Volume 2, Issue 4 (2017)
CONTEST WINNER: SHORT FICTION
|
"I find myself perched on the topmost house in Thera, nestled like a young skylark with the whole town before me. I see her in her robes again, proud on the high terrace. She makes the holy gesture to welcome in the ships.
"Then her words make me a seagull. My breasts skim the waves towards the stately line of ships and I wear the wind like a sheer slip in early morning: cool and loose and free. "Suddenly, and all at once, they’re there—the high sides painted with their many-coloured dolphins, the awnings and the sails billowing and rippling in echo of the water. The tillers all stand to attention and the captains stand in their tents surveying, like little princes, the ranks of deep-bronzed men who heave the oars as one strong heartbeat." |
PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY: APHORISMS
|
§11 Art and soul. No artist has a soul, but all good artists have soul.
§20 Vis-à-vis. Every countenance has its natural history. All of the relations between faces make up so many invisible fault lines, concealing antediluvian chains of active and dormant pressures. Every visage’s formations seem natural, eternal. Some are noble, gorgeous, and demanding. Others are open and inviting. Still others slope diffidently, with fragile arches and impending avalanches. The rains of spring and summer slowly give way to the furrows of winter. Yet all of these seeming permanencies are the result of prodigious and glacial transformations, collisions, ascents, corrosions. No canyon forms and erodes over time without at least two faces. §18 Pseudo-science. The only justifiable jurisdiction for pseudo-science is the bathtub. |
POETRY
|
"It's when they come the second time
to serve the papers, I knew then they was after somethin' else. Sure, dead cow's a nuisance-- I woulda buried it sooner or later, but sooner is a deep, sweaty hole, hand-dug, and sister, when you farm alone, sooner most always is later..." |
SHORT FICTION
|
"'Ahedonism,' she said. She said ahedonism, but she meant to merely describe something rather than permit it. In fact, remanding such terminology to the verbal slagheap beyond non-existence, it joined such other illustrious utterances such as disoperation and manatoit, as having been spoken without first existing. Was it a first-time event, a burst of originalism scarped from the outermost possible reaches? Only time will tell."
|
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.