Up presents Issue 3
Right in my darkest hour Carolyn DeCarlo brings me up. I am a little down today but I feel a bit better knowing UP exists. Sometimes I wonder ‘What does my heart want me to do?’ and I can barely hear it. Alt lit things make me really happy. There is a passion with ‘Up’, a sexual one. Look at that pickle. The pickle wants to show you its pickle. I dig Dave Shaw’s ‘Food Poetry’ quite a bit. Glad he is in here too.
fits/fist
Parker Tettleton says there are breasts and there are pillows. Maybe pillows are the new breasts. I wonder how pillows were even considered important or who invented them. No one is happy. Everybody does things they don’t want to do. I hope that changes soon. Jenna Jameson knows Parker. She laughs at him. God is soap.
J. Bradley is everywhere. I bump into his work all the time. Alt lit is a small neighborhood I reckon. Or perhaps he submits to places. I need to do that. Cancer on the fingertips is rough. That is a shame about his loss of random articles of clothing. Clothes really make the man. He’s right that no church is in nature. I remember the Simpsons when Reverend Lovejoy calls nature ‘cheap showiness’. Convert words into Christianity.
Robert Duncan Gray believes in the random cruelty of life. So ride a bike. Bikes like you. Try to avoid the fate of the famous Viennese prostitute or Russian tightrope walker. Their lives sound hard. Lighthouses are better. Get away from it all. Drink a glass of milk and drop dead.
William Keckler has quite an imagination according to the first poem. It moves really quickly. I feel it captures the imagery of dreams quite well. Dreams connect to our own personal feelings towards other. I try to avoid going to bed angry. The happier you go to bed the easier you sleep. That’s my philosophy anyway. His second poem shines a light on the ‘Broke Straight Boys’ phenomena. It’s pretty funny. I don’t know too much about it but the ending is amazing.
vein/vain
Paul Cunningham is awesome. ‘i hug you fluffy bunny because you are the best bunny’ comes from a post I wrote about him a few months ago. This is excellent. Not only do I finally have tangible evidence that somebody reads my posts but that they influence people. I’m doubly happy because this piece is perfect. Paul’s 32 year old wealth management advisor takes the idea of a ‘man-child’ even further. This isn’t a man child, it is an infant child. He abuses others and justifies it. He sees others protest in the street and thinks it is silly. What’s the saddest part of the story is there are plenty of 32 year olds who aspire to become this completely infantile in behavior, woefully unaware of their ridiculously privileged lives, looking down on others.
C.P Harrison appears! I’m happy. I never see C.P’s work enough, or not as much as I want. Something is happening in the character’s life. They try to put it together and fail. Maybe they were under a bridge. The coffee may help. But it doesn’t. At the end things they remain confused by everything.
Susan Min is a new face. ‘Gary Soul’ takes hormones. I think the hormones are to build up. Not in the traditional sense more in the ego sense. Egos are wrecks. Gary’s soul is horrible. He thinks of people he used to know, people who used to care about it. But he’s at the bottom of the ocean. Nobody can reach him anymore.
Seb Som is a film maker. I have covered him before. He makes films based off of Tao Lin Poems. I like this a lot though. He has some ultra-attractive looking guy doing horrible unattractive things. The guy eats cigarettes. He loves the taste of cancer the narrator tells us. Whenever he gets sad he humps fire hydrants, fucks traffic equipment, etc. He follows people out of boredom. Are we truly fucked as a generation? I hope not.
lips/lisp
Meghan Lamb writes about her friend Christina Hendricks. Christina Hendricks has her breasts growing into infinity. They are made to nurse others. She mentions her cup size. I usually drink from a mug. I don’t really know much about cup sizes I guess. She tells us the stores she shops at and mentions her stinking children.
Beach Sloth has a poem here. I really like my poem. Any feedback you want to give me is fine. I’m trying to get better. I am improving I hope. Perhaps you will see more of these poems. Maybe I’ll get a chapbook together. Things are still in the air. Posting is tough. But chapbooks get you more respect I think.
Jesus Moses’s poem makes me laugh. It’s a touching tale of a pizza/greasy fucking food deliveryman. That sounds bleak. Jesus makes it less bleak. He gives this pathetic loser at the edge of town gross food. A tiny dog barks at this pathetic loser who fails to tip our hero. As Jesus drives away he’s angry but the anger subsidies. Instead he realizes the dog loves that man, no matter or gross, lonely or pathetic he is or becomes. It inspires me to move to the edge of town.
Dave Shaw writes about a single night. None of the characters have names. I don’t know too much about Tim Horton’s though. It seems that he doesn’t name them because this probably happened, either to him or a close friend. I like the fact that none of people seem to judge one another. Most of it is a completely non-judgmental, vaguely hipster-ish scene. The sort of scene I used to be in before I got old and started farming corn.
Love this collection. Carolyn does a good job of taking the very best from alt lit and making it shine. All these pieces make me feel happy, like I’m nearly part of something. Happy they are out today. Carolyn has perfect timing. She turns my frowns upside down.
