Volume 7, Issue 2
POETRY
|
“Mine is deepest,” claims the tenured professor
as he probes the tiny folds of his navel with a swollen finger. “Mine protrudes like the stone at Delphi,” proclaims the endowed chair. “Mine, a sinkhole in the undergrowth,” admits the visiting scholar. The professor emeritus, a white-haired elder with yellow teeth, waxes poetic on the power of the solar plexus and something about interconnectedness and the Grateful Dead. [READ FULL WORK] |
PROSE
|
We cross the rubicon knowing the hourglass can never be turned. Its sands are finer too, for better or worse. Sands from dunes we believed were almost paradise. Now the rains rebel in excess. Another temporal mood swing they naturally blame on women.
Things appear unfamiliar by duskfall, distorted by neon and vignettes. Our toes, ballerina-like, barely feel the ground or river bed. We speculate whether they still exist or if our senses are simply confused. Men question their faith, longing to walk on water, or just be bound to a floating cross. I comfort my daughter, saying this is Swan Lake as we cling to mangled driftwood, the air thick with the stench of rotting sugar cane and unidentifiable flora even scavengers won't touch. [READ FULL WORK]
|
PROSE
|
In college, a professor said, thinking he might someday be a poet, “You ought to grow a beard.” When his girlfriend from Columbus, Ohio, visited him at school, his new beard rubbed the tender skin of her chin raw. She kissed him, then slapped him, and yelled, “Mammal!” Later, when his mother found beard hairs in the sink at home, she divorced his hairless father and moved into a trailer in the woods. Many wild men made visits there, dropping hints. In the meantime, his beard learned to read and roam without him, and picked up several women, all of whom wrote a novel before they left his beard. Further, he discovered that he is a character in several of his own beard’s writings, described variously as a chef, a tympanist, and a professional Irishman. Often in a strange city, he bumps into one of his beards. He introduces himself and buys it a drink.
[READ FULL WORK] |
|
Apophatapataphysics, a Quantum Era refurbishment of classical pataphysics which takes account of both actual and imaginary semantic displacements and voids throughout the cosmos, is almost always a matter of not straying close, of maintaining a respectful orbit about a hot location (an inflamed liver, a seething brain, rumbling intestines), in enough proximity to gain warmth, nutrition, or inspiration, at enough distance to not risk spontaneous combustion. (Measurements of mass, velocity, trajectory, topography, temporality, and temperature are critical and merit close approximation in transcription.)
[READ FULL WORK] |
Customized illustrations for all published pieces provided by Evgenia Barsheva.