Finery was 2-3x yearly feminist zine of art and literature by women and queers; now it is the same, only exists as an online journal. Submissions are currently open and guidelines are available on our “About” page. Visit Finery in its new online incarnation at finery.tumblr.com. Below is information on the out-of-print physical issues (1-7) with excerpts from each.
Finery #7: Myth-Making, Winter 2010
Featuring Traci Brimhall, Becca Klaver, Juliet Cook, Robin Crane, Nicolle Elizabeth, Christine Emmert, Ashley Lunsford, Christine Vi-Van Nguyen, Sergio Oritz, Vanessa Query, Michelle Wolfie Rodriguez and Paige Taggart
Comes with a CD of music by Bangs of Hunger!
Excerpts:
I Was a Water Ballerina
A water ballerina starring in
Marti’s Last Stand
A humorous quality to it not because
My father was a big-band member nor
because of my days in the water
pretending to be a contortion artist
but because
girls learn their own layers
A humorous quality to it not because
gum and borax in a heat proof bowl
(I use Pyrex) but because if
Lina Lamont had mixed it with milk
instead of gold, or EVA-Foam
Material instead of with
artists, the girls who play with
artists, the girls who play with
figurines, waterglobes, snow
nods to art in the Chanel show—
my days in the water pretending
to be a contortion artist
would be over. The girls who flashback
for gold, who play with EVA-Foam—
he would never see
my days in the water pretending
he would never see
mother was a water ballerina starring
in Rich Gold Material
(10 to 16 August 2003)
not because women are
tutu globes escaping orbit
but because playgirls make
excellent display artists
-Becca Klaver
____________
Wild Woman and the Piano Player
In a dream she demanded he go fetch
those little affections hidden
after her mother’s death: five yards
of black lace, three wigs, and the six foot
Lipstick palm tree left to die in their old apartment.
He was a good for nothing, nobody piano playing fascist
pursuing cheap adventures in cabarets.
With nothing to fear, she dragged him into her song,
an accomplice to burning vultures,
“The Most Beautiful Drowned Man In the World.”
It was difficult to find gigs playing ghost music
so he became psychic assistant to a private investigator.
They moved to Bangkok, where no one hated them,
and continued entertaining the dead. She took up farming
in her strapless gowns and occasionally landed work
at the Floating Cabaret in Patong Paradise district.
When Juan, a one-eyed gaucho, brought her
Cinnamon Myrtle, Esteban pushed his piano to the beach,
and never returned.
Nikkita moved to Barcelona and dated a bi-sexual rock star
before being cast in an Alejandro Amenábar film.
She won an Oscar and retired to work
at a Peruvian nunnery.
Esteban showed up dead on Carthage beach,
bones weighty from the water, taller,
much taller than Lipstick palm trees.
-Sergio Ortiz
linocut print covers
out of print
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Finery Issue 6, Fall 2009
Featuring Roxanne Carter, Kristina Marie Darling, Molly Gaudry, Adele C. Geraghty, Rohin Guha, Marream Krollos, Jennie Macdonald, Rhani Lee Remedes, and Kate Schapira
Excerpts:
Shouting and Laughing
Salty and sultry we hung over the rope which was tight like a fresh face lift, spitting spit out of our mouths and into the street corners, aiming for shoes, bald spots and the fast moving windshields of cars. Turning to each other to engage in a tongue swap here and there before releasing once more the sound of lugies pelting glass. Is this another debacle? This is the kind of loudness, i think, that one takes to make sure the current sparkle in your eye, if all else fails, never forgets you. I am on the balcony leaning over and the rope cuts into my stomach like a butter knife begins to part a fluffy cake. In all awkwardness I talk louder and laugh louder and try harder. I know it is at odds with the portion of my skin that faces inward but sometimes we are at odds and that is how it is.
-Rhani Lee Remedes
___________________
SPEAKING ACROSS THE BLOOD CASTLE
according to the mirror, every instant is deliberately episodic. what follows must resonate, to a reasonable degree. what follows a bloody lady – young women swathed in sheets of curdled blood, their bellies lifting from saturated pavement with blatant sucking, a plasmatic kiss. the sound stirring up other spectacles, sad alphabets wound between two fingers, letters dropped continuously. she might say the following, a paraphrase… or resist reducing the sentence to a simple paraphrase and say nothing, nothing, a blank space left broken. it didn’t matter to her: let them hang. always transgressing the familiar. another bloody castle, the latest blood splattered bride lumbering to the altar, a bloody cavern or a cunt; female butcher bellowing fat. books splayed flat, forgotten; this book bringing a smell of musk, swapping spit, no hard stops, no cut, continually returning to the scene. her husband: murdered at the unwashed hands of a prostitute. a transition directly intervening in the text, flipping the page around. she’s in the background, unable to disentangle herself from language, distinguished in form by her sharp decline. all this synthetic gore, stage blood, thousands of girls screaming for the silver screen, making synchronization impossible.
