FALL
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 018 // OCTOBER 12, 2024
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
“I asked Kat, Amalia, Maxwell, Max, Jack, Johnny, Alana, and August to write a poem about Autumn. These are the poems. This is best read on desktop. Mobile phones will fuck up the text formatting. Do as you wish. Godbless.”
Charlie Zacks
KAT MULLIGAN "Autumn Now"
The birds are in a rapture today. I did not ask them
to do this, yet they festoon the winds with fanfare
in the place where I have woken late, my brow a nest of fog.
Autumn now,
so even the sparrows sing swan songs while they can,
before their cheers, rattled by shivers, snag in bass clef
like feathered wings in wire, like chiffon
on loose nails.
It is one of those days when children tear down the street,
filling their sails with leaves, when the sun lumbers like a bear.
It is the time when larks disperse as seeds do, parachuting from
cottonwoods and clouds.
Autumn now, a heavy lid
piled with sleep and lashes, blinking over the place
where I have woken late. I did not ask for the welcome
I was given.AMALIA MAIRET "Electromagnetic October"
It's autumn and I’ve been getting high again,
smoking and thinking of arm bones and the meat
between them, how the radius and ulna twist into
each other but never touch, held a breath apart
by fleshy interstitial distance. I’ve been diagramming
the whole thing in my mind, how I’d draw the arm
if I had x-ray vision and every atom
was a point of light like they said it would be,
whether I’d look if I even had the chance.
When I think these things I lay in bed and it’s raining,
downpouring into a gravel trough outside the window,
the backyard smelling wet and deciduous. I think
of rain welling up behind the window ledge, how it would
overflow if it could, whether it would trickle through corners
or crash over in one cold shock. I saw the dog again
in a dream last night, and once in an illusion outside
the grocery store. I tried not to look, tried to stop leaving
food out for these figments. Instead, I sit
and swallow to remind myself I have a throat
and then I yell until I feel the scratch. MAXWELL NORMAN "When October Came"
October came to the door that first year with glass eyes and teeth big as tombstones. He stood at the threshold howling like a cursed wolf.
I learned to stand on the Jackson Street bridge. October 28th, the first day we all hung out at Charlie’s, remember? I learned how to cast protective sigils. Run your hands down the groove of my spine. You will feel these gentle annihilations like fallen leaves. At times death and concrete are soft as blankets.
When October comes now, grinning all slaunchways at my door, I let him in. Some say there’s a big black pit somewhere and it is swallowing us up.
October spoke when I saw him all those years ago. I knew fearing him would be like raising fists against an old clock’s hour hand. He said, “Sink into it.” So I took a breath and sank.MAX SHOHAM "Autumn is Always For You"
No flashlight
A dog with an eyepatch
A boy’s home for dinner
A graveyard in Skyrim
A Buddhist funeral
No one even knew he was Buddhist
Etienne, it’s always for you
They scrubbed your pictures off the internet
Except for one on Facebook
It maybe looks like a heart or a spade
That fractures into infinite black specks
And it also says “Went to Lycée Français de Toronto”
Which is true.
And I think about you in Autumn,
When Leo shows me a picture on his phone and he laughs
And it’s a drawing of an emo girl wearing huge headphones.
She’s closing her eyes
And the text says
“Music Saves My Soul”CHARLIE ZACKS "ANNIVERSARY"
happy anniversary this year i will feel nothingJACK SCHAAF "john wieners loved his sister"
i think some people
show a little more generosity
towards art
— “possessive, hypnotic” —
than i do.
sometimes i look at a painting
and cry,
and that is all i have to give,
that is the extent of my knowledge
on the subject.
john wieners once saw his sister’s breasts
in a munch painting
and called them
“heavy.”
i see mary’s breasts
all up in jesus’s face
and call it
“sacred.”
you will see me
trying to see you seeing something here
and call it
“a natural conclusion to the poem.”JOHNNY CARTER "The Full Size Mar’s Bar"
‘Six packs of smarties, two Reese cups, and all of your Rockets or no deal these are my demands.’
‘Fine’ said the second one.
