guard against threat, the coming hurricane, the border skirmish advancing toward life and limb, though there’s no guarantee a body will remain standing after the lashing subsides. Sometimes the body, practical joker, wry exhibitionist, will send its most private parts to the store for milk and then return unnourished.

Brains in particular are not to be trusted. There once was a little girl who trusted everyone, biologically, her brain bamboozling her into believing here, here’s a nice war profiteer, quietly prodding the brewing fury around him like wayward cattle; here’s a kindly growling cur, shiny yellow teeth so prettily bared; here’s a poignant cardiologist who cannot make her mortgage, so ready with those urgent and spendy diagnoses, hearts afail all around her. The girl loved the world feet-first and arms wide, kissed on their curling moustaches all the villains she could find, gave any passing chiseler her heart. The girl eventually caught fire, as trusting girls are wont to do, which made the nearby alley cats cry out in sympathy. Muah, muah! sang the cats when the girl’s pinafore suddenly combusted. The crackling sound reminded them of mice nibbling electrical cable and though the yowling toms were distressed for the girl, they were also gripped by a powerful longing.

When the fire died down and the girl began to smolder, she felt as warmly about scheming, ill-meaning confidence men as she did about the itinerant gerbil she kept in a round plastic ball at home, that is as warmly as she ever had. And as the smoke rose from her stockings, she developed a particular tenderness for that hoax the robot, with its rusting rivets and high-pitched locomotion. She did not scorn the uncanny masquerade of the most plausible knock-off, the reproduction that blink-blinked when she blinked, sneezed when she sneezed, wept tears of the same salt, whose heart could be seen faintly pulsing the silvery skin of its sternum. No, in that uncanny valley where most bipedal creatures begin to feel revulsion, in that place where those robots cross the line and dare to resemble humans in all their corruptible, imperfectible flesh, this little girl felt nothing but love, the kind of love you find at the mouth of a cave, gaping, dark, enveloping, strewn with bats and stalactites, a love you’d have to spelunk to find your way out of. And this was all the trust this particularly believable robot required in order to pilfer the little girl’s persuasive skin and leave her with only her charred bones to warm her. But even this did not dull the girl’s fierce devotion to her stalwart heart, heart of her brain’s making. She loved and loved even as she shivered. Such trust left the robot, devious only by avocation, without a replicated leg to stand on, and it was not long before the robot itself, snugly huddled inside the pelt of the little girl, began to embrace the world and all its charlatans and could not distinguish its own deceptions from those of the little girl it longed to be.

Artist Iva Gueorguieva responds to Michael Martone ‘s App ro x i m ate.

Iva Gueorguieva, Is it ever over, 2010, mixed media and collage on paper, 37″ x 53″

Iva Gueorguieva, Is it ever over (detail,) 2010, mixed media and collage on paper, 37″ x 53″

Writer Michael Martone responds to Tomory Dodge ‘s Appomattox.

App ro x i m ate

In the distance, Mason, receding in the distance, trailing the chain, a straight line vectored into a vanishing point on the beam of the horizon.* The blue of the Blue Ridge Mountains looks like At the courthouse, no one could produce a pen. All maps distort, are distortions, distortional. HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN, the discoverer of ancient Troy, made the fortune he used to discover ancient Troy selling indigo dye to the Union army. The high-tension power lines transmitting electricity parallel the parabolic curvature of the Shenandoah River watershed. Escape velocity can be imagined as The blue of the Blue Ridge dissipates in the gray rain as if Before entering the courthouse, Grant stops to lick his thumb to then wipe away a splatter of red clay mud on his right boot only to find the mud to be a fleck of blood. The panting steam engine working a grade in the valley sends up a code of smoke, a meditation in clouds… The last case heard here was a property dispute that remains unresolved. The Blue Ridge Mountains etch a pattern like ________________ against the gray sky. A forgotten observation balloon tethered to a caisson is left to rot in a field of red clover in bloom. Dixon draws an X in his notebook, erases it, and moves it to the right an inch, in scale, solid soiled in smudges. The North named battles after the nearest river while the South named battles for the nearest place, the illusion that they never occupied the same space at the same time.

