SACRED YOU
“…It’s mostly that album A Love Supreme. It feels sacred to me. I had a friend once tell me A Love Supreme is convincing evidence for the existence of God. And that’s really stuck in my head ’cause it’s a little bit true to me.” – John Green, in conversation with Ashley Ford and Kelly Stacy
As if the hands that built this were not so terribly human.
As if the stones are not the slightest bit uneven.
As if there is a waterfall somewhere that could kill this song.
As if the call of a bird is grander than all of the laughter we found.
Look, the stars are shimmering – their masses are exploding with joy. Continue reading “Umang Kalra: Sacred You & Me & My GF Will Change The World”
Eric Blix is the author of the story collection, Physically Alarming Men (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions, The Collagist, Caketrain, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he studies in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Utah. Eric’s work above are fragments from his novel-length prose collage, scrub lands—works in progress.
featured image: Ruby Anderson
We Make Our Instruments
Sitar is the prickle of a recent close-to-the-base
of-the-skull haircut tickling uncalloused fingers. Smooth
grapes on spiked vines—the thrumming heart beats
angry blood, in time, when the pressure elevates.
Calcification of heart-wood is how the tune is created.
Seasoning so sweet, incense swirl sounds these
tiny steps that expand slowly like the step of an animated
fairy. She blesses the room with ever-growing pink loops.
Perhaps, we have heard this and confused her hoops
of sound—the small swelling—the augmentation
of pink into magenta into mahogany as the expansion
of our minds.
And sound does work in this way.
Reverberations change the bearer. The weight of sound
waves are manipulated by air, by ear, by the redwood
walls, by the differentiation of instrument. The string.
Slip and stick. Contact the conifer slick. Heart to palm
rounded vehicles in glass cases, waiting to be touched.
The weight of balance on the bow. The density floods
a linearity of grain, or orientation of rings in her trunk.
A bow’s construction. Heat curves. Time wears
finger-grooves into her ample body. 150 taut hairs.
The timing on goat skin, donkey teeth—the weather
across California’s forests and cities. A reliance on
exhumation of rosewood, pernambuco, blackwood.
The skill of the mouth, the precise shape of the teeth
larynx, fine ear-structures—the blessing offered by
the specific elder to the thick elder at the time
She fell—
Once sound starts a journey, does it change the
circumstances?
The inevitable die-out which dampens this quality changes
the heart curves on each wave—pumps blood. Bursts the
ventricles. Drives a thick ginger residue spike through
the temple. Then, alleviates with chamomile resonance.
Titian once made the shadow under my eyes famous
toxic—an exported harvest that reclassified unique
sunlight blooms into beans that oxidize with age. Ages
crumble into the dust we made with our heaving bellies.
Our trees have become instruments—hot bows and gut.
As we boil with them, we suffocate.
No Chicken
She gets the precooked
carcass from the supermarket.
It shares her stature—neck
bobbed and folded. Her grin
is the thick slope of one leg.
She cracks
wing from
slick body—burnt
footless creature; no face—no eyes
to face. Hacked off at the neck. No, face this
meal. She wears
the title—face. No running
from this meat. Grotesque
eloquence in her slashing
lips. Fingers slide. No
running from this, meat.
Nails heavy with the shining
luster of gristle. She gouges out
from tooth. This creature’s salt
fills her cells—changing her to
flesh both gaping and unreliable.
No chicken.
Kari A. Flickinger’s poetry and short stories have been published in or are forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Ghost City Review, Eunoia Review, Riddled with Arrows, Moonchild Magazine, Quiet Storm, and Panoply, among others. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. When she is not writing, she can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat, as well as obsessively over-analyzing the details of neighboring trees.
Twitter: @KariFlickinger
featured image: Ellie Anderson-Hawkins
Sophie Essex is a softcore bunny existing 120ft above sea level where she promotes her adoration of poetry through Salò Press, lit-mag Fur-Lined Ghettos, & monthly poetry night Volta. Find her @capitanofelixio & @salopress
featured image: Bob Modem
Lucia is a poet, an environmental scientist and a quiet observer. She writes and makes video-poems. Her video-poems have been screened in the UK and internationally. Her latest poetry publication is The Quiet Life of Walls.
FETISH FUTURIST
A man’s body is his currency
Burning life upon Facebook friend request
Tendency to burn all the wishes for likes
Or the likes for wishes we like
Are we on the rag?
A rug as the tag…
A fag swing song
In mediocritas thong. Continue reading “João Pinho: FETISH FUTURIST”
Meat Factory
Who are the vermin?
Not Mother Nature
“Injustices are everywhere. We live in a world that is beautiful and yet there is so much oppression and destruction upon it. The anthropocene is upon us and humanity has a long way to go before equality exists in every sense. My artwork has the intention to make the viewer aware of this and sometimes feel complicit in the various destructive actions of humanity and thereby, hopefully lead my audience to enact positive change through feeling some what responsible to take action themselves. I hope the least I can do is provoke thought in to an individual that had previously not cared for the world around them.”
Gut Things I
The oral, at the end of one symbiosis is periodontopathic, we think parasitic bacterium to the human we think (symbiosis does not mean only parasitism to the) Fusobacterium nucleatum who has been, (like soybeans to breast cancer repeatedly and broadly) associated with parasitism within colorectal tumors. Continue reading “Julia Lewis: Gut Things”
i. dirge the sea
shall we put an end to the sea?
re channel its eerie cries
calabash its black bawls,
––– elsewhere … Continue reading “Sahara by Petero Kalulé”
On the vast land of a hospital in Tokyo, there is a pond filled with plenty of water. Water springs up not only in the pond, but here and there. It is the source of a river. The underground water passes through the downtown of Tokyo and flows into Tokyo Bay. No one knows this is a water land and I’m dreaming of the ocean through the vapor. Continue reading “Waiting For The Ocean by hiromi suzuki”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 