Photography by Tracy Chan and Loraine Ho.

On April 18, Ka Lamakua launched its second poetry event, Poet Trees, at Manoa Gardens. The venue came with access to new equipment on the cheap– microphones, a 8-foot screen projector, sound mixer, and speakers. Since the event was an open-mic, we just needed the performers to appear.

Keith Fernandez induced mass hysteria .

After the audience was sufficiently soaked in alcohol, Keith Fernandez broke the ice by breakdancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” With all the events going on that evening – a Hawaii Hall concert and Earth Day at the Sustainability Courtyard—Fernandez’s enthusiasm snagged new audience members and impromptu performers.

Poet Trees sustained its momentum for over three hours, drawing in a variety of guest performers and some of Ka Lamakua’s regular contributors. Thanks to all who participated!

Dylan Little, musician/poet/photographer extraordinaire, provided onlookers with sonic waves of acoustic goodness.

Freestylers Bali Fergusson and Michael Hamilton get their karmic flow on.

Hawaii Slam competitor Jonathan Larson blew us away.

Ka Lamakua’s Associate Editor Tracy Chan tells tales of misdeeds and tentacles.

Check out Poet Trees on Facebook for more visuals and stay tuned for the next Ka Lamakua event!

Photos and captions by Tracy Chan.

“Doing it on the Lanai” was a benefit poetry reading, featuring RYAN OISHI, TIARE PICARD, SAGE U‘ILANI TAKEHIRO, and JILL YAMASAWA.

It all went down on April 14, from 8 to 10 pm at Jazz Minds Café, 1661 Kapiolani Blvd.

Written by Tracy Chan

A circle shot of the poets gathered for Thursday’s event. Photo by Tracy Chan.

…While some habits are nasty, the Stairwell Readings are something that Kalamakua hopes to make a…slightly less nasty habit. It all began when the editorial staff got an abstract poetry submission by Christian Miller and began reading it aloud, alternating lines and having fun with dramatizing the words. Then, because people in the newsroom were giving us funny looks, we decided to take it outside and find a place where the sound could really do something. “Hey, what about that stairwell in Kuykendall we were messing around in the other day?” I suggested, and with the aid of a digital pocket recorder, the idea for the Stairwell Readings was born.

Dave Woo, Matt McVickar, and Ryan Maurice, three poets who read at the event. Photo by Tracy Chan.

Our first event was a success, with about 15 people showing up on Thursday the 20th. Various styles of literature and poetry, including sonnets, dada, free verse, short stories, and a random excerpt from Dostoevsky were read. Dylan Little brought his guitar, and graced us with a few songs as well.

Loraine, Kalamakua’s boss-lady, reading one of her poems. Photo by Dylan Little.

For the grand finale, we moved the whole group, including video camera, indoors to the stairwell, where all those gathered were posted spaced apart on the stairwell. Everyone came up with an on-the-spot line of poetry, to be read one after the other. How did it sound? Check out the audio player.

Mahalo to all the poets who showed up, and to Jessica Hamamoto, for videotaping the whole thing. Let’s do it again soon!

Photo by Tracy Chan.

If you are interested in participating in the next Stairwell Reading, please email us at kalamakua.org+literature@gmail.com, or visit the event’s facebook page.

Photo by Matt McVickar.

By Christian Miller

Hangs off the end of his seat in the Chatsubo, neon blue smoke from a Korean version of a Cuban cigar engulfing his head like the myst of some archaic, enchanted forest. The once icy, glinting chrome of his Hosaka-Activision seven-finger star-power-feedback prosthetic arm is sprinkled with stardust glitter, the texture recalling the eyeshadow of a raver. The tips of the cybernetic digits are painted a pretty rose, where fingernails would be, and dance like sugar plum fairies across a fretboard of cheap Chinese plastic, molded into the spectre of a Stratocaster.

“Usual Chandler special on the rocks then, Herr Artiste?”

