*Editor’s Note: biographical data withheld at author’s request.
Find [x] at http://evenunto.net & https://twitter.com/xxvi_xxxviii
Mike Corrao is the author of Man, Oh Man (Orson’s Publishing) and Gut Text (11:11 Press). His work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Always Crashing, The Collagist, and The Portland Review. He lives in Minneapolis where he earned his B.A. in film and English literature at the University of Minnesota. Learn more at www.mikecorrao.com &
https://twitter.com/ShmikeShmorrao
Dear Submitters,
In reply to your last message, I’m writing you from the Drowned House under the lake to your Burning House in the internet because the Gas House makes me tear and vomit upon entering and the Buried House remains unearthed. It is my understanding that you wish to send handwritten letters and postcards to fictitious persons from alternate Earths. Surely, you and your world is considered no less fictitious to them. But I will nonetheless humor this futile exchange—serving as your mercurial postman. Closely following my guidelines ensures that each letter and postcard transfers effectively. However, beware of the errors made by the techno modernist zealots. They cower at the wellsprings of decay, of terms and limits, of the tangible artifacts and palimpsests in which handwritten letters and postcards are baptized. Do not give into their weaknesses, and, moreover, do not try to stage our already counterfeit means. Continue reading “Handwritten Letters to Fictitious Persons from Alternate Earths – Elytron Frass – March 2019 Guest Editor”
All month long, the gorgeous photography has been contributed by the talented artist, stephanie roberts. Her photographs were just as integral to this month’s theme and overall aesthetic as the work of the writers we were so privileged to read. stephanie’s photos have been inspiring me for quite some time and it was an honor to have her brilliant images set the tone for The Mind As Prison & Asylum. Thank you, stephanie!
Continue reading “Featured Photo Artist – stephanie roberts”
[closing spells]
My mother said that I should bathe in oatmeal
So I do
thick baths gray with powder, sticking in clumps of snow
and I dip in so that I no longer itch
or bleed
PTSD
fine body hairs twitch
preparing for something
past feel of foil clenched
between gnashed teeth
tungsten singed to hip socket
powered by whipsaws
revenge
the way hatred crawls from the strands
to the sole, in sync with the soft hum of
owls, empties me to a satisfaction.
it is dark here, and the night is competing
with my heart. whose version of darkness
is darker?
A Broken Mirror
DNA smeared
over a broken
mirror
there was no
blood
CONSUMED
Rhode Island, 1892
For Mercy Lena Brown
I.
After you die, Lena, you will freeze
until the neighbors unearth you
open your chest, your breasts
split to either side. In your heart:
blood–frozen. Your lungs, shaped like wings,
will yield once, collapse, and won’t rise.
Ruminate
When nights steal in I paint
a house filling with water.
I make the exit transparent,
front door gray and ghostly beneath
seawater creeping past the baseboards,
sloshing over the table,
I See My House, My Field
after Marianne Boruch
My son lives there now, in his winter
like a husky dog burrows in snow.
Most of the rooms (yes, I can see them from Florida)
are muted by cold, and the furniture
is still the maple my mother bought the year
she had her affair with my father.
DURAS (THE MUTE)
“Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent.” M.D.,Writing.
MD is mute. She throws her voice into the text and there, her voice, resides. There, in the book, we hear her screams, we hear her weeping. But alone, in her giant white mansion, she speaks to no one. She paces, endlessly, the only sound, the sound of flies and death emanating from within the cracked walls.
Stasis
I know how to be a beetle stranded on its back,
a moth pinned flat inside a frame, a wildflower
pressed between the pages of a book, a petroglyph,
a fragment of my former self, a rock, a photograph.
Quiet//Rot
It is never really about thinness. It is certainly not about fashion, or fitting in, or models. It is facile to call it perfectionism, because it is not striving for a perfect body. It is an act of erasure, but also of tactility and isolation. That is what I miss.
Untitled [Elegy For the Memory of a Relationship]
It isn’t the space
the closeness of knowing
somebody so well
we hear their heartbeat
inside ours,
or the aperture of life
squinting one morning at a time,
but I freeze right there,
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 