Do you like crossing borders? Do you like rampaging? Do you like carrying around a weathered photograph of Franka Potente? Then the Identity Supremacy Ultimatum tour package is for you!

ITINERARY 

You will: be dropped in the waters of the Mediterranean — be hauled by a fishing boat to a nameless Italian city — take a train to Switzerland — drive a classic Mini (w/chase upgrade available) to Paris —  drive a stolen Sierra hatchback through explosions in the countryside south of France — go back to Paris — go to Mykonos, Greece for scooters and tans — go to Goa, India for dysentery and your significant other’s tragic murder — (somehow) ferry to Naples for further rampaging — drive a stolen BMW to Munich then Berlin — Moscow New York Moscow Paris AGAIN — go to London — take the high speed rail to Madrid, Spain –take the ferry to Tangier, Morocco — then round off the trip back in New York for your second cheap look at Pamela Landy through a window!

OUR GUARANTEE

While you cross each border (with a different passport) the Awkward Travel LLC executive team promises to sit around a plush mahogany conference table and tensely discuss your movements. WHERE THE HELL IS HE/SHE PEOPLE!? We further commit to slinking in and out of various Awkward Travel LLC safe houses and sub-stations with silenced pistols while monitoring where on the grid you have popped up.  At least one static monitor of your file will remain on at all times. We want YOU in a body-bag by sundown.

You will be outfitted with disposable cellphones and disposable patsy border officials. Count steps! Count employees! Count exits! And if you think you’re being followed then retrace all of it but this time remember the license plates of all the cars and the dominate hand of all the waitresses! You might have amnesia but you can do this! We will also provide a safety deposit box rife with clues to your identity. Hint. You get headaches.

Banks, Embassies, Train Stations, Cafes, Hotel Lobbies, The Apartments of Other Spies! You’ll learn how to kill people with not just knifes and guns or your bare fists, but also things that are sitting around like pens and magazines and the embarrassingly inept motorcycle driving of the local Polizei.

YOUR COMMITMENT

Regardless of the legalese at the bottom of the contract, we’re going to be upfront.  You must commit to a couple of things. You must know what to do with the insides of all cellphones and walkie talkies (lots of wires!), as well as have the ability to dismember any gun while walking briskly away from authorities.

If you get laid, the object of your spy love (Stockholm Syndrome) MUST cut and dye their hair the morning after.

You should be able to scale walls and always be aware of the movement of security cameras. Most importantly you must commit to finding the real YOU. This is a soul searching vacation. We want you to feel refreshed and replenished, like a blank slate. It’s really like a coming-of-age travel package except you have to cure your own wounds with a rusty needle and cheap vodka in a dirty bus station sink.

If at any moment you run into another Identity Supremacy Ultimatum™ tourist you, unfortunately, must fight them to the death. However you can spare them at the last moment if you wistfully look into their eyes and say, “Look at us. Look at what they make you give.”

On the last day you will happen across the evil mastermind of this whole nefarious plan that set you in motion. Make the check out to “AWKWARD TRAVEL” and give it to him.

It’s done. Shut it down.

Please contact us for package information. Your real name may or may not be David Webb. 

The air around polo is rich. Everyone wants to breath it; the money, the women, the perplexing lack of rap stars all pervasively surrounding our skin with light hued shirts and awful pants trooping amongst the grandstand. I dressed properly for today. Cream-colored small thread count Italian suit, Topsiders, white shirt, white tie, plaid Kangol. It wasn’t long before my hopes were confirmed. This was a completely ridiculous outfit. Sideways snickering glances and cynically unannounced amateur photographers polka dotting the scene at the Eighth Annual Miami Beach Polo World Cup. The whole atmosphere was oft smoothed, however, by the presence of a Beach Zamboni, which must be Poseidon’s beautiful land-based clunker loaner.

The picture was almost dramatic on the beach, with crashing white foam framed by drastic wind and sharp rain. All along the walk up were the horses and their shit, piles of the stuff, fantastically mixing with the salty bloom of the Atlantic. It didn’t effect the overall scent much other than adding hilarity to the setting. There’s no grace in shit. And to quickly avoid, people were rocking a strong strut towards the open bar. Lord were there people. People people people. These were the alive beautiful thirsty people, according to themselves.

