“Santa Crawl” by Ana Maria Ventura

“Sotto Voce” by H.K. Rainey

“After BANG OUT” by Chris Stroffolino

“The Model” by Laura Wolfe

Visit the Video Library to watch excerpts of the live performances.

The third BANG OUT reading was held Saturday, April 18th at Amnesia in San Francisco.  The reading featured work by local writers inspired by the theme “(Naked).”

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, “Esther Stories” (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). A film version of one of Orner’s stories, The Raft, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner. Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual. Orner has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations. Currently, Orner is an associate professor at San Francisco State University.

Chris Stroffolino is the author of three full length collections of poetry: Oops (Pavement Saw Press, 1994), Stealer’s Wheel (Hard Press, 1999), and Speculative Primitive (Tougher Disguises, 2005) as well as several limited edition chapbooks. His outspoken views on poetry can be found in Spin Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001). He co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House, 1998) and a critical edition of Shakespeare’s 12th Night (IDG Books, 2006). He was Visiting Distinguished Poet in Residence at St. Mary’s College from 2001-2004, and played with Silver Jews, Continuous Peasant, Sir Lord Von Raven, and is currently working on his first solo album. (www.myspace.com/chrisstroffolino)

Kirk Read is the author of “How I Learned to Snap” and two upcoming books, a novel and a collection of essays. He created the multimedia show “This is the Thing” with Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney and is the director of Army of Lovers. He’s worked at St. James Infirmary and toured twice with the Sex Workers Art Show. He grew up in Virginia.

Ali Lawrence received her MFA in poetry from San Francisco State in Spring 2007, and since her first book of poetry, “Anatomic,” was published on Small Desk Press in Summer 2008. She is presently planning her next attack.

Ana Maria Ventura moved to San Francisco from Salt Lake City, Utah, where she quickly learned to tack on the disclaimer, “And, no, I’m not Mormon,” to any introduction. After finishing her master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University, she was left in a quandary concerning What to Do With Her Life. After a few years of corporate editing, she rededicated herself to the utterly fulfilling art of teaching high school. To appease her innate editorial desire, she now works as copyeditor for Instant City, one of San Francisco’s finest literary journals.

Laura Wolfe is in her final semester as a poetry MFA student at San Francisco State University. She grew up near Boston, Massachusetts and attended Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate. Laura’s work has been published in freefall, Nimbus, and is soon to be found in Transfer Magazine.

H. K. Rainey lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is poetry editor of the literary journal 580 Split. She is an MFA candidate at Mills College in Oakland where she studies poetics.

From the shore of another day I watch the lights turn off and on according to the path of the sun. I think about lighting a candle or going to a psychic. I look for clues to you everywhere.  I find an old tank top I’ve kept buried in my drawer that is all white thread, no smell, or you, or anything at all. Your torso: muscles, holes, and cotton.

I try pressing my face against a particular technology meant to draw us closer. Flattened into a science, the room empties and leaves you there. There is falling sky behind your eyes and all over your skin. I have never seen that before, I can’t explain, but it’s as though you are the rain, dust, wind, and middle of the night. Not a monster, just without horizon. Your body a hollow full of sound, like an earthquake, a tight weave of bones and ghosts.

I watched the sun set into a jagged west tonight. It lowered over the planet and split in two. It’s reflection in flames against a house made mostly of glass, and here out in space it’s all edges and numbers and birds and sky. The ocean swallowed the temperature, my sunglass lens, and I cannot remember if we were ever the rooftop, or park, or the balcony, or dusk, or the bus stopping, or even the backseat of your father’s car. I cannot remember the shape of your legs and how your hands are now someone else’s altogether. If when it rained I was standing there, some version of a stranger, crafting a lifetime out of skin and habit. That even with the glare in my eyes, I still saw you look away. An entire population of shadows at your back.

And in the bask of fiction and memories, I can no longer recognize facts versus imitations. I reach into the center of all our words and find only the sounds we never made.  If not for the seasons you might have been right beside me separated by windows and clothes and then into each morning you came running.  I mapped into an atlas the lines on our skin, and then I thought I heard you say that absence makes the heart a supernova and I just knew all over again.

Copyright © 2009, Ali Lawrence

“There’s something you should know about me,” he breathed into Kate’s ear as he slipped his hands underneath her shirt. “I like to get naked. Right away.”

“You don’t say,” she mumbled drunkenly, looking over his freshly-revealed flesh in the dim, creamsicle-colored light from the street. “Hey, that’s not fair.” Now that all his clothes were off, Kate felt duped.

“What’s not fair?” he asked. He thumbed the button on her jeans and pushed it through the hole.

