Paradise
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The carousel’s distance
determines my longing for it. Dulled, or muted, or flagged, producing a posture and a face. The daughter under the pine was mine, but the photo misrepresented her look as serenity. A whorl, recessed and spangled. Everyone related by blood would, when given a plate of food, first push the pasta, say, and the corn, the salad, the fruit, all together in the slight depression at the center, then slowly, as they ate, separate each item slightly from the other items, so that nothing touched or mixed, and at family gatherings you could learn, and I did, by this habit who was family and who had married in, the former proud of how they ate, the latter proud of how they didn’t. I had always said, “I dislike fun,” in the spirit of ludicrous pronouncements that sound like truth when spoken. |
Ming-Jer Kuo. From The Everyday Practice of Art, 2010. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
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Paradise
Though spoken as an aside,
it was the truth. The actual
witch, near the end of
training, spoke of wild mind,
rite, and talking openly with
trees, “the standing ones.”
Half a heart, better than half
a smile, sipping a large red
Slurpee in the hot back seat.
The kid by whom, a kid
yourself, you define what it
means to be a genuine
asshole, Gavin Bloss. A failed
family outing, or a failed
family. Every item of
experience an imitative
imaginative for the child.
A shoreline, a beach,
continually refreshed. After
twenty years sober he began
to drink, and within a few
days, literally burned down
the house, the house he’d
built with his own hands, and
scattered the family widely,
before again getting sober for
twenty years, at which point
he died. But, do dreams.
it was the truth. The actual
witch, near the end of
training, spoke of wild mind,
rite, and talking openly with
trees, “the standing ones.”
Half a heart, better than half
a smile, sipping a large red
Slurpee in the hot back seat.
The kid by whom, a kid
yourself, you define what it
means to be a genuine
asshole, Gavin Bloss. A failed
family outing, or a failed
family. Every item of
experience an imitative
imaginative for the child.
A shoreline, a beach,
continually refreshed. After
twenty years sober he began
to drink, and within a few
days, literally burned down
the house, the house he’d
built with his own hands, and
scattered the family widely,
before again getting sober for
twenty years, at which point
he died. But, do dreams.
Andy Stallings lives and teaches in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His first book of poems, To the Heart of the World, came out with Rescue Press in 2014.
Ming-Jer Kuo, born in Taipei, Taiwan, is a New York-based artist. He worked as an environmental engineer for eleven years before moving to New York to study art. He creates interdisciplinary visual art works inspired by his lens-based media experience, urban living interests, and an engineer’s analytic perspective. Kuo graduated with an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from School of Visual Arts in 2014. He participated in the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2015), is a recipient of the Paula Rhodes Award for Exceptional Achievement (2014), and was awarded an Honorable Mention from the Taoyuan Creation Award (2011). Kuo was selected in the group exhibitions of New York Hall of Science in New York City (2015), Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in New York City (2015), The 2 Gateway Center Gallery in Newark, NJ (2014, 2015), Art Factory in Paterson, NJ (2014), Fotoaura Institute of Photography in Taiwan (2009), and Pingyao International Photography Festival in China (2004).