I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I'm doing it.

I am now a famous person. I represent real power.

— Newt Gingrich 

The chickens came home to roost.

— Malcolm X

It disappeared that year.

And isn't it true we glided past grace?

Glided past at the speed of surprised light.

One neon dump after another,

All glittery and stained with the mantle of bad decisions.

Way too smart,

We were way too smart.

— Harold Budd

* * *

Danse Makaber

{Dreiundfünfzig}

*STRONTIUM*

I'm surprised at how greatly Danse Macabre's monthly themes increase my enjoyment of each issue even though I know exactly how it all comes together. It's embarrassing, really, as if I were a backward child amazed by a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat again and again. It never gets old.

It's no mystery to you, I'm sure. You'll realize that the raw ingredients of DM are transformed by their inclusion in the monthly issue. And it's no mystery to you, even though it flummoxes a bumpkin like me, that the submission found naked and shivering at the bottom of the IN box reappears as a grand and elegant creature after being trimmed and laced and placed just so.

It's all about the context, liebchen, the context our brains hastily assemble from the jots and tittles and swarming pixels of this site in order to ascertain just what sort of thing we've foisted upon them. In their efforts to analyze and categorize, our brains fill in the gaps, so to speak, making Editor-in-chief Adam's job much easier. Just as a moviegoer interprets a series of static images projected in rapid succession as a moving picture, so DM readers tend to reinterpret the various bits of this monthly coloratura smörgåsbord as a breakless, breathless whole.

Consider: Just coming to a site named Danse Macabre for the first time, your sex-and-death receptors are set to HIGH, so the macabre elements of even the most mundane selection stand starkly in the foreground. If you're a returning reader, you know how DM's overarching Mitteleuropean kunst und kultur sensibilities tie those macabre elements more firmly to their roots, often making it seem as if the authors had drawn inspiration directly from Old World sources.

In the same way, issue theme often drives subtext into fascinating new directions. Over the past thirty issues or so, we've seen submissions innocent in the extreme — yes, even naïve and unpolished — take on outlandish and subversive overtones thanks to a superimposed theme. With careful opposition/juxtaposition and judicious use of whimsical images, voila! The rabbit comes out of the hat month after month. Magic!

STRONTIUM, however, is different. This time, you bring the context with you.

Strontium is a soft, silvery metal most widely known for the synthetic isotope strontium-90 (⁹⁰Sr), a product of nuclear fission. Strontium-90 is present in radioactive fallout (aboveground testing 1945-1980) and releases from nuclear power plants (e.g., Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima last year). Researchers learn a great deal about levels of strontium-90 in a given area by grinding to a fine powder the baby teeth of local children and testing that delicate powder for the presence of radioactive isotopes. Strontium-90 is a “bone seeker” that emulates calcium; most of the isotope that remains in the body stays in the bones and bone marrow. And in children's teeth.

That's why I say that with DM LIII STRONTIUM, you bring the context. It's in your bones, the burden of being one of the Smartest Monkeys. However, if your brain needs something more to fill the contextual gaps in this issue, here it is:

We carry with us every day the toxic weight of bad decisions from the past. Now, in annus mirabilis/horribilis 2012, your ideology has failed, our ideology has failed, and the chickens come home to roost look suspiciously like vultures. By the time Dec. 21 rolls around, we may be praying that the Mayans were right. We may be praying for le Danse Grande.

On the other hand, forewarned is forearmed. Yes, we carry those bad decisions in our bones, but perhaps we can learn from them. Let's all try to do better this year. We have nothing to lose except ...

Sincèrement,

The Elements of Strontium

Susan Fair - Don Peteroy

Ken Poyner - Jason Reeser - Edgar Rider

 Strontius, Strontia, Strontium

fictions

Ali Abdolrezaei - Casey Creek

Tatjana Debeljacki - Michelle Gaddes

Claire Huxham - Richard Marx Weinraub

Anna Niarakis - Vaughan Rapatahana

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Jerome Brooke

fiction

Michael H. Brownstein

poetry

Michael Estabrook

poetry

Jaq Greenspon

Castelul Bran
Törzburg Bran

Bran Törcsvár

Castle Bran

photography

William Grobowski

The Revealing

The Vril

fiction

David Hughes

performance

Henirich Marschner

opera

Bill Mayer

poetry

Marco Mentil

photography

Michael Mc Aloran

poetry

Frontispage

KJ Hannah Greenberg

Nina E. Larsen

AE Reiff

(below)

♠ ♥ ♣ ♦

KJ Hannah Greenberg
The Thief

Small clouds of powder rose where the feet of the dark women trod. Those sisters, their sun-faded skirts splaying slightly as they walked, tapped, at random moments, on the pots perched on their heads. Poppies sprouted from their vessels.