Now might be a time to familiarize yourself with the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Formed in 1970 by a group of British students, entry was only allowed to non-musicians, or musicians who had no prior skill with the instrument that they were to play. They focused on the classics, time trusted pieces of Western music loved and known by all. Gavin Bryars was a founder, Brian Eno played, Michael Nyman was there somewhere. The product is somewhat haunting, ultimately not that good, but most importantly completely hilarious. The players don’t know how to play. Silly stuff. And they played the William Tell Overture! The horsiest of horse songs. Hi ho Silver! Away!

The Portsmouth Sinfonia couldn’t be a more apt metaphor for the crowd at the Miami Beach Polo soiree. The people were there. These people. There were men AND women. The women, were mostly beautiful, but there was a depressing dearth of really large hats. The men had style, collectively, which is rare for a group of men, but it was terrible style as any gobber knows pastels are the closest tone to vomit.

My compatriot and I got into a couple of funny conversations, one with a plaid pants’ed fellow who said he had been going to the event for 8 years and the crowd was getting less classy. I thought about this long and hard, stroked my classy mustache and considered the fact as presented. Was it ever classy? A man, who I can only assume went by the moniker DJ Polo, was playing aggressively loud Techno in between chuckers. Everyone knows Techno between chuckers is not a classy look. A “chucker”, according to the pedagogical Brit announcing, “is an old Asian Indian word meaning ‘period of play’”. That’s it. NO ONE here knows what the fuck is going on in the actual game of polo. There’s horses and sticks and I also just overheard the Brit say “the head of the mallet will not get tangled with the long flowing tail” which gave us all (me) a collective (solitary) boner.

The game itself was like a bar TV on mute. The people that seemed to care only got caught noticeably caring once or twice. Polo is a timeless classic, but on Miami Beach it was just like the Portsmouth Sinfonia. The collective didn’t know what they were doing being an audience at a Polo match. The most recognizable team was a car, then a booze brand, and cock it all if fifteen percent of these people knew anything at all about the rules. I didn’t. And still don’t. It was difficult to understand. Thick with excess and cluttered.

I could suggest a couple of additions to the sport to make it more entertaining for the layperson. Quicksand, though obvious, should be reckoned. People love quicksand. There would need to be helicopters for equine extraction, as no animals should be harmed. I thought too that an extra horse with no rider would make things a bit more fiery. Just to be sort of loutishly in the way. A push and a bump. Totally legal. Steering.

At one point we were also introduced to someone later described as “the number one Polo player in America”. Though it must be, I resisted the fact that this was a even a viable concept. Perhaps my unbeknownst inner child abandoned in the dark forest of Anglo-Saxony might have been in awe. But who fucking cares, right? Not these people. No sir. They don’t even get the irony of it all. They could never play in the Portsmouth Sinfonia. Couldn’t even blow an oboe. But that’s exactly what they were doing. Right there, in the Miami sun, we abutted absurdity. We all sat with polo on in the background. We drank top shelf vodka and laughed at our own jokes. Playing an instrument we never learned.

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This coming Monday, April 23rd, from 7 pm—10 pm, Allography has teamed up with Cabinet Beer Baseball Club and the good folks at Lester’s (as well as a trio of Miami’s most talented writers and poets) to bring you the first ever World Book Night event in Miami.

If you’re unfamiliar with World Book Night, you should check out their site but all you really have to know is that lovers of literature the world over will all be giving away free books and you, yes, you!, are invited to come get some. There’ll be music and cake (okay, we’re not entirely sure about the cake), excellent beer and wine options and over a hundred free books for you to peruse and take home. And while we can’t tell you exactly which titles we’ll be giving away (why ruin the surprise?), we can tell you that we’ve got a great selection.

I’m fairly certain that I speak for all parties involved when I say that yes, we couldn’t be happier to be participating as World Book Night Givers, but we’ll be even more thrilled if you come join us as World Book Night Takers.

Hope to see you Lester’s!

Lester’s 2519 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL

This article was tweaked and reprinted with permission from Cabinet Beer Baseball Club. Visit the site. It’s awesome. 

And watch the poet read some stuff here:

One day in the not too distant future, we’ll be selling copies of the book on allography.com. In order for that to happen, though, we’re trying to kick start this project with kickstarter. That means that you can get a first printing of the book, signed by author and artist, as well as a bunch of other cool stuff. We only have a limited time for enough people to commit to getting a copy of the book, though, so please check out the kickstarter page and get your copy of Romeo’s Ugly Nose today. You can see the video preview below. Feel free to post comments and questions below, or email us at ari@allography.com

Above is a video performance created by artist Richard Höglund created in collaboration with Allography’s Nathaniel Sandler. Special thanks to Miami based artist Jiae Hwang. For more information about the artist contact Gallery Diet.