“Not tonight. Campbell’s soup if you got any.”

As he picks up his Spaghetti O’s, one of those strange instants of silence descends, as though a hundred individuals have simultaneously decided to check their internet forum. He does, in fact, refresh his Myspace at that moment, to discover his similarly specular avatar remains in the same position in her “top friends” list.

He sets the octave shifting, co-girl whore beside him and the heraldically un-photoshopped bartender on “ignore”. Treasurehunts cheaptickets’ for business-class tickets; single window seat, for Stormhold, Faerie, connecting flights through Lothlorien and Azeroth, at the end of the month. Possible delays due to Burning Legion outbreak. Control-tabs to eBay fantasy cosplay.

She reminds him of greener pre-war college days in Toronto. Cozy late night rehearsals at the theatre with the art-smart redhead donned in roseate velvet. She’d been second string Miranda in The Tempest that deserved first, but for facial features just off the particular moment’s Covergirl specifications. She was a caged spirit in an age before affordable beauty. An age before the strands of finely printed incantation that once held The Networks together were blown adrift on a tempest of infringing and user dreams. Back when celebrity was still an elemental resource, hoarded like magic or the remains of dead things, refined into fuel. Vials of starpower, clutched by decrepit wizards perched in glass towers, constructing a dispersed panopticon of megapixels and wifi that would ultimately be their evolutionary demise. She was immune, enchanted against such spells of dark discourse, and would ward off those trains of thought with a smile of the eye, “I just don’t let it get to me. I’m happy just to be acting, doing something I enjoy.” He remembers the calligraphic arch of her brow as she would elaborate on the finer points of Joy Division, Neil Gaiman and miscellaneous Victoriana. The way he eventually lost her with digressions into quantum consciousness, evo-neuro-psych, the Anarchist’s Cookbook, and cold syllogism;

“I didn’t land that contract I wanted.

Therefore all humans are pedophiles or stupid or a celebrity.

I think I’ll grow my beard out.”

He jacks his neural uplink in to WoG, into massively multiplayer, consensual hallucination.  Opalescent wings, elven eyes, the fragments of a hologram Rose weave themselves together, and she dances, pirouetting across the royal ballroom masquerade in his mind. Young energy makes him feel mean and old. Laughing, close. She smells of cinnamon and dreams devoid of Edge and all this unflinching, high contrast reality. Hi-def dreams, where economy is an NPC and Adventurer is an occupation. Good dreams, and she beckons him into their warm embrace with a practiced touch. His mouth is filled with the taste of pink and he hears the feel of down feathers as all his dead channels come alive with ecstatic signal, the stuff what she is made of. All he wants is to laugh and cry, chat and *hugs* and eat pie and look at kittens and menstruation seems so fascinating and he’s thinking in emoticons and and. The zeros and ones melt into ribbons of pixie dust, and all that bleak seems so distant and stupid and imagined and pointless, like a theme park he suddenly remembered becoming lost within. Silly-jism. Fuck corporations inc, fuck the viral recognition sharks, fuck fish, fuck evolution. I want a unicorn.

An 8-bit, metallic clang, and her perfectly modeled rose-petal lips are caught in an infinite one-second-loop pucker in his mind’s eye, like some demented editor’s joke of the closing shot. His third, pink pinky missed a hammer-on, cutting the rock guitar track out of the mix and shattering the fantasy of a four-hundred-note streak. He mutters a curse against American gods and post-national entities for corner-cutting in the arm’s response latency. “Shit, wifi still iffy in here.”

“Something up, Artiste? You look not here,” the bartender sidelongs.

Ultra-specular, impervious shades, still wet from a downpour, reflect rainbows over his eyes as he looks up, “An angel passed.”

Inserts coin, replays the song and the scene yet again, frilly metal turning out weeping tremolo licks, singing along.

