They Have Hand Guns Around Here

Photographer John Issac here.
Read National Geographic Photographers here.
Currently reading Tin House Review, the Paris Revew, American Photo.
Artist Julianna Swaney here.  And her Facebook here. Sample illustrations below:

We have hand guns around here

They broke in and stole

The old Jewish Lady’s

Red Irish setter.

Its nearly all she had except

For her New York accent.

Then they came back

And stole her hair dryer
and 4 large cans of Starkist

Chunk-style tuna.

Her son has come by

With a dozen cardboard cartons

He found behind the

Supermarket.

He’s moving her,

He says, to a safer

Part of town.

Now, I thought, where can

That be?

I ought to ask him while

She stands there waiting

In the center of the

Lawn but I think he’s in a

Hurry.

- Excerpt from Charles Bukowski's Slouching Towards Nirvana on NPR here.

-Ordeal-

Translated from the Romanian by Michael Impey and Brian Swann

I promise to make you more alive than you’ve ever been.

For the first time you’ll see your pores opening

Like the gills of fish and you’ll hear

The noise of blood in galleries

And feel light gliding on your corneas

Like the dragging of a dress across the floor.

For the first time, you’’ note gravity’s prick

Like a thorn in your heel,

And your shoulder blades with hurt for the imperative of wings.

I promise to make you so alive that

The fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,

And you’ll feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming

And your memories will seem to begin

With the creation of the world.

-After Dialogue Gallery-

The artist depicted his own hometown,

a church as a pile crumbling 

stone and clouds that could be benign

but more often mincing.

In great innovations

Romantics were built 

upon restriction. This palette, 

a color starved show

Blues and grays and greens and the exception,

“Just pass the Cathedral at Saint Francis Street, 

Then the road turns peaceful,” I overhear 

a passerby gives directions to out of towners.

We passed rushing waterfalls, crooked trees, exploding volcanoes.

We even got to the Oyster Bar on Grand, pictured here 1941.

The bar’s vaulted ceiling, vast and filled with arcades likely

but we couldn’t see that closely into the picture yet.

It was the busiest time of day. 

There were so many other people.

-After Pluck Gallery- 

The centerpiece was a grid

of a hundred small images

bucolic settings

bat bird wolf an adult fairy tale

really, a bed time for hipsters.

Him: huge

impressive, mostly aerial

landscaped whose color

has been tweaked.

Though the other images are abstractions,

we clearly see from far far away

a blurry grisaille portrait

of a smiling man in a uniform

circa 1965, handwritten of course.

A far cry from 37 million dollars

But hey, recently sold.

Her: Spectacular

historical ledger from the 1700s

was filled with descriptions of bodies.

It has already been bought and sold

but you can still see maiming shadows 
that press down the floor at the feet of her radical new sculpture 
some 75 ½ feet tall, a real must see

mammy as sphinx made out of bleached sugar.

Sugar is brown in its raw state.