Harp & Altar

Jason Michael Bacasa is a writer and musician currently living in New York. His screenplay Paperback was recently shortlisted for the Sundance Labs and selected as part of IFP’s Emerging Narrative. He performs music under the moniker Tan or Boil. His debut release is slated to appear later this year on Australia's Preservation Records.

Lynn Crawford is a fiction writer whose books include Simply Separate People (Black Square Editions, 2002) and Fortification Resort (Black Square Editions, 2005). She edits the cultural arts journal DETROIT:, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

David B. Goldstein is the author of the chapbook Been Raw Diction (Dusie, 2006), and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel—Second Floor, Jubilat, Typo, Pinstripe Fedora, Epoch, Alice Blue Review, and The Paris Review. He teaches creative writing, Renaissance literature, and food studies at York University in Toronto.

Elise Harris is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

Jennifer Kronovet’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Crowd, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and other journals. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Circumference, a journal of poetry in translation, and works at the Academy of American Poets as the editor of the magazine American Poet.

Miranda Lichtenstein’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, and has also been included in group shows at museums and galleries around the world.

A recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize from The Paris Review, Norman Lock is the author of Trio (Triple Press, 2007), The Long Rowing Unto Morning (Ravenna Press, 2007), Two Plays for Radio (Triple Press, 2006), Land of the Snow Men (writing as George Belden, Calamari Press, 2005), A History of the Imagination (FC2, 2004), Notes to the Book of Supplemental Diagrams for Marco Knauff's Universe (Ravenna Press, 2003), and The House of Correction (Broadway Play Publishing, 1988), among other works.

Eugene Marten’s novel In the Blind came out in 2003 from Turtle Point Press. He lives in Harlem.

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press, 2007) and an editor at The Encyclopedia Project (www.encyclopediaproject.org). Her writing has recently appeared in The Believer, Post Road, Fence, Denver Quarterly, and Harper's. She teaches at California College of the Arts.

Ryan Murphy is the author of Down With the Ship from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions. He has received awards from Chelsea magazine and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as a grant from the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York.

Michael Newton is a current MFA candidate at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. His gallery reviews have appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

Jason Stumpf teaches literature and creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island. His translation of Mexican poet Pura López-Colomé’s Aurora was published this year by Shearsman Books. His work has recently appeared in Action Yes, LIT, The Modern Review, and elsewhere.

Mathias Svalina is the author of the chapbooks Why I Am White (Kitchen Press, 2007), Creation Myths (New Michigan Press, 2007), and When We Broke the Microscope, a collaboration with Julia Cohen forthcoming from Small Fires Press. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he is co-editor of Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books.

Bronwen Tate is the author of the chapbook Souvenirs, published as part of the Dusie Chapbook Kollektiv. Her poems have recently appeared in The Cultural Society and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel—Second Floor. This year she began a PhD in comparative literature at Stanford University, where she also edits Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation, and gets teased for knitting in class. Visit her online at breadnjamforfrances.blogspot.com.

Jared White’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Meridian, The Modern Review, Sawbuck, and Verse, and are forthcoming with Another Chicago Magazine, Cannibal, Fugue, Fulcrum, and LVNG, among other publications. His MFA poetry studies were at Columbia University, where he received a prize from the Academy of American Poets in 2005. He lives in Brooklyn and can be found online at jaredswhite.blogspot.com.

Michael Zeiss spent five years at the American Red Cross working with people affected by the attacks of September 11. His writing has appeared in previous issues of Harp & Altar.

35.

