Asylum Annual 1994 - Greg Boyd compiles an outstanding collection of experimental writing. Here's a batch of openings to serve as a taste test from over 100 authors of prose, poetry, drama and essays. I've included both psychedelic art and folk art to underscore the range of what can be included under the broad title of "experimental writing."
WHAT TO GRAB DURING A FIRE:
poetry
is never discussed
-----Charlie Mehrhoff
TRAPEZE by Michelle Murphy
Air raid sirens kept all of us seated, chewing the last pieces of spearmint gum. Eager for the clowns to break open the tent flap, relieve us of reason. Everyone believed in what sparkled. Fool's gold, sugar, the tent's forged sky doused with childish clouds.
THE LESSON by Peter Johnson
When the teacher spoke, the students stole his voice, snatched it right out of his mouth.
The students laughed so hard they lost their own voices, which danced out half-opened windows, mingling with the exhaust of passing traffic.
Among the students, there was an unspoken agreement it was the teacher's fault.
THE SHIRT by Mary D'Angelo
thee shirt hangs
washed and ironed
on the wardrobe door
as empty as the night.
Each button has become
a small white moon in
an eye-blue sky, no wind
to sway the sleeves.
there is no pulse, no movement.
No body parts to fill the flat
void of spun cotton threads
A man-made, handless apparition.
A wire neck protrudes in the
shape of a question mark
where the head should be
as if asking where you are.
We wait, the shirt and I,
to be filled by flesh,
both slowly dissolving
in the dark.
NEIGHBORS by Mark Fitzpatrick
Outside, the werewolves howl.
We are told there are no more werewolves, that they all died in the Great Plague. But this is a lie. We hear them at night. We see shadowy forms, not quite animal, definitely not human, loping across the snowy fields. In the morning we see their tracks, large and ferocious. We find claw marks on doors, signs, trees, barrels.
JACK IS AN AGILE YOUNG FELLOW by Thomas Wiloch
hack is an agile young fellow,
Jack possesses the ability to maximize his locomotion rate,
Jack launches himself in a trajectory designed to overfly the wax-burning light source.
ANTECEDENTS by Kenneth Bernard
Some day I should like to make out a case for the atecedentless pronoun. There is a terrorizing grammarian in me, and I have impulses to rebel. For example, when someone says to me, "Isn't it a beautiful day? the "it" rives me like Ahab's white whale, and I should like to answer, "Yes, but they are after me." And when asked, "Who is after you?" I will say, "Indeed, who is," and laugh. Of course that way lies madness. So I do not act on these impulses. The drama is private. Yet I like to think there might be a residue in my eye, a visible mote that unsettles. For somewhere beneath grammar I am dancing with lunacy, punching holes in my pasteboard mask of contentment.
ANGEL FEAST by Rebecca Lilly
In the dome room, a poor woman's soul was served on a dish to the angels, garnished with cloud puffs and winter sauce. "Delicious," said the white-haired matron. "Tender," squealed a babe with wings.
TOES by Morton Marcus
Toes, the soft teeth of the foot. The lions have lost the ability to bite and pad through the house in papa's slippers.
They doze when papa does, below the big chair near the television set, dreaming of flies biting their ears on a hot African day, flies they cannot paw away.
THE BABOON IN THE NIGHTCLUB by Kenneth Bernard
I'm wondering about the baboon in the night club
he spills soup down the lady's back
and shits on someone else's table
his purple testicles terrify the young girls
and make the men tweak their moustaches
his appendage is sixteen inches long
and reaches across the tables
he has downstaged everyone
even with a dirty ass were he to sing
they all would listen
LAST NIGHT by Elizabeth Fox
Last night the stars sang clear and steadfast - each one the silent note of a diva. Ever so lightly tinted red, yellow, or blue, they pierced the length of velvet that covered the contours of the sky.
BEFORE DAWN by Marion Arenas
From a small window I see them build a scaffold
to hang me for a crime I can't recall.
I do not know how I came to this place,
why I have died here three times.
I wear no cross, no star. I celebrate no cause.
A man in my cell who doesn't know anything either
kisses me goodbye, goodbye, soft on my mouth,
but my throat already feels the choke
of a thick rope with a slip noose.
G IS FOR GRIDLOCK by Richard Benbrook
All lovers are commuters
routinely subjected to the
deadliness of gridlock.
But it is the price they must pay
to dwell in Eden
One of the many
bedroom communities of Hell.
G is for gridlock
G as in goodgawdalmighty!
HOW TO FARM AN ORGASM by Nin Andrews
The male orgasm is easy to grow. A root vegetable like a potato, it can be covered with almost anything. Even a little straw will do fine. Keep it in a dark place, and it grows, becomes large and hard, a stately presence, a wonderful addition to any country garden. Even when you ignore it, the thing ripens of its own accord.
HARD-BOILED by Peter Cherches
She was the B side of a brutal murder. A piece of fluff called Mandy. "That's Mandy with a d," she said two or three times. She was a centipede - one hundred legs and each one a work of art. A diamond on every finger - for protection, she said. She gave me the lowdown on the floor. So this is how it is, I thought. Seven thousand names and as many phone numbers was more than I could handle.
SQUARES by Matthew Howard
Inside the house on Ada Street, a woman figures it out. Her fingers are laced in a complex macrame configuration. The twine, displayed by length, measures the living room floor into rows crossed with color, thousands of wooden beads piled in pyramids of greens and yellows and browns. Moving from light fixture to light fixture, her husband unscrews the bulbs and replaces them with wrongly shaped fluorescents. Soon every lampshade will have a fat penis of light buzzing of the top.
CLEVELAND STORY by Jim Krusoe
There was a time, I think it was in the late fifties, when to be an existentialist was to be obsessed with people falling off bridges, and I remember one such story about a man who had been on a bridge in the middle of a foggy night and, seeing a woman in a yellow overcoat climb to the railing apparently about to leap over the side, did nothing, and so doomed himself to spend every night of the rest of his life on that same bridge, waiting for some other person to attempt the same thing so this time he could be ready. "What a waste," the existentialist had said, and I assume by that he meant that twenty years of a human life was not to be measured against a chace to undo a wrong.
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