Word on the Very Wet Street

Tenacious readers and writers clung to their little patches of pavement as the rain tried to wipe out the Word on the Street Festival. There were writers reading excerpts, publishers hawking books, zine artists talking with sci-fi writers reading cook books discussing the occult with vegan diarists.

Standouts included the zine and graphic novel cave in the Alice MacKay Room, Wade Compton's reading from a piece published in Event Magazine, and Barbara Stewart's reading from her creative nonfiction novel Campie.

Even the pigeons liked it! At first they were like, "What the...?" But soon they were like, "Aw, yeah!"

Vogon Poetry Slam a Putrescent Miasma of Filth

As promised, this year's Vogon Poetry Slam was revolting, putrescent, and snotterifically awful. In the end, a poem about bodily excretions narrowly edged one about a boy who drank the contents of a spittoon. Come out next year to be truly horrified by more Vogon poetry.

Summer Series Volume 4: A Sentence on Truth

A Sentence on Truth

It’s not in the Bible ‘cause I’ve read that book through, and it never fell out or peeked out or hinted at much beyond who begat who, and it's not in new babies who are purported by some to know the secrets of the universe before they speak a word and then lose it somehow when that first word tumbles out, maybe flies up and disappears and we’re left running after it for the rest of our lives, everywhere anywhere crawling on our bellies through the stages of life, first through the birth canal looking for it in mother’s milk then at the playground where time stands still and we don’t get a day older for a hundred years, but it’s not there and we don’t find it in first love either although we think we do because she is so perfect, she is such a perfect angel that we make ourselves believe that she has it and we hold on to her tightly and try to squeeze it out of her, maybe kiss it out of her, love it out of her, but soon we leave because we realize that she’s not it, she was never it, and we move on and look at art, art that's a blotch of white paint on a white canvas or maybe sperm and bile on a shag carpet and then in words like picaresque and inviolate and procrustean and capitalist hegemony but it’s not there, so we try looking at naked bodies, naked bodies writhing and squirming on top of us like giant eels with arms and legs, spurting bodily fluids on us and in us and yes yes Yes YES, but no, we don't find it there, so we start to think that maybe it’s in anger, that maybe if we just raise our voice loud enough and say fuck enough that it will materialize somewhere and we can bend over and pick it up and put it in our pocket and not worry about living the rest of our lives because life has now and suddenly been rendered moot because we’ve found what we were looking for all those years in mother’s milk and our Grand-Popsicle’s beer and beard and in art and eels, but it's not in anger either, no, it’s not in those angry people, all those angry people who seem unbalanced or off-kilter like a crooked painting of a tempest or a hurricane and we think ‘why can’t you just go for a walk or visit a petting zoo or smell a flower or a skunk or snort something that makes you dizzy’ so we give up being angry and we grow up a bit and we get married because after all we’ve looked everywhere else and besides, we love her and we know that if we go away to Algeria to make a film or to Japan to love a Japanese girl who teaches us Japanese through the time-tested method of pillow talk, that she will slip away, and besides, she might have it, maybe her laughter comes close to it, maybe her love is profound enough to plumb those roiling depths that hold the secrets that babies speak, the secrets that fly away at first utterance, so we get married and have a baby and we love her and we love what she has given us, we love the baby, that brilliant baby who we’ve spoken to in the womb, who can surely do calculus already, at least algebra, oh God, if only she could speak because that twinkle in her eye means something, I know it, but when she does speak we realize that she’s just a beautiful little girl, our beautiful girl, and that she doesn’t have the secret, so we kiss her on the forehead and she skips away giggling and that’s about the time we say 'fuck' to ourselves and think, ‘it’s not even here in my perfect little girl so where is it’ and our sweaty brow furrows and that hole in our soul rings the doorbell of our consciousness, loudly, and we look through the peep hole and it peeps back and laughs a great roaring laugh, and then blasts the door down, wind and black rush in, infinity, the empty universe rushes at us, screams so loud that we hit the back wall, screams those words that we always knew were true, but wanted so much to disbelieve or to misapprehend but that this time we cannot but hear: TRUTH IS A LIE!