StarCat/CatStar

!
!!!!!!!!!!!! !
!
DEDICATED TO THE
MEMORY OF DAVID
BOWIE!

Catatonically Speaking:
Planet Earth is Blue,
and There is Nothing We Can Do
An odd oxymoron of my artistic preferences is that David Bowie is one of
my cherished musical heroes, and yet he doesn't even figure into my top
ten of favorite musical acts.
How can that be, you ask? Well, consider this: Bands that do figure into my
top ten list, such as The Cure, Deerhunter, Bright Eyes, Sleater-Kinney,
and Joy Division, were all heavily influenced by Bowie, either directly or
indirectly. Therefore, you can say that Bowie is the ground that these
bands literally trod and tred upon. Bowie's influence is such that he is
cosmically present in most of popular culture. All bands that came after
Bowie, or began around the time that he became popular, quite patently
built themselves up from the foundation that Bowie lay.
Naturally, of course, many of Bowie's songs would figure into a songlist
compilation of my favorite tunes. His early tunes, especially, are stuck
perpetually reverberating in my head, because it was those songs that
nurtured my young mind. In the late 70s, I purchased a collection of
Bowie tunes, and when the album began to spin, it sparked a mad
metamorphosis in my whole way of being.

Songs like "Starman," Life on Mars," and "Space Oddity," had a soaring,
otherworldly quality, outerspace symphonies crafted by an alien for the
alien in all of us. Other songs, like "Suffragette City," flaunted a punk
urgency undercut with ironic hippie overtures. Later, there were freshly
funky songs, like "Fashion," "Fame," and "Young Americans." And, of
course, all those songs that are less well known but vibrantly potent.
I ended up seeing Bowie in the early 80s, when he'd distanced himself from
his outlandish, androgynous Ziggy Stardust persona, and transformed into
a more modish, dapper figure. His seminal 80s album "Let's Dance" became
a new wave touchstone, lamented by some as kitschy and commodified, but
ultimately embraced for its smart pastiche of R&B and post-punk.
After the 80s, my Bowie fascination waned a bit, but eventually picked
back up, as passions are wont to do. In the early 2000s, I was drawn back
into the Bowie vortex with the albums "Reality" and "Heathen," and ended
up seeing Bowie again on the Reality tour.
It was that first taste of Bowie, of course, that imposed upon me the most
deeply. Bowie's idiosyncratic sartorial sense, his exotic pulchritude, his
quirky, quixotic songs, caressed by a voice that had a futuristic robotic
resonance yet a warm earthy tone, will forever be etched into my own
sensibilities. His creativity fueled my own, both explicitly and implicitly, as
I was also heavily influenced fashion-wise and literarily by The Cure, one of
Bowie's major progenies.
Bowie's last album, released just before his death, "Blackstar," is another
galactic masterpiece, a fitting coda to his ethereal existence.
The main aim of Clockwise Cat is to present art that is transgressive, art
that surrealistically subverts. David Bowie was the preeminent surrealist
subversive, and we are proud, and very sad, to dedicate this issue,
Starcat/Catstar, to the memory of him, the most eclectic, enigmatic, titanic
artist of our time. May he travel to Mars, and may he rest among the stars.

FEATURED
FEMME: Jessica Wiseman Lawrence
Editor’s note: When I read a poem by Jessica Wiseman Lawrence over at
Cease, Cows, I remarked to myself, “Um, she MUST appear in Clockwise
Cat.” The verse had just the right balance of rustic and mystical elements
that titillate my poesie-libido. Thanks to Sarah Frances Moran of Yellow
Chair Press, I was able to get in touch with her! Here, we present a
selection of Jessica’s poetry compellingly diverse in theme, tone, and style.
About the author: Jessica Wiseman Lawrence grew up on a working farm
in rural central Virginia, surrounded by hayfields and chickens. She then
studied teaching and creative writing at Longwood University. After a few
years of attempting to create lesson plans based on ridiculous state
education standards, she left a career as a public high school teacher to
pursue more rewarding work teaching creative writing to adults
with disabilities in a day support setting. She has since moved on to the
corporate world. You can find Jessica's recent work upcoming or published
in Stoneboat, Cease, Cows, Acumen, Origins, Blue Collar Review, Dirty Chai,
and The Feminine Divine's upcoming Anthology of Female Voices, along
with many others. One of her poems has earned a Best of the Net
nomination from the editor of the recently-controversial Revolution John.
She continues to live in rural central Virginia with her family. She believes
that poetry does not belong only to an educated elite and that all people,

egardless of education level or economic class should be able to write,
enjoy, and publish their poetry. Additionally, Jessica was very upset when
she discovered that her local grocery store stopped carrying the Jello
Temptations box mix with chocolate shell topping.
Priestess
She touches the cross, and where
that finger hits she bleeds
black on her dress,
turned white with
untroubled earthshine.
Her night-lit home is shivering
and silent, waiting
for her healed hands
to guide and shift our full planet –
fragile as an egg,
crawling with carbon –
and littered by diamonds’ glow.
Epoch
The tires of my feet made fog from dust
at every walk toward the downy yellow.
The sky was a bright
overturned bowl,
and I, beneath it, was singing
to the baby chickens
who pounded against
wire
who peeped at brown grass
who gently tapped my
nails –
across forty acres of
what was possible.
I was surrounded

there
by erected trunks of time,
with their beds of scattered needles.
Beneath me, crushed mountains
groaned their barrel drum,
preparing worn down parts
for the upward collide.
The spring and balance set by the maker
served as promise of
fossil to green,
while I, domed-under, sang to chickens –
before I know what life was.
Remarkable
Suspended in his first ocean,
layering cells over cells,
becoming tissue.
Building bone and muscle,
building a heart, building
fingers, limbs,
a chest wall and a chest.
He sleeps
with his mouth open
as he will.
He is alive in salinity current,
alive in warm darkness,
and nearly whole –
not yet a fingerprint
or fingernail; he is a downy hair
suspended in the ocean we all know.
Cells over cells
becoming a certain stare that
someone will name, and yes –
A heartbeat.
A heartbeat.
A heartbeat.

Domestic
Each scream
is a long razor,
slicing the curtains,
shredding the wallpaper.
Each oath
is a hole
through the drywall
The powder –
the glue –
the threads
of what we were,
are scattered and ground
between baseboard and floor.
Nine Lines
Hunch,
wait,
and settle.
Nine lines
turn from nuzzle
into laceration
when the back stretches –
when the legs bend and spring –
a living trap and the devouring.
Into the Minds of Dinosaurs
Great ancient creatures lie down to die,
are covered by a foot of soil, and keep their shape.
The rounded pine mountain next to my elementary school
was a dinosaur.
She was an Apatosaurus, and
long ago she had tucked her knees under herself,
put her belly to the ground,
stretched her long neck out, crushed ancient ferns, and died.
On one side of her mountain-head was a light-green clearing
surrounded by forest.
Trees don’t grow over the eyes of dinosaurs.

