leah angstman is a poet/writer, editor, publisher, musician, actor, and visual artist raised in a small town outside of Lansing, Michigan, spending most of her youth in East Lansing and Detroit. The majority of her adult life has been in Seattle, Washington, and currently Boston, Massachusetts, where she has spread her affair with art and poetry from coast to coast. leah has been in the small press and underground art movement for over 15 years, running her own publishing company, propaganda press, and her own record label, banshee records. She currently operates an entire conglomerate of indie art revolution called the alternating current arts co-op, which encompasses anything you can imagine in the non-mainstream arts. In addition to this, she publishes an ongoing poetry litzine called "poiesis" and runs a literature blog netzine called "medusa."
leah studied theater, musical theater, Shakespeare, English and American Literature, and creative writing in school, as well as teaching creative poetry classes and directing theater in community colleges. Active in politics, she began Lansing- and Detroit-area chapters of Anti-Racist Action, Amnesty International, and Food Not Bombs; and she currently operates an interactive political ongoing art project called thermonuclear artfare. She was an active member of the Ignition Northwest arts council during her time in Seattle and is currently involved with the art scene in Boston.
leah has published 15 chapbooks and one play, available from propaganda press, and one split chapbook with Mark Sonnenfeld, available from Marymark Press. She has written countless plays, poems, and articles and is currently working on her first solo music album and her first professionally-bound paperback collection of poetry. leah has been published in many literary and underground press magazines, including: Paramasitic Propastitute, The J Man Times, Nothing (Notnivy), The Incognito Project, Mausoleum: mortis es veritus, Vox, Crackrock, The Literature Collection, Real-Life Poet, poiesis, (That's Like) Fighting Godzilla With A Squirtgun, Survivor, Static Zine, Strawberry Lemonade, MaximumRockNRoll, She Locked Herself Up In A Lemon, Zine Solar System, The HSS Reader, Clandestine Times of Incongruity, Pottsie Nation, Catastrophic Thoughts, Red Under, Vacuum Boots, Neo-Barbaric, QUEER, Dank Zine, Fem Zine, Cleave Press, Treats From The Underground, Mutant Renegade Zine, Feelings of the Heart, Clumsy Envy of the Fuzzy Sellout, Liquid Prudence, Fruit Salad, Stuff, Hey...Fool!, Bleeding Velvet Octopus, Kit Zine, I Can't Believe Magazine, Sammy's Got Hemroids, Ishi, and Flyer Times.
cornhusker highway tries to put his arm around me from across the seat the barrier the great divide kinda sexy albeit uncomfy these people are so small someone lives on that farm someone with nothing else but that farm someone who can be simple someone who could fall in love with the cornhusker state maybe enough to stay here maybe never even leave it racing the first transcontinental railroad through the great platte valley on route 80w he won't stop at the strategic air command museum so we pass the exit through the sporadic frenzied trees that shoot up out of the middle of the cornfields like those pop-up books you read as a child those silly windmill-looking wind power structures rise up like thick matchsticks twisting contorting in a primitive repetition my lover has never looked prettier he shines from sunshine or delirium or happiness or something in between he hasn't gotten to listen to his cds this whole way as we roll through the mobile home graveyard of middle america so he's happy with his white zombie even if it doesn't fit the scenery and as long as he doesn't have to look out the window he says he has been down this same route four other times so i told him he could learn something new the fifth time around as i tell him about the pawnee and the oto and major stephen long and general william ashley and the transcontinental railroad and telegraph and mormons and the pony express that carved out the first fur trade route to the rocky mountains he actively listens [active listening = that mmm-hmm and yeah and oh that is strategically placed in silent intervals in someone's speaking pattern when you don't really care what is being said but don't want to give that appearance] he actively listens very well but goddamn isn't he pretty and at least prettier than the dead grasslands outside the bug splatters and truck rock nicks this is the junkyard of the living the undead the strengthening moments the people you pass with your eyes down shaking your head inside your head thinking of irrigation systems and cows i love this man who doesn't get it either as we run and run and keep running run from all this like it's made of stone and could catch us and turn us the same -------------------- blinking light for the last time in the ghetto [or "moving up"] that blinking light is going to town outside my window it has an attitude that just won't quit that blinking bus stop sign that reads to all the bourgeoisie welcome to the jungle won't we bring you to your knees i'm gonna watch you bleed huh nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah bleed yeah these sleepy lids have caught up with me in their