-Roxanne Carter
out of print
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Finery Issue 5: Ritual & Rites of Passage
Featuring Erica Adams, Meliza Banales, Heather Bowlan, Juliet Cook, Brooklyn Copeland, Nicole Elizabeth, Janiva Ellis, Katherine Fallon, Liz Freeman, Kate Goldsworthy, Nicole Haroutunian, Sy Wagon, Ashley Lunsford, Christina Vi-Van Nguyen, Niina Pollari, Nancy Reddy, Michelle Rodriguez, Megan Roth, Lindsey Ryan, Adina Schoem, and Jennifer Waller
Excerpts:
Secrets
happen in cars that hide off the back-route
up a rough ditch where dry sylph-weeds reach high
one happened to my father when a startling crow
flew black as his heart was yellow with her hair
above the windshield he gasped and she knew
about his wife and let it happen the corn husks
when one happened to me
in Caleb’s front seat I bowed to his corduroy lap
his glass pipe’s cherry light wheezed I choked I swallowed while the windows wore
cataracts of steam so god couldn’t see
when one happened to this girl I knew
some man took her in his car and heaved her
deep into the ground and it swallowed
just like your heart had swallowed
what happened to you wherever it was
- Lindsey Ryan
___________
36 Mary Magdalenes
82 fistable, feminist pages + CD
Limited edition of 100/hand-sewn covers
Bonus Treat! With each copy of Finery 5 you’ll receive a dvd of “Baby Xalm Down Bye,” a short film by Lovewarz (Siobhan Aluvalot & Zara thustra). Bonus bonuses on the dvd include music videos made for Modern Lovers, the Manhaterrr film and the making of Stop Men, a public art installation.
Out of Print
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Finery #4: At Play
Fall 2006
Featuring plays by Rebecca Brown, Daphne Gottlieb, Katherine LaPlant, Anna Joy Springer and Leigh Stein
Photographs in response to the texts by Mashinka Firunts, Stephanie Pasvankias, Teja Ream Naomi Robbins and Sara Seinberg
Cover Illustration by Jennifer Baker
Out of Print
Excerpts/images:
excerpt from Art in Heaven, Act I Scene II
(Doing her own special enlarging of hair and lifting and sucking of body parts dance, speaking in a sort of haggard, leering femme-fatale style.)
Boys, you know boys, they go to the military with other boys, get themselves made into the biggest woodsiest boy-men of all, especially if it’s war. Not at all unlike us here in this fox hole. We do it too. Exploit the gender constraints. Bloat ‘em. They’ve got the military. We’ve got the sex-shop. We’re all wearing shiny black boots.
Become, my ladies, bejeweled clean slates. And they, the men, they’ll scrawl with their eyes, their misplaced desire. They are the eyes of our country. (FISTY leers at the naked girls.).
(Girls roll eyes/ shake heads, in a good humor. A bell rings. CHORUS OF PEEPSHOW GIRLS, SONYA, and FISTY harried, final touches, gathering objects, patting their fat parts, puffing their thin parts, dropping piquant objects.All wobble in a line around the “mirror/windows,” march behind them and come back around to the front, entering them now as peepshow booths. FISTY balancing on high heels like a pregnant stiltwalker. The world is already slanted.)
-Anna Joy Springer
___________________________________________________________________________________
excerpt from The Easter Parade
a play
Characters in the play:
Dee, a person
Dum, another person, older than Dee
The Setting: A Room
The Time: Always
LIGHTS UP slowly until we can see, dimly, two people sitting in
bathtubs. The tubs are facing the audience at kind of a V angel, the top of
the V to the back of the stage, the open part of the V towards the audience.
The heads of the tubs are about a foot apart.
Dum: It’s like sitting in a tub of molasses.
Dee: It’s like sitting in a tub of baked beans.