Roots don’t have eyes, or need them.
I looked out of the classroom window and climbed the mountain in my
mind.
Indifferent to eons, I dug, hit skin, and saw her.
She was color of dinosaurs. She felt like one of the snakes
I found in the kitchen.
Then I was at my desk again, where the teacher asked me
if trailer homes have bathrooms, and I wanted to dig
beneath the poverty and the dead snakes and the dirty shoes and the
stolen pencils,
into the past where all was poor, into cold clay on the sides of mountains
next to elementary schools,
and into the minds of dinosaurs.
Dollar Store Lingerie
It’s hard to find a matching bra and panty set
in a dirty wire bin two feet deep
with bargain lingerie, much less a sky-blue,
faux-satin one with pink ribbon there and there,
but I found one,
and once home, I tried it on like religion.
I was at the foot of the bed, standing
in my dresser mirror, looking like me,
and I half-twirled to see myself from the side.
My long, blonde-ended hair skimmed my back
below the bra line, and I shivered beneath
the new boundary that marked me a woman.
Bang! I was a different, just like that.
Scraps
Wednesday was an exciting day
at Green Pines Medical Center.
The doctors were provided
with a catered lunch.
When they were done eating,
the leftovers were put into the staff kitchen
in flimsy aluminum pans, and the tops of the pans
would be folded and thrown away.

Lasagnas were unrecognizable; burritos were opened
so that Dr. Crient could have extra chicken,
or a browning salad would be mushroomless.
A doctor informed the head nurse –
“There are leftovers in the break room,”
and the nurses lined up for theirs.
When he was sure the nurses were finished,
the office manager sent an e-mail
to the schedulers and secretaries –
“It’s your turn for lunch. Please do not
leave your stations without proper coverage of your area.
Remember, patient care comes first.”
Lisa had been Dr. Howe’s secretary for eight years.
She brought plastic baggies every Wednesday,
to fill with scraps for her dogs.

The Empire of Punk (Movie Review)
By Alison Ross
The decline of Western civilization has been underway for a long time, but
not in the way that some would construe the title of the iconic trilogy of
music documentaries, "The Decline of Western Civilization." Very
conservative, pedantic types would take the title to mean that punk rock is
symbolic of the decline of civilization - that the very existence of the music
means that society has lost its moors and morals.
Well, yes, it has, and yes, punk rock is emblematic of this decline. But for
music geeks like myself, punk rock is a glorious thing. Conservatives would
rue the existence of punk rock and feel that all is right with society
EXCEPT punk rock, which is fueling societal decay.
But conservatives, naturally, would be wrong. Punk came about as a sonic
subversion against an authoritarian "values," a screaming banshee against
constricting conformity that straitjackets and terrorizes. Punk was
founded as an unfettered expression to call cacophonous attention to what
was wrong with society. Punk wasn't what was wrong with society; society

was what was wrong with society, and punk was the pugnacious protest
against that.
Penelope Spheeris, who directed the trio of films , was and is an avowed
music lover, and she made her films as an homage to the 70s, 80s, and 90s
music scenes in LA.
And actually, one of the documentaries is not about punk at all, but about
heavy metal - or, rather, hair metal. Which as a genre, really isn't as
explosively rebellious as punk, but rather represents a glorying in
hedonistic excess, the apex of corroded values fed by capitalism's amoral
indulgences.
But the first and third documentaries are very much about punk - the first
one being about the burgeoning hardcore scene of 1970s LA, and the third
one being about the resurgence of punk - but even moreso, about the
charming gutter punks that constituted part of this scene. And it's the
third one which achingly resonates with the most pathos. But we'll go
chronologically and build from there.
The first documentary feels as fresh as ever, despite the fact that it was
made in 1979 and features long-defunct punk bands such as Black Flag,
Fear, and the Germs, among others. Indeed, the documentary induces an
extreme case of nostalgia, as I long for the days of more straightforward,
belligerent punk, rather than the half-assed non-mutinous musicians
imposed on us today.
The Germs, perhaps, are the main band standout in the documentary, as
the singer Darby Crash (who died from a suicidal overdose shortly after
the documentary was released) displays a thoroughly offbeat charisma in
both the interview portion as well as in the music footage. Darby has long

een revered among musicians as one of punk's great pioneers - an
intellectual whose wayward antisocial behavior garnered him fierce
notoriety.
The seminal LA punk band X is the second standout band in this film, and
it's fascinating to witness the band's early years, with matriarchal bad-ass
Exene at the helm, and the band's after-show pranks and antics fully
flaunted.
Black Flag also features prominently, with Ron Reyes, one of two pre-
Henry Rollins singers, as the frontman. Black Flag, post-Reyes, went on to
become of the most renowned and innovative of the hardcore bands, an
anarchistic outfit who raged against authoritarianism and poverty, who
also incorporated jazz and other elements into its ferocious, hard-driving
music.
It's the "Lightbulb Kids" who ultimately steal the show, however,
interviewed as they are under a stark lightbulb and imparting their
affinity for the punk scene in a slightly creepy, always captivating fashion.
Eugene Tatu is the most memorable of the bunch, his voice lightly tinged
with surfer-talk tones, and his petite frame threatening to belie his intense
glare and cheerless demeanor.
For me, the second doc in the series, focusing on the Heavy Metal years, is
the weakest of the trio. Not only is the title a misnomer - most of the bands
featured are hair metal bands, who have far less substance than actual
heavy metal bands - but the bands act in absurd and embarrassing ways,
and there is very little enduring value to their music - unlike the bands in
the first documentary, whose music persists in holding sway over some
younger bands.

There are three memorable scenes that nail this home. First, Ozzy
Osbourne is thoroughly engaging as he mumbles through his dialogue with
the director, cooking eggs and spilling orange juice and generally coming
across as a lovable goof rather than the menacing caricature he cultivated
as a solo artist.
Second, Paul Stanley, of Kiss, is hilariously and unintentionally selfparodic,
lying in bed with a bevvy of beauties, and basking in his success as
he attempts to transcend the sorry cliches of his rock stardom.
Third, you have the singer of W.A.S.P., whose severe intoxication as he
floats in a pool with his mother looking on is finally just cringe-worthy
footage.
So yes, those scenes are worth seeing, but they ultimately have nothing to
do with real music. Ozzy, really, is the only one whose tunes have stood the
test of time, and his association with the hair metal scene is a bit dubious,
in my view.
Part III of the Decline trio, made in the late 90s, is where the
documentaries come full circle.
The documentary was initially supposed to focus on the resurgence of the
LA punk scene, fueled by such bands as Naked Aggression and Final
Conflict. And those bands do feature in the film, their music serving up an
exhilarating, tempestuous update on the punk of the past.