Got a pink magic woman
Got a pink magic woman
I’ve got a pink magic woman
Got me so blind I cant see
That she’s a pink magic woman
She’s trying to make a faerie out of me…

By Casey Ishitani

The following letter is a response to the multiple articles that ran in yesterday’s paper.

To whom it may concern:

I am writing this letter to express my greatest dismay toward your printed institution. I find this newspaper to be a heartless and crude example of your nation’s downfall. This retort is a warning that the proposed quest you are on is one fraught with but little glory and even less chivalry.

I have read many newspaper articles centered around American politics, even forgoing food and sleep so that I may retain their glory in one fell swoop. But, while stumbling across my niece’s mail while she prepared what she called “a necessary bonfire,” I found your editorial section. Of all the things I have read, I find it to be a most disturbing chink in your people’s armor.

Logic, which a great number of your writers use, is the enemy of glory. It is hard to be logical and lead a life as a derring-do cavalier at the same time, and we all know that Americans love to be cavalier. Being logical and sensible toward politics takes all of the adventure out of living as a citizen in your great nation.

As you plead for logical solutions to American problems such as poverty and poor health, you don’t realize how much you are killing the chivalric nature with which your leaders have molded America. What better way to show one’s love for a nation than dying for it valiantly– without the aid of government-funded medicine or welfare?

Besides, gallant individuals like Americans don’t need medicine or social welfare to protect them. They have an elite squad of Templar knights, which the government calls Blackwater. These valiant warriors defend the peasants and women of this country with their swords and steeds (M-16s and H2s) and ward off the heathens of Persia. Were it not for police officers and Minutemen, I would plead with them to roam all of America, dispensing justice and spreading the word of Christ.

Another article I take exception to is one pertaining to the serfs of your land. Were it not for serfs, your country would not have been built. Egypt and Russia were built by serfs much in the same way. Yet, your editorial page finds it necessary to speak of their unfortunate caste situation as if they should be treated as something other than serfs. By blaming the growing number of street urchins on the so-called “destruction of the middle-class,” you are evading the issue that the serfs are being given a golden opportunity to become knights. Why, by invading Persia, it will soon be a glorious time in which all Americans can become knights – fighting honorably for God and country, receiving estates and being greeted as liberators.

Which leads me to mention the most horrendous example of your attack on chivalry: your complete and utter lack of commitment to your king, George W. Bush. Even your writers who usually fawn over his beliefs and doctrines seem to be evading their god-given duty to serve their leader with the utmost and unconditional loyalty. And yet, your king is bringing you back to the great days of the Crusades, when noble warriors clashed, the Hebrews had no say and courtly love was in bloom (between men and women, that is). By spreading the harmful message that your leader is fallible, you destroy his glory and force people to vote for a king that acts less like a king and more like an Athenian. For shame! Fie upon thee!

Your newspaper is an example of all that is wrong in modern journalism. While others regale their readers with tales of wonder and whimsy, you report things that inspire feelings of unrest and motivation. While others ask the masses to have faith, you force them to form opinions. You’ve made a plea for the death of the days of the Saxons.

Also, a science article of yours, written about what you call “wind turbines,” appalls me. How dare you advocate the birth of giants? I shall have no choice but to engage them in battle.

Sincerely,

Alonso Quixano
La Mancha, Spain

Despite a surprisingly late appearance and a generally negative reputation with the press, Lord Satan has emerged as an unlikely dark horse in the 2008 Presidential Campaign. “Better late than never,” he said, while adding, “It also helps that I am immortal.”

Agreeing to an interview, Lord Satan poured Jasmine tea in his Alabama office and settled into his favorite chair – a diamond-encrusted throne made from the charred bones of a hundred of the Lord’s most righteous seraphs. “You’ll have to excuse me if I am rude,” he said in a low, rumbling Latin-accented timbre. “But I believe my reputation with guests should have proceeded me before you agreed on this interview.”

