Episode 14: Martinis are Just Like Testicles

Welcome to Episode 14! We’re having so much nerdy fun with these and hope you are, too. This week we discussed one poem a piece by Hilary Jacqmin, Keith Woodruff, and Kierstin Bridger, each submitted for different issues. Another Slush Pile first! 

Welcome to Episode 14 of our podcast! We’re having so much nerdy fun with these and hope you are, too. This week we discussed one poem a piece by Hilary Jacqmin, Keith Woodruff, and Kierstin Bridger, each submitted for different issues. Another Slush Pile first!

First up was “Private Lives”  by Hilary Jacqmin.

Hilary S. Jacqmin earned her MA from Johns Hopkins University and her MFA from the University of Florida. Inspired by Baltimore performance art group Fluid Movement's elaborate water ballets, Hilary aspires to learn synchronized swimming. This summer, Hilary has kept busy by going to entirely too many concerts (including Beyoncé, Weezer, and Jason Isbell), baking a sour cherry pie in honor of her Door County, Wisconsin family heritage, and seeing Hamilton on Broadway

Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, edited by D.A. Powell, The Awl, Pank, Subtropics, Passages North, AGNI, and elsewhere. You can also read her article on "killing your darlings" here!

This poem struck a chord with everyone at the table. It’s hard to write a poem about boredom that isn’t, well, boring! We were right there with her in her grandparent’s house, trying to pass the time.

 

Next we discussed Keith Woodruff’s  “Bride of Frankenstein Blues,” submitted for our Monsters issue.

Keith “from the Black Lagoon” Woodruff has a Masters in creative writing from Purdue University, and lives with his wife Michelle and son Whitman in Akron, Ohio. His work recently appeared in The Journal, Quarter After Eight, American Literary Review, and is forthcoming in Wigleaf. His haiku have appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Mayfly, Acorn, A Hundred Gourds, and in Big Sky: the Red Moon anthology.

We all sympathized with poor Frankenstein trying to find love in the modern dating world, but this poem also sparked discussion of “pick-up” artists. We wondered what Frankenstein’s Bride would say about his pick-up methods? Regardless, the poem was accessible to all of us.

 

Last, we read “To the Girl From the Reformatory Town” by Kierstin Bridger, submitted for our Locals issue!

Kierstin is a Colorado writer and winner of the Mark Fischer Prize, the ACC Studio award and was shortlisted for the 2015 Manchester Poetry Prize in the UK. Western Colorado is full of incredible writers, and for the past several years they’ve been performing Literary Burlesque! This year they pulled a switch-a-roo on Oh Brother Where Art Thou. They changed it to Oh Sister and combined themes with The Odyssey. Kirsten says, “It was a smash, and so very collaborative.”

You can listen to Kierstin read from her book, Demimonde,  here.

We were intrigued by the imagery in Kierstin’s poem. Although none of us grew up in a “reformatory town” the emotional language put us in the mindset of the “girl.”

Over the years, PBQ often accepts work, contacts the authors, and then gets told there’s been a revision. Almost always, the original is better than the revision. We discussed why this might happen, and how difficult it is to know when your own work is “finished.” Let us know what you think—do you continue to work with your work once you’ve sent it out?

You can find PBQ on Twitter @paintedbrideq or on our Facebook.

Don’t forget to visit our Facebook event page to discuss this episode, and subscribe to our iTunes account!

Read on!

 

 

Present at the Editorial Table:

Kathleen Volk Miller

Marion Wrenn

Tim Fitts

Jason Schneiderman

Caitlin McLaughlin

 

Production Engineer:

Joe Zang

 

PBQ Box Score: 3:0

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Hilary Jacqmin

Private Lives

 

They have retired

to lost pines

and BurgerTime.

When our tan Malibu

grinds up

the switchback

to their mock-

Tahitian Village

in the Texas hills,

the grandparents

can barely stand to touch us.

But “Little David,”

they cry out, until

my father blushes.

