Copyright © 2012, Geraldine Kim

An entrepreneur and a multi-billionaire, Mr. B. sponsored multiple humanitarian projects: The Happy Human Machine; the Transatlantic Bridge, and the Moon Yellow Cab.

“I want to make a difference in the world,” confessed Mr. B. to The National Enquirer.  “I want to grow an eggplant the size of the Empire State Building and feed the hungry of the world.  I’m a vegetarian.”

So Mr. B. established the Be Fund and invited scientists from all over the world to work on the Be Eggplant project.

First, Dr. Nangerel Dramaaraarj, a marine biologist from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, suggested that the Be Eggplant should be planted at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.  According to Dr. Dramaaraarj, the spongy tissue would expand and the eggplant would swell up like a balloon, while the marine life would add to the nutritional density of the product.

Then, Igor Pukin, a ninety-year-old chemist from Zakhromyrsk, Russia, revealed the only existing photograph of the monster eggplant created in the 30s on Stalin’s request.  “The bloody eggplant” had the shape and size of the Kremlin.  Thousands of prisoners labored inside the vegetable.  They ate eggplant only.  Many died from overdose.  The dead were pureed and buried inside the eggplant.  KGB burnt the vegetable a decade later, but Mr. Pukin had swallowed a capsule with the secret code and kept the know-how.  Lucid and enthusiastic, he was eager to restore the deed of his youth.

Finally, Joe Chin, Dan Chan and Stan Chun, American students from Lowell High School, San Francisco, California, came up with the revolutionary idea of implanting the DNA of a white mouse into a Japanese eggplant.  Should their expectations come true, claimed the scholarly youths, the eggplants would learn to reproduce at a mind-blowing speed.  Although each baby eggplant would be only the size of an average mouse, quantity would triumph over quality.

“Size does not matter!” chanted the American students.

The slogan agreed with the philanthropist.  He awarded the grant to the talented youngsters.

Joe, Dan and Stan and the international crew of experienced scholars settled in a spacious state-of-art laboratory in North Carolina.  The North-West Wing hosted the Department of Mice.  Animal rights activists built a white shack—shaped like a mouse—in front of that wing.  The activists recited: “Hickory-dickory-dock, the mouse ran up the clock.”

Eggplant rights activists resided in a giant plastic purple eggplant by the Department of Eggplants, the South-East Wing.  They wore purple and played Deep Purple songs.

The CBS Eyewitness News crew settled by the Main Entrance.

The scientists worked.  The mice reproduced.  The eggplants grew. The activists chanted.  The reporters drank—for six months.  Joe managed to get one crooked little eggplant with paws to run in a wheel. Dan and Stan grew a snow-white eggplant with silky fur and a disgusting pink tail.  It purred.  The research went on.

One night Dr. Puncinelli, a scientist from Italy and the manager on duty, paced from the Mouse Department to the Eggplant Department and back, the way scholars do.  A pet white mouse named Claudia Rossi sat on his shoulder.

Dr. Puncinelli wasn’t thinking about DNA.  He was thinking about sex.  He was lonely in North Carolina.  He hated American food and women.  The first did not agree with his digestive system, the latter did not agree to sleep with him.  For months he watched mice copulating and eggplants swelling up.  He envied mice.  He hated eggplants.  He wanted to go home.  Mice, eggplants and sex.  Eggplants.  Mice.  Sex.

His far-away Italian girlfriend Claudia Rossi had aubergine violet eyes and Pompeii hips.  He sighed.  Eggplants, mice, sex.

The clock struck one.  A ripe eggplant fell off the shelf onto Dr.Puncinelli’s head.  He patted its smooth surface.  It was the color of Claudia’s eyes.  Oh, tiramisu-like skin, oh, mozzarella-like breasts, oh, unforgettable Claudia Rossi!

“Eureka!” screamed the scientist, as he slashed the eggplant with his scalpel, orbiting his eyes and mumbling, “Mus musculus musculus, solanum melongea esculentum.”

A sleepless eggplant rights activist spotted a giant shadow swaying up and down in the window and heard a mouse squeaking.

The next morning a powerful explosion woke up the activists and reporters.  The windows shattered and the walls crumbled.  Slowly and magnificently a glossy eggplant rose above the ruins.  Like the Tower of Pisa it stood erect, leaning to the side.  Its purplish-red skin glistened in the morning sun.  Two female activists from Portland fainted.