But while the music was interesting, Spheeris' focus soon shifted away
from the bands and more toward the "gutter punks" who constituted the
fan portion of the scene.
Think of the threatening-looking ragtag groups of kids you've seen by
highways or in parks, their tattooed bodies encrusted with dirt, heavy
chains swinging from their army surplus wear, their faces penetrated with
bulky silver hardware, their jackboots ready to stomp out the haters, their
canine companions usually looking alternately dangerous and pitiful.
Kids like that, or some variation thereof, captured Spheeris' heart, believe
it or not, because underneath the raw swagger she found genuine heart.
Most of these kids were runaways fleeing abusive homes. Spheeris even
ended up adopting some of them. She was so taken by their struggles in the
street that she wanted to document their stories, and made the music the
support element. For the music is what the kids congregated around and
what gave their broken lives deeper dimension.
I too became enamored of the kids, and wept for them. Spheeris'
compassionate, relentless focus on them enabled me to understand that
punk, as it was originally conceived, is more vitally necessary than ever.
Since the 70s, economic exploitation has only worsened. Corporatization of
everything has rendered us a horrifically homogenized, severely crippled
society. These "gutter punks" are the sad crystalization of how far society
has regressed.
The decline of Western civilization is nearly complete, and we are in
desperate need of authentic punk to save us from full collapse.

TWO POEMS
By Sommer Lyn Cullingford
An Inevitable Return
On the numbering of days
the pages fall away
with the peeling of paint,
like flakes of skin that burn
word-by-word
through sand’s narrative;
The girders of nurturing
and buttresses
of summers spent
reviewing the harbour’s
renewing of each tide
distinctly every time,
hold me -
- unevenly
in cozy cusps.
We pitched pavilions
upon the rolling,
rising verdant comforter
at the mezzanine green,
plucked of wilderness -
I sat atop it and sucked in
that steely serenity
of the granite sea;
When a porpoise surfaced,
her silvery skim stretched
into a crescent arc
forever.
Back home our dials declined,
the eaves wept

and the gutters were blocked
by weather’s ceaseless motion -
And it cluttered
and it clumped:
the dead blue eggs,
the discarded nest.
The exterior has no time for rest.
Interloper
She ranged,
she was hastily creative,
she hatched tiny,
expired empires
arranged on whims,
sweet nonsense
and the contraction of ideas;
she said they always split
- rent -
down the stem,
where each divide
was high
or torn a-shred.
A venous mistress,
she approached
the human hustle
not for reproduction,
but the blooded marrow
of connection -
she would cut off the head,
in search of a friend

from the hellion haunt
of hydra-headed
blues;
she climbed the walls
- her hair -
shone a mirror for her flaws;
an old reflection
built each new house,
she freaked her borders,
in bondage
she plucked from the perimeters,
and then she fled
deranged,
to another
immaculate imager
of arch-design.
Author bio: Sommer Cullingford is a poet from Auckland, New Zealand
who is slowly composing an omnibus of her distinctive work; a fiend of
imagery you can reach for, she is always trying to scramble the senses
through a characteristically evocative selection of words to convey
narrative and escape the monotony of the mundane, while delivering
poetry with coherent perspective, tinged with insight.

KROG STREET TUNNEL/ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Observations of the self written in second person
over a 40 hour period between variously
sustained, chemically induced highs
before finally sleeping
by Phillip Quotient
"Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was
in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and
independence by daring to exercise them."
--from, Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"
Chapter 39, p. 405
1.
Awaken from full moon dreams
where ivory pale brides
wear translucent
jelly fish veils;
backdrop extras or life
size chess pieces who become
pawn promoted queens.
2.
Religion for you entails
permeating the blood-brain barrier
with candle bright chemical
wishes god-sped by Tinker Bell
or Hermes or whomever
willingly shares their
lush communion banquet.
3.
Mother's milk-breast embrace
remembered warmly
as those drowsily imagined
lactate white shallows
womb-scented and dawn-domed
beneath God whom you embraced
as a young boy without a single doubt.
4.

Hallucinations where savior newborns
open their small sanguine mouths mistaken
for vibrant, multi-foliet blossoms.
5.
At the downtown art deco bus terminal
impoverished zealots discuss Revelations
with spittle-lip vehement-sincerity
you summarize sardonically: narcoleptic assassins
camouflaged in cloud white outfits angelic
taking aim at make-believe agents.
6.
Standing in line at the "Hope Center"
you watch as pawn promoted nuns
dispense peanut butter and white bread;
alms accepted by prosthetic limbs
received with either drunken
irreverence or solemnly as one
who believes in transubstantiation.
7.
At times you feel nude as Yossarian
because the war between addiction
and daily survival rages on…
8.
Dusk lit nuclear power plant towers
billow plumes in the plentiful green
summer distance mistaken briefly
for colossal bongs smoked
by unknown, lesser deities.
9.
Alien symbols burn in the holy cranium
accompanied by atomic mushroom explosions
still yields away from a 1 to 1 ratio negation
that one day will demonstrate true annihilation
or the realistic promise of intergalactic travel.
10.

Pneumatic pianos play all night
for automaton guests…
Dances at the midnight cabal.
11.
The mind nods while the body wanes.
12.
Peering out my successful ex's window
I witness Tibetan monks wearing vivid orange
robes while practicing golf swings in unison,
truly uncertain anymore as to what's a dream.
Inadequately elucidated reality knocks
hard and loud upon the metaphors.
Author bio: Phillip Matthew Roberts is a 42 year old writer who resides in
the small city of Lexington, Kentucky. He occupies a comfortable, book
cluttered home and spends most of his days revising poems, short stories
and novels he's written over the past 25 years. His other pleasures include
good food and world cinema.

Two Poems
By John Grey
Author bio: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently
published in New Plains Review, Perceptions and Sanskrit with work
upcoming in South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Owen Wister Review and
Louisiana Literature.
BLOWUP
Going to the market,
the young girl skipped more than she walked.
The dusty sidewalk seemed as always.
Except the dirt felt fresh.
But then the earth blew out from under her.
Her legs collapsed.
Air fumed blazing white.
She spat out teeth and swallowed dust.
Her dress burned to her skin.
Nails jagged from her knees and ankles.
Blood sizzled on the feverish ground.
In a makeshift hospital,
she turned pale and thin.
She wept in half-darkness.
Her mouth seldom opened.
Something liquid
was sucked in by her pores.
From college,
a daughter phones her mother -
nightmares she says -
the worst kind,
the ones that don't let go.
She says she'd dancing
and the floor explodes.
Or she's walking down a street
and a house collapses on her.
Her mother says,
"I've had worse."
She's at that age -

the surety gives way
to randomness.
It could all end at any time.
It's worse when it doesn't.
THOSE MORNING BLUES
The alarm clock-radio
is playing "Stairway To Heaven."
A kid on a rainbow bicycle
rides by my window,
hand whacking horn.
A blue-jay squawks at a
stalking cat.
And that's just the easy part.
Einstein's seated in the chair
in the corner,
explaining the photoelectric effect.
A five foot wide tarantula
clings to the ceiling.
Moses is parting my wife's hair.
There's an albatross
in my pajama pocket.
With this as its beginning,
who knows what kind of day
it's going to be.
My wife will plump
for one like any other.
I'd agree were it not
for the ostrich at the door.