A full size chocolate bar is worth a lot when you have such little hands.ALANA DUNLOP
"unfortunately Mother Mary arrived with her hands smashed off"
Often when Fall comes, I feel I am building back up from ruin. And that’s not just because of the name—Fall—implying errors of biblical proportions, or a brief second of suspension in air, or a great tumble from a smooth staircase with those floating stairs you might just slip between. It is because seasons sever time like comic strips do—that space in between panels, that’s called the gutter, you know, and it splices time so you can never quite map it linearly, it is more of a slow procession, then a crawling acceleration, like a car careening around a corner, the lurching movement of its sound. Summer usually ends in spoil; fruit that is no longer ripe and sweet on the tongue, humidity cracking and revealing mold behind my bedside table—yes, I have been sleeping next to it this whole time.
My birthday creeps up quickly, right as the leaves start to turn red like an engorged pimple, right as the first weekend of Fall smashes into frame. I break a wine glass on the counter and then, a few hours later, my roommate gives me a small statue bust of Mother Mary with a lightbulb so she lights up dull yellow from the inside, and when I unwrap her from the bubble wrap, both of her ceramic hands roll onto the floor, already severed from her wrists. My roommate emails the Etsy seller she bought her from. She says unfortunately Mother Mary arrived with her hands smashed off. That night I have a big birthday party, so big that at one point there is no room to move in my narrow apartment and beer cans tumble out of hands and onto hardwood. Some tall guys come near dawn and one of them plunges a fist into the cake’s remains—dollops of vanilla icing smatter the walls and the toaster oven.
In the morning I wake up and the back window is broken—if I lightly push at a piece of glass in that big gaping wound it will open up and it will all fall down like clink clink clink. I get up to pee and wade through the party’s ruins—the sickly sweet smell of festering alcohol, the cans crushed and scattered, the mold behind my bed that I tried to tackle with vinegar spray. Mary sits on my desk, watching, with the holes in her wrists where her hands should be. Her cracked hands are beside her, hovering right on the edge of the desk, threatening to fall again. When I get back into bed beside my drunk friend, sleep grabs me like a snake wrangler and says come now, it’s seven in the morning, when you wake up it will be colder. Not just from the smashed window, but from the sun that will rise smaller and later, zapping colours from the landscape, it will be colder from the wind whipping around your ears and it will be colder from the shadows of whatever ruined place you are coming from, or towards, and here, now, don’t look—as winter stretches its bony finger across the room.August Costello "Writing for Charlie"
Teenager, talking about thanksgiving dinner: “I mean they’re great people but… and it’s all love but…”
I’m in the airport. I miss you. I just bought two things that are basically the same. With my mom’s credit card. I have an essay to write. I’m stressed. I’ve been tired for too long. I’m going to do something about this.
On the plane … sticking things into my skin in my mind. Born Ruffians playing. Need another release. Therapy in two weeks, less.
The hostesses, the flight attendants now must be my age. And still they are all mostly women.
Guy beside me writing his ‘limits’ down in his Notes App: “kid beside me farting three times in a row.”
The thong line of orange highway lights from up here look like lava working its way down you.
This is me: hovering above all the empty, outer city baseball fields lit up at night. - Is that stupid?
Woosh, the plane comes to a stop. And my head, if we collided, could rip right into the back of this seat, and I’d fracture my skull in two and spill my brain all over the guy beside me.
Limits:
“Kid bleeding his brain all over me.”
We all turn our Airplane Mode off.
maxwell norman’s album of the week
nujabes - modal soul (2005)
A blissful tapestry of soul-infused rap, both with verses and instrumental. When Nujabes brings in collaborators, rappers like Shing02 and Substantial are dropping joyous bars both romantic and introspective on songs like “Luv(sic.) 3” and “Thank You”. The tracks Nujabes keeps for himself and his mastery of beatmaking will have you dancing in your bedroom or nodding your head like a tweaker in public (shoutout to “World’s End Rhapsody”). It’s a long listen, a slow submersion into the world where street kids smoke plumes of pure light until the wee hours of the morning. Elegant, groovy, heady, happy, beautiful.
get hip
STIMULANT CURATED READINGS. OCTOBER 20. 7PM. PWYC. MARK YOUR CALENDARS.
Semiotics of the End, the second book in the series edited by Alessandro Sbordoni featuring 13 essays (+ afterword) on capitalism and the apocalypse via Becoming Press.
L’Amour - La Mort 16 “In the City” is available for purchase online now. Featuring “CITY BOY MONOLOGUE” by Charlie Zacks.
Read “The Audience” by Sabrina Small on Bizarre Publishing House.
Scatterbrain Halloween party @ Humble Abode on October 26 featuring Art Grey, matthew909 and more.