“It’s alive!” screamed the crowd.  “It’s breathing!”

“Go Lowell!”  chanted Joe, Dan and Stan.

Soon the whole world was glued to the television sets.  The CBS News ratings rocketed sky-high.  Mr. B. proclaimed himself a Be Jesus.  Dr. Puncinelli gave an exclusive interview about his discovery, “But it is very, very simple: Think very, very big.  I’m not at liberty to tell you more.  The Nobel Prize?  Maybe, maybe.”

People had a special issue: “Scientist Copulates with an Eggplant.” The National Enquirer confronted it with: “Scientist Copulates with a Rat.” The British tabloids published an article: “Scientist Copulates with a Giant Locust.”

Mr. B. was on the phone with Wolfgang Puck ordering Garlic Eggplant Szechuan style for the homeless of the United States, when…

“Hold on!” shouted Stan.

“Watch it!” screamed Dan.

The bottom of the ruins shook again, and a white mouse the size of three Be Eggplants crept from underneath.  It trotted to the Be Eggplant and dug its teeth in.  Like a giant eating machine, it ate the eggplant, Joe, Dan and Stan, Dr. Puncinelli and the fainted animal rights activists from Portland.   The beast’s mouth foamed.  It turned purple.  The CBS News crew kept recording.

Mr. B.  jumped off his skyscraper.  His scattered brains appeared at 7:03 pm EST on the CBS Eyewitness News.  And at 7:05 the giant purple mouse exploded, erasing the planet Earth from the Universe.

Copyright © 2012, Zarina Zabrisky

The Empire lay shattered,
in scattered fragments,
stinking of pepper-spray
stagnant, but for a few viral fiefdoms
sputtering, in and out, of new alliances —
none of them weathering well
the onslaught of vengeful climate.

And with no Yao or Shun or Yu
or Moses to lead the way,
but only a pale horse
cantering across dried-up sea beds
inundated with desiccated bones
of water-seekers, misled
by fake gods with dousing rods.

And every day, a bloodier battle
for rusty tap . . .  or vintage bottle.
Give us this day—our daily drink.

And every day, we drown in dreams.
Delores tells me of her visions.
She sees Laundromats —
like the one she use to use, in the Mission,
around the corner
from the Amnesia Bar.

Weary, I grunt — miles from hearing,
but she talks on and on, never seeming to tire,
of washers and dryers, and all that water —
of coin change, and candy, vending machines
dispensing packets of detergent and bleach
and chewing gum — amidst old issues of
fan magazines and The Kenyon Review.

And once in a while, a drunk stumbles in —
slumps down in a vacant chair and stares
into the swirling eye of a whirlpool dryer.
Hypnotized — he nods off designating
drivers into oblivion.

And once in a while, a dog wanders in and lies down
where it’s warm on the soap-scented floor.
He sleeps a few cycles, from puppy play days
to sly trickster grin,
then wakes with a start —
strrreeetches his bones —
shakes    loose    his   joints!
Then saunters out the laundry door
and disappears in the midday sun.

And once in a while,  a crazy old lady,
dying of dementia, plays dimes in the slot
of each hazy machine.
And cycling back
to check on her winnings,
finds a dryer with clothes in it now,
and cries out, “I won, I won!”
and scoops them all up and carries them home.

“I won, I won” she tells Delores,
who gives her a hug and says, “That’s fine, Ma,
you always were the lucky one”
and puts her to bed, and sorts them all out.
Boxer shorts and houndstooth trousers,
but, varicose hose? . . . floral blouses? . . . Ah,
nursing bras . . . baby diapers — and grandpa’s too.
Must be Maya’s load.

She folds them neatly, into a large wicker basket,
then carries them back to the Laundromat,
where Maya sits waiting
by empty dryer with open door,
reading Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks.”
She never complains, she knows Ma from
way back when — before the Alzheimer’s came.

Surrounded by swirling sheets, in billowing warmth,
Delores, too, remembers
a girlish figure, framed in summer sun:
Ma — hanging laundry out on the line.

Lulled by the rhythm of laundry machines
drumming bubbles and suds into the dry desert air,
she closes her eyes and dreams of someday
owning her own machines
and all that water.

Softly— she sighs a wafting sirocco
blowing puffs of sand
through her parched eye sockets.

Her sun-bleached skull goes tumbling
down the steep dune
and gives up her ghost
at the rattle of bone striking bone.

