DRUNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR volume 1 welcome to the new hallelujah DRUNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR VOL. 1 Welcome to the New Hallelujah We have tried in our way to be free. Book Design: Melissa Newman-Evans Edited by: Todd Gleason, Eirean Bradley, William James, Chillbear Latrigue, Adam Tedesco MASTHEAD: Editor-El-Heifer: Todd Gleason Curator of Poetic Badassery: Eirean Bradley Wordsmoker Liaison/Highly Imposing Man/Vidster: Chillbear Latrigue Punk-Rawk Loco-Motivator of the Musikal Maestros: William James Grand Inquisitor: Adam Tedesco Prettiness Engineer: Melissa Newman-Evans Ghost in the Machine: Tommy TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii FOREWORD 1 EIREAN BRADLEY A Field Guide To Being Day Drunk In Your Hometown You Always Thought The Music InYour Hometown Sounded Ominous To My Son On His Eighteenth Birthday 10 TONY BROWN Ten Poems You Could Be Writing Whiteness Cryptozoology 18 MELISSA CHANDLER Alexander Schmalexander Jones You Will Have to Choose 23 CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON Hip-Hop Introspective #3 Keeping JELL-O Natasha Romanoff Deactivates Her OkCupid Profile 27 ROBERT DELAHANTY Photography 31 CALVIN FANTONE Falling In Love With Oncoming Trains Facebook News Feed Jungle Turbulence 35 MCKENDY FILS-AIME For Those Who Whistle Vivaldi Prayer in the Cracks In Spite of Heartbreak 41 LAUREN ELMA FRAMENT for my father hampton street, 7:22 pm (prelude & chorus) the kind of silence that kisses you as if you have a real & honest mouth 45 TODD GLEASON Remembering The Genie 52 GRAY Projected Class Schedule Question Mark 63 ROBERT DUNCAN GRAY To Unfuck It All Haggard Europe and the Graveyard of Human Rights Distraction Can Be Deadly 68 HEATHER A NOBODY DIES ALONE – Ask Heather A #4 – It Buuuurn! NOBODY DIES ALONE – Ask Heather A # 6: True Love Quiz 73 M.E. HIRSH Still Life 78 JOANNA HOFFMAN What I Love About What I’ll Never Understand I Don’t Want to Disappear Wilderness Tips 82 JELAL HUYLER Hashtag The Fox News Building is Literally a White Portico’d Slave Mansion House... Look It Up Untitled Wariable z 88 WILLIAM JAMES After 18 Months The Sentence Is Commuted Strange Language Screaming Thunderbox (Obsolete Engine Blues) 96 ROBERT LASHLEY L. L, April 7, 3:17pm When God Lets My Body Be How Not to Think About Slavery While Listening to Three 6 Mafia 100 CHILLBEAR LATRIGUE The Highly Imposing Man’s Guide to Surviving Breakups With Dignity Traditional German Cuisine 108 JENNY OLSEN Photography 112 EMILY O’ NEILL right to be hellish NJ Transit Everything to Everyone 117 MELISSA NEWMAN-EVANS Hidden Track Owning It (at 15) Work Anthem 123 SOPHIA PFAFF-SHALMIYEV If It Hasn’t Been Yr Decade For A While Waiting to be Emptied 130 KATHERINE PIVODA STILL LIFE WITH BABY’S ARM: a critical analysis of the modern art of the dick pic I Would Tell Betty Freidan to Suck It But I Am Pretty Sure I Got There First: A Modern Ethical Slut vs. The Feminine Mystique 137 BARUCH PORRAS-HERNANDEZ As A Gay Man It Is Good To Have Goals Christopher Columbus And I Play Gay Chicken Dating Tips For Lonely Gay Men 144 DOUGLAS POWELL (ROSCOE BURNEMS) Conquering Depression And... And... And... Physics Lesson for Officer Darren Wilson, The Cop Who Shot Unarmed Mike Brown Six Times in Ferguson, Missouri 151 JEREMY RADIN CHAMPION After Botching the Big End-of-the-Night Kiss You Drive Home Over Mulholland Drive, Listening to Leonard Cohen & Weeping with Relief The Bull Speaks 158 APRIL RANGER What The Poet/Waitress Works For The Poet/Waitress In Love with an Art Critic’s Son What A Minute Is Worth 162 JESS RIZKALLAH i left the light on two minutes past dusk and now mortality is trick or treating in my neighborhood if teta never had to leave lebanon i wonder if she would make preserves Sin el Fil, Lebanon 170 OLIVER MICHAEL ROBERTSON Drawings 175 MELANIE ROBINSON The Melanie Manual of Don’t Fuck with me: The Handbook of Handling Too Closely Drunk Texts to Ichabod Crane Jibber Jabber 180 MEGGIE ROYER @ The Poet I Become When I Drink On Having a Boyfriend with OCD Past Lives 184 CARRIE RUDZINSKI October Survival The Hallucination 191 SAM SAX Teeth I DARE YOU. BESTIARY 195 CLINT SMITH When Maze and Frankie Beverly Come on in my House Passed Down Letter From Barack Obama to Karl Marx Circa 2011 201 SARAH MYLES SPENCER When the Clock Strikes Six Feet The Last Pull 205 ROB STURMA Tinder Lure, or Paul Heyman and I Go To Hot Topic Because It’s BOGO T-Shirt Weekend Antisocialist 212 ADAM TEDESCO Rabbit Felled The Odd Vein 218 TOMMY The Title of this story, which