PINCH
by Annie Lure
Pin-up girls
& opium poppies
I pin to your palms.
The dainty needles your skinny women—
kissy women
& women pining
for the tracery of veins.
A full canvas you fondle with gesso tongue
& prink with acrylic lips.
Tiny seashells you feed me.
Bedroom windows that shred the red
curtain-clothes to bare
their brilliant sex.
A light-bulb perky as my nipple.
Author bio: Annie Lure enjoys poetry, erotica, apparel design,
photography, antiques, traveling, and art collecting. She has been
previously published by Clean Sheets Magazine.

Ice Cream Utopianism
By Matt Duggan
We love all the ice cream round here
over indulging ourselves in the utopianism of mirrors;
Where occasionally we look around
the edges of our own reflections
opening our eyes widely
to see that behind each layer is a sugar coated illusion,
We love all the ice cream round here;
It makes us fat yet our visage thin
the truth is a reflected manipulation
like those twisting mirrors on the seaside pier;
We love all the ice cream round here.
Autor bio: Matt Duggan won the Erbacce prize for poetry 2015. His poems
have appeared in many journals and magazines such as The Seventh
Quarry, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, The New Ulster, Section 8, The
Dawntreader, Roundyhouse, Poetry Quarterly, Illumen, Yellow Chair
Review, Jawline Review, Carillon, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Vagabonds, Lunar
Poetry Magazine, The Screech Owl, Message in a Bottle, OF/With, IANASP,
The Stare’s Nest, The Cobalt Review, Sarasvati, Expound, Ex-Fic, Trysts of
Fate. Matt created and hosts a spoken word evening at Hydra Bookshop in
Bristol U.K called ‘An Evening of Spoken Indulgence’and is also the coeditor
with Simon Leake of a political poetry magazine called ‘The Angry
Manifesto’. Matt can sometimes be found scribbling poems on bar-matts in
the dark shadows of some Bristol pub or wandering the Quantocks for the
perfect view.

Two Poems By David Mac
Author bio: David Mac is a wino forklift truck driver from the UK whose
words can be found in many sites, zines and mags.
Go Get ’Em F.D.
The gambler tries to beat god
Fuck’s sake baby be lucky
If I take off my hat
dice fall out my head
If I give you a wink
fish live in my cufflink eyelid
If I give you the sign
stick hold red black the 4 th horse is my heart
I only aim to out universe
the universe
I only aim to beat it all
to hell
Les Temps
You’ve never gotten over the rain
And the trees move like strangers to me
Days when you say ‘I think I’m getting
My period’ I pour a glass of wine
When there’s wet on the fence or on
Brickwork washing this town away
‘I think I’ll do some laundry’ you explain
I ponder the sky in the same way I
Ponder the tragic meaning of sex and
Is it vital to our well being?
Whatever we do we refuse to discuss
The weather and deny old time
What will be will be and you know
There’s no point dancing on rooftops again

Two Poems
By Jeff Nazzaro
Author bio: Jeff Nazzaro teaches creative writing and ESL at Loyola
Marymount University in Los Angeles. His work has recently appeared in
Flash: The International Short-short Story Magazine, Bareback, Every Day
Fiction, and Rind
Laughter Impossible to Refute
With a gravity that made her
laughter impossible to refute
he said Give me what I need
and I will give you
everything you ever wanted.
She lay back on the bed, and,
raising a foot as if from bubbly bath,
said, Remove this shoe
and then we shall make love.
Not dangling, a slipper,
like a ballerina might wear,
or a princess, unadorned,
as small as rain,
as bare as her other foot.
Kneeling, he removed the shoe,
though beneath it lurked another,
and another:
penny loafer, stiletto pump, Annie Lo Nurse Mate,
ice hockey skate with black Tuuk blade, galosh.
Bright yellow rubber boots
grip the last step of the escalator,
last not first, endlessly cycling,
just the last, looming gone.
The escalator rises, straight up,
not around in endless ellipse,
the little girl in the gold boots
clings, does not leap
to make the train.

She doesn't jump, only rises,
and though he chases, shouting,
gesticulating like a madman,
hairy and distraught,
she elevates up and up out of sight.
He leaps and snatches in the desperation
of sudden death, a goal line stand,
and grasps—not pyritic heel or mikado neck,
but only remainders, cold and sharp—
the tip of an elbow, shoulder blade.
An express train thunders by
in chest-compressing rush,
the labyrinthian web of streets
and alleys of his iron city on the Inland Sea
too insignificant to snare
the grandest of these passing plans.
Sparks of electricity
crackle in the descending night,
leaving quasistellar remnants
in a mist of impossible hope.
The room rocks to and fro
and he stops in the panic
of Is this the Big One?
to fold his handkerchiefs
into neat little squares.
I Flew From Them
I follow from station to store
an ancient stream
concreted
canalized
cannibalized
inches of former self longing
for the Grand March to join
the salty tears of the last ice age,
overwhelmed

y the minutiae of bureaucracy.
It is the slaughtered conscience of ironed out kinks.
It is the ensnarement of dreams.
Benjamin Lazarus apprehends me in the street
to smack me out of the anesthetizing gambit
of myopic derealization.
He wants the time.
He tells me that every eight days
twelve looks like eighteen
and sends me on my way.
My Eureka! moment appears before
me in a Yomiuri Giants
jersey and toenail polish
alternating in coats of orange and brown.
Orange, brown, orange, brown.
I meander away in warm-necked buzz,
Aquarian pets sporting plastic bottles
of unsweetened green tea
strapped to their necks float by.
I never saw them tossed from passing cars.
I never saw them.
A can clinked from a bicycle
into the time travel light tunnel
emptying into the salty-teared
massif-forsaken basin.
I never knew they swam not for me.
They swam. Not for me.

Corporations and Cultures as a
Whole Are Psychopathic
By Edwin Young, PhD
Cultures have psychopaths, often in power or are wealthy, or they are
small time manipulators, con artists, and street hoods. Some of these
types are clever and some just aggressive or persistent.
Then there are their victims who have various forms of neurosis,
psychosis, or other serious in-capacities. Finally, there are those with low
intelligence or who are bereft of cultural knowledge and these groups are
typically the ones who are potential victims.
This is not an exhaustive catalog, but you get the picture. There are so
many forms of psychopathic modes of operation that are impossible for the
ordinary person to detect. For instance, grocery stores that sell
nutritionally devoid of anything but beguiling tastes but that promote
obesity and ill health. However, the list of such is very long.
Beginning long ago and for many years I worked as psychotherapist or
institution reformer with these groups. From those early years, I began to
develop an understanding that the structures and systems of civilizations
are such that they shape people into behavioral categories like those
mentioned. Thus I found it impossible to blame any of them. Their
defective behaviors were not derived from bad or ineffective will power.
Themselves, they were not aware that they had been shaped by sick
structures and systems. I, however, was and I set to create structures and
systems in institutions that would promote more mature, more socially

esponsible behavior. I was amazed at how successful these redesigned
structures and systems were in making enduring positive changes.
These experiences provided knowledge to shape my 'Natural Systems
Philosophy and Method.'
Human civilizations, since their beginnings, have perpetuated such
horrible patterns for many millenniums. Consequently, I can only have
compassion for both the victimizers and their victims. I wish I could
communicate my message to any who could engage in restructuring
civilizations. What I find is that my message is so contrary to the
prevailing cultural paradigms, usually an intransigent belief in free will
and personal responsibility, that when trying to communicate my message,
I get indulgent “mmmm hmmms” or blank stares.