“You’re, like, all cut and shit,” she said. His giant biceps and sculpted chest looked too perfect, like George Micheal’s foam muscle suit in the first season of Arrested Development. Nick’s body was hard, thick with real muscle that cut deep lines into his abdomen and down the curve of his pelvic bone, even in the mostly-dark of Kate’s three AM bedroom. She crossed her arms over her naked chest, self-conscious of her fleshier flesh in the presence of Nick’s Adonis-like physique. “You’re all… muscle-y. And I’m not.”

He pushed her onto the bed then, sucking up her bottom lip, her left earlobe, her right nipple, halting any protest about the fact that his Santa costume was misleading — Kate had been under the impression that he was an average guy under all those clothes, but now she could see that he was muscular. Too muscular.

But he didn’t seem to agree. He seemed to like Kate’s body, and let his eyes run over it slowly when he lifted up the sheet and held himself in the plank position over her while he gazed, and gazed, and… gazed.

“Stop,” she finally said. “You’re letting all the cold in.”

Kate had never been a “naked” person. Even as a kid, she had feared the thought of her own funeral. Not because she was afraid to die, per se, but because the thought of the hospital staff or the mortician or the coroner seeing her exposed body was terrifying. At the age of ten she had committed to wearing nothing but black, to be prepared for her own funeral, just in case she died. She didn’t know, of course, that nudity was inevitable.

Eventually, Kate got older and acquired a raging set hormones that made her want to do things that generally required her to be naked, with men, and she found herself in a quandary: have sex or remain clothed? She would simply have to succumb, shed her clothes, and slink back into something immediately afterward.

Fortunately, one summer afternoon, Oprah offered a solution in the form of a guest: “I love being naked!” the woman gushed on national television, to a largely female audience who smiled at her with mixed awe and envy. The guest leaned forward to tell Oprah her secret. “It’s easy, really. You just have to practice. Take me for example — I didn’t always feel great without clothes on, so I just started taking them off more. I started vacuuming, doing laundry… really just picking up the household chores. Eventually, I was so used to it, I stopped even wanting to put clothes on. If I can love being nude, anyone can!”

So, the next time Kate noticed her floor needed vacuuming, she yanked her shirt off, flung her pants and underwear on the bed, and swished the vacuum around, for about three strokes. Then, she caught sight of herself in the mirror.

“Jesus.” She grabbed her cast-off clothes and scurried back into them like masturbating teenager, busted by Mom. And that was the end of Kate’s nudity practice.

It was this time-faded memory of Oprah’s pontificating nudist that Kate first thought of, oddly, when she was jolted from her leaden drunk-sleep the morning after San Francisco’s annual Santa pub crawl. She pushed Nick’s arm off of her body, but he pulled her back. “Where are you going?” he mumbled into her hair.

“To put some clothes on,” she said, liking but also not liking the feel of his thighs and calves, tangling between and around her own.

“You don’t need any clothes,” he said. “Go back to sleep.” He ran his fingertips over her stomach, trailing light patterns around her belly button. She felt her skin shrink away. Was it because it tickled? Or was it that she hated that part of her body? The bit that existed, say… just between her neck and her ankles?

“I can’t go back to sleep,” Kate said. “It’s late.” It was late — almost noon — so Nick pushed himself out of bed with a groan, but not before kissing Kate, seemingly not concerned at all with morning breath, the lingering stench of mass alcohol consumption, or any other post-drunken-hookup issues commonly cause for concern.

Kate pulled the blankets up around her body, tucking the edge of the sheet modestly over herself and leaned against the pillows. Despite her own bodily insecurities, she felt no shame in watching Nick while he sifted through the pile of discarded clothes on the floor. “Okay, boxers. Shirt? No, this is yours. Here’s mine. Okay, and where’re my pants? Oh, fuck. I have to walk home in this Santa costume.” He smiled up at her, sheepish, his thick arms resting against muscled thighs in his still-naked squat.

Kate smiled back at him, amused that he was embarrassed to walk home in a Santa costume, but seemed perfectly at ease with his junk bared and dangling, in the middle of a near-stranger’s bedroom. Maybe, she decided, she could be comfortable disrobed, too.

