betweenthehighway press

::: S4 ::: receipts

06-17-2024

flux: a spell of acid

by Su Zi

2.25″ x 52″

Edition of 300

What body accepts endlessly? In eight ebbing movements—the number of her birth and name—Su Zi’s spell of acid is a “little wound of ink” in a vast sea where memories, membranes, and insecticides meet.

i rise up
rise up to you
up into the decline of the day
when the River of the Americas
takes up her blue gray shroud
i see you hanging
voluptuously
in the smog smear
a vibrant round inferno,
a majesty in the vermillion decay.

Poet, Artist, Eco-Feminist, and Equestrian, Su Zi edits and handmakes the annual publication Red Mare. [link]

TO BE “IN THE MOUNTAINS” IS “A FLOWER OPENING WITHIN THE WORLD”

by emilio Taiveaho Peláez

2.25″ x 91″

Edition of 300

Peláez writes how they climb, with the patience of mountains and glaciers, the swiftness of birds and streams. Originally written during 2023 and printed at their home in Haw River, North Carolina, the long poem introduces itself:

Dogen sang Sansuikyo
as if speaking with
the North Cascades

the birth of
place, these words

poems fruiting
with humility & gratitude
for the wild places
that remain

emilio Taiveaho Peláez is an investigative poet based in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Their word-work emerges from flesh-eye experiences within the living archives of American landscapes and seeks to grapple with the colonial languaging practices that shape these environments — from sidewalks to national parks to the common places of lyric poetry.

And there I was, I was just hanging out,
doing nothing. Then death appeared and said something dumb.

by Angel Warwick

2.25″ x 91″

Edition of 300

Welcome to Grief Club. This is death’s party and they know everyone. The Angel of Death is in pursuit, but their bicycle chain is rusted and you’ve already cycled across England.

The pallbearers of my grief
have slipped to their knees.
I wander through the shifting gloom
between streetlights, until
I hit the reaching black
of country roads —
those corners you can't see around.
The blazing hell of headlights.
He's coming, he's coming for me.

Angel Warwick is a poet from the South Coast of England, as well as an avid cyclist and consumer of scotch whisky that tastes like peat bog water. He left school at 12 and learnt to write in online poetry communities. For inquiries and support with the Grief Club, write Angel: adgwarwick@gmail.com

Taking 500,000 Photographs of a Dogwood Tree

by JL Rosser

2.25″ x 51″

Edition of 300

They say pick a tree to grow old with, yet leaves still gather like withered lives around you, and even that tree—once rooted fast in your memory— now falls into the mire among its rotting children, remaining only to be seen across the frenzied moments of this search for “a life stripped away.”

The dogwood blooms droop
like sleeping children over
the water, and the twigs
droop like it hurts to carry
them. The roots of the trunk
spread out like Papa when
he walked too drunk. It’s
branches spindly and knobby
as his twiggy arms gorged
on bursitis. Liver stuck out
like the front of an 85’
Silverado. Legs like Marlboro
100s but this one woman;
she takes photos at funerals
to show them to the family,
so there’s Papa all folded up
like a paper plane that didn’t
fly far enough. Polaroids
ain’t useful. This is no time
to be useful. This is time
to sing badly in the woods
and scare deer.

JL is a queer poet living in Georgia. Currently, most of the poems they write are about Yugioh cards and Youtube videos.

I draw a fake effigy. “Who let us into hell?” It says.

by Sara Lefsyk

2.25″ x 70″

Second edition of 200

With the shrieks of 10,000 Angels, Sara’s poem forces 10,000 insurance companies to fall to their knees in terror at meeting “the daughter of a solitary fish” speaking with the language of “a small but savage town.”

When they found me scraping
my ugly little teeth against the
pavement, my diagnosis was
dental. When they sent me to
the actual dentist, my diagnosis
was an eight-fold path.

No one could tell me anything
because my diagnosis was small
and vegetal.

When my diagnosis was glass-jar
heart, the treatments were: wild
hare, water of rye and water of
snake.

My diagnosis was a never-
ending receipt.

Sorting rocks from beans until she kills all desire, Ethel carries a shovel as if she really knows how to dig a grave. When she is let loose inside the orchard, she is a wide-eyed god, dehydrated and convulsing. Nailed to the ground, laughing with the sun in her eyes, she is dreaming of a videotape about an even more disposable fashion. Fashioning a wound or planning for gestalt, out in the field or trapped in the cloisters, she fingers the firmament and role-plays a joy, then vomits all over the sanctuary carpet.

Sara Lefysk runs Ethel Zine & Micro Press. [link]

OIL

by Al Brilliant

2.25″ x 28″

In deciding what to republish of Al Brilliant’s vast writings, I considered excerpts from his many journals, such as Bus Journal or Bookshop Journal, but I was continually drawn to the slim PAINTBRUSH pamphlet with the even slimmer poem “OIL.” If not only for its applicable formatting for receipt, then for how the poem encompassingly depicts a life through a single substance, oil, and how that life—the life of a publisher—takes on a mythic quality, subsisting on that lubricating, penetrating, birthing, and protecting substance. This republication includes the biographical essay by Alex Benedict, “A Brilliant Life.”

They say that oil and water
won’t mix
but when I was born
they put olive oil scented with balsam
in the sea water of my mother’s womb
they put ink there and pads of paper
a hammer, a ruler
a type case full of lead

Writer, bookmaker, and late editor of Unicorn Press, Al Brilliant was born in St. Louis, Missouri “a triple Gemini on May 22, 1936 in the midst of a severe American Depression.” In 1965, he and his wife Teo Savory began running Unicorn Press, publishing hundreds of poetry collections as well as translations from French and German. At 73 years old, Brilliant established the Glenwood Community Bookshop in Greensboro, North Carolina where he passed away in May of 2022.

betweenthehighway

wherever
visible and invisible
streets meet

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