Volume 5, Issue 2
FICTION [Contest Winner]
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"It is with some reluctance but compelling need that I set pen to paper once again on the subject of my recent voyage into the southern Pacific Ocean and the narrative relation of it first published in the Southern Literary Messenger under the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Poe, editor of that publication, learned of my adventures and encouraged me to set them down, trusting that my awkwardness of style would testify to the veracity of my account. But I was hesitant. I did not believe I could write from memory a description that would convince the reader. Poe therefore suggested he himself write the narrative, or a part thereof, and publish it in the magazine as fiction. This ruse would demonstrate that the story's facts would be believed by the public even though presented to them as fiction! And indeed this is what occurred. The narrative was taken by many as truth. Consequently, I decided to write my own description of the entire adventure AS FACT, there being evidently no danger of the public not believing it was all true."
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POETRY
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"A drunken man on a bicycle tumbles over streets
like a crumpled paper in the wind of history-- behold the miracle of flying trash, animal shapes rich and strange: top hat horse head, dinner jacket monkey, ferret and weasel dealing five-card stud at the conference table— marvel at the polished sheen of this inscrutable now. Step right up: watch the raveling of the feral woman, witness the juggling hands! For we have decreed sacred this manner of inebriation, this monkey riding the back of a dog, godlike, our adorations gathering as insect clouds over the muddy waters of our borders, malarial, heretical. Hush for the conjuring spell, marvelous prestidigitation! For we have canonized this chaos of handlebars, this zigzag careening through the morning commute, this hit and run of spectators frozen in testimony, infectious—maybe you, maybe me, as the turning of the bicycle weaves and veers to eat the world up." [READ FULL WORK] |
NOVEL EXCERPT [Contest Winner]
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"The dogs were muscling their gaunt shapely forms from out of blind snow-bracketed banks, lanes, ditches, Detroit’s steel-girdered interstices — the inglenooks and modesties of Dearborn, slender brown skulk like clats of sinister inchworms on the eye. Their bellies cinched in dry lank starvation. Their ears and snouts and coats kinked wet, glossed, obtaining an august diesel sheen in the glaucous boreal light, blue kidney figments as though migrant dolphins come ashore on roaming silver-haired legs. A thousand thousand hounds surface loping along the grey march. Their tongues pink and exposed and ice-chafed, whiskered muzzles zebraic with facets of cloven white. Their gums scalloped a darker pink, their gums bared and gnarled a traumatic hue, their gums clustered with milky crescent teeth. Pelted and knickerbockered a variation of colour, a mottle of browns, reds, rusts, yellows, silvers, blues. Coats to pillow the eye. Lemons and whiskeys and jets and gold oxides all assembling in unpeopled streets striated fire-pure and barren with snow coral. Old winter-feasted trees, choke cherries and aspens ailing and sharded in the godless thaw, holly and gold hyssop and shimmering sneezeweed felled low before the raptured greening, now trembling to herald the arrival of the dogs."
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POETRY
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"shaggy raggy rudeboy hip hop feministic slam
starchy Formaliste is up in arms Formaliste insist on platted streets & tuckin shirt & tuckin sheets but heat’s too heat for shirt & sheet a’tall Formaliste knock wrong way talk wrong color lovers with wrong other Formaliste give mouth-closed kiss-o, mwah!" [READ FULL WORK] |
ESSAY
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"The idea of a false accusation leading to the performance of the same act of which one is accused seems almost preternaturally pregnant with theatrical possibilities. One can easily imagine a play of Shakespeare’s with this narrative; Sylvanus would begin with devotion towards the emperor perhaps stronger even than that of Brutus, and in his dying moments reflect that his sincere wish to serve Constantius with fealty was subverted by the inhuman exigencies of Fate."
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Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.