Volume 9

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POETRY

MASQUERADE BALL and other poems - M. Benjamin Thorne

At the lion’s court you cannot count
ev’ry marquess, duke, margrave, viscount
that preened and purred en promenade,
though certain subjects truly awed:
the jocund jaguar’s jacquard dress
proud puma empress did impress;
its baroque brocade broke
barricades of silence; roque
players awoke from bored stupor
to applaud—but spy sly cougar,
her corseted couplet (quite compressed)
caused many a suitor to feel stressed
in his constraint. And behold in linen white
bold snow leopard’s gown, that in light
shifts to golden brown (and so you see
a leopard can change spots easily).

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SHORT FICTION

EGO IMAGO - Dina Rivera

A gentle trepidation convulses then the whole anatomy, a strange intimate vibration that displaces the fuzzy dust on the ground, the little bits of grit and sand that hurt ever so slightly the tender surface of the still-brittle thorax as one sinks softly into the warm sweetness of the deep soil, sitting on the subway, soaking in the echoes of ten million fellowships, so easy to recall what poets describe as the material forms of memory old selves cast off after each molt, dun crinkly specters scattered on every corner, rock-candy sheaths leaning casually against walls…

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FICTION

SHELDON GUTERSON AND PINCHUS FLEISHER COMPARED - Ben Guterson

Regarding Fleisher’s notorious, profligate appropriation of others’ works, I found myself fixated by this sentence in an online appreciation: “Harrison, alone among reviewers, has suggested that Fleisher’s motives were hidden even from himself, and that, similar to Irina Ustinov in the notorious episode in which she unknowingly recreated a tale she’d read in childhood, Fleisher was a naïf, suffered from the (disputed) malady known as cryptomnesia, or unconscious plagiarism--the belief that a thought is novel when in fact it is a memory.” (Emphasis mine.)

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Check in every month for a new story in Volume 9!

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Customized illustrations for all published pieces provided by Evgenia Barsheva.