Operating mainly through online viral marketing platforms, which include privately funded web pages and self-approved YouTube postings, as well as a surge in the souls that he has “laid siege upon,” Lord Satan has made an impact on other candidates with his frequent accusation that “none of them would be where they are without me.” His stances on punishing “the wicked” have made him a favorite in the Gallup polls. He has also been noted for his retorts against his detractors many of whom claim he is not an American, an accusation that the candidate feels is “slanderous and untrue.”

Lord Satan bases his assertion that Hell is most definitely a part of The United States on its identity as an all-encompassing dimension with a growing number of portals springing up in various US locales, “mainly in the South.” He added, “These are the same people that don’t think Hawaii is a state. Besides, I’ve been here for as long as there were Trans-Atlantic slaves.”

Lord Satan’s stances on cultural issues have also caused controversy. He is vehemently pro-life but supports stem-cell research. The candidate was also the foremost champion of the SCHIP and universal health care, citing that his divergent political stances are all in the interest of “keeping more American souls alive to partake of.”

While his politics on health and stem-cell research have won him a largely liberal fanbase, it is his adamant opposition to gay marriage that has lost him most of the vote from the political left. “Look,” Lord Satan said when pressed about this issue, “my job is to influence the souls of Earth in my endless rebellion against The Creator. I corrupt souls. I don’t complete them.”

Even with a last-minute campaign, the candidate treated the interviewer to the unveiling of his own Malebolge Party mascot. “Meet Geryon,” he said while holding up a portrait of the flying demon with claws and the face of a beatific man. “Not as domestic as the elephant or the donkey, but I felt it was best to get supporters acquainted before they meet him. Plus, would that face lie to you?”

While he has made no secret of his plans to use America to wage his war on The Gilded The Army of Heaven, Lord Satan has found no opposition. “It seems as if Americans are just tired of their repressed states, serving under an overlord who is both incompetent and unwarranted in his wiles,” he said before laughing maniacally and sending out an earthquake that claimed 100 lives in the nearby area. “No, I’m just joshing. You guys are just gullible and paranoid. You’d bomb Iran just because of what their leader says about you.”

When asked about his foreign policy concerning the Middle East, the candidate had few words to say but insisted he had everything under control. “To know why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sounds like your leader you have to ask yourself who has two thumbs and is an adviser to both of them,” Lord Satan said before pointing at himself with both thumbs. “This guy.”

As for the environment, Lord Satan plans to “crack open the portals to the Well of Sinners and bathe the whole of this wretched land in the festering toxins of boiling blood, pus and excrement until every corner looks and reeks of Los Angeles.”

When asked why he felt that people who don’t agree with him would still vote for him, the candidate sat back and finished his tea. “I think,” he said, “that if you look at how everyone seems to agree with John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich based on how ordinary decent people should live, and then never turn out at the polls, I have the distinct advantage of being the most despicable candidate who may very well accumulate the votes.

“Not to mention,” Lord Satan laughed as fire rose from his eyes, “the fact that people vote based mainly on fear, and who is a master of fear more than I?”

The candidate then ended the interview before engulfing himself in flames and vanishing into the ether.

Lord Satan was born in Heaven from the whim of The Creator, God. He was educated at the very second of his inception, but later received his Doctorate in Business Management at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA. He spends much of his time traveling the world, but has settled on living in the US with his home base in Alabama. He plans to move to Saudi Arabia, which he feels is “finally catching up to America in terms of hatred and paranoia.”

Billy Collins read a little more than a dozen poems to a room filled with the laughter of more than 300 people. Every seat in the auditorium at Iolani highschool, next to the Alawai, was taken. Collins’ readings of poems like “Ballistics” and “Divorce” were sincere and terrifyingly frank. As the poet laureate for this year, Collins delivered a reading that was both entertaining and insightful. It seems many of his poems are written to mock other writers. Collins wrote “Litany,” in efforts to rewrite a bad poem he had read in a magazine, a poem that compared a woman to, well, nearly everything. His poem:

“Litany”

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine…
-Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.