It's been truly rewarding putting together this little zine. Over the last year I've had to say goodbye to two pet companions. Miss your stubborn dedication to your own path and impromptu howls, Vegas. Hope there's popcorn wherever you're at, Pip. It's hard to know what to do with these griefs, how to fit them in with other enduring griefs like losing my dad, how to fit them into a daily unfolding of worldly horrors. Or where does the loss of friendships end up? Somewhere in the body. Where does one grief end and another begin? 

I tried to write a poem about all these griefs sharing apartments in an apartment building, like I once lived in a commune in Gothenburg, connecting and feuding, but it didn't quite work out, or not yet. A sitcom or a drama or both. Griefs having a block party. Coming together for meals. Grief knocking on another grief's door to lend sugar or salt. Pleading notes in the laundry room.

Anyway, the Dear Easy Mac zine came to be because Janie lost Easy Mac, and Easy Mac, among other important contributions, is the logo and poetry editor of SUPERFAN WRESTLING ZINE which we co-edit. For the love of the great sport and art that is pro wrestling! Superfan zine is in a forever feud with Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit but for this ONE TIME ONLY have agreed to team up. Their entrance will be legendary.

Janie wrote a note about disenfranchised grief and it felt like a good idea to make a zine around. Thinking about how it can be hard to know how or where to express these feelings. Not a wrestling zine this time but not NOT a wrestling zine either because there are some wrestling entries in here too. DEAR because remember when you could write into magazines to ask questions or share. Making a zine out of such dear entries felt like a fun way to approach a less fun topic. Imagining those Dear Easy Mac entries together.

I wasn't sure if this would resonate with many so it was moving and inspiring to receive all these excellent and touching entries. Submissions sound wrong. Letters. Thank you so much! We actually had to expand our usual format to fit them all in.
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-Kim 

If want to order a copy you can do so here.

or GRAB A PDF AND PRINT YOURSELF:

or TO READ:

For all of autumn, MMPP is spotlighting our favorite pets: real or imaginary, yours or a wild one. We want to know your pet's artist statement AND their favorite songs. Send us all the deets so the world can get to know your brilliant buddy!

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America loves a roadtrip movie and a heist movie, both fantasies of new beginnings, of leaving behind and starting new, from scratch, temporarily released from reality and history, if you only dream. Who doesn’t want to dream? Who doesn’t want an adventure? Don’t look back, don’t note the graves. Here, see this open road and horizon full of possibilities. They replicate an alluring image of American freedom, even if at the end you go up in a hail of bullets.

Wanda, the movie, refuses to be in service of this dream. There is no dream and no escape. She is traveling but not really going anywhere, from one man to another, one quarry to another. Wanda is in survival mode. There is no space for her. She is just trying to make it from one moment to the next. 

Food feels like one part of this refusal. Food is material. Eating is basic survival. Repetitive. Wanda is bleak and doesn’t offer hope but these are moments of pause, of some brief enjoyment, of existing undisturbed. 
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A local poet has been begging people to buy their book of poems and to also like them. The poet is Barracuda Guarisco (bærəˈkuːdə Guarisco) and the book they are begging people to read is called LIKE MY POETRY, PLEASE.

The poet is known locally to publish poetry, host readings and shoot pool. According to a post on social media there were originally 25 copies but now only 3 copies of the book remain and there will never exist any more copies. 

On a day just like this, painted gray overcasted skies that rained off and on, several canvases arrived and filled my apartment. Varying degrees of completion , styles, medium and life. The pieces of her soul left behind; her art.

One stood out. One she had barely begun to bring it to life, yet the fainted started lines stretched out and took hold. An outlined woman, reverenced in a hallway. Hands clasped.

The beginning of my brushstroke was fury. Ignited inspiration that shook from my root. I dove head first right in. I felt the canvas move me. Bewitching my fingertips in rhythmic creation. 
It was delicious kismet.

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Held frozen in the midst of this painting, a ghost of a woman who once was started on canvas then halted. A painting over top of the ghost of an unfinished painting before, this canvas living in the corner of my kitchen, haunting me. This old piece of someone else’s history. A piece from a collection of a woman now passed. Her leftovers, now housed in my apartment. A gift from her son, a stranger to me, who just a couple months ago, stood in the middle of my living room with grief soaked air around us. Complete silence. He wished them goodbye and good luck on their future lives. They were his mother’s. An artist no longer in this realm, left behind a house full of her work. Abstract to portrait, from landscape to still life, and all throughout the seasons of her existence. Married name back to maiden, from fresh student to a skilled artist. Fifty canvases filled my apartment, brimming it to its limit. I shuffled through them one by one. Connecting and dreaming up her story. With each painting, each manipulated speck of color, I witnessed a woman whose art was embedded into her fiber. It ebbed, flowed and grew as she went through life.

A passed torched torture of artist block, now in this moment, has its grips on me. I was able to carry on her painting a little further. However, it stands frozen yet again. This painting on top of painting of a woman stilled. Alone. Perhaps she too is held in time where an unfinished piece stands in a corner. Matryoshka dolls of the past, present and future. I hold this painting close, intertwined with me as I try to carry her forward.

For now, I wait. Wait for the spark to return. For the story to come back and carry on with me. I wait for the block to be lifted so that I can set this phantom free.

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On a day just like this, I began again. As if no time had passed, like an old friend.

I picked up a single paint and brush and started with the tiny thought of what if I placed a single stroke here. With a twist of my wrist, a swish and a flick, the spell was broken and intuition took me by surprise. Once again knowing exactly what to do. When truthfully, I simply allowed myself to get lost.

On a Thursday night, there she and I were again, in the middle of my kitchen. As the euphoria crashed over me, I found myself deeply entrenched in gratitude for the return of inspiration. I began to type out the words to a friend when a second wave knocked me breathless; the realization that the weekend to come is Mother’s Day. The air turned dense, lungs exhumed, I burst. Her presence made known. I was to finish this today.

And I did.

To all mothers in every form.
​
 With love.

There are good witches in West Virginia, summer heat transforming skin to boiled hamburger. They change into livestock, feeding the earth with bones that crumble to dust, their hair  bundled like ragweed. Every sneeze is from pollen that was once a solitary, free-range goat-- once a wild mountain witch. Death is a seafoam bubble, the mung in water, and I homesteaded South only to find that mountain bikes move differently in Appalachia. After I stumbled, the ocean frost of myself festered and burst, spilling saltwater insides to water the world below.  Crash of sound, like how the peak of a mountain looks like the crest of a wave.

When I woke, the water returned to me, and in my hand, I held the rattle of a lone goat's bone. I carried the relic North where it sang songs the whole trip back. In the silence of the city, I buried it beneath piles of office furniture in a locked closet--a cycle returned to the familiar: pressed clothes, too much coffee, a life rebuilt into what it once was. But sometimes, in the quiet, I hear the bone humming, and it sounds like blues and grass and fiddles--songs born from a wild goat who was once a very good witch.