Modern Cartoons - A Quiz For Parents
By Kaylea Champion
(A Satirical Review)
A - Under the guise of exploring, a shrill chatterbox with facial
deformities repeated fails to get lost.
B - A rowdy Hispanic boy subverts natural selection with alien
technology, stealing prey from megafauna.
C - Teen anticapitalist club repeatedly thwarts the progress of
anthrogenetic therapies.
D - An emotionally troubled French child behaves badly and goes
largely unpunished.
E - Rodents attempt to dance.
F - The fate of the world depends upon opera-singing classroom pets.
G - Freakishly large dog destroys the economic future of a naive
suburban family.
H - Sparkling horse-people establish an absolute monarchy and throw
lavish parties, expecting universal adoration.
I - Fascist railway magnate manipulates enslaved trains into teaching
one another dubious moral lessons.
Answers:
A: Dora the Explorer
B: Go, Diego, Go!
C: The Wild Kratts
D: Caillou
E: Angelina Ballerina
F: WonderPets

G: Clifford
H: My Little Pony
I: Thomas the Tank Engine
Author bio: Kaylea Champion is a Chicago writer from Oregon. She cooks
like a fiend and likes to run in the rain. You can explore her vaguely
competent view of reality through the scribblings linked
from: https://sites.google.com/site/kayleachampion

Two Poems
By dean allan
I cut the waywrong cocaine
powder came
out. The worldclose
to wash sins in giving Christblood.
My nose pressedmirroragainst
Held
A c C h R e O s S t S
Lazarus W
I
T
H
E
R
S
Suicide Attempt
moonlight of my word shadows
slivers of a golden chest (inside)
i love that {inside (side) myself} youare
black turtlenecks swirls
and berets.
the bare highway til its very end,
both in the passenger seat with no driver.
SOULS and SELF and SACRIFICE.
Author bio: dean allan attempted suicide three times and suffered three
subsequent hospitilaztions. He had bouts of mania wherein he thought he
was the second coming of Jesus Christ and thought other commits to the
mental insitutions were Angels. He writes about these experiences and
other sufferings with bi-polar.

Babes in Toyland:
Riotous, But Not Grrrls (CD Review)
By Alison Ross
I arrived very late to the raucous riot grrrl party. Not fashionably late, but
mortifyingly late. Like, so late that everyone had a hangover already, and
were sleeping in for years to come.
But then, something happened. The party picked up again. The riot grrrl
festivities, in all their gritty anti-glamor, have revived in recent years.
Suddenly, everyone is celebrating the riot grrrls. Bikini Kill frontwoman
Kathleen Hanna came out of hiding to feature as the subject of a
documentary, "The Punk Singer," and form a band called The Julie Ruin.
The women of Sleater-Kinney magically merged paths after a 10-year
hiatus, put out an album of rousing, robust tunes, and launched a highly
successful international tour.
And then, this year, ferocious femmes Babes in Toyland began touring
after a lengthy split.
The problem is, Babes in Toyland, though similar in sound and ethos to the
riot grrrls, never actually considered themselves a part of the movement,
and indeed show a veiled contempt for being associated with it.
The riot grrrls, you see - vociferously feminist - brashly flouted society's
expectations of women. They didn't just simply eschew demureness, they

impertinently combatted it, incarnating the obverse in the most unfettered
way possible. At Bikini Kill shows, an underwear-clad Kathleen Hanna
would bare her stomach with the word "slut" scrawled across it, and taunt
the men up front, ordering them to move to the back and concede their
places to women. Bikini Kill's fierce sonic tirades would mock men's
narcissistic relationship with their genitalia and attack subjects such as
domestic violence. Sleater- Kinney's melodic punk anthems would skewer
male hegemony and embrace Sapphic pleasures. Riot grrrl zines
would spell out thorny manifestoes against a society suffocating in
patriarchy.
But while lyrically Babes in Toyland were less political than the riot
grrrls, physically, with their "kinderwhore" aesthetic (incorporating an
ironic babydoll look), and raw, feral approach to music, they seemed
perfectly aligned with them. In fact, the fearsome threesome perhaps
seemed a better embodiment of the movement than, say, the more
domesticated Sleater-Kinney.
Mostly, however, Babes in Toyland were cited as major influences on the
riot grrrl movement, even as they consciously extricated themselves from
it. Babes in Toyland were also revered by the reigning male bands at the
time, such as Sonic Youth and Nirvana. And, lastly, Babes in Toyland were
infamously imitated by Courtney Love and her band Hole - a legend in its
own right.
On "Fontanelle," the band's sophomore and most critically acclaimed
album, Babes in Toyland mesh an almost robotic tautness with menacing
sneer, showing that unhinged aggression can have a truly ovarian genesis.
The Exorcist-style guttural snarl of Kat Bjelland and a scorching satanic
sound forged from the ashes of 80s metal and hardcore is both bolstered
and belied by poetically misanthropic lyrics:
"I want to live in the smallest corner of the densest mind of the
fuckmost room and sing the stars they swing from the chandelier strings
You know who you are
You're dead meat motherfucker
You don't try to rape a goddess"
(Bluebell)
"Say violets hang around with toilets and look smack at us and symbolize
everything that is disgust and mistrust
Licorice eyes pin me down thighs"
(Handsome and Gretel)

Elsewhere, self-loathing, corrupted family dynamics, and vindictiveness
toward men all feature rather frighteningly.
The album, indeed, is steeped in horror; it plays like the soundtrack to a
slasher film and yet has psychological terror at its core.
Babes in Toyland were not explicitly riot grrrls, but they caused riotous
rifts in the male-dominated punk/grunge scene, with their audacious
refusal to yield to standards of decorousness hypocritically implied for
female artists. They turned the "idealized female" concept on its dastardly
head sartorially, sonically, and lyrically. They toyed with the sexist
expectations of their gender in a landscape littered with provincial
misogyny.
Long reign the Babes.
Editor’s note: This review was first published in Literary Orphans,
Issue 21

Two Poems
By Russ Cope
Author bio: Russ Cope is a writer from West Virginia. He's been in food
service, janitorial service, and many other jobs. His poems have appeared
in Poetry Super Highway and Eternal Haunted Summer.
Unzipped
zipper's down, what a mind fuck
on a bland otherwise bizarre week day
with the scrabbling grabbling little tykes
running from me in droves like I'm some
dank monster, fangs full of fun times,
spitting venom at them, unzip me further
and you might find a field of flowers or
a delightful promise, unzip me all the way
and you might find Aristotle's prime mover
or a full orchestra about to go into swing,
dancing, what a mind fuck, here they are
laughing in my unzipped-ness and I'm all
-ness and nothing much else and that's
the sad truth of me, unveiled, bare to light.
Sergeant's Version
now listen you ugly bastards, the world's
turning all potatoes on ends, and we're
going to be stuck out here in this blue moon
desert looking at each other's assholes like
they're the girl next door. climb in. climb
aboard. we've got a brand new vessel. this
one packs pounds of ammunition. don't worry
about the skin of the bloke over there. or why
I said bloke. just pull the fucking trigger so we
can go home. remember the feeling of a Coke
bottle on your lip? remember what it was like to
only be worried about making it to the movie
on time? pull the trigger. let's go.
the tank's running.
there is no tank.

