by Victor Infante

 It was a cross-dimensional throw down across time and space, with superheroes, monsters, magical warriors, superintelligent machines  and more duking it out for Metaphoric Supremacy, but in the end, it came down to one titanic tussle: Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert's Kermit the Frog vs. Orange County, California poet Jaimes Palacio's King Kong.

And in the end, it was easy being green. 

That's right, Rick Lupert has won his third round of #FantasyPoetrySlam in a row, leading #TeamMuppetTheater – which comprised himself, Providence poet Ryk McIntyre and Worcester poet Chris Reilley – to triumph over their opponents with a whopping score of 272! In the individual rankings, Lupert was the overall winner with 257 points! 

​But it wasn't a walk: Heavy competition came from the direction of #TeamMonsterIsland, as King Kong, Godzilla and their ilk – brought to life by Palacio, Justin Lamb of New Orleans and Christian Drake of Massachusetts – with a hefty score of 148, led by Palacio's monster-sized score of 115, giving him the 2nd place overall score, even though Kong was forced to bow before Kermit.

​Interestingly, the giant monster poems were among the most meditative and spiritual, in their way, of all the entries, so kudos for finding philosophy among the rampage! 

Coming in with a valiant third place was #TeamMandalor, representing a galaxy far, far away. New York's G. Kagan Trenchard and Michigan's Scott Beal turned out two of the most highly regarded and praised poems of the bunch, with Trenchard scoring 53 points – third place overall – for their exploration of “The Mandalorian” as a trans allegory, and Beal taking  22 points for his portrait of a stormtrooper wondering, “Maybe those WERE the droids we were looking for?” The Force was definitely with this duo! 

​In fourth place as an individual, Karrie Waarala of Michigan scored 43 points for #TeamNarnia and much praise for her reappraisal of Susan, from the Narnia books, coming in fourth place as she and Maine's Christopher Clauss took for 60 points as a team, scoring them fourth overall.

​While those were the highest scoring teams, this competition was ranked on a highly unscientific method that involved “liking” videos on YouTube, and as such, there were some fantastic and extremely underrated videos in the bunch that didn't come out on top: Some excellent poetry, some avant-garde strangeness, some outright silliness – all of it made for a grand old time, and all of it was a blast to watch. So to all the competitors in this year's #FantasyPoetrySlam, THANK YOU! This one has been the most fun so far, and thank you to Rob Sturma and FreezeRay Poetry for giving this silly little game a home. Enjoy, and until next time, may the odds be ever in your favor!

AND SO IT BEGINS .... REGISTRATION IS OPEN FOR FANTASY POETRY SLAM!!!!

Once upon a time, poet, journalist and semiprofessional nerd Victor D. Infante saw references to a 'Fantasy Poetry Slam” – much like fantasy football – for the National Poetry slam finals. (NOTE: It does not matter if you know the first thing about poetry slam, except that it's a poetry competition. The rest is irrelevant.)
So, being who he is, he thought, “What would a REAL 'fantasy poetry slam' consist of? Would Harry Potter slam against Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something? What would people in, say, H.P. Lovecraft's novels, write poetry about?”

Which bring us here! Welcome … To Fantasy Poetry Slam! The Adventure is About to Begin!

THE RULES:

1.) Write a poem in the voice of someone from the world you've been assigned. For instance, if you are on Team Gotham, it can be from the point of view of anyone in a DC Comic world, from Batman or Superman to a guy on the streets of Central City. The poem can be of any subject you choose, but the world must be reflected, and hilarity is encouraged.

2.) Trades are OK by mutual agreement, but let Victor know ASAP. Late-joining players will be added as we go.

3.) Registration is open immediately. Just leave a comment saying you want to be involved. Teams will be assigned on April 1. We'll alert you to the assignments when they're posted. We'll add you to a Secret Facebook Group to help facilitate game play. (Not mandatory, but trust us, USEFUL!)

4.) Record the poem, and post it to YouTube in the month of April. You have until April 30, but it will pay to get it up early!

5.) In the metadata for the video, include the hashtag for your team – #TeamGondor, TeamArkham, etc. – as well as the Hashtag #FantasyPoetrySlam.

6.) Share the video on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. Be sure to repeat using the hashtags each time you share it.

7.) You are scored by the number of “likes” on each video. This is woefully unfair, but then, so is life, and really, this is just a silly game. (The hashtags allow us to follow the video if it gets shared widely, so you don't lose out on those points!)