The sound wave a train produces steaming up the Shenandoah Valley warbles as it approaches. In the distance, the Blue Ridge dissolves in the soaked summer air. A moth has gotten to the General’s gray sleeve, unraveling a hole. My son, a baby then, picks up a slice of an apple left on Traveler’s grave by a visiting Son of the Confederacy and attempts to eat it. Zeno’s paradox suggests a bullet cannot transverse a distance like this sentence can nev An aide de camp collects the tears of his general in an empty blue bottle he found left in a drawer. The surveyor for Walmart® stakes the parking lot perimeter with splintered sticks tipped with red flags. Early studies of artillery contemplated the physics of projectiles and the force of gravity working upon it forward velocity like Grant>Lee An artist re-enacts the saturation of canvas with water in order to create that cloudy brooding quality, in order that the fabric not take paint. * Dixon draws an “X” in his notebook, erases it, and makes it again inches to the right-solid, soiled smudge.

Artist Tomory Dodge responds to Terrance Hayes poem “RECONSTRUCTED RECONSTRUCTION.”

Tomory Dodge, Appomattox, 2010, collage and watercolor on paper, 8×10 inches

Poet Terrance Hayes responds to Rebecca Campbell’s three pieces of art.

RECONSTRUCTED RECONSTRUCTION

Q:

A: The strange thing about the portraits was that sometimes from within the display case during my rounds as the night guardian (a part time job), I could hear them singing to one another.

Q:

A: It was noise if you weren’t listening carefully enough, but the kind of noise you find in the woods behind a farmhouse– the noise of hooves stomping a cowbell into a bed of dry leaves. Who knew so much genre could come from sticks and air!

Q:

A: Your guess is good as mine. It may have only been the courthouse basement (where we kept our town’s old photos and whatnots) was haunted by a tambourine player and fiddler circa Whitman on the battlefield, a brother and sister name of Quincy and Adelaide something or other.

Q:

A: Looking at them, there was no way of knowing whether they meant their expressions to be ironic or allegorical. (I could tell she had this really black freshly mowed mustache and lovely white eyes.)

Q:

A: I don’t think they were twins, but I’ll concede, you can do anything with make-up and lighting, and I don’t even know for sure that their tune was called “Quixotic Abolitions.” Where’d you hear that?

Q:

A: They had no children, but the woman couldn’t have had her tubes tied. It was against her godship and moreover it was the Reconstruction era!

Q:

A: I wouldn’t say that– I’ve got manners. He had no chickens and even less knowledge of you and me waiting down the road. His head was asymmetrical, his laughter made a strange pennies-in-a-tin sound when it came from his body, but no, no…

Q:

A: There’s nothing written about the town’s runners-up and third stringers: Mr. and Mrs. Beauford Wood who witnessed two, three dozen lynchings between them; Isaiah Davies, the thrice married banker who supposedly owned one of Abraham Lincoln’s handkerchiefs; the boot wearing widow, Martha Herman; Mr. and Mrs. Knot who being some manner of immigrant with no concept of the silent K announced themselves as Kinnot–but that’s why I’m giving them a shout out here. You should look into their stories.

Q:

A: He ain’t in the photos I’ve seen, but yes, there was a field-hand with enough muscle to muscle the land. I’m willing to bet he was blacker than you and me. Once or twice the postman saw him down on his hands and knees in the field, not like someone praying or weeping but someone waiting to be transformed back into a beast. Word was, he snapped and tied the couple up in the barn. (Could be fieldwork inspired in him an inkling of revolutionary violence.)

Q:

A: No, I wouldn’t say that. You seem to wrongly think that I think of him as the wrongdoer in this moral calculus.

Q:

A: That’s my point.