LIGHTS UP further until we see, broadly, two people sitting in bathtubs,
Dee in a tub of molasses, Dum in a tub of baked beans. Dee has on an old
ski cap type hat, Dum has on what looks to be a fallen or cast off or
purchased at Value Village Easter bonnet kind of affair with droopy flowers.
We see that Dee has on an undershirt, Dum the top of a pastel party dress.
Their clothes are, obviously, stained with either baked beans or molasses.
Dum: That’s gross.
Dee, maudlin: I know.
Dum: Ewwwww! (long pause) That’s TOTALLY gross!
Dee, snapping: I know! I TOTALLY know!
Dum, sheepishly: Sorry.
Dee: I’m sorry. I’m sorry I snapped at you.
Dum: I wasn’t being very sensitive.
Dee: You couldn’t help it.
Dum: I could
Dee: We’re under a lot of pressure.
Dum, by rote, a little joke of theirs: What we’re under is – a lot of
baked fucking beans -
Dee, carrying on their little joke: – and a shit load of molasses!
They both laugh. Then gradually stop laughing. Dee looks angry; Dum
looks sad.
Dee: I hate it.
Dum: I hate it, too. What can we do about it?
Dee: Nothing.
Dum: I knew you’d say that.
Dee: Then why’d you ask?
Dum, brightly: You never know. Something might change.
Dee: Things never change.
Dum, chipper: They could!
Dee: But they don’t. Even when they may seem to–
Dum: Seeming to change is a kind of change. (Dee glares at Dum) Kind
of.
Dee, with finality: Things always go back the way they always were.
Dum, at first hesitant, thinking out loud but then excited: But IF they
GO BACK to “the way they always were”, THEN by definition, that, suggests
that FOR A WHILE, they were NOT “the way they always were”.
Dee: Come again?
Dum more excited: IF they GO BACK to the way they always were, then
that suggests that there was or is a time then they were NOT as they always
were., i. e. that ergo ipso facto things, at least for a time, change.
Dee: Don’t get smart with me.
Dum: I’m not getting smart.
Dee: Correct, alas, my poor, special friend.
Dum: All I’m saying is that things can change. You said things never
change but I was just showing that things do change!
Dee: But not forever. Not for good.
Dum: Nobody knows about “forever”. But that doesn’t mean that things
cannot or do not change at ALL for now! For a while. For a time…?
Dee: What good is a while if everything just changes back?
Dum: But maybe not everything!
Dee: Stupid stuff changes. Little stuff. Piddly stuff.
Dum as cheerily as a soap commercial and in the fact to the tune of the
old Sarah Lee ditty “Everybody doesn’t like something but nobody doesn’t
like Sarah Lee”: Everything has to start somewhere! (Dee rolls his eyes,
crosses his hands across his chest and looks away from Dum while Dum carries
on like Pollyanna Glad) Besides, even piddly little stupid things are still
things nonetheless! That should give us hope!
Dee, with disdain, with spite, spitting: Hope? Hope?!? Perhaps
yourself but I, for one, am not that stupid anymore.
Dum, with the encouragement of a grade school teacher: Oh, but Dee-Dee,
you’re not stupid.
Dum, haughtily: I know I am not stupid. You are the stupid one.
Dee, as if Miss Logic again: But you said you weren’t that stupid
anymore. Suggesting, that you were still somewhat stupid. I’m trying to
make you feel better.
Dee: Save your breath. The only way I’d feel better is if I could get
the hell out of this goddamn fucking hell of a bathtub of baked fucking
beans.
-Rebecca Brown
_____________
Finery #3
Issue Three, Fall 2005
Featuring Erica Burkhart Alexis Dei Santi, Lesley Kartali, Katherine LaPlant, Casca Lin, Nalini Ramautar, Katie Romeo, Leigh Stein, and Brittany Warman
Two different cover photographs by Caryn Drexl
Out of Print
_________________
Finery #2
Issue 2, Summer 2005
Featuring text by Rory Adams-Cheatham, Roxanne Carter, Alexis Dei Santi, Mashinka Firunts, Lesley Kartali, Vee Levina, Lilit Marcus and Katie Romeo and photographs by Erika Nakamura, Carrie Gabella, and Elizabeth Green
Out of Print
______________
Finery #1
Spring 2005
Featuring Rory Adams-Cheatham, Lesley Kartali, Katherine LaPlant, Lilit Marcus and Katie Romeo
Out of Print
