Bullet List of Shame-Based Issues
● The stunning fact of shame’s preeminence Scanning for New Face Avatar Choose template type before you show your eyes— Mini-interview with Wes Civilz HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? WC: This may seem a strange answer, but I think rejection from journals is really underrated as a builder of writers. The ongoing “practice” of receiving them really does make you face some tough questions—is this truly the best version of my piece? Does it need more time? Do I really believe in it? HFR: What are you reading? WC: I just finished Sei Shōnagun’s The Pillow Book, and just started Frank Conroy’s memoir Stop-Time. HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Scanning for New Face Avatar” and “Bullet List of Shame-Based Issues”? WC: “Scanning for New Face Avatar” came out of an interest in all the tech jargon we’re immersed in. (This interest also lead me to stumble on William Lessard’s work, and then onto Heavy Feather Review, by the way.) It’s fascinating to see technologies imprint themselves on language during periods of rapid change … I mean terms like “machine learning,” “large language model,” and “augmented reality.” We know the original words these terms are built with, but they are being repurposed into new concepts right in front of our eyes. “Bullet List of Shame-Based Issues” is in some sense a traditional poem in which the poet excoriates himself for his foibles and flaws. But I thought it would be interesting to give it a twist by overlaying the sonnet form onto one of our modern genres of information, the bullet list. HFR: What’s next? What are you working on? WC: I’m currently working on a manuscript of sonnets that these two poems are part of, and also on a memoir about the role of intoxication in my life. HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share? WC: I recently helped out on the production of an independent film that will be screening in some festivals and theaters this year. Check out Me and My Victim, by two director-actors, Maurane Dubois and Billy Pedlow … it’s a disturbing film about their brief and troubled relationship, and about consent, and I suppose about chaos itself. Wes Civilz lives deep in the forests of New Hampshire, which are lovely but have ticks. He posts writing-oriented videos on Instagram under the handle @wes_civilz, and his writing has appeared in journals such as The Antioch Review, The Threepenny Review, Arts & Letters, and Quarterly West. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
In all I say and do and make and think
● Blue gloomy penis: an impediment
● The lazy way I use my blood as ink
● Eating my food so fast I hate myself
● Wolfing down burgers easily, I’m busily
Constructing toys of shame, like Santa’s elves
● Sitting and watching all this bacon sizzling
● So food is pin in stomach’s voodoo doll
● So voodoo stomach represents my soul
● How I hate me thus they hate me, and all
My ways of wrecking needlessly the whole
World due to weakness-artist-penis synthesis
● A steady inkling: “I’m no good at this”
Now show your eyes. Then, following the script,
Select a face and match its grid of eyes,
Nose, lips to your own eyes and nose and lips,
Remaining motionless and calm. Keep face
Emotionless as cool smooth ancient stone.
Expressions interfere with mapping phase
And can create uncanny shapes of bone
Moving beneath the iterating flesh.
A seamless, realistic avatar
Emerges when the polygons are meshed
Like constellations dreamed anew from stars.
Gold skin. Pearl voice. Sleek hair. Sharp eyes. New face.
No name, no age. No gender and no race.
Heavy Feather Review 