Q:

A: Who knows, who knows. The future came dragging a blue carpetbag up the long dusty road. In time the night would be pregnant with stars and I would be back to working the earth. Anyway, you can see how what happened to them could be made easily into a song…

Artist Rebecca Campbell responds to Poet and Essayist Nicole Walker ‘s piece “The Physics of It.”

Rebecca Campbell, The Landscape Positively Swims With You, 2010, Mixed Media, 3″ x 5″

Rebecca Campbell, The Physics of It, 2010, Mixed Media, 3″ x 5″

Rebecca Campbell, Took Myself Down a Notch, 2010, Mixed Media, 3″ x 5″

Today, Poet and Essayist Nicole Walker responds to artist Kristin Calabrese‘s painting “My Only Regret.”

The Physics of It

It was an accident. Who wears wooden shoes to a banquet? I was being as careful as I could be, carrying my plate of fried chicken, which really only counts as banquet food if the cooks forego the mashed potatoes and try to spice up the menu with something contrarian, but there wasn’t anything I wanted nearly as much as mashed potatoes. Well, maybe something. Mashed potatoes are the quintessential comfort food and yet sometimes you want something more than comfort–sometimes you want the powers of an eel, the ability to simultaneously electrify and to slip. Sometimes you want the swimmers to knowingly stay out of the water. Just for you. Sometimes you want the landscape dotted with potential blues and yellows so energetic that the water positively swims with you. So, without mashed potatoes and with, instead, the rather viscous macaroni and cheese I did let my plate fall to the ground in the spot right behind me and right before you and had you not been wearing those shoes, if you had not been there before, if it hadn’t been you, needing to make that loud sound, if you hadn’t simultaneously required and been given the attention of the banqueteers and, simultaneously, the attention of the chefs, then you would have noticed the mac and cheese swirling on the floor beneath you. All the greasy electrons pulling your protons down. It should have been your feet that hurt. Your ankle. Your loud noise. You were wooden. I should have taken comfort in the percussion but instead I sank and sank and sank. If I were carpenter and if I were, simultaneously, a ladder, I would have found my own saw teeth biting in my ankles. For every rung, I shrank. Took myself down a notch.

Artist Kristin Calabrese responds to Antonya Nelson’s ” All of a Sudden You Reached that Age.”

Kristin Calabrese, My Only Regret, 2010, oil and acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

Fiction Writer Antonya Nelson responds to Kenichi Hoshine.

All of a Sudden You Reached that Age

All of a sudden you reached that age. On the other side of which lies The End. When everything is deja vu instead of deja new. When the perfect murder is an entertaining fantasy involving yourself as victim instead of somebody else. That age.

You could hike up a mountain, you could carry a bottle of too many pills, you could crawl into a cave, you could go to sleep.

Asleep, you might dream, exigencies and emergencies, everything exhausting.

If the children were young…

If it all hadn’t already been done…

You should have named the dog Ironical. Because it’s he who’d rescue you. Faithful companion, alibi, witness, optimist. Whose perpetual forgetting is his gift: Hello! Hello! Hello! Better to be brain-damaged, his grinning face proclaims. Hike! Hike! Hike!

So here you go again. Facing the funny fact that making coffee requires having already ingested coffee. That you need your glasses to find your glasses. Need the pills to feel like taking the pills. And need the scissors to open the container containing the scissors.

Artist Kenichi Hoshine responds to Nick Flynn’s poem, Wisconsin Death Trip.

Kenichi Hoshine, Untitled, 2010, Charcoal, Acrylic, Wax on Wood, 8″x10″

Poet, nonfiction author and playwright Nick Flynn responds to Nancy Reddin Keinholz’s mixed media, Rebecca’s Dream.