There were two relatively unheralded discoveries made this month that the internet told me about: a newly unearthed piano piece by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was found in the stacks of the Princeton University Library, while across the globe and galaxy well respected Russian scientist Leonid Ksanfomaliti claims he has found life on Venus through a series of previously tabled photographs from a 1980s probe mission. Both of these things, in their varying degrees of potential reality, made me yearn for 3 solid days of looking at piles of once important documents no one cares about anymore, and simultaneously gave me hope that people still actually do paper and print based detective work.

Now we can argue that the image above isn’t a Venusian Scorpion until we’re blue in the anthropomorphic skin, but good lord how scary is this conceptually? I mean, A SCORPION FROM VENUS? This is the kind of thing Edgar Rice Burroughs made a career out of and James Cameron still beats interns for spilling the coffee on. Do its barbs shoot proton beams? Is its skin plated with some sort of impenetrable space armor? Can I duel it? Can it out duel me? Evil Alien Arthropods! The internet hasn’t answered any of these questions yet but lord I hope it will. At least I hope it gives me a better explanation than the scrambled cable box porn pictured above. That’s just a closeup of Ksanfomaliti’s bath rug, right?

More attached to reality is the uncovering of the Brahms’s piano piece entitled Albumblatt (which isn’t a Kraftwerk record, I checked) by the musicologist and conductor Christopher Hogwood. The piece is played below. It’s quite nice.

Albumblatt translates as “Album Leaves” and is particularly fitting for this moment, as Hogwood found the piece stuffed into the book of a little known music director from Germany who was a contemporary of Brahms. Indeed, in those times this kind of piece was sometimes given away as a gift, put into autograph books as a memento, and not meant to see the concert hall. And here we are 150 years later listening to the gift. And it has become ours.

I envision both Hogwood and Ksanfomaliti coming across these gems accompanied by intense moments of realization and joy. It is this lightbulb-over-the-head moment of discovery that brings us to the parallel between the two men this week. We must remember that though many of us now choose to consume most of our information online, there are still hidden treasures amongst the folded real pages and actual stacks of things we once thought no longer useful, or have just been plain forgotten. So. Always search the cracks. Each and every crevasse you can. There might be hidden greatness no matter how absurd –like thoughts of the Venusian Scorpion–or absurdly beautiful–like the gift of a previously unknown Brahms ditty. Keep searching. Never stop. And always remember to fortify yourself from the impending invasion of interstellar scorpions.

Follow Nathaniel Sandler on twitter.

UPDATE: Make your way to the comments to see a take on how the Brahms discovery is a media hype job.

Stanley Archipoulonous had been working for the Bald Eagle Conservation Corporation in Alaska for nearly 10 years when the nature of the birds themselves began to modify. He was the chief scientist on the team that noticed the derivation and was also the direct contact for the Senate Committee that got progressively more engrossed as the situation devolved. The events unfurled with a terrifying quickness.

The laboratory was huddled in a temperature-controlled fortress imbedded in the side of an ice-packed rolling hill in the middle of nowhere Alaska. The maps, satellite or paper, showed no place, and indeed the silent and unforgiving terrain itself was unaware of it’s own existence. The moon was down as it almost always was. Stanley was outside having a cigarette when the barren tundra landscape seamlessly dotted itself with two black SUVs. The frozen ground regurgitated the slick black dovetail of machines lightly onto the landscape. Government, Stanley thought. Only ones that still have the nerve.

The instant the cars stopped three sizable men threw themselves into the stiff wind from the back vehicle and walked toward Stanley. A badge was flashed. Agency. The front SUV remained a rolling black tomb of anonymity.

“I’m not security.”

In stern voices with serious faces they requested entrance and directions to the CEO’s office. Stanley faltered; he hadn’t the patience for this type of officially sanctioned barking treatment. He wondered how the badges would react when they found out that they would be dealing with him. Not at all, he figured, and that presumption stood as both his best and worst guess. Stanley, of course, wasn’t the CEO. The CEO isn’t interested in this kind of interaction. Right now he’s either in his winter home with his girlfriend or his country cabin with his second wife and their kids. Both places were exceedingly far away.