Copyright © 2012, Ken-win Jung

“Apocalypse Oasis” by Ken-win Jung

“Be Eggplant” by Zarina Zabrisky

BANG OUT Volume XIV: “Apocalypse, Now?” was on Friday, January 13th from 7-9 pm at Amnesia in San Francisco.

“Apocalypse, Now?” is a theme to celebrate 2012, the year to end all years. Arguably. The best new apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, anything-apocalyptic poetry, fiction or essays were banged out especially for this event. As always, we welcomed any and all interpretations of the theme, and the pieces that made the final cut displayed some very unusual and compelling interpretations of the End of Days.

We heard fresh new work banged out by these readers on January 13, 2011:

Madison Davis is a poet from New York City. She is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at Mills College. Her work has recently appeared in The Yalobusha Review and Leaf Garden Press. She enjoys art projects that utilize magazines from the 80’s, putting poetry to music and riding the bus in her newly adopted Oakland.

Ken-win Jung is the author of “Sumatran Sutras: the Durian Connection” published in Transfer Magazine (100th Edition). He just finished banging out B.A. at SF State. After flying under the radar for decades, he finally landed on Creative Writing in the “Over 60 Degree Program” before it was suspended due to budget cuts. Ready to start anew, but the Apocalypse could definitely put a dent in it. And if the end is nigh, at least, we all get the last laugh.

Scott Lambridis‘ stories have appeared in Storyglossia, Black Static, received the Leo Litwak award in Transfer, and are forthcoming in New American Writing. He earned a degree in neurobiology at UVa before founding Omnibucket.com. While completinghisy MFA at San Francisco State, he’s working on a novel about the scientist who discovered the end of time. Read more at scottlambridis.com.

In 2010-11, Sean Labrador y Manzano appeared in Conversations at a Wartime Café (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/sean-labrador-y-manzano), Fag/Hag, Tayo, Beeswax, Our Own Voice, Try, Volt, The Walrus, Tarpaulin Sky (http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/issue-17/index.html), The Poetry of Yoga, Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/sean-labrador-y-manzano.html) and else where, and has edited JS Waters’ novel, The Modern Primitives, and the Altered Barbie 2010 anthology. He edits the annual anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café. Forthcoming are the chapbook, The Gulag Arkipelago (Tinfish, January 2012), and poems in Aufgabe and The Encyclopedia Project.

Named for a fictional character, Maya Marie Weeks writes to prove that she actually exists. Born and raised in California, she has lived as far away as Copenhagen, Denmark, but Oakland is the farthest she has ever lived from the ocean.

Zarina Zabrisky started to write at six. She earned her MFA from St. Petersburg State University in Russia. She wrote and traveled around the world as a translator, kickboxing instructor, street artist, and a model. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Full of Crow Quarterly Fiction, Lip Service West: True Stories, Blinking Cursor Literary Magazine, Blinking Cursor anthology, and Wicked East Press anthology. Zarina lives in San Francisco.

Geraldine Kim is the author of Povel (Fence Books, 2005) which was featured in the Believer and Village Voice’s top 25 books of the year. She also wrote the play Donning Cheadle and has been published in Kitchen Sink, Big Bell, 2nd Avenue, 14 Hills, and others. She is part of the band, two boobies and a vagina, where she is not the vagina.

On October 15th during Phase 2 (7:15-8:15pm) of Lit Crawl at the Beauty Bar, writers Marisa Crawford, Matt L. Rohrer, Lizzy Acker and Ryan Van Winkle read fresh new work on the theme “Meditations in an Emergency.”

Marisa Crawford is the author of The Haunted House from the feminist poetry press Switchback Books. Her poems have recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Columbia Poetry Review and Black Clock. She is an editor of Small Desk Press and lives in Brooklyn where she works as a freelance writer. Find her work online at marisacrawfordforever.com.

Matt L. Rohrer is the author of Probability of Dependent Events from Beard of Bees Press, and has had work published in Tinfish, Skein, The Surfer’s Journal and more. He is the editor-in-chief of Small Desk Press.

Lizzy Acker’s first book, Monster Party, was released in December 2010 by Small Desk Press. She was born in Oregon but now lives in San Francisco.

Ryan Van Winkle has been Reader in Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library and the Edinburgh City Libraries since 2008. His first collection of poems, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, was published in 2010. His work has appeared in New Writing Scotland, The American Poetry Review, AGNI and Northwords Now and The Oxford Poet series. He lives in Edinburgh but is still an American (and he says ‘Tomato’ that way).

