Screen & Paper Magazine

To the black male children (overheard conversation)

powerserge1 — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:56:45 +0000

How did you get so skeptical and bold and broken and re-assemble?

Philosophy is a prison, it destroys the uncustomary things about us.

They (the elegant thinkers) they have attitudes, they have all the proper attitudes, but they have no true convictions—

and the technique of accommodation has broken down

Oh.

So the shy dialect is under the pressure of its quietness again. Quivering between pleasure and torture, exiting in the middle somewhere. Sacred pressure, we write our letters in there, back and forth across nations. Oh, how wide the letters get from wrecking western tunnels. Oh, the wreckage, the over-grown headlights, was it after the end of the world? A new symphony for improvisers.

–

I’m not sure where we were but there was all the water and everyday I re-learned to fly my kite. When we thought about the girls we liked, and them phantom queens, tires sprung from our hands and the cards went blank and chrome-bland, rancid empty space vibrating the in the nook of a cave, Ron Carter solo, channel 13 in a L.A., a ufo scare or delight or network of starry pavement where we behave in raybans and ravens, electric candles for those who crave the boulevard, a ban on the light, or one of those night rainbows, where the vagrancy doesn’t breed and all imitation is that extinction/suicide but so sleek we say the meaning of life is to learn how to die, and jump off the ledge of that child afterall, find out

I have never known a lethargic negro,

I have known a demoralized negro

Learned to be guilty of loving him anyways, in spite of himself.

We would watch re-runs of the Cosby Show while we talked on the phone

I feigned a crush on Theo. It was really Bill, called Cliff for T.V… which I found poetic like a trampoline in the home of adults where I kept it. Hope you had a crush on Denise

–

I want to talk about you.

Maybe later.

But, did you see those two kids on the beach, one holding a stray tire?

Sometimes it’s an intertube, for floating, sometimes it’s a telescope. The whole zone of it is afro-blue, you want to warn them to get in and roll out but they’re young enough to learn to swim without it

Text by Harmony Holiday. Image by Christopher Channing Daniels.

Tibetan Woman

powerserge1 — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:43:45 +0000

My photographic trick realized the cosmetic modifications we make in memory. If I were to remain faceless like the mountain, I could pass like all the others who have passed before me into the opposite of eternity. I’m not an arrogant woman. I know my place—my spot on the transparent plastic ribbon. Self-exposure is critical, so I will allow myself this small joy. In the forensics of aesthetics, I see blow-up cathedrals, highways and trolley cars, rancorous tenements filled with the beautiful violence of litany and garbage where women like me are disposable, their existence obscured by a great man. Behind me, the soft, fleshy pulp of the mountain, this soggy mass emerges into something that will soon dry. Harden. Take form. I sense a romantic readiness in the mountain. A series of unbroken gestures that climb skywards feeding the dust that is my future self. I say it aloud so I don’t forget, don’t feel that sweet love or else you’ll lose it.

Text by Jill Di Donato. Image by Christopher Channing Daniels.

Flight

powerserge1 — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:10:02 +0000

We prefer to drink lying down. It makes it easier
to keep lying down. The bubbles pool
in our throats and the bray keeps itself low. Can’t say
we didn’t spring for everything— canopy,
sham. This makes the bed unbreakable. Won’t you
paper your walls in the print we picked out for you?
Wrap your mouth too— we’ve had enough of you calling us
lazy, us party-too-much, us not going to surface—
too long under we might as well stay, make fort
in the folds of here. Here we never unpack the airline bag,
constant go our motto. We would like to say
you’ve been so patient with us, your patients,
you’re the most agile chase we’ve had, been had by.
Can you smell the curve of this wood, pillar of the four-poster
we hang on? Can you thrill— we’ll never be fixed,
why we keep an extra suitcase under and above the frill.
Breakfast included. Always a weekend away with us,
no visa required, no runway, no tent, speed as you will.

Text by Rebecca Keith. Image by Miriam Elia.

I Saw My Younger Self Today

powerserge1 — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:57:48 +0000

I saw my younger self today, from afar; she didn’t see me at first. I knew it was me because you know, anyone would know. I was as I would have hoped: happy and wary of things to come, but eager for them all the same. It was a street I don’t remember, there was something portentous in the air but the moment still sun and ease. I moved to walk closer, but she saw me. Our gaze locked for a minute, she studied me. Perhaps she recognized me too? But she turned away first, a hint of aversion in her open lips. I wanted to tell her; it’s inevitable, you don’t control as much as you think you will. But I did not interrupt her. I walked on.

Text by Colin Spoelman. Image by Ry Russo-Young.