The vault hatch door shuddered with its usual reptilian hiss as the Chief Scientist and Executive Vice President of the Bald Eagle Conservation Corporation flicked the two-thirds remainder of his cigarette into the hard snow and loudly blew his smoke up toward the sky. He waved a sweeping salutatory entrance with the broad swing of his left arm as the hulking portal swallowed all four of them.

“Agents.”

Through the extended white x-ray corridor not a single word was uttered. Stanley was very quietly whistling the theme song to Dragnet. It was the kind of snark he wasn’t sure how far he could push. Which is why it was being done very quietly. Identification swipe. Smirk. A gentle rustle of the establishment. He thought of other nominal ways to get under their skin as they passed through the second hatch and main entrance.

The lobby of the Bald Eagle Conservation Corporation had very high ceilings and an echo. Ostensibly, this was not elementally a design decision, considering the roof floors and walls were all painted white. The ambiance was aseptic yet secure. Perched high in the nave-like ceilings were security cameras facing in all four directions. There was a lone receptionist on the far side of the nave flanked by two hulking armed private security guards with automatic weapons draped across their chest falling slightly to the side in secure-ready position. Stanley walked in front.

“Government typesssssssssss.”

The hissing echo caught every crevasse while the three suited men and their serious faces were unchanged. In fact their faces were the same faces that walked into Stanley’s corner office after a brief but perfunctory security check. His office only had two chairs. Two chairs. Three men. There was only one raised eyebrow out of six when the men realized this subtly combative man was going to be their main contact.

“Agents.”

Stanley sat down in his swivel armchair and did a spin. Above his head was an 18^th century engraving of the skeletal structure of a bird wing with a Latin inscription written between the wings. It was the centerpiece of his office and something he was quite proud of. It seemed to fit here, in this place. One of the Agents seemed to study the image with some care, exhaling loudly as if silently trying to understand its placement within the office space. He opened his mouth as if to say something and was cut off.

“I found it in a cryptic decaying science folio years ago. Was on vacation. It is perfect. The image haunts and soothes me.”

All four of the men stared at the engraving. Stanley felt a tinge of embarrassment when the last sentence came out of his mouth. It was almost as if he had told a secret and revealed too much about himself. It was an incongruous moment and it seemed the whole room felt it. When these sorts of awkward comments spew forth from someone’s mouth in an official environment it is everyone’s job to try their best to act as if they did not. Business must resume past the quirks of those conducting it.

They wanted a precise breakdown of the situation, as men of a governmental cut always thought was possible. Law Enforcement always wants narratives simpler than they can be explained. Binary would have been sufficient. And indeed, when Stanley began a dissecting explanation of the complicated strain of Avian degenerative cancer seemed to be killing off Haliaeetus Ieucocephalus with particularly intense vigor, one of the three men who may or may not have been in charge began talking about what he called “other possible expedients.”

“Expedients? Excuse me for a moment, but ‘expedients’?”

It was a typical elaboration. More money. NASA Scientists. Top men.

The BECC is constructed of only top men.

The intricacies of bird viruses are usually lost on the general population. It is perhaps the implications of disease-ridden flight, or a more general lack of veterinary knowledge combined with a latent distrust of animals that are not fully domesticated. Fear is typically the only possible response. More symbolically the cancer eating at Haliaeetus Ieucocephalus was quite simply attacking the soul of America and it was not unspoken that the Bald Eagle Conservation Corporation stood only to save an idea.

It should be noted that the three agents and their superiors were also only loosely informed about the nature of bird viruses. Stanley did his best to contrive simplistic verbal explanations of very complex issues. When it was clear that he was getting little with this flapping back and forth he decided to lead the men on a tour of the facility. It was most likely all that they really wanted. Regardless they were here to draw their own conclusions and report what they were going to report. He would run them through the meat of the laboratory with a stop at Patient Zero.

So, the four men lumbered down a few tributaries of lab corridors until they reached the decontaminating scrub zone. They changed into the sanitary white coats provided and moved through the first animal holding cell. There were lines on top of lines of the birds in the cage in various stages of plumage and squalor. Some seemed dead already, while others maintained something of the visage the great nation once knew from collectible coin commercials and militaristic propagandas.