This is Me and My Dogbite (Satire)
By Alexei Kalinchuk
It happened in my unfiltered past. Back then I had a habit of telling
people exactly what I thought of them. Before you judge, it was only for
purposes of their improvement. Only from charity did I single out dinner
companions to tell them about their bad breath or ugly child or how their
taste in clothes made a circus clown’s look modest.
It’s who I was.
And that mattered a lot to me at the time because, unlike anyone
else I knew, I was authentic. As a byproduct of my job, I was that vulgar
man the front office needed when they wanted someone to...handle things.
After the board decided shareholder values were unacceptable, I was
promoted to a job as corporate separation specialist. So after work, it felt
like I’d earned the privilege of a sharp tongue. Maybe that sounds bad but I
couldn’t see myself gardening and jogging when I got home to rid myself of
poisons that had built up in me all day at work. I just wasn’t made like
that.
And that’s how it was with me until that summer night.
In a backyard at a friend’s party was where I said it, something I just
muttered over the glass as I sipped wine.
No one laughed.

I want to emphasize how unimportant that remark was, and of
course I don’t remember it. Maybe it involved someone’s repugnant
mother or the unofficial profession of someone’s sibling. I’m sure I don’t
know or care. You shouldn’t either.
But what I do know is how the world shut itself off to me
immediately afterward. Imagine how if the sun switched off every time you
stepped outside, that you felt the heat, but never got to bask in its rays like
everyone else. That’s how I lived. Weeks and weeks of people closing their
doors, refusing me contact. Those that did speak to me said I’d had this
coming for a long time. To explain my level of isolation, let’s talk dogs.
Yes, dogs. I’m picky about dogs. Won’t touch anything but pedigreed, but
one day I was so starved for recognition of my humanity that I approached
a mongrel on the street. Some cold-nosed, mangy leg-humper no one loved
enough to adopt. I only wanted a wagging tail, a playful lick of my hand.
Instead it bit me. A flea motel of a stray bit me but I had no one to
tell it to. I’d been abandoned. I saw that now.
It was just me and my dogbite.
But reading between the teeth marks in my flesh, I saw that I needed
to change.
I taught myself the art of an idiot’s grin by visiting the primate house
at the zoo. From the tropical bird exhibit I learned to entrance others by
repeating their stupidities back at them. I was onto something. Oh, I still
identified flaws in others, but now I had all of these compliments I wanted

to share. Someone WAS losing weight. Someone HAD the fullest head of
hair I’d ever seen. Someone DID say the wittiest thing ever said in the
history of saying witty things.
THIS is how I climbed back into polite society; THIS is how I came
into my own importance; THIS is how it all changed.
By the way...have I told you how much I like your haircut?
Author bio: Alexei Kalinchuk writes literary novels, has had fiction
published in Amoskeag Journal, The Bitter Oleander, Foliate Oak and is
Pushcart Prize-nominated. He smells like fennel and likes eating
pomegranates alone.

New Strange Life
By Ally Malinenko
It was my year of magical thinking
of walking backwards thought the bad luck spot
that someone drew on the cement
at 14 th street
trying to undo whatever curse this was
because we already had enough bad luck.
Me only 37
cancer already mushrooming inside
like an old oak tree
ready to leave the forest
instead of a scared girl
in a new strange life,
so in that year, David
I clung to you,
to your star
to your Freak King promise
to all your alien angel power.
You could make me bulletproof.
Because you managed to transcend
the chasm of my life before cancer
and my life with it
because you alone could
stitch up the shredded remains
that this diagnosis ripped through my life

ecause I wore your shirt to my first surgery
and then my second
and then my third
when they couldn’t scrap all that cancer out
because it was 2014
and it was your year of magical thinking too,
David Robert Jones, you mortal man, you
who
like me,
sat in
a clean white doctor's office one day
and was ushered into a new strange life.
Author bio: Ally Malinenko is the author of the poetry collections The
Wanting Bone and How To Be An American (Six Gallery Press) as well as
the novel This is Sarah (Bookfish Books). Better Luck Next Year, a poetry
collection, is forthcoming from Low Ghost Press in 2016. She's
@AllyMalinenko where she blathers on mostly about Doctor Who and David
Bowie.

The Chartreuse Cow
By Cindy Hochman
The chartreuse cow is coy when I wear my loving tattoo
The jade jaguar purrs so sweetly in her sleep
The lavender elephant cries when I pull the lever to the left
The pacifist turns blue when I press the red-hot button
The black dog lies inert in its own dirty pool
The white oyster forgets to turn itself into a pretty pearl
The half-masked cat goes into heat on Halloween
The orange mouse trips on a tangle of computer wires
The blonde canary sings a sensuous hymn
The desert is too hot for the fragile golden calf
The pink pig rolls in mud wearing Rimbaud’s mismatched shoes
The buck-toothed beaver builds a lovely high-rise dam
The azure ant is working hard for the money
The queen bee makes love and then she leaves her honey
Author bio: Cindy Hochman is the president of “100 Proof” Copyediting
Services and the editor-in-chief of the online journal First Literary Review-
East. Recent poems are published (or forthcoming) in CLWN WR, Arsenic
Lobster, Lips, Muddy River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Monkey Bicycle,
Levure litérraire, Glimpse (Canada), Unlikely Stories, San Pedro River
Review, and Kiyi (Turkey). Cindy was recently a grand prize winner in the
Long Island Light Verse Content in Huntington. Her 2011 chapbook, The
Carcinogenic Bride, has been recommended on Winning Writers. Her latest
chapbook is Habeas Corpus, from Glass Lyre Press.