Norman Lock

The Prime Minister’s opinion is that a Magus is among us—or even two, who (the P.M. cannot help his pedantic nature) must then be called Magi, whose gifts are not always so beneficent as frankincense and myrrh. Might not the General’s absence in the photograph of him on the carousel be due to a magician’s prank (unless the General is a ghost or vampyr, which the Chanteuse swears he’s not)? Perhaps he is a mental episode occurring in the consciousness (or, more likely, un-) of a jinni (whose plural form is jin). “The Arabian ambassador, whom we often entertained at home when I was in the government, often spoke of them as beings delighting in bedevilment. Might not all of us here be nothing more than toys for one, or two, of those spiteful Mohammedan characters out of Sir Richard Burton?” The Plumber, just returned from unclogging, so to speak, a hotel artery (why not allow the metaphor?), pooh-poohs the idea. “There’s no such thing, or things,” he says. “My concept of an Over Mind capable of Thought Projection is much more probable.” The Taxidermist yawns to hear again this old ground covered. He dreams of a perfect world in which everyone is stuffed and, if motility is desired, equipped with clockwork motors designed by his friend the Engineer. The Telepath happens to read his mind and scoffs: “You propose a universe of robots! Who wants to make love to a girl who winds down?” The General, who is the cause of our current wrangle, enters in his pajamas, saying: “I, for one, would not! I may be old-fashioned, even senile as some claim; but I want a girl to sleep with, not a mattress stuffed with fustian and spare parts!” I regard with envy lipstick traces on the General’s face, left there by the Chanteuse. Suddenly, I long for the Funambulist and leave them to debate the issue—P.M., Plumber, Taxidermist, Engineer, and Theologian, who until now has been hiding in the wine cellar. In the Venetian Room I find her on the tightrope, reciting from the Balcony Scene of Romeo and Juliet: “Take all myself.” “I take thee at thy word,” I reply, then continue: “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized; henceforth I never will be Romeo.” She: “What man art thou that thus bescreen’d in night so stumblest on my counsel?” “Your husband.” [Silence, then:] “Oh.” She seems let down. Suspicious, I quiz her: “Aren’t you pleased to see me?” “I am, it’s just, I was, you know, thinking of Romeo. You are, though I love you dearly, Norman, not him.” I reply that no one is, that Romeo’s a fiction, a figment of the Bard’s imagination, a Mental Projection of Shakespeare’s mind. (There is no escaping these subtleties of existence!) “Wilt thou come finally down, dear wife?” I beg. “Not on your life!” she rudely says. “May I then come up?” Although difficult on the high-wire, love has been possible now and then, for us. “Nyet!” I sigh and leave her to her lofty pursuit of Elizabethan love. I feel—how can I explain it?—the tristesse following—to speak plainly—copulation. Why this should be, since I have not coupled, is a mystery. In the lobby, among potted palms and bellboys, the Prime Minister, Plumber, Taxidermist, and Engineer are at it still. The Theologian has returned to his Amontillado, of all dry sacks his favorite. The P.M. is, at this moment, proposing a costume ball in which to trap the Magus—may the singular noun be sufficient! “He or she or it will be unable to resist dressing up as one or another omniscient and omnipotent archetype like Napoleon, Nostradamus, or the Whore of Babylon.” It is agreed, though I am dubious. That night in the grand ballroom copied from the Paris Opera House’s, the Plumber masquerades as René Descartes; the Taxidermist, a woolly mammoth; the Engineer, Gustave Eiffel with a model of his Tower; and the Prime Minister as Thomas Cromwell. Hoping to ingratiate myself with my high-wire wife (sworn never to come to ground again), I arrive, in tights and doublet, as her Romeo. Confounding me for the second time today, she passes grandly overhead as Sputnik! “Can I come to you tonight, my love?” I shout toward the frescoed ceiling. Yet again she answers, “Nyet!” Why this obsession with Russian language and technology, I cannot fathom. The Clarinetist plays, each note a knot within a net of music; but no serpent raises its envenomed head. Nearly all the other guests have come, but none reveals a demoniacal character heretofore dissembled—not one has dressed as Machiavelli, Stalin, or a modern sadist. So if there is a Magus or two among us, the case is not proved. Whether I am a unit of information within some antic brain, or all is a product of my own imagining—it matters not at all so long as I am here and my wife is roving over head.