Stanley was explaining the brass tacks of the bird’s physical and genetic characteristics as it stood in glory and to what it has now been reduced. They moved slowly, but with purpose through the various rooms lined with plexi-glass caged birds. They slinked silently into a door labeled Lab 257, with Stanley noting that this was where the most important work was done. They had a specimen that was under observation as Patient Zero which was the earliest known contractor of the virus. It was still alive, which was the most fascinating lead that the team currently had to go on and they felt they were on the brink of learning how this bird had survived while so many others had perished.

The thing lay on its side, seemingly pulsating. Surprisingly, the most noticeable physical change was that its mighty talons had morphed into a deeply discolored purple, as if it had been repeatedly squashing beets in its claws. But the Bald Eagle is a predator, not a forager, and this animal still had a keen and ferocious eye, albeit jaundiced and bloodshot. The spur shriveled out the side of its feet, limp and almost toxic. The beak had turned a painful yellow, and it seemed to be causing the beast pain while the feathers on its head bordering the beak and mouth were spattered with a pinkish red hue with the odd speckled green interspersed. The only part of its face that maintained the traditional pure whiteness was its piercing edged brow. This green hue, while ancillary atop the head, was pervasive in the body. As the feathers undulated down each became greener and greener, like the palette of an inexperienced painter turning lime, honeydew, pale, hunter, olive, pine, teal, all into a putrid and sickly shit brown.

While motioning the Agents over to the largest microscope in the room, Stanley began explaining the current trajectory of their findings. Underneath the powerful magnification of the electron microscope were cells that seemed to be jumping errantly around the slide. Many people don’t know that birds actually have scales on their beaks, claws and spurs. The insinuated horror of what Stanley was showing these men was that the scales from the beak of the sick Haliaeetus Ieucocephalus were actually moving.

The beast rolled over frantically and let out a bellowing squawk of aggression.

“You know, when chosen, Benjamin Franklin spoke out vehemently against the Bald Eagle as a national symbol. He found it a treacherous beast, even calling it a coward, and he was not altogether incorrect. ‘Bad moral character’, I believe the phrase was. It was in a letter, 1784 to his daughter…”

Stanley was cut off extremely abruptly. The history lesson, and tour of the premises was apparently over.

Upon return the office of the Executive Vice President, the men rearranged themselves back around the desk, one Agent standing, the other two sitting loomingly, and all four men in the same spot and all four staring at the prized antique engraving of Stanley Archipoulonous.

One of the men exhaled loudly yet again, but this time he spoke up and the other two of them continued in succession.

“You realize what that means, correct?”

“The Latin? On your picture there?”

“If the birds change then so will we?”

Stanley was taken slightly aback. He knew what the Latin meant and often considered how the image complemented the work that he did at the Bald Eagle Conservation Corporation. He had even purchased it with company money, though he never told anyone that. They continued.

“It’s a joke, right?”

“It’s presence here seems too well calculated.”

“In this story.”

Stanley froze. He had no clue what the fuck was going on.

“It’s laughable, really.”

“And with all of your highly specialized skill you don’t see what the fuck is happening, do you?”

“I’ll make the call.”

Before the third man could even reach for his cell phone an alarm sounded deep in the lab. It began locally until the shrieking chirp was almost instantly ringing in every corner of the facility. Stanley maintained his permanent smirk, the one he wore when things were funny or not. It was a defense mechanism, because Stanley was completely in shock. He could not say a word.

“This is what we feared. Our team. We need to shut it down”

“As you can quite plainly hear things are already getting worse.”

“These are no longer birds. They are changing. As your ridiculous piece of art foretells.”

The phone buzzed on Stanley’s desk. His mind was churning. These men knew something he did not. He picked up the receiver wordlessly only to hear the screams of people in desperate trouble reverberating loudly over the other line. The man on the phone was clearly disheveled. Three of the birds had escaped from their enclosures and a fourth had bit another scientist who was now going into convulsions. Stanley quickly hung up and called for the medics. He began explaining the situation to the Agents, but was once again immediately cut off.

“Get your house in order.”

“Or don’t.”

“Either way we are shutting you down.”

With that warning they left the premises suddenly and without pleasantry. From within the rear of the two black SUVs dovetailing around the Alaskan tundra, the third man made a phone call and whispered something imperceptible into his cell phone.  About eleven and a half minutes later, two F-18 Super Hornet fighter aircraft passed overhead going approximately 1100 miles per hour in the direction from which the Agents’ SUV came. Very soon after they fired a crisp barrage of air-to-surface missiles into the side of the ice-packed rolling hill that held the offices and laboratory of the Bald Eagle Conservation Corporation. There were no survivors.