Review of
Jupiter Works on Commission
by Jack Phillips Lowe
!"#$%&%#'())*#
#
#
!
There is a cumulative strength to the poetry in Jupiter Works on
Commission, the latest pamphlet/ small poetry collection by Jack Phillips
Lowe (published by Middle Island Press, 2015). The twenty-four poems
explore American blue-collar life from the down in the mouth perspective
of the blue-collar, urban male. Frequently jobless, working on painfully
reduced salaries or in dead-end jobs, it is not an uplifting existence. Despite
moments of black-humour, occasional lightness and some bizarre
surrealism, the sequential narrative of the poems collectively builds to
create a sense of routine despair and desperation, or perhaps it is just tipof-the-fingers
survival of mundane life. Whichever, there is no way out, not
even via death, as Harry discovers in the poem “Easy Layup”, when he
meets his dead drinking buddy Lou “sitting upright and breathing”. Lou
admits that, following a quick peek at his Netflix queue,
“ “I snowed the Reaper into refunding me the time
I spent watching Twin Peaks in the 1990s
All of it,” said Lou, chewing ice from his drink. “
Television figures significantly in the drab lives of the men exposed in
these poems and in the poems themselves.
There is Buchman, a character who appears in a number of poems
exploring progressive episodes in his life, who imagines his father putting
his love of the Western TV series Bonanza before his wife’s desire to see
Elvis perform, live at Vegas. The fact that his parents had made it to Vegas,
but then had been stopped from achieving his mother’s desire by the

mundane interruption of the TV creates a sense of second rate failure and
not-achieved potential that underlines many of the poems in the collection.
Then there is the poem “Multiple Ironies” which explores the live on-air
suicide of American TV presenter Christine Chubbock and the fame and
popularity she achieved only through death. The poem “Godspeed, Myrna”
explores the obsession of the poem’s protagonist with the TV actress
Myrna Fahey when,
“By his fourth month of unemployment,
former magazine fact-checker, Lon Colfax
had discovered a most pertinent truth –
just because you’ve left your job
doesn’t mean the job has left you.”
The British comedian Karl Pilkington gets a poem to himself. “Where The
Wheels Fell Off” is a jaundiced contemplation of where America went
wrong and why it takes someone outside the system to point it out. That
fact that Pilkington’s stage persona is that of a first class idiot serves to
emphasise the irony of the situation.
The poems are overtly narrative and the language of the poems is plain,
conversational and largely unornamented. Despite traditionally structured
stanzas, the poems read more like prose-poetry than anything else. The
cumulative effect of this laconic, conversational tone adds to the gritty,
abandon-hope, feel of the vignettes and brief tales sketched in the poems.
One of my favourite poems from the set is the opening poem, “The
Breadman”, in which the initially mocked Christian charity of
who
“Calvin the Bibleman,
born-again Christian forklift driver,”
“used to bring loaves of bread
from his church’s soup kitchen
and leave them in the break room
for any and all takers.”
gives way to something more practical and positive when the bread
becomes an essential part of day to day life for his colleagues, following
several rounds of savage pay cuts.
There is also a number thing going on within the poems, with all numbers
highlighted as numerals within the text rather than words. I must admit I

can’t work out if there is a poetic significance to this, and if there is, what it
might be, or whether it is just a formatting quirk.
Amongst the review quotations on the back of the book there is one from
me, taken from my review of an earlier pamphlet by Lowe. It says, “If you
like your poetry narrative and reflective of contemporary man-in-the-USstreet
existence, you might want to check out [Jack Phillips Lowe].” The
quotation is as applicable to Jupiter Works on Commission as it was to
Lowe’s earlier poetry. In my opinion, though, in between times Lowe has
polished his writing and, as a result, Jupiter Works on Commission is a
smoother and more accomplished slice of US poetry compared to the
previous chapbooks.
In terms of Jupiter Works on Commission, I’d summarise it by saying that
it is plain-talking, narrative, semi-prose poetry, interlaced with moments
of black humour and surrealism, which takes us into the airless,
contemporary existence of the blue-collar man in the run-down, urban, US
street. Yes, it’s a mouthful, but, for me, it says it all.
Author bio: J.S.Watts is a UK writer. Her poetry, short stories and book
reviews appear in a wide variety of publications in Britain, Canada,
Australia and the States and have been broadcast on BBC and Independent
Radio. Her poetry collection, “Cats and Other Myths”, and multi-award
nominated poetry pamphlet, “Songs of Steelyard Sue” are published by
Lapwing Publications. Her novels “A Darker Moon” - a dark, psychological
fantasy and “Witchlight” – a paranormal tale with a touch of romance, are
published by Vagabondage Press. For further details see:
www.jswatts.co.uk

Two Poems !"#$+,+(,#-./*)0(1#
#
i ain’t nev’a been loved...
i been a lotta thangs
in my life
been somebody’s child
somebody’s wife
taught sundy school
n’ carried a knife
lived in good
and lived in strife
but one thang
i ain’t nev’a been is
loved
had sweet nothin’s
whispered in my ear
even had somebody
call me dear
stayed with one
for more’n a year
‘n once or twice
i shed a tear
but i ain’t nev’a been
loved
oh yeah
i been hugged on
and kissed on
‘n i been loved on
but i ain’t
nev’a
been
loved
not
true blue
through and through
not till now
not till
you

hey mister…
hey mister
is it my dark brown skin
my matted nappy hair
my ruby red lips
my deep raspy voice
my nose that spreads like wild fire
is it my eyes
my black onyx eyes
these eyes that talk to you
that talk back to you
eyes that see through
yur brittle bones ‘n yur empty heart
them white powdered bones ‘n ice cold heart
is it my long reachin’ arms
arms that reach round this here life
this life without life that you chain me to
arms that reach back to tha’ land’a my cousins
reach back to ancient dreams and soundless screams
reach back to tha’ beginnin’s
of all tha’ beginnin’s
hey mister
is it my big round breasts
breasts floatin’ round like summer clouds
in yur wet dreams of kingdom come
yur kingdom that is
yur kingdom that done come
all over my purty red dress that you bought me
you know tha’ one
that one you said was
tha’ color’a my ruby red lips
yeah big round breasts
now all full’a warm life givin’ milk
milk for this here little baby girl’a mine
this here purty little girl that look jest like her mama
‘n a whole lotta like her pappy
her skin ain’t so purty brown ‘z mine
‘n her hair ain’t so nappy ‘z mine
‘n her arms ‘n legs well thay ain’t so much like mine neither
‘n you say you love the way she look
‘n you say you gonna treat her tha’ same special way
you done treated her mama
hey mister
is it my swaggered walk

my big wide hips swingin’
to tha’ silent chants’a my ancestors in tha’ motherland
you know tha’ land don’chu
tha’ mother land
my mother’s land
that land where you done
gone ‘n stole my mama
wrapped her all up in that
iron clad neckless ‘n them iron clad bracelets
‘n threw her into tha’ pits’a hell
till ya’ll washed yur scrawny asses
upon tha’ shores’a this here promised land
‘n what all this promised land
done promised you mister
seems it promised you
you could jest go on ‘n do whatever
you wanted with whoever you wanted
don’t make no difference who or what
like it din’t make no difference
what you done to my mama
when you rolled all ov’a her
on them long rollin’ nights on that long rollin’ boat
that went ‘n took you to my native land
‘n then brought you back to this here promised land
this here land’a milk ‘n honey
well mister
tha’ only thang ’bout
milk ‘n honey for you now is
you thank that there blood
runnin’ through yur filthy veins
is all nice’n white like milk
‘n that your slitherin’ slimy thang
is all sweet like honey
but that’s where yur all wrong mister
all wrong
yeah
dead
wrong
‘n i’m wonderin’ jest what part’a me
you thought you could hold hostage
with them there chains’a yurs
cause these here eyes
that see you fur what you are
‘n these here ruby red lips you love ta’ bite
‘n this here nose that smells yur foul stink
‘n this here nappy hair you like ta’ pull
‘n these here arms you bound in hate
‘n these here long legs you like ta’ part

