Volume 8
POETRY
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a pantry mind at supply chain’s end grips the
twilight of nourishing things. textures moisten toward non-seaworthiness, toward post- absorptive soupbone impressionability— consciousness nearly bestowed upon the remnants—something to lose amongst the wrecking crew... [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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What hath God wrought—chip or ballad?
The horse does not eat cucumber salad. Watson, come here! I want to see you! See you I will, in hi-def color, see you I won’t, nor skin nor blood, the horse does not, repeat does not eat lumen pixel volt or watt, dots or dashes, ones or naughts-- don’t blame God for what you’ve wrought... [READ FULL WORK] |
CREATIVE NONFICTION
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Should you find yourself as one of the enslaved in a private home at the Cape, beaten for insolence, or for burning the beans, or any other such infraction, take care to call on the snuff shop of freedwoman Jamilla van de Kaap in one of the unnamed side alleys on the slopes of Table Mountain. You will know the place by the signboard in her backyard. There is no need to show her your wounds. As such, should they prevent you from visiting her yourself, send only a messenger with a note requesting Caijpoetij olij, from the tree grown in Malaysia, that place from which many of the colony’s slaves have been captured. Clean your wounds with the oil in order to prevent infection. For pain, take a few drops in water or rum.
[READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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Why not sign a pity release? Spare your children
and wife. Surrender – just for the moment – what defines your life. The boat for escaping is waiting in the bay. The judges want their take. What will history say if friends do not save a man accused in the wrong? Who will teach virtue if the teacher of virtue is gone? Scales that tip and sway. It must have weighed on Crito’s heart to learn the decision was already made; to arrive in a drafty cell for a teacher- student review – so late. [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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Andy Warhol’s Invisible Sculpture
hits the mark on its invisible nose. Gertrude Stein’s inimitable syntax cuts to the bone of the risible rose. Ronald Firbank’s coy eccentricities reveal more than just one cardinal’s pose. Mina Loy’s lunatic baedekers map the terrains of prophetic furbelows... [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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... Not often as before, lord knows,
but always and again in time. Some nights he wobbles to the shore and, through the damp, squints where her tower lamp once shone but hasn’t now for years, and there he rages at the whelming tide. He weighs against the blind remorseless deep a preference for sleep. But every dusk the syruped sun will sink again behind her cloistered home and with the evening stars his sense is pearled around her newer world... [READ FULL WORK] |
FICTION
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...Where should anyone start with a fellow as complex as Adalbert? We might opt to begin at the end, and indeed I do. If we are to believe this morning’s published account, it would seem that our reclusive tyrant died alone inside his private library. Famously, Adalbert’s home is an opulent manor house, Eternidade, a fortress-like construction located in Rio de Janeiro. I know the place to be squat and solid, its exterior walls thick, stuccoed and adorned with bougainvillea. Set within the city’s now-affluent Leblon neighborhood, Eternidade has for many years boasted an indulgent staff of twelve. As I enjoy a second cup of coffee, I am reading how the Provençal housekeeper—Marie Claudette, a dependable figure—discovered her employer’s body. Adalbert was no doubt wearing his habitual pajamas and robe, but we are told for sure that he departed this life in a straight-backed leather chair, his head and arms resting upon a writing desk. Apparently, foul play is not suspected, and it looks as though our aged polymath had no surviving next of kin.
Oh, but these are details. Woeful trivia... [READ FULL WORK] |
POETRY
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...then responds like
Native American Sacajawea, sculpted from enduring obsidian, her bidden wisdom now a stone face covered by a veil of water – [READ FULL WORK] |
PROSE
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One smile, like lavender milk. One smile and the basin would teem with life once more, the perch would russet and skate in shoals through the green-cunning waters of the Nagara spillway, the lotuses would float in sutras above the lilies and the parrot-oleanders, the shapes of human torpedoes in lemon bathing suits would spring unbidden once more – swimmers in their millions! – and hot amazake would sweeten the mooring posts at the banks another time. But that is the music of all successful fables: they compel us to maintain the vital and barbarous delusion that resolution exists to reconcile the storm and cruelty of human sadness.
[READ FULL WORK] |
PROSE
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The Earth speaks. Not in a petty language of tongues, lips, and lungs, but one of stone, trees, and smoke. It is our great inheritance that we may speak this language, as it is our forebears’ labor whose fruits we enjoy. It was nearly four thousand years ago when our ancestors on the banks of the Yellow River heard the quiet whispers from the Labyrinth. It did not come in the form of a prophet, nor of a mythical beast. Rather, it came to them in the humblest of ways: in the remains of their fires.
[READ FULL WORK] |
PROSE POETRY
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From the extant fragments of Pediculopubis’ 108th Summative, dedicated to, and performed at court for, Clessidra V, last Divine Empress of Orgiastikon.
…that a voice, beauty when written for, is without all contour when it is left to speak alone… …a jewel in its setting, a clot of mud beyond… …when the liberating vowel too elongated trickles, seething, into the hourglass… [READ FULL WORK]
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PROSE
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The butlers were fake butlers and the spies were fake spies. For a time this held, and one knew that a spy was really a butler and a butler really a spy. However when lie had become truth and truth became lie, the spies disguised themselves in their own skin. England was a land of half fake and half true spies.
[READ FULL WORK] |
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POETRY
PROSE
PROSE
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to the emptiness, and the emptiness remembers, although it is almost gone, displaced not only by sun, but also by the multitude of sun’s kin: displaced by feathers, milk, and rings, by the creviced skin of the rhinoceros (in which dwell, however, splinters of emptiness still), displaced by the courses of fish through the ocean (which allows no emptiness at all, closing swiftly behind the goings of haddocks and sharks), displaced...
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Customized illustrations for all published pieces provided by Evgenia Barsheva.