“Approximate casualties at around 65. A training exercise gone wrong.”

“I don’t think it will be noticed.”

“Zombie Bald Eagles. How fucking stupid is that?”

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Image Credits:

The top image is republished from the Secondary Occupants project with permission from designer Julian Montague. 

The engraving image was created specifically for this post by designer Jessika Merrill. 

LEROY:            

Sitting at the bar, shaken, full of ale, I picked up the scent like a cartoon pie picks up a cartoon cat. Eyes on me. Big eyes. Green/brown, bloodshot and mismatched. I ogle round the frayed denizens of The Backstop Brewery before making the connection. A seven beer shiver of heat glosses the faded red dye-job spilling like wet rope over the grainy face of a woman. Her body sways. The bar sways. Only her hand remains perfectly still as it suggestively stirs the near empty beverage.

She looks at me like she is ready to serve up the cooled revenge of a childhood wrong. She stands. By God she’s tall.

The planet or my stool spins to meet her arcing approach. One of her hands elegantly slides the length of the bar, tracking spills, nuts and ash seductively into the thick, lurid atmosphere of my own personal space. I cock my head. Too far. I cock it back to keep the world upright. I try a smile.

“Hey baby”

One of us said it.

It could have been me but the band pipes up and we lose our conversation in snatches of snares and upright bass until we start pretending to talk. We mime … fishing… or something easy. Her breath is heavy with gin and mint. Menthol cigarettes.

Mine? Well, mine is a mixture of taco, ale and light acid reflux from the breakfast of last night’s Chinese. Maybe it is the haze, maybe the knowledge of what is to pass but I think the reaction of our breaths combining would spontaneously combust a fireball between our bruising, boozing, working-week soaked skins. I always loved chemistry.  So what if she is going on fifty. nine…

The drum roll slid off the stage and inserted us into a certain sort of silence with the brief audience participation.

“Hey baby,” That one was me. For sure.

Sinking sideways to approximate a laidback gent I grease the side of the bar too far. I am sideways, under her, looking up. She looks down at me. I look at her tits.

That finger, greyed and greased lifts my face to hers and our mouths let off a cacophony of oozed sparks of happiness.

Sipping the spittle from the side of my mouth I spin round to see the audience’s reaction. The backs of their heads nodding in salute and the band strikes up my victory song. They play it wrong but I know their hearts are in the right place. Six men with brass and gold and ivory drag out an evening at The Backstop with the right amount of humility. Occasionally they look up, surprised to see people in the same room as them. I know that one.

“What’s your name?”

Warm smoke tickles my ear drum. Breathe.  Why aren’t I home?

I make it up. Tonight I am a pointsman for the railways. LeRoy. She says her name is Marie. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, maybe I’ll push the boat out tonight. I shall have kids and a wife (separated).

Am I looking for a good time?

Am I?

Only if that time is long.

I spill the contents of my thesis on time onto the bar counter and watch the reflection of her dazing eyes in the pool of whisky that has started to collect. I light a cigarette to cover the anxiety. Someone politely and then roughly insinuates that fire is an “outdoor kind of thing”.

It’s 4am now and I’m staring at a pale blue wall with “Obama is a queer” etched disconcertingly in my own handwriting. The bars on the bathroom window remind me of the gaps in her teeth.

Maybe I’ll wish her a happy anniversary when I get home. Maybe she’ll finally move out. Maybe we’ll finally tell each other our real names. Marriage is a complicated beast.

We climb into our car. She drives and I whistle. It’s how it’s always been.

Andrew Futaishi is an actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker living and working in London. Read more by him on allography or find out more about his work at A Winter Road. 

Beloved Miami scribe, founder of the University of Wynwood, the O, Miami Poetry Festival, and friend of Allography, P. Scott Cunningham delivers this quick and hilarious poem based on a craigslist add he once found. We felt this piece fit perfectly into this issue as a retelling of a typically used forum. The piece was read at Lester’s Bar in Miami, FL on Tuesday, May 17, 2011, as part of FITLFNF, a reading with Matthew Abess. The poem originally ran in PANK Magazine in September 2010.