“How to be a Small Press Success” – Poetry by Catfish McDaris

Girl in Bathtub - Saul Steinberg, 1949
Girl in Bathtub – Saul Steinberg, 1949

FLAPPERHOUSE #9 is our sexiest & most invincible issue yet. If you’d like a taste, please enjoy Catfish McDaris‘ informative & inspirational poem “How to be a Small Press Success,” which is but one of five fantastically madcap poems Catfish contributed to our Spring 2016 issue. Should you care to read the rest of those poems– as well as impeccably flappy poetry & prose by 15 other all-star writers– you could order a digital PDF copy for $3US and see it alight in your emailbox as soon as humanly possible (usually just a couple minutes, though it could take up to a few hours. We apologize for any inconvenience or delayed gratification.) Or if you prefer to read us in soft, pulpy paperback, print copies are available for $6US .

{ X }

TAKE A NEWSPAPER CUT IT ALL UP and pour
in the letters from a Scrabble game
mix two ounces of Mrs. Butterworth
syrup with water in a spray bottle

Get your woman naked in the bathtub,
squirt her until she’s sticky all over, then
throw in all the letters and an ant farm,
write your poems before making love

Get a Bowie knife shove it into the earth,
put your ear on the handle, listen closely,
all the magazine names in the world will
be whispered to you at the same time

Write as if your sexual organs are in flames,
until your fingers cramp, until your eyes
bleed, until you use the bathroom in your
pants, set fire to all your words, throw them
out the window, now you’re ready, proceed.

{ X }

Catfish In Milwaukee Doing a Pee Wee/Urkel Poetry Monologue
Catfish In Milwaukee Doing a Pee Wee/Urkel Poetry Monologue

CATFISH McDARIS’ work has recently been translated into French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Mandarin, Bengali, Spanish, Yoruba, Tagalog, and Esperanto. His 25 years of published material is in the Special Archives Collection at Marquette Univ. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He’s listed in Wikipedia. His ancestors are from the Aniwaya Clan of the Cherokee Nation. He won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015.

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s