By the time I can afford to live there it will be underwater

I can’t fight it; you can’t fight it; the punctuation of this city this paragraph as city is rapidly changing. That’s what it does. That’s what we does, for that matter, because we are changing into pointier shoes. My sideburns are single quotation marks, though I am not, in fact, single. Think collage or pastiche, but the samples aren’t lining up, they’ve already moved in. By all rights, those that would make moves not involving the cultivation of career or the harvesting of lettuce have no right to compete for real estate. And you know that I know that picking bugs out of your three thousand dollar credit limit isn’t what it used to be. If this were church, which, of course, we all know this isn’t, but if it were, this is where the pastor would bid us pray together. Let us then make this more irrelevant; let us then sing together; let us then let in our brothers and sisters. A sticky cheeked mafia of genetically superior children currently runs vast swaths of Brooklyn. Oh, yeah, cute to look at, sure, they were MADE that way, and they are just as ambitious as their parents project upon them. The towers of the North are falling, no new dive bars. While the dinosaurs grouse that their tattoos are irrelevant; while revelers outside of former machine shops tend to look like pre-grunge metal heads; while a dandy that works in media in midtown steps out from the greasy turnstyle (MY greasy turnstyle), I try to pull my head out of my diminutive arse. Again and again. Watching the old paint flake off and a new coat get applied is a kind of pastime. I have already purchased the proverbial scuba diving suit, though it is ill-fitting. My emotions are telecommuting, though, sadly, they will have to be downsized. There will be what I would consider a fair package. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

-Mark Gurarie

We like surprises; we like poetry

MENTAL MARGINALIA

Sampson Starkweather is a founding editor of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press. He is the author of a bunch of shit you’ve never heard of. He’s writing a performative book of poetry in which actors play an invisible game of tennis, called The Tennis Court Oath by John Ashbery by Sampson Starkweather, and a meta-pseudo-memoir called Bubba King and the Fruitfly Afterlife. El vive en Brooklyn.

Beth Amodeo, the first fiction writer to infiltrate the poetry lair of Mental Marginalia, tried to publish her premier novel at the age of twelve. It was about a kangaroo with magical powers who fought arduously to protect a powerful rock in the center of the earth from an evil dingo who wanted to rule the universe – written in comic sans font (size 14) and maxing out at a whopping 275 pages. One-hundred literary agents in New York City…

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Subterranean Homesick Alien Sighs

holes in themselves, and leftwards the hollow shell of that which is meant

to plod out. Correction: Plot. Outwardly sedated and sampling; headphones

and high definition alert. Position of the Eye Brows at the Moment of Realization:

 there were different colored reverb units; we are a long way from home

the sunshine “around here, so near” an uncomplicated rendering of slant alien goggles

a backing to our vocals that is as interminable and but disregard

said usage. A Thom Yorke sandwich, please, extra mayo; the mayo itself

itself the mayo

the mayo

itself the mayo

But wait, aren’t the Stooges, like, sexist?

All particular with our questions, are we then condemned to repeat the beginning of things to insist on an answer to— in the nude, mind you— what is meant by raw power? In the beginning there was just a bone and a rock, right? What are women in this Fun House? What if today, we spoke only in questions of the primarily irreverent sort? Would the reflective-tired-cliché surface meet us in the bathroom, laughing in the soap scum caked sucked dry, off the porcelain and inside the requisite allotments of glitter? Was that objectification? If a flea whispers in an ancient Latin I don’t speak, are you then to tune a violin while my ears are burning? Would you let old Iggy into your house if he was wearing a frumpy t-shirt? Exposed torsos notwithstanding the glare from the grave of Ron Asheton; what are you doing now, whose nudity are we discussing? If subsequent generations of cultural figures are already dying, why is it fair that Pop lives? Is he the Dead Father that we must carry, grudgingly across the shattered psychological landscape of punk rocke? Have you heard this one: his face is like the picture of Dorian Gray, his torso the anti-hero in the flesh? But, damn it, what was the issue at hand? Forty odd years ago? Michigan misogyny? Stooged, are we then asking, or answering?

-Mark Gurarie