“Call It What It Is” by Suzanne Kleid (via TheRumpus.net)

“History Lessons” by Brent Armendinger

“Comstock” by Diana Turken

“Rapping” by Jen Sullivan Brych

“Amnesia” by Aneesa Davenport

“Leonard B. Stern, Creator of Mad Libs, Dies at 88, June 7th, 2011″ by Aneesa Davenport

“This is a Story” by Brittany Billmeyer-Finn

“Encounter/Chronology” by Brittany Billmeyer-Finn

Watch the readers perform their pieces in our Video Library.

“BLANK” is… the perfect anti-theme, or the spaces we leave or that exist between us, between all things; what we choose to fill them with or how. Blank stares, shooting blanks, whatever the blankety blank.  These seven readers performed their works at Amnesia on August 13th, 2011.

Sarah Fran Wisby writes poetry, fiction, memoir and essays, preferring always to deepen and subvert genre by way of the hybrid form. Her book Viva Loss was published in 2008 by Small Desk Press. Recent work can be found in Eleven Eleven Journal and Rumpus Women Volume 1, and heard on Invisible Cities Audio Tour #2: The Armada of Golden Dreams. She’s also been published in Instant City, Sparkle and Blink, Digital Artifact, and The Encyclopedia Project Volume 2, F—K, for which she was honored to write the entry for fuck. She performs her work all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, and was a Literary Death Match champion in December 2010.

Suzanne Kleid is the manager of Readers Bookstore at the Main, a used bookstore inside the San Francisco Main Library. Her essays and fiction have appeared in the Believer, Bitch Magazine, Other Magazine, Watchword, Pindeldyboz, and We Still Like.

Brent Armendinger is the author of two chapbooks: Archipelago (Noemi Press) and Undetectable (New Michigan Press). His work has recently appeared in LIT, Court Green, VOLT, and Prism Review, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol. He teaches creative writing at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.

Diana Turken was born and raised in Los Angeles, Ca. She is currently working on her MFA degree in Poetry at Mills College. She likes to write about railroad barons, cowboys, and Californians. She is a cable news junkie, a basketball fanatic, and makes her own biscuits from scratch. She lives and works in Oakland.

Jen Sullivan Brych has written plays, fiction and journalism for places like the Los Angeles Times, Wired, The Rumpus, Killing My Lobster, the Bay Guardian and blah blah blah. She was a finalist for the Third Coast fiction prize and teaches creative writing and English at City College. She can be seen wrangling her huge baby at various city parks.

Aneesa Davenport lives in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Fanzine, Beeswax Magazine, Kitchen Sink, Monday Night, The South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She has read with Quiet Lightening, Funny/Sexy/Sad, and Don’t Mention It, a 24-hour literary reading. Find her at http://paragraphed.wordpre​ss.com/.

Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, a Michigan Native and Oakland transplant moved here last August to attend Mills College. She is currently an MFA Poetry candidate at Mills, part time retailer, Maya Deren enthusiast, vintage dress collector and loves all things crystals, shells and feathers. Brittany lives in Downtown Oakland where her fellow poet housemates, graph paper notebooks and Magic, their cat, constantly inspire her. Also, Brittany is currently madly in love.

        I have never heard the doorbell ring before.

        When I say doorbell I should say doorbells. The doorbells are ringing, all throughout the building, a school of notes that once all rang at the same pitch but sound different now, not only because their sounds are jangling toward me from different apartments in the building, upper and lower floors, rooms that share a common wall with mine, or are diametrically opposed like the fingerholes at either end of a Jacob’s Ladder, but also because sounds age differently, or, rather, the apparatus ages and reveals its degree of decrepitude through its sounds, be they springing or garrulous or barely limping along. The fire has no doubt had an impact. Some of the bells rasp like voices destroyed by thousands of cigarettes. Some bells must be entirely dead, as there are blanks in the volley of sounds: pockets of silence that hover like questions in the otherwise unthinking cacophony. Or else the person ringing the doorbells is consciously altering the rhythm, inserting bursts of silence in odd places to surprise the listener.

