Tag Archives: amanda chiado

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

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Dark_and_stormy_night

Nailed it.

Answer #1: Places! Answer #2: Here!

Unsurprisingly, writers who choose to associate themselves with JDP often go on to perform additional death-defying feats of creative dexterity. We recently highlighted the literary accomplishments of Danger_Slater and our production editor, Samuel Snoek-Brown, and we thought this might be a good time to update you on what a few of our other favorite people have been up to.

Carl Fuerst, whose “The New Mercury Ghost Dancers” appeared in Issue 10, has recently launched a journal of bizarre audio fiction called The Break Room Stories, which is a great way to experience odd little tales with someone else’s voice doing all the work for you. Check out his submission guidelines if you think you might have a story you want him to consider.

“Floating in Jagermeister,” one of the two amazing poems Amanda Chiado contributed to our Poetry Issue, will be reprinted in the forthcoming Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books anthology from Minor Arcana Press. (We nominated her other poem, “The Birth of Houdini,” for a Pushcart Prize.)

If you’ve been looking for something special for the Stephen King fan in your life who also appreciates fine needlework, you will definitely want to check out yt sumner’s pop-culture-craft Etsy shop, Stitch You Up. (She wrote another of this year’s Pushcart nominees, “Bazaar,” as well as “The Last Bird,” “Hole in the Garden,” and “Big Girl.”) We’re only sorry we weren’t the ones who bought this so-terrifying-we-just-peed-a-little Pennywise. And it looks like she takes custom order requests, too, so this could be the year your dream of a cross-stitched billy-bumbler becomes a reality.

Finally, our illustrious founder Eirik Gumeny’s hilarious “Gnome-pocalyspe” is included in the recently released Tall Tales with Short Cocks, Vol. 4, from Rooster Republic Press. And if you’re going to be tootling around Albuquerque in your car (or mobile meth lab) any time soon, you won’t want to miss his recently posted Breaking Bad Self-Guided Driving Tour, featuring twenty-one locations from the show in one conveniently downloadable .pdf.

By the way, if you’re reading this and thinking, why didn’t they mention my recent [insert accomplishment or venture here] in this post?, it’s probably because we didn’t know about it. So tell us! Shoot us an email or brag to us about it on the Twitters; we promise we’ll be proud of you. And maybe a little jealous. But mostly proud.

Amanda Chiado

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The Birth of Houdini

For Angelo

In the beginning our mother
slept with a silver sword
in her throat, ate ruby fire,
danced like a banshee, all charms
of a stone-face conjurer.

Our father was intent,
a phantom with slip pockets
crossing over the fog.
Music pulsed from his top hat,
rabbit furs swinging
from his leather belt.

When the thunderstorm
brought you, my brother,
our father levitated until
a lavender dawn, beside himself,
his future self. Mother rocked you
with a mystic’s two-step, her skin

gone chameleon peach with you,
a sweet cantaloupe, in her arms.
Now, you always ask. Now, they tell you
that time stood still. Now, you know
they were always right.

* * *

Floating in Jagermeister

Batman chomps heads off bats
like Ozzy when he gets blasted.
Up-heaves a memory-grave, his father
flung like yesterday’s newspaper.

Clumps of muddy-blood stuck
in the rabbit fur his mother wore
that night at the Opera. A plane drifts
feather dust before its smithereens.

Batman’s brain whirls like cotton candy.
How does it feel to be a dead man
Not just float like one?

When Batman gets smashed
he puckers up to women
who are 5’s and 3’s, spreads
his buttery eroticism of wings.

He starts to whip with pleasure,
if one knocks her head back
rolling her eyes, her legs
flightless birds, except in bed.

Batman remembers being new,
a knot of veins, plucked from a cave.
He wishes he might resurrect time
but that just makes him drink more.

And the shot glass hollers.
Let’s dive and die again
cling to ceilings instead of
grounds stuffed with the dead.

Batman touches his body
like a blind man, echolocation.
Booze and a night suit: an embrace
without a person to complicate it.

AMANDA CHIADO is an MFA graduate of California College of the Arts. Her work is forthcoming or appears in Witness, Sweet, Forklift, Ohio, Best New Poets, Fence, Cranky, Eleven Eleven and others. She currently works as the Program Coordinator for the San Benito County Arts Council and she is also an active California Poet in the Schools.