8.) The results will be posted and the videos shared on the FreezeRay Poetry blog, FreezeRated: http://www.freezeraypoetry.com/freezerated. Thanks to Rob Sturma and Team FreezeRay for being true heroes!

And that's that. It's completely ridiculous, and will lead people into a nonsense game across the Internet, and the goodnatured chaos will be hilarious.

Feel free to get started on your poem and video as soon as you receive your assignment on April Fool's Day.

And as the great Effie Trinket once said, “May the odds be ever in your favor!”

To join the Facebook group and be part of this very nerdy endeavor, follow the link:
​
https://www.facebook.com/groups/224535721078452/

Our intrepid Multi-Media editor MIkkel Snyder has been busy creating custom zines just for our readership, and your grizzled, rattled editor-in-chief forgot to put up the May zine in a timely fashion so NOW YOU GET DOUBLE THE ZINES IN ONE POST!

Download and print the PDF for your mini-zine (s), and/or see what they look like assembled with our slideshows!  

May brought us some candid Instagram moments from Gotham City, and June gets us meta inside panels and bubbles like the comic nerds we are.

New journal issue coming soon; in the meantime, enjoy these pop presents!

​

With Avengers: Endgame having finally come out, but also having just come out, any of us who have seen it (see: proper humans and not the troglodytic crab-people that seem to populate comment sections en masse) now find ourselves doing the no-spoiler ballet. Essentially tiptoeing over the thinnest of ice in New Rock boots and hoping to not cause any cracks.
 
And somewhere between leaving-the-theater hype and not-ruining-it-for-anyone-else decency, there is a tightrope to be walked. A needle’s eye to be ducked through, through which we can indeed vent all those feels we spent the last three hours marinating in. We all want to do it. We all want to shout our post-movie exuberance from the mountaintops like we ourselves are the post-credit scene nobody ever remembers to stay in the theater for.
 
So here’s the secret. Huddle up, because I’m about to crack open the social-media GameShark and let you in on how to dance on this precipice and not plummet to the doom of Facebook pariahship.
 
The secret?
 
Pop your ego in the freezer and take a walk.
 
Close the browser, close the app, put your phone back in your pocket.
Don’t post anything about Avengers: Endgame.
 
Surprisingly hard truth: your Facebook friends don’t need your smug vagueries about what does or doesn’t happen in Endgame. Your Instagram followers don’t need your spoilery, dog-whistle memes when the movie hasn’t even been out a week. Resist the urge to flash that I-saw-the-movie badge, and keep your hype to yourself.
 
Now, this may read with all the bile of someone burnt by spoilers. And that’s because I have been. For Avengers: Endgame? Thankfully not, but for any number of other, equally-hyped-and-then-immediately-lumpy-milked movies and shows? Yeah, buddy. We’ve all felt that Durden kiss one way or another, and it ain’t fun.
 
So when Facebook asks you what’s on your mind, just keep scrolling. Find those spaces where spoilery discussions and threads are already happening, and drop your payload of rage/glee in there.
 
But for the love of all that is good, all that is right and just and worth the Avengers’ jeopardized lives...don’t post about Avengers: Endgame.
 
(And yes, this can also be applied to Game of Thrones. The Seven help the person who spoils a single frame of Game of Thrones for me…again.)
 
 
Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in or forthcoming from places like Half Mystic and FreezeRay, Poets Reading the News and Rogue Agent, as well as his newest, nerd-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby.

Print it!  Assemble it!  Dig the social media presence of Metropolis!  #somefilters #freezerated #zineclub #ezine

So Us, the latest gut-tumbler from Jordan Peele, came out this weekend. As of writing, I’m still counting down the hours until I can join y’all in gleefully subjecting myself to its doppelgänger sadism, to the nightmare of black (horror) excellence my goosebumps are already telling me it’ll be.
 
So, in the meantime, I’m thinking on the last time Jordan Peele drew back that undulating curtain and séanced us all (...the willing of us anyway) conscious of something ugly.
 
Get Out, that omen of Swahili whispers and “Redbone”.
Get Out, that brotha nod of awkward garden parties and grit teeth.
Get Out, that black-horror jubilee where everyday racism is made the diabolism it really is.
Get Out, that eviscerant rack of antlers lancing the lie of a post-racial America.
 
The nightmare this movie invited us all into wasn’t familiar territory across the board, clearly, as plenty of people—including the Golden Globes—decided its body-hijacking white supremacy cult landed it more in the realm of satire and comedy than anything legitimate. But, for me, there was no soul-searching needed to realize how authentic Get Out was being with its horror.
 
