I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a literary journal I’ve recently discovered. PANK is a magazine out of Michigan which publishes work that, from what I’ve read so far, is edgy and at times nothing short of bizarre. From the website:
PANK comes from the end of the road, the edge of things, a north shore, up country, a place of amalgamation, and unplumbed depths, where things are made and unmade, and unimagined futures are born. An ultima Thule, PANK – no soft pink hands here. We bear old scar and fresh scab, callous, blood and dirt. PANK is serene melancholy, spiritual longing, quirk and anomaly. PANK is progressive, experimental and improvisational. PANK inhabits its contradictions.
Here are a few sample pieces that stand out to me in the current online release (Issue 4, September 2009). There are several, but they’re relatively quick reads, if you can handle the awesomeness.
_________
HARD-TO-REACH PLACES
by Beth Thomas
Jody wakes some days with pieces missing. Small pieces, mostly: an eyebrow, a toenail. Sometimes the things come back, sometimes not. Last month, she woke with a hole through her right hand, a neat hole about the size of a half-dollar coin, big enough to look through. She plays peek-a-boo with kids on the bus when their parents aren’t looking, wondering if this memory will surface later in therapy.
Sometimes, though rarely, there are extra things. An extra finger, which disappeared weeks later. Once, an extra tooth jammed in the back of her jaw, aching. She says to whomever, you can get used to anything. Her mother used to say that.
Every morning, she investigates, fingers nimble in her mouth counting teeth, then down over her breasts and ribs, poking around, feeling for holes. Roger finds this sexy. Roger is missing an entire leg, from the hip down — car accident a dozen years ago. He understands how things that once were there can just be gone. He helps her search her hard-to-reach places, then makes pancakes for breakfast…
_________
RED
by Lindsay Oncken
She said my color is red,
like bursting cherries and summertime,
like her mother poised on a lawn chair
at noon, hair newly dyed and curled,
and the color of the Mustang
shaking off dust and tree branches
while a man traces his hand up
the porch railway. It’s the color
of lipstick smears on wrists and teeth,
the way the man’s eyes catch
and her mother jumps and she spends
another hour cleaning cherry pie
off the floor. The color of love, even,
smeared with paint all over
the living room walls because the man
said that red calms him.
Her mother smiles but her eyes dart,
and every night the house goes silent
at exactly nine o’clock…
_________
NOTES ON A CANDY CANE TREE
by Gregory Sherl
What did I think about before you touched my thigh? Let me say this: I’m going to touch you until my fingers fall off. If my fingers don’t fall off, I will hold your hand even if it’s sweaty. And let me say this: You are lovelier than clouds that look like lovely things. I have only loved a few times and the last time was when you rubbed my neck under the monkey bars. We weren’t much younger than we are now. I still have the same haircut. You still have only one dimple. It’s on your left cheek and it looks like you fell on a pebble. I love that it looks like you fell on a pebble. Let me say this: You taste like candy canes. There was a candy cane tree in my old neighborhood. My neighbor hung candy canes on the branches of the willow and I snatched them in the middle of the night. It was December when I rode my bike the quickest, like I was going somewhere to meet you. I like you more than the candy cane tree. Let me say this: I am uncomfortable in my own skin, so I hold your face. I hold your face and your hips but mostly your face. You have a lovely face. Let me say this: I love you like monsters like scaring little kids. I make a list of words I can use to diagram your body: petite, mellifluous, comely, milk, necessary. Please, forgive the humming; you see I rarely taste candy canes in March. When I don’t taste you I taste sweat. Not good sweat, mind you, sweaty sweat from the men’s locker room. Sometimes I taste pizza, but that’s only because I loved pizza first. Let me say this: My love for pizza was fleeting. I was young and naïve and thought that extra toppings meant something. These are fine days because they end with you. Let me just say this: I’m going to kiss you until my lips fall off. If my lips don’t fall off, I will kiss up your spine until I run out of spine. Then I’ll start over.
_________
TEN INAPPROPRIATE DOPPELGANGBANGER HAIKUS
by Wess Mongo Jolley
I.
He told me he jerked
off in a mirror. Yeah, I
smiled, I’d do me.
II.
Cloning, I thought, was
a waste of time and money.
Then I saw twin porn.
III.
My test clone said he
loved me our first night. No, I
said, I love you more…
_________
BRIDGES
by Jennifer Andrews
She stands on a steel girder, her feet hooked around its ice edge, her hand wrapped tight around a cabled wire, her body, pulsing in the wind.
Rewind.
She leans into the side of the bridge, her nightgown snaps, like lightening, in hard cracks behind her. She places her hands flat along the wall, then looks down.
Rewind.
Nights before Christmas, surrounded by bolts of calico and yards of crimped ribbon, my mother, running flannel and pins under a needle and following chalked lines into small wrists and necklines, made nightgowns for my sister and I. After church on Christmas Eve, we’d come home, brush our teeth, shimmy into our pajamas and sit under the blink, blinking lights of our tree. Then we’d open one gift. It was always a flannel nightgown. Donna got dark blues and yellows. I got pinks and lazy greens. I envied her dark colors, the chance to be wrapped in bold dyes. Sometimes Donna liked my dewy pastels. Sometimes we traded. Our new nightgowns brushed the tops of our feet, the middle of our hands. We smoothed ourselves down, ran our hands along arms, stomachs, our legs. Then we sprinted along our stretch of hallway to feel the gown snap at our feet, to feel it stop us. It was fur against skin. Safe…
_________
I HATE ZOMBIES LIKE YOU HATE ME
by Scott Woods
Here is what I wish would happen:
a windy November day,
before the snow has spilled its milk
and the leaves still grip the ground in their stiff handshakes,
that while visiting your grandmother’s gravesite,
having cleared away the autumn debris and dew dust,
I wish your grandmother would break the crust
and reach for you,
swirl her knobby, apple-pie baking bones around your ankle
and drag herself out of the trench she has been digging,
staring at you with unblinking, puss-laden eyes
yellow from a lack of sun and birthdays,
moaning from her diaphragm and her throat at once,
baring her teeth after having popped mortician stitches,
aimed at your snot-nosed five-year-old who only
wants to know if you’re going to stop at
McDonald’s on the way home.
I wish that in that mortifying moment you
remember how, while we sat in a theater
and the trailer for yet another zombie movie splayed across
the cinema canvas, you turned to me and said,
“Zombies are awesome.”
And when I said “I am so sick of zombies”,
you tightened your lips and lost
my phone number…
_________
WHUPPINS
also by Scott Woods
A whuppin is a ritual.
I agree: a smack on the back of the head
is degrading,
borders on abuse.
But a whuppin?
A whuppin is an understanding.
Praying to leather belt gods,
extension cord deities,
flying shoes made missiles,
switches ripped from the arms of
understanding trees.
Some of you
will not understand
what I am talking about.
Some of you
will nod your heads and
feel the breath of a ghost belt
whispering in your ears…
(click here & scroll down to read the rest)
_________
Bam.
You can visit PANK’s website for more online samples, subscription information, or submission guidelines. From what I can tell, they publish all genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, et cetera), although I can’t find this explicitly stated. They have both print and online issues, the former published once a year and the latter released in monthly installments.
If this last release is any indication, I consider it a journal worth keeping in mind.
You’re right on the money with this article, keep up the good work!