Kindness is cold

champagne coupes

at 5 and 6 o’clock,

then Jeopardy. A walk

through bull pine,

clearing brush.

Whatever can be done

with us? My sister’s

fist is purpling

with cactus spines;

my mother’s stomach

bites; this week, I will not bathe.

The grandparents shy

from our commotion. Secretly, we flip

through The Handmaid’s Tale.

Our shared air mattress

crackles like a seed. We’re trapped:

now that we’ve come,

they won’t let us go out

past the dry creek bed.

Next year, they’ll never

even leave the house.

Why is their clubhouse

impermeable,

a miniature Pentagon?

And why can’t we order malteds

at Lock Drug? Mother says

“We can’t ask why.”

Inside, we play

endless Rummikub.

Uno, uno.

“There ought

to be a religion

for people who don’t know

what to believe,”

grandmother frets,

her bad eye winking

like a cut-up moon.

Outside, a loop

of fire ants

works a burnt-out

stump, persistent

as pump jacks,

and night’s an oil field.

We are too young

to know what granddad did

with catalytic crackers

at Shell, too dumb

to talk duplicate bridge hands,

Gravity’s Rainbow,

or split stock,

but we think hard

about the hardwood

in the Lockhart

smokehouse

and how granddad’s

bread machine vibrates

like a Gravitron.

Sometimes, they notice me.

They say, “What are you writing?

Are you writing about us?”

They say, “That makes me

so nervous.” I want to tell them

there is so little

that I can write. Almost nothing.

Perfume like propane. A tickless clock.

How quickly they both turn away.

 

Keith Woodruff

Bride of Frankenstein Blues

 

Consider the moon, my friend,

how its absence conjures this unromantic air.

Here in the bar, smoke unwinds  like bolts

of slow lightning across the gauzy light;

everywhere you look

mouths, small dark graves, chew on drinks.

Now the music gropes its way

through the crowd looking for phone numbers, drags

itself onto the wooden dance floor.

This is no night for finding brides.

Still, you try, touch her wrist during “talk”

& spring the classic recoil. Her black eyes, twitch like nerves,

the head cocks bird-like,

spindly arms jerk back from your touch & clasp up

her breast sacs as the goose hiss splits

her blue lips.

These damn castles are cold.

Some nights, alone again, arms outstretched on the stairs,

you think you might prefer

the murderous torches. Anything to light you up.

 

Kierstin Bridger

To the Girl From the Reformatory Town

You wrestled against the clutches of brothers and cousins, etched lessons

in your muscle, broke tendencies, rerouted synapse with unwritten

chapters entitled, Risk, Pain, and Tolerance. Though pale and tender as

your own, you clawed your way into their flesh; red scratches and waning

moons of bruise. You carved a language of ferocious prey and warning but

more startling than the DNA that curled from under your nails was the

power which made you surge, the breathless current of survival that ran

like a lightning rod through the center of your axis as you spun in and out

of years knowing blood tracks would either catch up with you or become

abandoned to faster byways and untranslatable modes. So you walk, never

looking over your shoulder, one step in front of the other, past the

fermenting bumper crop yard-fruit. Never mind the dirty shoelace untied,

the frayed, grey string dangling over the trestle bridge track. You need this

grip of heat, the hot rail under your feet. It's like the static warmth the

addicts wear like skullcaps, the chokecherry buzz after needle pierce and

plunge. Keep your hair blown back, baby, and charged with the horizon

line. Ignore the periphery of prison men in orange. Their 40 ounce cans

and spent shells are their business not yours.  Disregard the jackrabbit

carcass and its fur which still clings but will sail away soon like dandelion

seeds. Remember it's not a charm and their sentence is not your sentence;

you can't do that kind of time. Keep going, never say, it'll all blow over

someday because lies like that scatter, fade, sink back to soil. They'll

transform into fragments so sparse, so swallow-drunk, the next generation

will skip the deciphering stone, misspell the story of you, digitize and

archive it on some pixelated and odorless, dot com.