A Literary Arts Journal
Valerie Haugen Nuzzo is the Executive Artistic Director of Zephyr Stage at Cavalcade in Fruita, Colorado. She is a practicing poet, and has written several plays, most recently co-writing Multitudes – a one-man show about the American poet Walt Whitman with Kim Nuzzo which was performed at the Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland. The play will be performed June 1, 2019 at Walt Whitman's Birthplace at the State Historic Site on Long Island, New York. She has performed in more than 50 productions with Thunder River Theatre Company in Carbondale, Colorado, including playing all the big Greek girls - Lysistrata, Medea and Antigone. She performed as The Professor in Zephyr Stage’s American premiere of The Principle of Uncertainty by Italian physicist Andrea Brunello, and she was most recently seen as Ivan in Yasmina Reza’s play “ART.” She has published one book of poetry entitled Naked Underneath, which is available at Amazon.
twitter: @valerie_haugen
absinthe minded or all gods are bastards
dear sailor always sick at sea
there are birds that suck the breath of dying men
the fever
the chest rattle
while we the writing ibis
exchange riddles wabi-sabi
(even the skeptics have skeptics)
we are a catalogue - a list
death as the jack in the box
no house is complete
without an escape hammer
i know you know
down where Arturo used to live
they're running out of deities
you are so clear to me
it's as if i was remembering my real life
I speak to the wall while the ceiling understands what i am saying
they cut down a great oak worshipped by my people
if your gods are so powerful, the christians asked,
why didn't they stop us?
then it was as if the sun never rose - night ever more
i don't think of myself as a hero
I will go to my dead father - he will not return to me
I will go to my mother long gone - she will not return to me
my lost sister, I travel toward her
we're all traveling to see my sister
these words fall to the ground
my knee is bent for me - in stubborn supplication
kindness is a knife
i wear a crown carved upon
i divide my father into measurable parts as he stands before the glory of the red son of the sun
before his death my father told me he thought death was inconvenient
my father told me he'd talked to God and it surprised him that God has an accent – it seemed east coast
my father told me God called him 'Old Soldier'
my father told me to laugh and love, all you can – laugh and love
my father told me he refought Vietnam every day – hoping it'd come out different
my father told me it always comes out the same
As an offering to the sun.
It's not the drug, it's the dreamer
Billy Lee asks
what's for dinner
every damned day
a recipe for a heavy heart
go to bed a little hungry
in me the underworld
mafia
chronic malingerer
immaterial antagonist
tragedies
travails
Billy Lee bids me goodnight
every damned night
by biting
a piece out of me
if it's not my monkey
whose monkey is it?
I will not eat from a plate over which his shadow has fallen.
Faizah Ahmad Rajput is a visual artist and poet living in Los Angeles, Ca. She is currently working on her first book of poetry at Otis College of Art and Design, where she is as an MFA candidate in writing.
The background drawing here is part of a larger body of work, a series of one-minute freehand sketches of Faizah's sleeping experiences next to her person. The drawings will accompany the dream poems, which are the resulting products of those nights.
She is on most social media platforms.
If you are interested in collaborations, you can contact her at