Having grown up a mixed kid in predominantly-white spaces, the idea of being the beloved novelty is not some farcical leap in logic to me. The tropes about hair-touching, about melanin envy and tanning jokes, about exoticized blackness and otherhood—those all come from somewhere. And they aren’t harmless dead ends. Because the culture that decided to idolize my difference is the same culture that used it against me when the whim struck. White adults fawning over my curls, their white children--friends even—making me the punchline of racist jokes in the safety of homogeneous playgrounds.
 
But this is how our country built itself, this tradition of perpetually othering its black citizens. In America, to be whiteness’s trophy implies being whiteness’s prey. This isn’t two sides of one coin; this is two eyes in one face. A face still maintaining its ownership of / entitlement to black bodies—to worship or ridicule, to use or destroy. A slavery-nation relic, a never-exorcised ghost thought banished only because of the time we’ve buried it under. But so little has changed. So little has changed, and there are new victims every day. And Get Out was every cell an accurate depiction of what that existence feels like.
 
Now, as for Us, I can’t say on where the movie will go or what Peele plans to do with it. But with Get Out reppin’ at his back...I think we’re all in for something spectacular and scissor-sharp.
 
 
Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

Three weeks ago news broke that a live-action Nightmare Before Christmas adaptation was sliding its sleigh of carrion baubles across the table. Now, if TNBC has taught me anything, it’s that a sleigh of carrion baubles is 1) “going to be a disaster” (thank you, Sally) and 2) a great way to get your year’s worth of work “blown to smithereens” (thank you, Mayor). So I won’t go into the details on why a live-action Nightmare Before Christmas has me forecasting showers of certified-rotten flotsam, but I will take the chance to point out how on-it this movie stays and how, 26 years later, its leeringest side-eye is slapping grab-handsy whiteness in the mouth harder than ever.
 
If you haven’t seen this movie yet, I’ll summarize: in TNBC, Jack Skellington—Pumpkin King and patron saint of making us mortals shit ourselves—has an existential crisis and goes roaming for something fulfilling to wrap his bones in (a premise several bits of Oscar fodder would call a whole movie and cut to credits). It turns out that the something in question is Christmas Town and, discovering Christmas Town, his gut impulse is to take it, make it his own and chuck deuces to anyone who calls him out on his festooned steamroller of narcissism. And just like _____ (insert name of headdressed/dreadlocked/kanji-inked white person of choice) going viral, it blows up in the Pumpkin King’s face. He and his host of skeletal coursers get shot out of the sky. And that’s what it takes for him to understand how severely unentitled he is when it comes to the culture and customs of Christmas Town. Fortunately, being undead and all, he’s able to piece himself back together and save his friends from the gogmagogical mouth his appropriation inadvertently served them up to. Jack learns a lesson about staying in his lane, and Christmas ultimately comes to Halloween Town anyway. Not by hijack or impersonation, but by Santa himself bringing it to them, inviting them into it as appreciants instead of pillagers.
 
Now, you could say I’m shoehorning a whole jack-o-lantern of ideas into a story that didn’t intend them. And to that I’d say...welcome to fandom, can I get you some more tea? But yeah, that is pretty much what’s going on here (the IRONY). Was The Nightmare Before Christmas conceived as an anti-cultural-appropriation PSA?  I think that’s an easy no. But does it shamble and shriek all the same takeaways as a movie that was? Does the Bone Daddy Christmassacre feel any different from Nicki Minaj’s fetishistic “Chun Li” performance on SNL or Justin Bieber wilin’ with his platinum, dingleberry-looking shits? If Halloween Town had social media, you can bet Sally’d be dragging Jack up and down Twitter the minute she warns him he’s slipping and he puts her on suit duty instead of listening.
 
And that’s the suckerpunch buried inside this movie. The thing’s a sleeper agent of social commentary. Cultural appropriation, while not a new problem, is certainly a more spotlit one today. And I don’t know if there’s another movie out there that dances over its fence posts as elegantly (and accidentally) as The Nightmare Before Christmas does.
 
 
Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in places like FIYAH and FreezeRay, Poets Reading the News and Words Dance, as well as his newest, nerd-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

​As much love as I have for The Craft (see: being hexed gothstalgic by a Beverly Hills 90666 wonderland of blood oaths and pre-scenester Hot Topic), there’s a certain stance the movie took that never landed with me. And I feel like it’s this one line in the sand the film chose to draw that keeps it from being the fistful of kryptonite it could be.

