Get all 11 Stevie Subrizi releases available on Bandcamp and save 30%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Accessories, Songs for The Jungle EP (10/18/2022), Possession (2022), Live, from Inside of the Whale (poems), songs for Gideon, Nightstands, Nails, Dressing Rooms, and 3 more.
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Stovetop popcorn and hand-rolled cigarettes will gild your passage through the crisis. You will disintegrate into Jackie from Alaska’s couch and into the sunset over a colonial cemetery. A pelican that passes overhead may happen to inhale the smoke but will not experience wistfulness or consider its own context in American history. Sugar may be sprinkled over the popcorn once the oil sizzles to create the illusion of carnivals. A rose may be grabbed out of nature and handed to the prettiest individual at the carnival, or if a rose cannot be located, one acceptable and inexpensive substitute is secret home-popped popcorn. Unpopped kernels left untended may flee back into Jackie’s cupboard, flipping their little brown wings, to chew up everybody’s cereal and laundry, and so it behooves you always to leave the popcorn on the stove until each of the kernels has popped. You are also encouraged to note that rose bushes are not permissible in the cemetery and will be confiscated from the grave.
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After Many Days
01:17
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I used to be a seagull
until I fled to the bay.
I changed into a bagel.
I sat behind the counter
of the bayside donut shop
all morning and all day,
till the cusp of dark. The shop
closed. The keep threw me out.
I sat inside of the dumpster
all night. In the morning,
the seagulls descended. They
live by the bay too, but I
had left their ways with the tide.
The language of gulls is a fast
tongue. Much less tongue
than beak. Much more bread
than sea. Off they flew, guts
full, over the giant and shining
water.
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3. |
Business Cards
01:09
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The bushes are flush
with business cards.
The children are having
a yard sale in forty-point
Helvetica. Hear the birds
linking to their fan pages
while the breeze tugs, whoops,
angles toward a sponsorship
with a popular new brewery.
My band is playing a show
at this bar on Tuesday.
It would be cool to see you.
Check out the clouds,
each plastered into an odd shape.
Must be part of a high-concept
viral marketing campaign.
We might get rain soon.
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In this future, each and every human has been swallowed by a whale, or at least that’s what you can tell yourself while you pace your new sanctuary’s tongue. The rest of your family got their own whale, and they are spending the sequestered time finally hashing out their issues over forkfuls of burnt kelp. You are alone in your whale. And maybe your secret and corrosive loves are alone in theirs too. She kissed you into dawn after one Independence Day, and now soon enough she too will notice how certain clumps of algae look like fireworks. He tided orphaned undergarments into your tangled sheets, and now his own cruddy boxer-briefs will disintegrate in ambergris, and how his lesser lovers’ homes must gnash their teeth. Meanwhile, you are still naked and inside a whale. Eventually, you should give your whale a name. Name your whale after a famous crooner, some great lugubrious diva. It will never know you from fish. It will always shake your puny body when it sings.
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Counterintuitive as it may seem, the most passionate stove setting is medium low. I mean no disrespect to high heat or the crisp gifts that its kiss delivers—however, when I stir garlic on medium-low heat for no longer than one verse of a song or bring a briskly boiling sauce down to a persistent simmer for an amount of time most aptly described as “however long it takes,” I am using the flame to say, “I love you in the steadiest and gentlest way of which I am capable; take of this warmth and make of it what you will; my heart is your chafing dish.” This is to say nothing of the slow burn of memories, each particular meal and its myriad savors and labors, nothing of the beets my lover and I managed to pan fry despite our lack of a plan or the kit for lasagna I left in her fridge. This is only to say: the deepest care comprises the slightest work. Sure. By now, you suspect me of attempting to sell you a crockpot. So, let me admit: the beets were tender enough, but from a critical distance, an unexceptional course. I never learned the fate of the lasagna. I cook most meals for myself. Still, I watch the flame to keep it short and blue, for the sake of the garlic.
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Having stripped off the skirt and the jewelry
and wiped off the lipstick amidst the beard,
eyes and body cleansed of all adornments
fussed over and fought for against stubborn
family elders, yet fawned over by kind friends,
I dip my fresh old self into the warm still
water over and over for the attendant’s amen,
and when they wrap me back into the towel
and I open the door leading back to my effects,
now with even cleaner nails and face and being,
even now, I see a new queer lovely in the mirror,
the changing creature that I lead the charge to love.
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While I was dating this minister, she invited me to her church, waited until the congregants left,
and took me upstairs to see inside the organ.
She led me past the organist’s desk, strewn with notation and framed photographs, toward
the reeds in the wooden skeleton,
and when she asked if I wanted to climb into a slim compartment to see further within,
I am sorry to say that I declined.
And so now there is this place, within an organ within a church within a life, that I will never
get another chance to visit,
like how there was once a place for me to tell this sort of story, by way of this sort of poem,
in a basement bar that no longer exists.
Even while I loved that minister, I never believed in heaven, but if I did, it would be a room
you could play with your hands;
someplace you never would have thought to ask to be allowed to enter, if you ever noticed it,
in a lifetime on the ground floor,
but a place where, once inside, you could spend whole eternities between and within the tones
wrung out from the air in its walls.
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Stevie Subrizi Boston, Massachusetts
Stevie Subrizi is a genderqueer songwriter and poet. They were once one half of Somerville-based guitar duo the Crazy Exes from Hell, along with Kirsten Opstad. Their chapbook Alone & Naked Inside of a Whale won Yemassee Journal’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest, judged by Dustin Pearson. ... more
Stevie Subrizi recommends:
A whole LP of covers of songs by my ex-Crazy Exes from Hell bandmate Kirsten Opstad—and two of those covers are by me! (Stevie Subrizi!)
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Poor Eliza has one of those voices that always sounds like it's breaking the worst possible news to you in the most empathetic possible way, and it's a power matched here by the full band production.
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From America...The Daylilies
by The Daylilies
For me, this new Boston-area supergroup lands somewhere between the Buggles and Blondie, and I am absolutely 100% here for it.
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Super riffy psych rock trends towards the heavy end of the spectrum with copious amounts of of groove, fuzz, and shred.
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Spirit Guide مرشد حقيقة
by Skyjelly
Ultra-fried desert blues, a trip through the darker aspects of psychedelia with some wild sound deign.
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Indie rock with a light shoegaze shimmer that won't blow your ears out.
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