was written for a blog, is: These Computers Are Not Real. 227 KAYLA WHEELER The Year Mr. Iliopoulos Was Arrested In Front of His Math Class and Convicted of Raping a Student On Finding Blonde Bobby Pins In His Bed Since You Asked Where I’m From 232 HANIF WILLIS-ABDURRAQIB On Joy Do Your Part To Save The Scene While Watching The Baltimore Protests On Television, Poets On The Internet Argue Over Another Article Declaring “Poetry Is Dead” 239 JOY YOUNG The Queer Hokey Pokey Teleportation Joan Rivers Isn’t a Robot 247 AMIE ZIMMERMAN On the Morning of Your First Day of Eighth Grade Blind People Riding Bikes Jackal FOREWORD “Pack the bags under your eyes with something other than tears and the grease of worry, Hold the sad slant of your chin heavenward. When you stare ghost serious at the mirror today, remember that each defect is a golden ticket. remember that you are invited.” -Eirean Bradley I used to write plays. Mostly in high school and college, and a few after. A hand- ful of them were produced, but mercifully, the earliest ones are lost to history, except in memories, or maybe on some VHS tape in a box in somebody’s parents’ basement, that no one (thank God) will ever bother to watch. I cringe when I recall certain snippets of dialogue, and the yappy, pseudo-cool, pop-culture obsessed, urban-myth-laced influence of early Quentin Tarantino. I also had a terrible habit of writing long scenes where every- body in the cast sat around on couches trying to sound clever and arguing about nothing particularly important, until two of the characters finally came to blows. It didn’t help that I was all too comfortable writing way above my weight class—about marriage and war and the Civil Rights movement and being a professional artist—all as I was still living on microwave burritos, bouncing around in mosh pits, and using student loan money to buy weed and sixers of Mickey’s Big Mouth while my phone (yes, a land line) was about to get shut off for the fifth time. The plays had to be excruciating for actual adults to watch, but for whatever reason they kept encouraging me to stick with it, so I did. What kept me coming back, what I personally found so exciting about writing plays was watching my words come to life right in front of me. I handed over the script and soon enough there was music and sets and actual people on stage, speaking dialogue I had written, and fighting and kissing and crying, just the way I had imagined them do- ing. Of course, these were students and amateurs for the most part, and so, as you can imagine, my painfully amateurish writing performed by relatively inexperienced actors produced some less than transcendent theatrical moments. However, there were those rare moments where something ignited—some flicker of violence or truth or laughter that came alive on the stage—and you could feel the crackle of real theater happening. xiii This invariably had less to do with my writing than with some choice the actor or director had made that breathed genuine vigor into that moment. It was no longer mine. Once I finished the script, the production took on a life of its own, a beast that, for good or for ill, had grown completely beyond my control. It was exhilarating and terrifying, and sometimes made me sick to my stomach or on the verge of tears or filled with unname- able joy—sometimes all three at once. I’m not sure there was much actual art happening. But what was happening for me was that I was learning to sit at the edge of my creations, like at the edge of a campfire, and let them burn themselves wildly up into the fabric of night. Drunk In A Midnight Choir (drunkinamidnightchoir.com) was just a glimmer of an idea for a long time. I wrote with characteristic verbosity (which I am trying my best to avoid here, I promise) about the original inspiration in an essay titled “The Big Sink,” but in short, I wanted a place for my writing that felt like home—some clean, well-lighted place that didn’t take itself too seriously, that didn’t feel like it had walls all around it, with the VIPs inside and everybody else on the outside. I just wanted to create, and I wanted others to create with me. I didn’t intend to start a blog to host nothing more than a col- lection of my daily rants and musings. What interested me was community, but communi- ties aren’t conjured out of thin air. They grow organically, by attracting individuals with a shared sense of purpose and values. A creative community has a life of its own that is exponentially more powerful than the singular voice and taste of one measly editor.