concrete pleading i miss the smell of you sleeping beside me i miss how you breathe all heavy through your octa-broken nose when a lotta times it's pressed in my ear so umm yeah it's all i hear and now the silence is perplexing introspection these silly moments to be alone unwittingly tomorrow i pack those bags for the long haul thefuckouttahere this ghetto and that bus stop light you're lucky you met a girl who wanted to getthefuckouttahere what would you have done if i had wanted to stay in this deathtrap vacuum cesspool that is this ghetto of d-town that claims eminem and my rent and incapacitates me i said in that slurry drunk voice of mine smiles drunkenly says clubbed you over the head and stuffed you in my suitcase ---------------------- the prostitute in apt 9 somehow manages to remind me of you the woman across the hall from me in desolation number nine is a prostitute i know this now never have i seen so many men walk through one door so at least she must be good at what she does sad though that she has a kid and i have sickening thoughts of that kid witnessing this armageddon god you seem so far away as i hear the squeak squeaking during the restless ghetto night i put in your earplugs that you got from the last airplane i miss you as i stare at scars on the back of my hand i'm finally writing again too sad to write for the longest while the thought suddenly struck me like a club at save-a-lot this morning where i was saving-a-lot on stuff i didn't need which doesn't really technically actually amount to much save-a-lotting at all i didn't even cry the last time you left so maybe i am finally over the stretch but now you are the sleep i've been missing the weariness in my skull and my sluggish dull step that's a lotta times back my insides hollowed by blue eyes replaced by a pen dormant for decades newly finding that hollowed doesn't have to mean harbored --------------------- sex with a stranger is that weird awkward casual sex that really really hot quiet passionate sex where you can't even make a sound because he has you suspended over the tip of your own tongue stranger yes that kind of stranger that you swear you would never tame even if he started learning little quirky things about you like that you turn the car heater on full blast just so you can wind down the window even in the winter and that you fill the bathtub up the whole way because you like the sound that little water drainer makes when it's letting it all back out he won't find out these things because oh his mouth is so hot his skin so hot on the back of my neck the touch of his big hands his hardness embracing my fragility he is not a perfect man he is loaded with flaws and blips and lies he is looking for a playmate a girl who will remove her dress and won't ask too many questions a girl who won't pry into his consciousness demand gold change his routine expect him to return or notice when he's not there he wants complexity rivaled with simplicity and then don't you have to remind yourself constantly that he is not worth it as you make the drive again sleep in his bed again fall into him again and again until suddenly you can't crawl back out --------------- the bored wife a wife is bored her husband is talking on his phone and from her expression it has been some time this way neither knows i am staring but i am empathetically and inadvertently feeling the wife's numbness it's sending its shadow all the way over here she fingers her ring sucks on it a little and then moves her teeth up to the tips of her nails for a minute i see what i must look like to others when i am nervous or anticipatory he is a chatterbox my goodness business then golf then back to business he winks and smiles a little bit at her in an i'll be with you soon manner that she reads as please take a number her eyes are so grey dulled over two bricks sunken into clay with no pulse or momentum her hair is fried out on the tips from too much coloring and she occasionally pulls it back from her eyes then back over her eyes like it's the only softness she can touch her attention wanders to the busybody server who seems to be busy with everything except serving and just then you show up i look away from them and to you we both smile when our eyes meet i say honey please turn your phone off just in case ---------------------- knockin on your door ma i want nothin from you now ma now that you can't open this door to me nothin now that i was a kid when you opened that door for the last time and i fell out like a cannonball cut my jaw on the streets knew nothin but the alley boxes rooftops shelters sex yeah sex with it didn't matter who now i have a what the fuck man but he doesn't know my darkness where i lived on the edges of those blocks he doesn't know me but he's good enough cuz he don't ask no questions he don't point no fingers he's never seen me smile and he don't seem to mind i don't blame you now for the woman you were then i don't blame you for the scrapper i became i could just as easily have gone out a saint but it didn't quite come down that way in the end i don't blame you now but i got goddamn nothin to say to you a lot of things are broken now with need of fixin got nothin to say to you
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