When the front door finally slammed shut and Nick was out of her house (and maybe her life), Kate threw the covers back and tiptoed across the carpet to the window. She drew the curtain back to watch Nick and his perfect body, now shrouded by Santa’s jolly red suit, meander up the street. “Santa baby,” she sang to his back, swaying her hips, daring him to turn around. He didn’t. There was a sharp whistle, though, and a catcall from some guy on the fire escape across the street: “Work it, baby, you know what daddy likes.” Mortified, she yanked the curtain shut and listened to his laughter, penetrating her single-paned window.

gash of dawn
halved shell of sky

bone         ash
brutal grooves

halfshell of a mother’s loud arm to lull a child

a hammering of bullets
so many birch trees
naked on a dead hill                                                                     

Copyright © 2009, H.K. Rainey

the way a band and a theatre company and a football team
have much more in common with the practical dreaming of writing
than most contemporary American notions of the ‘poet…’ make me cry

And I wouldn’t even waste any time criticizing those standards
If they weren’t also my own—
So you’ll probably have to pay me a lot to get me to read something like
I would really love to sing you the most sincere, naked
Song of my heart, or song of my soul, or song of your eyes
Or your ears or your hair, or song of the beauty,
The beauty we shared—
Or “redeem it” with linebreaks and such…

I’m coming closer to singing it, as a convincing character
(of nakedness…)…”in a Leonard Cohen song”
But, we’ll see, how it pans out…
And in the meantime she’s singing in
Conspiracy of Venus and I,
Well, “It Ain’t Cheatin (If You Broke Up With Me First)”
Might end up being a hit….or, better a near Miss…

Nontheless, I was too much the joker, not enough the thief,
                       Flitting around the surface,
                                                                         Merely “comic relief”
Now I think comic relief is needed,
But it would be better to develop the trance,
And I didn’t even get people to dance—
So I settled for a cop-out
Out of fear that the trance would have taken more than 10 minutes
To develop effectively—
Or maybe just the knowledge that I came ARMED
WITH NAKED RECORDINGS!

Copyright © 2009, Chris Stroffolino

Vi suddenly perceived figures standing there in the room amidst the blackness, staring at her. They gaped, bent into grotesque positions and held their breath, watching. They stood motionless, like skeletons. Violet’s eyes slowly adjusted and she convinced herself finally that they were only easels. Someone had left them out after the advanced painting class. Violet groped at the wall beside her with clammy fingers and found the light switches. She flicked up the nearest four out of eight. A murky fluorescent rectangle illuminated in the ceiling above her head, two more over the counters, and one in the ceiling of the walk-in.

With just enough light to navigate, Vi moved to the center of the classroom. She rolled the easels, rearranging them sporadically as if to erase the intimidation of their first encounter. She then positioned them in an oblong circle that surrounded the modeling platform. One by one, she drew more easels out from the cluttered walk-in. The easels were a circle of dance partners, waiting for their students to enter.

Violet was startled by a noise as a freshman girl with dreadlocks pushed through the door, clicking her cell phone and scowling at the screen. The girl hoisted a satchel off her shoulder and slung it to the ground. More students entered, two or three at a time, chatting as they entered the blurry room and dropped their things against the wall. They claimed easels, resting enormous pads of newsprint on their sills.

When Ms. Roberts entered with a click of snakeskin high heels, she glared into the dim perspectives of the room. Then with a snarl of contempt at having to do everything herself with no help from Vi, she flicked all the remaining switches. The room jumped into new levels of light that underlined every object in the room at once.

Violet felt dizzy from the bright room; she slunk back into the cluttered shadows of the walk-in and opened her bag. She pulled out her artist’s smock. It began as an old collared shirt of her father’s but had belonged to Vi ever since she moved off to college and discovered it packed away with her things. She slipped the smock on over her sweater and rolled the big sleeves up to her elbows. The shirt tails hung down to her knees. Vi left her bag in the walk-in, picked up her newsprint and carried it into the classroom along with charcoal and pencils. In the glaring lights of the classroom, her smock looked dirty with clay and charcoal finger-streaks, built up over months. Oils and acrylics stained her in a thousand hues.

Searching for the space heater, Violet opened the door to the adjoining office. The doorknob pushed into the soft waist of a girl who looked back at Violet with a glare. Her eyes shimmered darkly above a nose that flared for an instant. Her pouted lip had a piercing and she wore only pinstripe boxers and a thin men’s undershirt that traced like a ghost over her skin.

Violet dropped her hand off the doorknob and stared with a silent apology. The girl shrugged past her and walked out into the center of the classroom where students casually ignored her approach. Violet stood motionless in the doorway, watching dumbstruck as a nervous feeling rose within her. Ms. Roberts made a gruff announcement to the class:

Our usual Tuesday model, Saundra, has the flu, so we have a substitute for the day. Please start the two minute sketch.