        I’ll try not to be so fancy: the listener is me. There is no one else. If I admit that much will other things become clear? Probably not. There are already so many evasions in what I’ve said here. The word bell, for instance. Obviously the truth of the matter is that any apartment building with more than a few units is going to have a system of buzzers rather than bells. Not only is the sound of a buzzer considerably more abrasive than that of a bell, even an electrically simulated bell, the word itself is unpleasant to say, bringing to mind buzzards, which naturally bring to mind death, not death in the abstract which I’ve been known to think about in a lovely, silly, romantic teenage-girl sense, not death’s blank endcaps which frame a life and supposedly give it meaning, but death in the particularity of its physical breakdowns, death as an announcement via stench, death as dinner bell.

        Right now there is another sort of announcement happening, a bedlam of bells, buzzers, bantam cocks crowing crazily—whatever one wants to call them, they won’t be stopped by naming. Some other action is required.

        A person is ringing the doorbells.

        I have no idea who that person might be.

I open my apartment door and creep barefoot downstairs. The only footprints in the soot on the stair landings belong to me, and there are not very many of them. It’s not often that I leave my apartment, and the soot is like dust, it falls constantly though invisibly, filling my old tracks.

        The man ringing the bells wears a long black coat with the collar turned up, and a black hat, perhaps a fedora that has lost its shape. I cannot make out his face. Behind him, in the light from the streetlight across the street, it appears to be snowing. He is turned slightly away from me, facing the grid of doorbells, punching at them with the naked tips of his two middle fingers, but in rapidly deteriorating order, as if he is losing hope. As I watch him through the glass, trying to determine if he is some sort of buzzard drawn by my stench, he gives up, lets his arms fall to his sides, and leans his cheek against the panel of buttons, depressing several of them all at once. The sound of all the bells together above me is like a roof of light going on in my brain, a deeply pleasurable sensation. It’s been a while since my brain has been lit up. I must make some sort of involuntary movement, an electrified swoon, because the man’s head jerks away from the panel. He straightens up and peers into the dark vestibule. He sees me where I stand hovering between the second-to-last and the last stair. I feel caught, and though ashamed and fearful, I quickly remind myself he is the one who is at my mercy. The face at the window is slack and empty. The flesh hangs from it in sad ropes; the lips sag in a default pout; the muscles of his cheeks seem barely able to hold up his chin, which is pocked like a golf ball and covered with several days’ hair growth. In that moment I think he is perhaps the ugliest man I have ever seen, and my heart opens up wide, as wide as it goes, which, having had little practice at that sort of thing, is not so wide at all.

        But then the man smiles, and his face is transformed. Primate confusion is replaced by intelligence, sly wit, and—what may have been there all along—a brooding sexiness around the eyes. I don’t know what to think. I allow myself to smile back, tentatively, and commit more fully to being on the last step and leaving behind the second-to-last step. He responds to this encouragement by deepening his smile to the point of making dark furrows in his cheeks, and leaning slightly backward to raise his shoulders into an open-armed shrug. Also, he mouths something, or this is how it appears through the glass. More likely he is speaking aloud in an exaggerated way that if I were a lip-reader I could understand, but I do not understand. I continue my tentative approach, stepping across the floor of the vestibule, which is covered with scraps of old newspaper and ash. Later he will tell me that he thought he might be seeing a ghost, that the hairs stood up all over his body when he saw me, but that might have been from the cold, and I will tell him that I myself have sometimes wondered if I am a ghost, and was a bit surprised he could see me, and that more than half of my surprise may have been gratitude, at being seen.

She and I had weathered so much together,
such sweet loves, such deep losses, so many
comas, climaxes, heiresses, estate taxes.

We had mono together. We were laid up for weeks,
wondering whose spit carried the crux of this script.

And that winter when I sank swanlike through the ice,
and woke at Easter with amnesia, she tended me daily,
kept accounts of my affairs, nursed my memory with flashcards:

“Loyalty,” a card said. “Family,” she read.
She tested me, and I know I tested her: “Patience,”
she repeated. “Attention,” she mouthed. “Television.”

I tried to reassemble her family tree. Started at
Season One but couldn’t keep track of each degree.
Harold is to Georgia as Luke is to Ashleigh.
Ashleigh is to Walker as Marian is to Marshall.
_________ is to _________ as _________ is to _________?

I was anchorless; its timeslot filled by Dr. Phil. He slapped me
to snap me out of it; wouldn’t consider my appeal. Instead
he scrunched his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears
and chanted to himself, “Get real, get real, get real.”