Volume 1 Issue 1
stars that shine, when it's not their time.
Rolling mountains, fish that fly,
watercolor photos from an oil painted life.
Holiest of holys, but only at church.
Unopened packages waiting for birth.
Gregory Peck in Brando's used shoes,
don't ever expect, and everything's new.
Happiness in holes you'd never think to dig,
six feet in the ground, and it feels like you did.
Night's open window, the blacklight of the moon,
a thousand lost postcards will arrive soon.
Everywhere to hide but no wish to run,
your joker's crazy stories only half the fun.
Using your mind to clear up a path,
you don't want to go but you'll never come back.
Justin Friello is a student at SUNY Purchase pursuing a B.M. Classical Composition. "Yellow" was written in 2006, but the YouTube video was filmed in 2008. In the words of Friello, it "began as a simple chord progression with no lyrics. Scanning my bedroom for some inspiration I spotted a calendar whose monthly picture was Charlie Brown and Snoopy over a solid yellow background. Using the color as the theme for the song, I began to write about the sun, the outdoors, and living without boundaries. Looking back on the song, I can see a subtext of environmental consciousness. The lyric "I'm seeing yellow and I would say it's bright as the sun/Cover your face it hurts my eyes" now seems to hint at global warming, although such social relevance was not on my mind at the time of the song's creation. Aside from any other message one might draw from the song, I really only wanted to show the benefits of friends, family, and having a good time."
Contact Justin Friello: justin.friello@purchase.edu
Website: myspace.com/filmingohio, youtube.com/earlebrown, justinfriellolyrics.blogspot.
Red Letter Day
by Tim Kirman, Scotland
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About the Artist:
Tim Kirman is a Trainer from Gasgow, Scotland. "Red Letter Day" was taken on the 7th of June in 2008 with a Holga on 120 film in Glasgow.
of roaring flax
in arsenic search of machines
that pump through crust hungrily.
The thunder echoes:
there is no rush of rain;
a soft reverberation at first,
brushing through the sand,
and then the massive machines yield
in the face of those Americas.
Clay-creased faces look up
to the tanks, turn the sky lime.
They stare with pixel eyes
and yell sepia words full of fear:
like a disease, it
spreads.
The second rumble
ejaculated from the tick of a rifle
in the brown hands, almost black
repeats itself until the tanks raise their own fire
and death onto the machines.
The shots ring through the air
until a first man dies in obsidian,
collapsing from the tank
crimson jetting out in all directions--
a scarlet stream through buff sands.
Screaming—
it ain’t over yet—
tanks hacking into metal,
bullets tearing white skin:
the Arabs are fearless!—
but they are full of black, black
Fear.
While the families in soft Florida villas cross their pale fingers
over their 60 blaring inches of azure
Mediterranean conflict.
They don’t know their men are off in the golden desert
in their little ecru tanks
still pink from the fight,
red-turning-scarlet-turning-puce,
dead like the 8-year-old girl
the Egyptians or Pakistanis raped and killed.
But still all the Arab men are dead,
and all the American men are dead,
and the cars continue to roll
down Manhattan streets
the oil boiling in engines, smoke swirling to the sky.
All dead under sallow sun
because of our hunger.
The children and wives in puke-green huts,
still thinking their giver is pushing honey
from the ground.
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