Wisconsin Death Trip

Something Wisconsin

Death Trip in this, something Exploding

Plastic Inevitable, something Weather

Diaries. Zapruder something, Michelangelo

something–the hands, unfinished, like his

slaves. Remember Cindy Sherman? At first

she looked scared, then it all turned

scary. Or Nan Goldin & her black eye, now

forever? If I listen to the playlist called NOISE on

my Ipod it will take 1.7 days–this

I can know. Tonight, between the guacamole

& the pork belly, our two year old threw her naked

body against the yoga ball, again &

again, each time with a burst of maniacal

laughter. It’s still taller than she is. She’ll grow up to be

Buster Keaton, Bowe said. They

threw him against the wall, Bill said, his parents,

night after night. Vaudeville people. The Flying

Keaton’s or something, Adam said. Keaton was

given the name Buster by Houdini, Adam

said. His real name was Chester, his real

name was Carlos, his real name was

Carleton, by then I wasn’t really

listening, by then I was doing the dishes, thinking

about the flowers Lili brought, wrapped in

newspaper, the headline about serial

killers. I was thinking about the first human

being to be photographed, getting his boots shined

on a Paris street, his leg is all that we see, the rest,

like everyone else on the street in those few

moment the shutter was open–every horse-drawn

carriage, every passerby–the light finding its way

onto the emulsion, everyone but this man’s leg

is less than a blur, less than a trace. Shine on

you crazy diamond dog day afternoon

delight. I rinse each plate before putting it into

the machine–maybe this is a waste. I saw

a bronze nameplate once, nailed at eye-level

–POPLAR–the tree swallowing it

whole. I thought of the disaster, of the live

feed–does it prove the plume is now several

plumes, is that what I heard? Or that no one

can find the oil, that it has all simply

vanished? The weeks we watched, through sheen

& top kill–for all we know

they simply moved the camera, for all we

know the earth simply swallowed it. I don’t care

what they say–Michelangelo’s Slaves

are the best thing he ever did. Only a fool calls them

unfinished.

Artist Nancy Reddin Kienholz responds to Nicole Walker’s poem “This is not a poem.”

Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Rebecca’s Dream, 2010, Mixed Media

Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Rebecca’s Dream (detail,) 2010, Mixed Media

Poet Nicole Walker Responds to Rebecca Campbell’s painting, “Wake Them When It’s Over.”

This is not a poem

I am not supposed to tell her there is anything wrong.
Perhaps I can distract her from the larger picture. There is no war
but I admit to her there is dust and sand.
I can’t explain the gun but perhaps I can explain the way

metal ripples like bed sheets. It is not beautiful but cylinder
plus sheen equals energy. You can’t ignore kinesis. The ship powers
forth. The plane flies over. The helicopter turns. They all have
to land somewhere. Who am I to complain about physical

forces? I brought this iron ore on myself. I believed in hard
and impermeable just like I believed in birth control and garage
door openers. There are some things about this present I cannot give up.
And there are others: Brain pan. Heart Valve. Brass Knuckle.

Look at the rivulets, the whorls, the shared characteristics.
Qualities that suggest good and intention. See all the work
they can do: Spin, smooth, train, direct. What you admire in metal
you can admire in the human. It is solid. It can bend.

That should not, necessarily, make us nervous, but
I have crawled into her bed and slept next to her before.
I can pretend I was protecting her but you can see
in the morning whose small hand wraps around whose.

Painter Rebecca Campbell Responds to Huffington Post Headline, “Wake Them When It’s Over” by Jason Linkins

Rebecca Campbell, Wake Them When It’s Over, 2010, oil on panel, 10″ x 10″

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of art created by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers will collaborate to create ongoing, live-made art. The responses will come daily, with artists having only twenty-four hours to respond to each others’ work. Click here to learn more about this project, the creators and participating artists.

Read more: Rebecca Campbell, New York, Installation, Writing, Collaboration, Los Angeles, Flagstaff, Music, Film, Painting, Poetry, Telephone, Video, Nicole Walker, Game, Ex-Mormon, Creative Writing, Utah, Mormon, Salt Lake City, Children, Afghanistan War, Gun Violence, Metal, Kenichi Hoshine, Nancy Kienholz, Nick Flynn, Kristin Calabrese, Arts News