A Folly We Trust In

powerserge1 — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:39:39 +0000

In the beginning birthing ourself of fabric and plastic and wire,
a flap of flesh hooked over the stair and descending. Wake us!

Unfold a hand and its contents pour over a necklace of generations.
There is no recinching this map over red outcroppings of fat on the thigh in winter.

We tried pushing back its horns but the red-printed hours
took on a serious pose and seemed to shrug away from us. So we smiled

against breaking and hoped to conceal the flatness of our ghost.

Somewhere it was simple to utter love. In other rooms,
benevolence confined to illegible corners.

Or glowed from a smooth object locked under glass.
We could never but always it grew.

Daughters levitated upon it, our Lizzies our Janes carried across a sleeping country,
its glass-footed gondola rocking, a saucer of milk.

And out we would ever emerge laced and buttoned and hoed
and the curl sweet upon our ear whispering ever, ever.

That only we would turn, that coolly we would turn to our mother, grandmother
unbitten, a smock over the heart-object. Its register of sorrows.

A paper cap preserve us, a ribbon make us glad.

Text by Jean Hartig. Image by Miriam Elia.

Screen & Paper Magazine

powerserge1 — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:44:17 +0000

This project began as a small collaboration between Sara and me, when she wrote a few pieces inspired by images of mine. After that, we asked a couple of friends of ours—visual artists and writers—to contribute, using an image as the inspiration for a short writing piece. There was no initial conceptual theme tying the projects together, as we want the artists to feel free to experiment and take risks and allow the images dictate the content, but as the project has developed, a formal “Polaroid” theme began to emerge. Now, we hope to continue to attract submissions from talented people that engages in the nostalgic and temporal form of polaroid images. Eventually we will make a small and curated run of the ones we feel work best.

Editors:

Sara Femenlla & Serge Kirsanov

Contributors:

Ethan Hon…………………………..Christopher Arens

Sara Femenella………………………..Serge Kirsanov

Emily Wolahan……………………………..Ian Brook

Rebecca Keith……………………………..Miriam Elia

Jean Hartig……………………………….Miriam Elia

Colin Spoelman…………………….Ry Russo-Young

Jill Di Donato………Christopher Channing Daniels

Rebel Island

powerserge1 — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:57:15 +0000

Once, before me, there was nothing.

Be thou like God.

These specks: seeds. These flecks:

hearts. Fingers deep with soil,

the cold damp of origin, growth dank

immersed in growth. My stench—

the mixture of stench and matter.

Voila: tiny shoots.

Voila: unfurled. Voila: my ardent,

created empire,

a forest for walls, cacti

like rafters. Their sound reverberates,

their spikes crown mad kings:

yes and original.

Radical, free. I reign over

the adjustment of plant to pot,

human to chair, world to

disposition. A canopy of music

encased in dancing

knowledge—flutter, sway,

a formal desire

of cultivated tropics. Touch this,

hear this, come closer.

Text by Emily Wolahan. Image by Ian Brook.

Exchange

powerserge1 — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:35:59 +0000

A promise [ ] on the cusp

of an orchestral negotiation

baroque as an eye or rococo, as if [ ]

someway or another we feel it

nimble and acrobatic, as if to say:

you’ve never been through this before

[ ] this watery hope this bad-weather landing

this white-knuckled sleep.

The ground rises to greet you. Sleep harder.

We want to be [ ] this human all the time.

This farewell and when.

Text: Sara Femenella & Image: Serge Kirsanov

Standard Archaeology: Los Angeles, Present Day

powerserge1 — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:35:12 +0000

Where strays stalk hulks and finitude rusts

restlessly at the fringes profane and barbed

we’re bored already

the narrative calamity that is the vertical horizon’s

gathered tales, least to matter most or an imaginary city’s

fatalistic exposè, that old story

so the question begs where is it going?

whose variants between hesitation and deliberation

littered with our starts and stops we give it story

we give it arc, we rattle it truth

as razors edge closer to something

like a vein, something that never happened

even though it happened exactly like that

exactly like we said it did because

we saw what we saw and we kept on seeing

Text: Sara Femenella & Image: Serge Kirsanov

Most Earnest Pretense: Los Angeles, March 2003

powerserge1 — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:33:22 +0000

You’re not alone: paper hats, accordions, several continents

tossed into the mangled parabola or rather

pinned beneath it, say uncle,

it’s not any better than the way it was before but you’re

partial to these muddled up anomalies

your hued way of making the same mistake over and over

your heart in it earnest

belief in the can’t-put-your-finger-on-it-ness

and maybe, simply by showing up you might change

the whole unraveling thing

the spritus mundi’s

double helix coming apart in your hands

that unavoidable unknowing how far you would go

and how far you would not go.

Text: Sara Femenella & Image: Serge Kirsanov