The new Tuesday model stepped up onto the platform. She turned the metal folding chair backwards, then straddled it, leaning back. Where her legs extended, the lower muscle hung from the leg line. Students considered the shape and line of these legs, calculating the amount of clay that would roll between their hands later in the evening. First they had to sketch her body, its compact volumes, its bronze sheen.

Violet remembered the space heater. She found it in the office, grasped tightly at its handle and carried it through the busy orbit of students. She placed it down on a bare corner of the platform and turned the dial to a medium setting. The coils flushed orange with an expanding glow that reflected off the model’s shirt and angles of her face. Violet glanced up at the model by accident and was rushed by an intense beauty, the glow of heat refracting against the model’s defined face. She had meant to ask if the heater was warm enough, but her throat swelled with silence. She tightened her dirty smock around her own frail body and dropped her eyes to the model’s feet, bare and bent against the platform’s surface.

Vi turned and pushed away from the easels and the students, now sketching methodically. Their eyes followed closely along the path of their own fingers, dragging charcoal against the page. Vi followed the path of her awkward sneakers with as much concentration towards the mixing barrel.

Already lagging in her assistant duties, she would do this one task ahead of time. She lowered the dense blocks of clay into the barrel and drenched them with a pitcher-full of day old water. Letting it soften, Vi peeked back at the model’s pose. At least from this distance the sound of her breath was inaudible. Vi churned into the clay, her eyes still glancing up, mixing the blocks of tough material. When it had softened a little, she dug her hands in deep. Leaving impressions of fingers, fists, and palms on every surface of the clay, she pressed all her weight down through her arms and into the material. She went to refill the pitcher at the utility sink. Adding more water, the clay finally loosened and billowed in on itself.

Eventually, Vi couldn’t stop staring at the model. She glanced up from her task while pouring water, while churning, while pressing. The model’s form was neon and burning like a dancer in a nightclub, as if her body did not belong in the sterile white light of the classroom. She curved back against the negative space below her. The hoop in her lower lip caught the moisture from her mouth.

Most models didn’t wear makeup, as this was an artistic exercise in appreciation of the nude. Most models let their natural beauty hang out in fleshy weight. Most models moved with serene respect for the form of their own bodies. But her eyes were painted with eyeliner reflecting black like metal. Her body twisted back further than the chair allowed. Her dark, narrowed eyes searched the faces around the room.

Ms. Roberts’ heels clicked over towards Vi. Violet, tell the model to get undressed, Ms. Roberts commanded in a whisper, we need to start the forty five minute sketch.

Vi stood and breathed in, hands aching and covered by a film of clay. She approached the platform with the intention of seeming nonchalant. Her eyes settled on the clothes, what she was about to ask the model to remove. Then, reeling her eyes back too late, Vi had glanced at the dark, rough curls between fabric and thigh. Vi coughed and turned her head quickly to cover the gaze that had unexpectedly come out of her. The model would be naked in a minute, anyway, but that was different. That was Art.

We need to start, Vi said to the model in a shaky murmur, hoping the request would be understood. After the sentence was out, Vi slipped back to her place by the barrel of clay. She avoided looking directly at the model who was boldly peeling off her underclothes. Instead, Violet watched the student sketches of the body as they developed around the room. Some used dark, thick lines. Others etched a thin film of charcoal in sweeping, atmospheric patterns. None captured the animal growl Vi had seen in her; the legs thrusting forward, the exposed teeth.

After half an hour, Vi was dizzy from over-churning the wet clay and her underarms burned with the repetitive motion. A few students lined up by the barrel, ready to take a portion of clay, as if their sketches were done. As if they had seen all there was to see in her. Vi was surprised by their ease as they took the sticky heaps of clay and landed them on the rolling stands. They wheeled about the room like brown bonsai mountains.

Soon the whole class had moved on to sculpting. They dug in immediately, barely looking at the model. They made legs, stomach, chair, back, and stuck all the pieces together. Last week’s female model was much heavier through the chest and sides, with thick wobbly pads of flesh above her hips. Sculpting her had been simple because the textures were similar. Softness created folds. Clay became body.

The students tried to use that same technique this week, clumping heavy limbs of clay together, but frustration took over. The rough drafts they created leaned strangely off their bases. The students grimaced at this new Tuesday model and her difficult body. Her pose was balanced on the curve of her spine. Her eyes and neck strained. She was not asexual like other models whose breasts you could pass off as fleshy muffins. She was harder to look at, or at least, harder to understand.

She was looking back at you.

Copyright © 2009, Laura Wolfe

Excerpt of Peter Orner reading “Tuesday”

Excerpt of Ali Lawrence reading “I Used to Sleep Naked Beside You”

H.K Rainey reading her poetry

Chris Stroffolino and Friends