Volume 3, Issue 3 (2018)
NOVELLA
|
"'Twas the fault of the blasted mountains albeit their beastly geography deserves no more curses than the Count and Emily themselves acting within their natures. Perhaps I suppressed minute unaccountable moments of dread in the lowlands as after a stopover by the Danube the Orient Express pulled out of Budapest in late afternoon and clackety-clacked through the drawn-out summer twilight and into a moonless black night dotted with sparse yellowflame lights in scattered villages, yet, though boring despite my proximity to Emily, a luxurious ride subsequently followed by a mad automobile dash into black mountains on endless winding dirt roads until, after endless hours, arriving at a massive iron gate... How came I thus to this forsaken place?"
|
PROSE POETRY
|
"There is death. A blue-collared lizard sits on a low stone wall, stares at me. Sun on his back, he wants to transmute stone into skin, skin into stone. I say: "I'm sorry, but I did not kill him." I know this has nothing to do with this moment, this lizard. I am insisting on my innocence for things that I have not done because of all the things I have. I am not saying this from inside a dream; I too, want to transmute stone into skin and skin into stone."
|
POETRY
|
"'A man devoid of history.'
So we gave him one. An Old Detective, trench-coat, hat, rusted revolver tucked in his waist. Empty bullet casings for teeth. A geometry laid over his face. Rhombus. Trapezoid. A cuneiform language dripping from his eyes." |
PHILOSOPHICAL RUMINATION
|
"But, alas, the Black, it is a lonely illumination. Lo the shadow of the world and the worldly below. Loreless, the miasma of the mind is the nature of the night, of the Gray, of the worldly despair into which the Black descends. Through every tempest and every locus calls the shadow into the night. Leave us! Leave us – so it is said to the shadow! Leave us – so it is said from the mob, the miasma of the blind, the gloomy and the Gray!"
|
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.