Volume 5, Issue 1
STAGEPLAY
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"ABELARD
I want to talk about “imagination.” I want to talk about what I imagine at night. I imagine trees. Very old trees. Common trees. Oak trees poplar trees sycamore. I imagine a tree’s life in reverse. I imagine: twigs shriveling into branches into trunk. Filament roots sucked back into the tap. Solar flares, dirt, rain hurl as a century old tree is compressed into a sapling, a sapling standing like an adolescent, arms lifted towards heaven at the still hole in the center of a hurricane—before it is sucked back into the earth. The winds settles around upheaved ground. Where a seed nestles. A seed nestles in the earth. Explosive. HELOISE Do you dream about the wind? Do you dream that the wind tears through your hair? Lifts your arms and parts your legs? The wind smears your face against your skull. You look like a satyr with your face smeared against your skull. You are lifted. On your back. The stars whirl nearer, nearer and you laugh. You double over, laughing. Doubled-over, you are too heavy and you fall. You smash against the ground. Then something else. I can’t remember. A departure. A going forth into darkness. Along a path so smooth I think it must be paved with water." [READ FULL WORK] |
PROSE POETRY
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"Letter P is among the sounds that blocks the airflow, it has a coalescence with soft S / or key sounding C and/or L which makes a thing a common english word. Rarely found in Farsi and if so imported by tradesmen like a tin of pringles. For example, there is a sudden release of air that follows an ellipse’s P. There: clouds are created. I eavesdrop on the friction of two unvoiced rubbing against each other...
-- ...a portrait of dot is in its entrance / against guernica and the installation of bani adam every statement needs a full stop [a speech of] my source of food is pause, the freedom to talk, it tosses my stream of consciousness onto the dark cavities of teeth / making me echo what comes through the ear / it gets routine order from the frontal cortex..." [READ FULL WORK] |
NON-FICTION
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"This revelation was born at the intersection of two grocery aisles, though it might have dawned anywhere and everything would have followed on in the same way.
I am typically cautious with shopping carts at aisle turns, but like all creatures I harden under sedimentary pressures on occasion, in the depths of which self-preservation proves antonymic, and at such times veering toward a crossroads—any crossroads—is worth the hazard for the chance at air it brings. So it was (and thus was I) on the verge of her emergence." [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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"Robin breast crest plumage pledge worn on my sleeve
Robin breast crest plumage pledge worn on my sleeve Robin breast crest heart pledged sleeve for thieves Red picked raw, pocked peeled fingers burnt with worry Red picked raw, pocked peeled fingers burnt with worry Red and raw, rocked and reeled, my fists that burn with fury" [READ FULL WORK] |
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LITERARY EXPERIMENTS
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"1.) a novella with no more than two words to a paragraph (and then, in one of its two published forms, no more than two words to a book page (One Night e, 1969, 1977).
2.) a visual fiction whose principal narrative action comes from the incremental addition of the alphabet’s letters (In the Beginning, 1971), 3.) words printed on syntactically continuous looping plastic strips that lack beginnings or ends (Infinities-Stories, 2005), 4.) two books of scrupulously Minimal Fictions that are no more than three words in length, most having only two words or one prior to the period (aka full stop) that necessarily concludes the narrative action—one with several to a page for 80 pages (Minimal Fictions, 1993); the other with one fiction to a page for 900 pages (Micro Stories, 2010), 5.) stories that develop through a series of shapes that are composed exclusively of letters or words (“Football Forms,” 1968; Come Here, 1975, respectively)," [READ FULL WORK] |
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.