The plot points in question: Rochelle and Sarah’s incantations gone awry.

In The Craft, Rochelle casts a revenge spell on her school’s Klan Darling Barbie™ and then finds her going full Brundlefly in the shower. Sarah casts a love spell, gets sexually assaulted because of it, and then villainizes Nancy for ragdolling her would-be rapist out a third-story window.

The fault in both of these scenarios is how the movie doesn’t even have to think twice about sympathizing with its abusers. Broaching the topics of racism and misogyny in this little coven-fable that could was an unexpected victory for black and femme viewers, but one that The Craft almost immediately recants as it shifts its loyalty from the victims of institutionalized abuse to the abusers finally catching the hands due them. Instead of dragging these societal sepses into daylight, the movie’s message becomes the same status-quo shill that prefers its injustices unchallenged and its suffering done in silence.

“Racists are bad, but shutting racists down is worse.”

“When sexual assault happens, look at what the victim did to provoke it.”

Any opportunity for social commentary dissolves when it’s decided that the witches bear more guilt in their insurgence than Laura and Chris do in their respective racism and male entitlement. When holding problematic people accountable for their venom becomes less important than letting that venom continue to course.

And, of course, there’s a monumental difference between social justice and revenge, between reforming ingrained injustices and pushing people out of windows. But within the realm of fiction that is The Craft, that was an unnecessary and unhelpful line to draw. Because if we were already on board for a horror movie about women with vicious, omnipotent godhood hailing their bloodstreams electric, then something tells me it wouldn’t have been much of a hang-up to have those same women justified in what peals of anti-victimizer violence they’d wage. I mean, it sure went in for The VVitch.

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Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. 

Valentine’s Day. Or the less cuffing-season-complicit Cacaolebration, if you dig. Regardless of how you feel about the antiquated, semi-pecked box of chocolates we call a holiday, there’s some good to be gleaned from its predatory cherubs and tsunami of you’ll-never-be-as-in-love-as-us selfies. And I’m calling The Crow the best of that good. Not the sequels, not the never-gonna-happen reboot, and definitely not the TV show. But the OG Crow? The gothic swansong whereby Brandon Lee gave love its most uninterrable champion, Eric Draven, poetic justice incarnate set on righting the life stolen from him and his bride? If you’re in need of a new Valentine’s Day tradition, let me redirect your attention to this monument of goth too bursting with sorrow and heart to stay buried in the ‘90s. Because damn, does it rap at the chamber door of these feels.

If for no other reason, the movie makes timely Valentine’s watching because Brandon Lee was born February 1 and revisiting this piece of tragic brilliance is a fine way to remember him. But The Crow is romantic to the core, a love-beyond-the-grave parable calling out to that ache so many of us either burn with or hunt for—a heart full enough to be broken. And heartbreak is this movie’s very marrow, from the bereavement and hope in its score to the slivers of joys past and joys to be, from the Burmecian gloom slicking almost every scene in rain to the anguished way Draven navigates his resurrection. He says “little things used to mean so much to Shelly,” and suddenly all of our tiny pastimes are holy ground. We see him remember every slight interaction he and Shelly had, crumpling under the weight of how much it hurts to have that all taken away, and a highlighter is ran across each of our relationships as if to say “These. Don’t miss these.” And it’s just so rare to have a movie implore something from us, to plead us into mindful love without compromising the strength and integrity of its story. The Crow swooped that brass ring before we even knew we needed it. No dead horses or ham-handed PSAs disguised as drama—just a deadboy given one more night to right the trauma barring him and his lover from paradise, but crafted in such a way that coming away from it unbettered just doesn’t happen. In seeing Draven’s love for life and the living, our own is deepened. When he collapses on Shelly’s grave a mess of cemetery flotsam, and she finally comes to him, finally meets that gaze that has torn through an underbelly looking only to hold and be held again and the score weeps them into their rest—there’s simultaneously no movie I’d rather be watching and no love I’d rather be taught by.

Because it may not be #couplegoals (what with the couple being brutally murdered and all), but it makes major stabs (heh) toward #devotiongoals, toward #lovegoals, toward #iwillcrawloutofthiscoffinandmurderyourmurderersgoals. And for a holiday mostly despised because of its superficiality, a little “real love is forever” could go a long way.


Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests with his co-meanderer, Brittany—the Sapphire to his Ruby. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.