Volume 4, Issue 2 (2019)
POETRY
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"In the undermusic,
there’s a stumbling where the balconies of her ribs are covered in climbing roses. Darling, death is a blossom and pain is a flock of wildflowers. Don’t say, we’ve lost another songbird..." |
SHORT FICTION
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"Albert Cesar DeSilva was once a writer of repute as brief as it was inexplicable. His fame was entirely based on a quirky series of short stories that appeared in noir detective magazines in the ‘50s. Known later in their collected form as Life and Death Computations, their unlikely protagonist was a pioneering computer scientist named Capperby, who used an analog device of his own invention to solve murders. In one story, which happened to be the final chapter of Capperby’s adventures, his punch-cards even managed to name the place and time of a future murder."
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POETRY
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"Bear witness to the love triangles of the cuttlefish.
Inhale the perfume on the landing. Measure the span of the dragon’s vestigial wings, Not broad enough for lift-off into the sky." |
SHORT FICTION
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"Maybe he liked the ottoman’s colour or its shape. I could never tell. But he loved to sit on it, with his back straighter than straight and his hands on his knees. One day I asked him why he liked it so much and he gave me the same look he gave me when my mathematics average fell into the shameful percentages he called la parfum de la moyenne. He said, “You would not understand. You have never been home.”
I said, “But, Daddy, this is home.” And he said, simply, dismissing me, “That is why you would not understand.”" |
POETRY
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"Meanwhile, life winnows itself. An egg, one superlative egg, could be anything – acacia is immediate in its hyperbole – and its long-winged mother calls above countless inert puddles (not to say inconsolable). Somewhere in the galaxy a flatworm is loose. No matter that it has no word for freedom." |
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.