#undergroundpublishing

Premiere issue featuring Catalina L’Amour, Ivy English, Chlöe Nicholle, Desiré, Lennox, and classic mid-1990s underground fetish and alternative print culture aesthetics.

by Mariette Papic

I see the silver car looking for parking in chinatown, angling close to the fruit seller and the sandy skin of an old smoker pulling strong on the inhale, his gaze turned towards a blue screen

I see the traffic lights whistling dixie, the potholes pulling in small children if they were given half a chance to open their asphalt jaws.

I see the wilting lettuce in the garden. I see the thermometor of last week, so much closer to freezing.

I see the bolt of revolution  catch tinder in the flying city trash. From Istanbul to New York a call goes out. From here to there a web, from here to there antennae of our insect selves serving us well. Bzzt, bzzzt, goes the little bug walking the pavement, flying in the wind. Bzzt Bzzt go the people walking the pavement, flying in the wind.

I see the melting body fluids of a thousand needy people walking to the store for blasts from the freezer section; the cool scent of cash. Flowing into your hair, touching you cold, down to your scalp. The salvation of a popsicle wets your childhood memory, your adult lips.

The tips of this meet the tips of that. Your tongue meets the popsicle while fire is lit to dynamite and all the pretty children come in pretty dresses, to cheer the pretty ideas.

Up go the ribbons, up go the women and the skin of their breasts, up they go into firework surgery. Explosions of pink, red, and orange. Explosions of silver, a burning champagne of gold.

In the heat I see the mother and her four children all dressed in purple. A waddling troupe of glittering alien beings speaking in spanglish, laughter and sharp nails. I think of Margaret and if you knew her, you’d think of her too, right now,

while your tongue exploded with ice and watched the traffic and saw the breeze rustle the mulberry that grows on a cracked street at a corner behind the deli with the torn canopy and the open fire hydrants, baptizing the street with hope, calling all weeds, “we need you to grow”

sensuous snake of street water, kiss my toes, run your tongue on my heat blisters,

wash me.

I see the heat

I feel the beat >>>>>>>>>>rising, the pulse of a storm blowing on your cheek made of beads

I see the heat

The space in between the heat and me is thin.

The woman on the bench is one with it. Her small dog is not.

  What I see in the heat, Part II,  

In the heat  glow mirages

of mermaids testing their legs

of the seaweed clinging to their hips,

of choir practices under the tow of the ocean’s continuous bow.

The day is a violin.

The sound is wave

of wild haired babes dressed in stripes and a subway outside.

Singing voices curl into bits. The wave has got the purple mother and her kids.

They’re tumbling with the sirens. They’re tumbling with the pigeons, and bodega ATMs. Together

we roll

from the shore and into a Square with our people.

We swim together

Together our hair is a mess.

Kelp is slick on our fins and on our legs.

The square is a tsunami speckled with plastic and signs with pretty slogans written on cardboard and together we float. 

We float.

From square to square,

birds perch on our shoulders in quieter moments

like those that happen in early morning and deep into twilight when again and again pretty lights

explode like dragons.

and burn the cities while here we bob. (Bzzt. Bzzt.) The heat is a mirage.