Sookoon Ang

July 2019 | visual art

Exorcize Me II

 

Sookoon Ang

Sookoon Ang is an artist living and working in Singapore and Paris. Her work centers around intangibles and their co-existence with the rational world. The artist has consistently and precisely built a body of work produced in response to the transient nature of existence. Her association of seemingly contradictory materials and ideas poetically approaches problems of pictorial space and sculptural presence, often by engaging nuanced but transformative production techniques to create objects at the edges of comprehension. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Palais de Tokyo, Art Basel Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, and Fribourg International Film Festival. Sookoon Ang’s nearly 2 decades long art practice has also provided her the catalyst and milieu for her new feature documentary on the livelihood of contemporary artists which premiered in International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal.

Milk Bomb

July 2019 | poetry

When Buddhists were a national security threat a strange old world broke open, swallowing poems like prayers. America, land of the unfree fundamentally white, Christian. When all the world grows dark, a growing political crisis wraps itself in mortality poems love poems grief poems peace poems happiest place on earth poems. When bombs bullets rain down, Pearl Harbor 1941 December 7th David Tanaka, Japanese American surgeon, father, family, friend climbs a mango tree on a dead-end street raises his hands, seeks god’s protection, the tenor of his voice rising with dark orange brown, black smoke, war poisons lingers off water knees give way to soil tears to martial law ignorance to incarceration. He will die there, asphyxiated, by racially-based hatred. 77-years later, a large crater where hearts used to be. Pummeled with milk bombs the world opens its mouth & sings. Resistance poems, protest poems #MeToo poems, Black Lives Matter poems, refuge poems lgbt rights poems, school violence poems, liberation poems.

Sheree La Puma

Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in O:JA&L, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, The London Reader, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.

Sunday Morning

July 2019 | nonfiction

It sidles up next to you, standing closer than you like, as usual, with its offering plate.

On top is the lesson you prepared after eleven last night. You and the middle-schoolers will be reading about Jesus busting up the temple.  You like that story, and you think they will also because it comes unexpected. They like you more than you expected, and you like them, too, which is why you teach them On Top of Everything Else.

You have 22 freshman essays to read before Wednesday, including Collin’s, for once.

There’s 57 pages of Dante to read this afternoon if you count the introductory material. You’ve never read Dante—really!—but you assigned it this semester because you felt it was about time you did.

The 30 pages of Derrida and Foucault you have read before, though the truth is that won’t matter with these two. Count on four hours.

Your boys appear before you wearing the burgundy lipstick you bought for the Halloween party last fall.  The lipstick careens beyond the boundaries of their lips.  They look like they have been killing chickens with their teeth.  You should be dismayed—we need to be leaving in three minutes, David announces—but other details keep swarming into your line of vision: the unruly trochees and anapests from last Friday’s failed scansion lesson; Collin arriving fifteen minutes late to class and then peeling an orange, right there in the front row, extending an easy smile as way of apology, his white teeth lined up in disciplined, military rows.

We need to get gas after church, David adds, and we’re out of cereal. The bathroom wastebasket is overflowing—from the corner of your eye the wadded Kleenexes look like anemic peonies cascading across the black mouth of the plunger.

You are certain Collin is still sleeping, and you suspect he might end up enjoying his Sunday more than you will enjoy yours.

Perhaps next week you will decline the descent into Sunday.  Perhaps today you will sit on the front row and write a poem, one free of rhyme or meter, during the sermon—a poem, you admit, no one, save Collin, has time to read.

 

Kristin Van Tassel

Kristin Van Tassel teaches writing and American literature at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. She writes essays and poetry about place, teaching, motherhood, and travel. Her work has appeared in literary, academic, and travel publications, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, World Hum, ISLE, The Journal of Ecocriticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, About Place, and Temenos.

Duality

July 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry

it’s a question of relativity

ignorant view that there are two

split down the middle a brain’s

how and how not to see landscape

or hear a heartbeat an echo

a distraction from the other

and me thing and essence each

where are we even free

cut through the dry ochred earth

we need borders to cross

and again in almost

of work the transportation business

deficit and accrual an increase

effort of balancing side

is an abstraction rocking us

align to misalign

to the enormous

an exposure of the usual

sides

consciousness divided

when we look outside

detect a rhyme one

by turns stroke evoke you

requiring for identity the other

to fly over this road

this line drawn in the sand

to find ourselves again

the same place this line

a kind of attention

of possible answers in the physical

by side even eye movement

from limbic to critique

a door swung wide

all we could ever ask

Alice B Fogel

Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate. Her collections include A Doubtful House, Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” which won the Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award, & Be That Empty, a national bestseller in 2008. Strange Terrain is her guide to appreciating poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated ten times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards, & her poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Spillway, Hotel Amerika, The Inflectionist, & DIAGRAM.

The Lesson

July 2019 | nonfiction

Her parents, for reasons she did not fully understand, didn’t attend church. Ever. Her father said nature was his church, but, on the other hand, so many millions believed otherwise, who was he to judge the merits of indoor, group-oriented worship? He drew the line at smoke bombs and hocus-pocus; he wouldn’t even read fiction because he only wanted to learn facts. Her mother saw no point without such evocative pageantry, but she didn’t want any trouble at home.

They didn’t want to deprive the girl, their only child, of wholesome church-going social normalcy, nor, certainly, any possibility, however remote, of everlasting life. So, at 11, she was left to the mercy of, briefly, the Pentecostals and later, more lastingly, the Nazarenes. (After all, moderate factions don’t recruit.) She was as good a Sunday school student as she was a student-student, the girl who grew up to earn a PhD and three master’s degrees, and her teacher, Mr. Meadows, offered her the unprecedented opportunity to prepare and teach a Sunday school lesson to her peers.

What was he thinking?  They paid her elaborate, lavish inattention, doodling, passing notes and chatting with one another, sighing and fidgeting as if she weren’t there, until Mr. Meadows broke in and took over. She stayed, she had to, they carpooled rides home for orphans like herself.

She could not, however, muster the perspective to return. A month later Mr. Meadows, jilted lover, appeared at their door, to say that one day she’d be a wonderful teacher. As her father jumped up and stood, spread like an X in front of the card table littered with ashtrays and beer cans, she understood.

 

Julie Benesh

Julie Benesh’s fiction has been in Tin House Magazine, Bestial Noise: A Tin House Fiction Reader, Crab Orchard Review (receiving an Illinois Arts Council Grant), Florida Review, Gulf Stream, and other places. Micro-memoirs are forthcoming from Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Green Briar Review. She has an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and lives in Chicago.