Volume 5, Issue 4
POETRY
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"Come up into my nesty bed,
the Owlet to the Turtle said. Here will I feed you nuts and mice, here cosset you in wings and twice each day, at sunrise and at gloam, lay kisses dewed with honeycomb and stainy crush of thicket grape upon your ancient leathery nape. Here talon you behind the ears, here hold your riddles years and years, and guerdon you with balmy myrtle, so fiercely do I love you, Turtle." [READ FULL WORK]
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POETRY
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"gaze enough upon the sea and whales breach.
a monstrance twinkles from the riverbed of realtime numbers. watch your orchid closely and you won’t miss the instant of her blooming. these moments could be simulated-- slowed, multiplied, magnified, saturated, sold, resequenced, scored, altered, sharpened and dulled. appetite curdles in recrimination at the prospect of such surfeiting. proliferations conjure a too-seedy wattle. dandelion bracts plucked from the sky dry to the windowpanes. crimson leaves outlive their own memories, pressed unfulfilled between the pages" [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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"Because a beached cloud dies on your lawn.
Because when water drowns, you will never find the body. Because the balloon holds an old man's last breath. * Because dust becomes us when it dies. * Because this morning is drawn by a child with no hands. Because a fly is a saint washing his hands with sunlight." [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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"...like she has a language,
end falling like a touch of lace down your spine, all the small-laced vertebrae touched to its air’s lace brace, an air-pointed honeycomb of mouth’s lace, a mouth’s brace of its perforations and picks: net end of its honeycomb, knot honeycombed to net; trace of a mouth’s small breaks spun to a lily’s body, spun to a petaline touch on the skin, on a body like air’s lilies, skin’s honeycombed bone of a lily stitch, in an arm, two arms, brace spun in on a thigh, or a cheek, a white-cheeked brace of wings, in the wheeled turning aspirate bone flesh of their lily, spun in on the skin, reticulate lily stitch spun to touch on bone- laced lilies, white lilies of a lilied skin, spun to touch on a limb, end organ of a skin’s bone surface noosed, pricked in the small aspirations of bones like bird’s bones, a bone body’s air-strung brace of a lily’s body, stitch-strung bone lily’s break, mouth’s brace of air’s iterate lily, net strung to bone’s brace of white mouthed lilies, break to air’s mouthed stitch, like she has this language,..." [READ FULL WORK] |
NOVELLA (Contest Winner)
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"English, unbeknownst hitherto to the entire planet, was owned as it had always been by one British family, the Words. Lord Frisbee Word II, who preferred the title Lord Byword as a sort of elitist play on words, may or may not have had a recent stroke, but most assuredly and recently announced that he was to put his family’s singular, ancient, prized possession and heirloom up for auction, one word at a time. The notion that one of the populace could now collect royalties upon overhearing his or her newly purchased word (or words) bandied about in common street chatter made for a mob mentality the likes of which had never before threatened the staid, secular sanctity of the auction house.
In immiscible human matters of this rare sort, not to be mixed or sifted without singular sensitivity of intellect, Daed Oversoul was often and eagerly sought by police and high-ranking officials of the Anglican sovereignty. Professionally, Daed was a poet, the British Isles having claimed him as their laureled own on one of his coffee-house, pub, and church tours just before the new millennium. Now almost twenty years later, now a full-time poet laureate and part-time crime liaison, Daed Oversoul stood at the lofty Word family’s front door and awaited entrance and further acquaintance with Lord Frisbee Byword’s world-shaking decision to sell off the noble, primogenial English lexicon." [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY (Contest Winner)
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"I watch your boots press their downwards force into the dirt,
and its deep forest litter. I see their compression of it; how a heel strikes the distinct trace of your weight, in humus, and how it rebounds, as if decomposing upwards, our long hard-pressed relations coming back on up, to the arch as the heft of the body moves itself, onto its toes, from the great toe, to the second, to the third, and so on: the body’s lift, to the ‘toe-off,’ and the load of the ‘stance phase’ of the gait to be perambulated over ground. How the valley has loft itself into the strata of schistose rock—time in foliated, metamorphic rock, up-ended into its mineral sheaths, sheared along our escarpment: the grand cuts of orange sericite, green ottrelite, and the sandstone that has been veined in quartzite, coming up tight and tipped to the course of our feet. How the heel lifts and is swung by the foot, in a pendulum, from the hip, to the plant of the reciprocal leg’s pendular pivot; it’s like pole-vaulting..." [READ FULL WORK] |
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.