In the distance, a stone and mud dwelling exhaled hot air through a roof hole. A skinny horse whinnied. Farther along that road, a craftsman tinkered beneath a worn sheet. His awning perched on roughly carved poles. His anvil leant more sparks and heat to the morning. For small moments, his hands settled on an awl, on a file, or directly on a bit of shiny material.

A dusty child, corn cake hanging out of its mouth, stopped suddenly in front of the artist’s iron block. A pretty, half moon pendant was taking shape there. The young one’s dirty hand searched his equally soiled bag. He retrieved a few coins. There was to be a wedding and the groom had demanded gifts.

The worker looked up, regarded the extended offering, and shook his head. Each subsequent hammer blow produced flash. He used a powerful forearm to wipe his brow.

The women with flowers arrived. They giggled.

The smith raised his eyes to their lashes and full lips. At the same time, the youth’s quick appendage reached for the reflective ornament.

The boy shrieked. The metal, though not molten, was hot. He yelled again as the smith raised his hammer as though to strike the child’s offending limb.

The women gasped.

The instrument came down quickly, landing next to the fashioned object. A dull note sounded as it struck the metal slab.

The young one cringed, cried, shrunk into himself, and fainted. Though his burn was blistering, he had become woozy from fear.

One woman lifted her jug from her head. Inside her ewer were dozens of opening buds, all delightfully abundant in crumpled petals.

The metalworker, whose long since formed calluses dulled the heat of the adornment, nodded at the proposed exchange. He held out his tender.

He also grabbed the woman’s hand.

She yelled. Her companions scattered. The shop awning came down.

Later, much dirtied and a little bloody, the girl of posies limped out of the workshop. No one, not even the would-be thief remained.

That the small child had been stymied in his act of stealing, at least for that day, was her only compensation. Once men become habituated to pilfering, they are unlikely to break their habit.

KJ Hannah Greenberg

is double trouble. She's been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, in the genre of poetry, helps out as an Associate Editor at Bound Off and at Bewildering Stories, and has two new books launching, a full-length poetry collection, A Bank Robber's Bad Luck with His Ex-Girlfriend (Unbound CONTENT), and an assemblage of short fictions, Don't Pet the Sweaty Things (Bards & Sages Publishing). What's more, she makes her hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs line up in pairs. 
 

* *

Nina E. Larsen

A snailkiller in Mollusc. Purgatory

Forced to leave
after an attack snails oysters scattered.
There were wrecked shop fronts
and train stations, shells snail houses
blackened by fire,
pavilions blown upside down. Snails oysters
that were not killed during the battle
appeared to have fled,
leaving a trail of tiny pieces of shell pearls
and grey love darts.

Nina E. Larsen

lives in Paris, has published work in Norway and the US, won a poetry contest in a national newspaper in Norway, and holds an MA in French Literature from Sorbonne Paris/Oslo University. Her work is recently published or forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, Haiku Journal, Fourandtwenty.com, Three Line Poetry and Indigo Rising. 

* *

AE Reiff

New Jargon Horrors of the Obesity Wars

Jargon Psmith derived new art, new species and a new organ in a day. This species, called Psmith, was an anti-diuretic nerd. It grew a carapace to protect its inner parts. Then it overate. Squeezed by this carapace the parts ballooned out. Afraid it would go pop, Psmith took anti-diuretic meds to shrink it back. So Psmith reinvented itself, but shrinking had unintended consequence. It’s was like turning in a bottle of pop at the store. Heightened exposures produced a noir. What’d ye think? Pushee down, pushee back.

New Jargon had hands full of specie and art. Things you cannot dream. Gene sculpted! But it took more uresis than Psmith thought, which engendered The Horrors of the Dessiccate. Perhaps you read it. Flakes of acid crystal lodged in Psmith’s brain.

We admire how urinary speech transformed Psmith’s kidney to a brain. We’ll be digesting that kidney with the gut when Psmith brings up more.

 AE Reiff

sculpts fictions, animals and people. Sometimes the sculptures precede the stories. It’s all about patterns clay makes that the brain recognizes. He conducts investigations in leftist beliefs of the Pennsylvania Dutch, was twice a PopTart nominee, sent poems into space in digital bottles, and is useful as a surfactant package to biomediate hydrocarbon. But you already know this. Indexed at Encouragements for Planting. Current ceramic sculptures at Animal Wilderness, examination of biological extinction at Human Botany Review. 

DM LIII

 STRONTIUM

Danse Macabre