Guest Editor: Karissa Lang
May 7
A Ubiquitous Man by Jake Kendall
May 8
My Naming by Eve Black
3 Poems by Paul Brookes
May 9
The One-Eyed Elephant Trainer by Ivy Ngeow
May 10
3 Poems by Shriram Sivaramakrishnan
Genesis of a Writer: A Memoir by Deborah Hansen
Continue reading “Identity: Crisis, Creation, Multiplicity, Singularity”
i was taught to be pink—
the blushing cheek of a virtuous girl,
or the pearl of her unspoiled innocence.
i was taught to be the color of the rose
lovingly selected for the virgin Continue reading “2 Poems by Lisa L. Weber”
fat ass hot cock ass
thunder thighs
bionic booty
pretty eyes thick thighs
basket ball butt
5th grade child bearing hips
linebacker in a strapless dress
getting chunky
grown woman’s body now
don’t be prancing around the men keep that butt from jiggling in a thin
dress 4 years old perverse booty jiggle
you better hope you can fit into it
buffalo butt
you too big
itty bitty titty committee
you are too skinny
sloppy fat
fat fingers
self-hating well
you ain’t missing no meals I see
don’t make sense to be that heavy
need to push back from the table
eating all natural still fat as hell
talk trash deny food
low key slut shamed
offering lipo make you
feel bad for feeling bad
you can live off your fat don’t need
to eat big arms like your grandmother
don’t be making up a plate of food
of the food she fucking cooked
there are men in this house
man
I thought I imagined the slick stuff
Grand our mothers were
poets and didn’t know it
Soliloquy For The Loner Spectator / Ultimo espectador del mundo is a translation by Cesar Torres from the book “Conciertos Imaginarios” by Camilo T.
[ Brief splendor. The world beheld.
Things falling apart as this man enters]
Spectator: I sit here to watch; one man leaned his soul close to me,
I am here, straw man, bum, getting closer to, perception,
I’m trembling on my seat, trembling seat drifting on high tide,
stroked by the mare, or maybe by a crazy-one; me, slender
who could not stand nor defend his place, see the stars,
see the falling lights of the sky, madly,
witness those words that never had been spoken,
sit here, without relief from the coldest loneliness, you’re here to watch. Continue reading “Soliloquy For The Loner Spectator translated by Cesar Torres”
i.
when pushed to choose, i always fall towards abstraction;
the f/64s would not have liked me very much.
ii.
if you ask for a song,
i will give you song lyrics
written backwards in watercolors.
The City of Dreadful Night is my response to the 1874 poem of the same name by James Thomson which dealt with depression, alienation, suicide and the urban landscape. With these images, I sought to respond to the spaces or penumbra between Thomson’s words; to capture the poem’s feeling of dread, to transmute this to my own setting here in Trinidad and Tobago; to suggest his dread mirrors something of what local marginal communities (LGBTQ, disabled) experience. The range of images in the book includes asemic writing, visuals generated by performing random functions on text, illustrations and photographs. I wanted the multiplicity of media – deployed in response to a source text – to suggest the multiplicity of identity/diversity, all while retaining the dread of Thomson’s poem.
Continue reading “The City of Dreadful Night by Andre Bagoo”
My earliest memory of Grandpa Melvin was when he fought Ronald McDonald out near the McDonald’s Playplace. It was my fifth birthday, and family and friends watched through the glass as the two men squared off.
Here is a photograph I never took:
I am holding a woman in my arms
as if it were for the last time.
Her half smile holds a secret.
In the background, the Bay Bridge
is a bodybuilder—outstretched and posing.
4 TROY HILL to DOWNTOWN
The thing about the 4 is, it’s always five minutes late. You tell yourself that, getting ready. You say: Mike, wait five minutes. But the thought of the bus passing makes every car outside sound like a bus, and besides: what if today is different? A new driver, a training bus, a holiday unaccounted. You leave early. Too early. No loitering at bus stop. No smoking. Caution. Watch your step. Have payment ready.
when you bond
with the alien
that invaded your beloved’s body
become more maternal
than you could be with your
daughters
who seek comfort in the
luxury of expensive puddings
nocturnal snacks
Remember your first? I remember my almost. We met at an English Studies conference panel in Greensboro, NC, where she gave a presentation on “Trauma & Mental Illness in Young Adult Fiction.” After that, we met in Chicago where we chaired a panel on “Suicidal Closure in Modernist Fiction.” Even though we lived on opposite coasts, and she was five years older, we began to develop intimacy quickly. At the next conference we rented a room together, and even though it was unstated, I, who was still a virgin, assumed we’d “get together.” We skipped the conference festivities, instead snuggling on the room’s king bed, murmuring about our childhoods, our depressions, our sexual questioning. I began to think, after a long absence, of a word like love. This is the way things ended between Manesa Gilnum, Ph.D., and I at the Modern Language Association conference in Austin, TX, on January 10th 2016, the night David Bowie died.
Continue reading “People On The Edge Of The Night by James McAdams”
“There was an artist I worked with for a while who used Polaroids as drawing references. When she was done with them, she just chucked them in a black trash bag under the kitchen sink – where I found them. I urged her to think of them as sketches, to value them…”
A set of beliefs about the future (it’s right now)
Can you afford to eat right now? I need to know if you can afford to eat right now we need to know if we can take anything else away from you.
Continue reading “Best Practices For Staying Hydrated by Griffin Ward”
At the age of thirty, Daniel Lufto lived alone in a single bedroom apartment. In his first thirty years on Earth he had made very few lasting connections, and at this point, his existence had virtually no perceptible impact on anyone else. He was just another recurring face on the bus ride to work, a vaguely remembered customer in the local liquor store.
Continue reading “The Borderline Angel Of Death by Nick Johnson”
If god is always watching we should give him a good view / He compressed us into a VHS tape that eats itself every million years or so / We look for our rosaries at the bottom of river Styx / all wrapped up in grocery bags because we want to stay weak / the kids you grew up with in the back of the classroom / with snot on their chins / and white eyes because everything is pure / When you were thirteen you ate the world and puked your guts out across December / Until all the snow melted and flooded the places she could have been born / A 1969 blue Chevy Camaro drives down the beach and chews up the ocean underneath / girls cannot survive on saltwater alone Continue reading “3 Poems by Rachel Thorpe”
The surreal world of Sergio Sainz Vidal’s collages are not just a matter of style and technique but a way of ruminating on eternal human subjects such as death, mysticism, eroticism, and our relationship to nature.
Mottled brilliance of chameleon leaves,
a concert audience on the horizon,
120 km/h on the crest of a highway hill.
My son loves fall colors.
Brittle gutter leaves under my feet
are your idiotic face, belly mom. Continue reading “Difficult Colours by Jordan Trethewey”
after Grey’s Anatomy S09E02
I cut my body into little suns
– Carrie Lorig
patience is canon—something to spit out,
re-engulf, me, that I may be re-shaped
without heaving muscle, the clamps
anchor my scapula, your lighthouse
done ignoble, instead miraculous
The first time you wake up with your chest straining, an aching sternum and something scraping your ribs, you’ve been to an ‘All You Can Eat’ Chinese buffet and cleaned them out of prawn toast. You wonder where you’ve left the antacids, open your eyes and there’s a high cheekboned, thin-lipped woman in armour sitting on your chest. You say loudly to the empty room: Khutulun. The best way to vanish phantoms is to name them. You resolve not to mix history books and salt and pepper squid again, and attempt to turn over.
