CityLit Festival :: April 16, 2011

Photo by Melissa Streat

Time is such a pain in the ass. There’s writing to be done, edits to be obsessed over, submissions to read, blogs to blather into, page layouts to suck the minutes out of the day – all to be done in seclusion, all to be done in the riptide of imagination, mine or someone else's. I’m not complaining. We, I, publish a magazine and write not because it’ll make us famous or get us laid, but because we love it, because... what else are we going to do. Actually, with every step deeper into the swamp that is the literary world, anyone can see the opportunities for celebrity slip further into absurdity. But we didn’t want to be famous anyway. Right? Fuck you world. I'll do what I do, and you can pay attention or not.

This, of course, is it’s own delusion. It’s own narcissism. One born of long hours in front of a screen insisting to your computer that your words are all that matter.

Baltimore, there are words in my whisky... again.

So we're doing it again. The readers and the crowd that came to our last reading were so incredible that we just couldn't help but throw another one of these shindigs. This time we present two very talented writers; two people who I guarantee will fill your drunken minds with all the wonderful and manic gobbledygook any one man can take. Ian Humphrey and Jess Borowski have been friends of Artichoke Haircut ever since we were just a wee child. So it is our pleasure to keep this one in the family and give these two excellent writers the attention they deserve.

And did I say there would be alcohol... What more could you want?

Editors' Shorts :: #2

Laura Letinsky, "Untitled #85"

Sunday

Sunday is my day to pretend I am not

animal I clean my clothes and wash

the pots that have pondered

for a week and grow

not in size that would be preposterous

but in life egregious

they mimic the rest of the world

or at least the part that runs

behind your back whenever you turn.

I’m sad to think that everything

in the world has already been touched

or nearly like a rock I found sitting in a gutter

by a flamingo feather I picked up

the rock and not the feather because though

they both sat perfectly next to one another sharing

color and a yearning for the market or a sleek city

condo the feather must have been retched

so I picked up the rock and not the feather

put the rock in my pocket smooth from some other

long place and time

and watched the feather lend the gutter pink

starving itself with generosity and ecstasy

while a trickle from someone washing their car

slid it closer and closer to the drain.

           

                                                              – Adam Shutz