Volume 3, Issue 2 (2018)
POETRY
|
"Where things gather the meeting-meaning,
at sleep’s slim light line, a deep rosebloom and gristle of raw meat, scrawl of tendon. I taste as it ate me, swallowed me down at sleep’s thin light line, a deep rosebloom from my grandmother’s jewelry box: I touch because it wrapped me around, her melamine necklace of pace and nox." |
SHORT FICTION
|
" Jaybirds complaining in barren trees escape notice as the mute child slips into the protective channels of his mother’s voice. The cobbled floor chilling his bare feet as he watches her, his silence a sacred landscape...
In those trees, I forget I am bound to bones—I’m as free as melting ice. Nobody judges me. I am a new born colt with no idea stronger than the taste of her mother’s milk. Son, dying is clouds turned to rain, a sunset married to dawn." |
POETRY
|
"Nope, he admonished.
It’s not what happens It’s how you react. She stabbed him with a blade of grass." |
CONTEST WINNER: POETRY
|
"Did someone’s dying breath gift you
to inherit the memory of Keats, one day to write your name in water to gift another poet your breath? You are more than blood – birth in a bowl. You breathe holy secrets. Pears fall from the sky. ... At sunrise, you are the giant peach surrounding the rough ruby pit of you. At sunset, you are the beating ruby pit, relinquishing the juicy peach." |
NOVELLA EXCERPT
|
"‘There are many ways to skin a cat: sir.’
‘Are there really?’ ‘Yes; there are.’ It was a tad embarrassing – this situation: hanged, drawn, quartered. The long dangly older man – sporting a large bald head like a waxen, yellow-pink bowling ball, and dressed in clean-pressed black trousers and pristine white shirt, opened widely at the collar – was also feeling slightly embarrassed. It just wouldn’t do – this pornography business. For all the young man opposite being one of his favorites – house rules were house rules; one shouldn’t, one mustn’t let the team down; a gentleman owed it, as it were, to his club." |
CONTEST WINNER: POETRY
|
"Eye-level with the youth I outgrew,
my fingertips pressed against the glass, warm as a father’s yawning throat, its unconscious grace, I imagine someone taking my covers and smuggling them to this hill in East Africa, as the air in my chest thins, and all my adolescence abruptly erased. What was I so busied with that incessant April? How many souls perished each time I blinked?" |
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.