Matter Press Compressed Journal of Creative Arts

Month: March 2013

filigree powder compact

by Eleanor Bennett

[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing this 12-part series, one photograph at a time, for 12 consecutive weeks. This is 8 of 12. Click on the picture to view it in full size.]

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 16-year-old internationally award winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic,The World Photography Organisation, Nature’s Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in the Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited, having shown work in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia and The Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition (2011) amongst many other locations. She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.

A series of images all taken in 2012. On themes covered I decided to reflect the beauty I find in recycling, wreckage, peace and strange and odd little things. The bag is one that resides in a charity shop with currently no buyers. The powder compact is one of my own. My favourite is the ill and lonely every envelope stuffed with the prescriptions of ill patients just in my town with only around 5,000 residents. A lot of the population is aged but I suspect the cheap stodgy food is a contributing factor to the poor health. White dove of peace was taken a few hundred yards from the previously mentioned photo near a pub. Estate agents fiend was taken smack bang in the middle of the two previous points in very early January.

your oni,

she is the ghost who echoes
in the corner,
blurred, like motion.

three-eyed and taloned,
the bride with white hair

a dragon you took
to bed, rutting

the rearing up of her chaotic head
is the undoing of mine

by Allie Marini Batts

Allie Marini Batts is an alumna of New College of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has been nominated for the 2012 “Best of the Net Award”, as well as the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in over 100 literary publications that her parents haven’t heard of. Allie lives in Tallahassee with her husband, where she feeds opossums on the porch and rescues treefrogs from the kitchen (they’re very adept at breaking in, it’s the sticky toes). Allie is pursuing her MFA degree in Creative Writing through Antioch University Los Angeles….oh no! It’s getting away! You can find links to Allie’s work at: http://www.kiddeternity.wordpress.com, or visit Bookshelf Bombshells at http://bookshelfbombshells.com/

What would you like us to know about “oni”?

“your oni” is quite simply, a poem about jealousy personified.

In traditional Japanese folklore, oni appear as clawed, horned, wild-haired creatures. Jealousy makes both me, and the woman I’m jealous of, (my rival and predecessor), this hideous titan of fury and bad luck. The oni is the spiritual force that is assigned to disasters, and often times deception, which contributed to their character being cross-culturally represented in Chinese as “ghost”.

I took these two ideas–the raging spirit of disaster and bad feelings, and the nebulous deception of a ghost, and used this trope to express how my jealousy felt– as an anthropomorphous thing of its own–the oni–the deceptive self-doubts and insecurities of the “ghost lover”, and the way that chaos follows internally, once the oni has awoken.

channel m

by Eleanor Bennett

[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing this 12-part series, one photograph at a time, for 12 consecutive weeks. This is 7 of 12. Click on the picture to view it in full size.]

Looking at an Abandoned Russian Themepark in Niigata, Japan

by Meg Eden

oh God of open windows,
God of new ruins,
God of all-things-green,
God of nine-year-old-
festering-dog-food.
God of Russian peasant
dancer women, God of many
phones, God of outdated
computers, God of molded
woolly mammoth models,
God of broken matryoshka dolls,
who even clothes the sparrow.

Meg Eden has been published in various magazines and is the recipient of the 2012 Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award. She was a reader for the Delmarva Review. Her collections include “Your Son” (The Florence Kahn Memorial Award) and “Rotary Phones and Facebook” (Dancing Girl Press). Check out her work at: http://artemisagain.wordpress.com/

What was the origin of this poem?

The origin of this poem is from the phenomenon “haikyo”. This is the Japanese word for ruins, used for abandoned buildings and their exploration. This piece was inspired by the haikyo of the Niigata Russian Village (Google it!). I love haikyo as it is a reminder that nothing physical and of the world lasts. To see a world covered in kutzu vines, decaying into the earth only to be forgotten raises in me many spiritual questions, and creates in itself an odd kind of psalm to a creator of an earth that can reclaim itself, despite our peculiar and often foolish constructions.

baccarat ice

by Eleanor Bennett

[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing this 21-part series, one photograph at a time, for 12 consecutive weeks. This is 6 of 12. Click on the picture to view it in full size.]

Root Cellar

by Justin Bond

The rain always comes too late to make any difference. (more…)

flowers and drink 2

by Eleanor Bennett

[Editor’s Note: We will be publishing this 12-part series, one photograph at a time, for 12 consecutive weeks. This is 5 of 12. Click on the picture to view it in full size.]

the log-bright night

by James Claffey

Dublin. The suburbs.

October 1978.

A rainy night, electricity strike. Power could go out any time.

Red-bricked house and a woman making bread at a Formica-topped table. Smoking.

A gray striped cat slinks along a wall.

BBC 4 on the wireless: “A Book at Bedtime.” Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Not his best.

In the kitchen the woman slides the dough into the oven.

The kettle boils.

Another cigarette. The fag ends in the ashtray, dead soldiers.

Her husband away these six weeks on the Gannet Alpha oil rig in the North Sea.

Under soil tulip bulbs wait for spring. The windows rattle in the fierce east wind.

A garden shed. Rusted spade and rake. An abandoned wasps’ nest in a corner eave.

Patterned linoleum on the kitchen floor patched in spots.

The Aga range pulses heat from stacked wood.

Under the stairs last year’s plum pudding ferments in brandy.

At the top of the house a small boy kneels bedside, hands joined.

“O Angel of God, my guardian dear…”

Dad promised him a Celtic soccer jersey on the next trip home.

The boy’s feet tap the hot water bottle beneath the covers and he wishes his dad home.

The mother snaps off the wireless and checks the doors, front and back.

Bread cools on wire rack.

James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist, Maureen Foley, their daughter, Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog, Rua. His work appears in many places, including The New Orleans Review, Metazen, Elimae, Necessary Fiction, Revival Literary Journal, and Word Riot. His website is at www.jamesclaffey.com.

The opening of Dublin for me evokes James Joyce. Is he anywhere to be found in this piece?

Strangely enough, we lived a few blocks from Joyce’s birthplace in Rathgar, where I grew up, and there’s a very distant connection to Joyce through his cousins, the Murrays, on my mother’s side of the family tree. Tangentially, Joyce is evoked by the images of the garden shed and the dead wasps nest, hearkening to the opening of Araby. Also, the plum pudding under the stairs might hint at the Dead and those fragments of the past that populate the story. And of course the boy in the back drawing room of the house in North Richmond Street, suggests again Araby. Somehow, Joyce’s writing has entered my subconsciousness and on rereading the piece I find him lurking in the language like a ghost in the wallpaper pattern.

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.

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