‘n this here heart you thought you could kill
‘n this here me you ain’t nev’a did see
well mister
these here thangs
all put togeth’a make one woman
one mean woman
one mean woman
that ain’t gonna take yur shit no more
no she ain’t
oh
hey mister
jest one more thang
‘fore i go ‘n give you what you need
jest one more little ole thang
i’m gonna go on ‘n call you
by yur right name now
yur special name
jest one time
yeah
one
time
hey daddy
bam!
Editor’s note: “i ain't nev'a been loved” appeared in yareah magazine in
June 2012, and “hey mister” appeared in yareah magazine in December
2014
Author bio: Ms. Gilstrap is a featured poet/artist at Yareah Magazine and
also at Plum Tree Books. Her first two volumes of poetry, Gypsy Woman
Words [2014] and Words Unspoken [2013], are both available at Amazon.
Her poetry has been widely published in numerous literary journals and in
2014 and 2015, she was invited to read her work at the prestigious
Fermoy International Poetry Festival in Ireland. A number of her poems
have been narrated, as well as lyrically arranged and recorded by the
accomplished Aindre Reece-Sheerin, vocalist/musician. She is currently
working in collaboration with the internationally-acclaimed artist, Ken
O'Neill, on a book that will feature her poetry, along with his art. She
resides in Shreveport, Louisiana, but divides her time between there and
the East coast as she completes her third book of poetry, Willful Words,
that will be released in 2016. You can link to her work at:
http://thegypsyonwordsunspoken.blogspot.com/

Artist bio: Denny E. Marshall has had art, poetry, & fiction published,
some recently. One recent credit would be Camel Saloon. See more at
www.dennymarshall.com
Editor’s note: Drawing #1, “Windows To The Soul,” was first published in Pablo
Lennis; Drawing #2, “The Waiter,” was first Published in Pablo Lennis

Bitter
By Devona Sand
my skin was tender
elastic wrinkled experience
and
the incision that bled
translucent honesty and trust
out
was no paper cut
in sessions my flow
hijacked
missing the specific connective
tissue as warmth left
and
scars widened growing cold
with the projective lashings of adapted
diagnostic regimens leadened
while
my lifeblood
a psych matter debated
gently poured into vials
a particular strand of genome
revealing
a reddish hue mutated
glint reflected from a
light above
my eyes caught the shine
a loose construct and process
so
smashing the container open
genes with fine-tuned roles
collagen gone spatial
I
continue to carry the shards

an embedded sting dripping
hypermobile regardless of status
resistant
name it disease
own it as evolution
change as a condition is
incurable
Author bio: Devona Sand is a midwestern, cloud watching, tangent-prone,
butterfly chasing, studious writer with an --some say, 'overactive' --
imagination and a deep need to express issues both real and dreamed. She
has a BFA in Creative Writing awarded from Hamline University and has
been known to receive paychecks for her work in communications. Sand's
musings have been published in BareBack Magazine, The Fulcrum, The
Paper Lantern, among others. Sand believes reality is an individualistic
experience that is responsive to environmental cues. Heavily influenced at
early age by Bugs Bunny and the Velveteen Rabbit, Sand may be a stinker;
however, she keeps it real.

Storytelling
Lemon-juice truth
burns through a kiss
& your narrative carves
talismans from our bodies.
The skin between my breasts
dissolves with the dregs
of stories we share for the sake
of becoming us; ego
snaps my neck, each whiplash
syllable catches in my throat, until I blow
a joke into your cloud of smoke
& it tickles the cheek
of the secret you hunched
under half-lies, the you sheltered
in untold myth, releasing your ginflushed
regret to the rain.
Author bio: Kate Garrett was born thirtysomething years ago in
southwestern Ohio, but has lived in the UK since 1999. She writes poetry
and flash fiction, and edits other people's poetry and flash fiction. Her work
has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her latest pamphlet, The
Density of Salt, is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2016. In
real life, Kate lives in Sheffield with another poet, a cat named Mimi, and
three too-clever trolls who call her "mum". On the web she lives here:
www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk.
#
#
#

WAR IS GOD (polemic)
By Virs Rana
God is defined as the Supreme Being, or, god, a supreme being, who is
worshipped. Worship is showing reverential admiration, respect, and
faith, usually toward some deity. A deity is someone who is more powerful
than humans.
Since most of us do not witness the power of God, or some god, on a
regular basis, we often feel helpless to accommodate our basic needs and
wants. Though many attend a church, a temple, or a mosque, for, at least
one day of the week, this hardly seems enough to maintain against the
trials and tribulations of our daily sowing. And since most of us are not
educated about who, and what we are, we long to see, in some way, the
manifestation of something greater than ourselves. And what is it that
happens every day, to which we are all witness that appears more
powerful than we are? Death,of course.
And as we are duly informed, most deities from ancient times to the
present sustain because they have conquered death, as we hear and read.
So how do we, mere mortals, participate in this power and glory? Well, we
presume to do as much as we can. And what we can do very well is kill,
because death, ours and others, becomes our affirmation of God, and our
unique association with him/her/it. Reference various scriptures from
major religions where God invokes His believers to protect His name, His
people, and His law. But who gets to decide when a transgression against
these invocations occurs? And what is the appropriate response? These
are questions lost to the ubiquitous claim that our/my action against the
other is purely a defensive action, and, therefore, justified. Thus, curiously,
no one truly offends. And still there is war. Perhaps it’s time to point our
fingers at ourselves.
So whether some god inhabits your family, gang, tribe, nation, religion,
philosophy, science, or what we call the universe, matters not, for we have
erred on the side of entropic power: We are here. We are us. You are there.
You are them. We give cause for us more than for them. We mourn for us
more than for them.
The fact that we choose to participate in only half the equation is
considered irrelevant. For the acquired security and proof of 'might is
right' is our god-given mandate to affect death, stand beside it, not be
touched by it, except for any wounds and scars that remain as a tribute to
our survival through it all, and if we die, become martyrs to the cause.
Those who would bristle at the above proposition need look no further
than our history books, which do not record times of peace, but of war.
From the Homeric Wars, to the latest war, and just about any other word
you choose to precede or follow ‘war’, Pyrrhic, Punic, Crusaders, Hundred
Years, Thirty Years, Seven Weeks, Six Day, Napoleonic, American

Revolutionary, French Revolutionary, Civil, Crimean, World, Korean,
Vietnam, Of Roses, On Drugs, On Terror, On Poverty, Cold, we delight in
measuring the outcome so we may gain any advantage in our next conflict,
with better weapons and intelligence to prevent what we can never
conquer, God, as doomsday machine. "The quicker we get there, the better",
many fundamentalists proclaim. (Somehow, there's something diabolical
about praying for peace that we neither understand nor incorporate into
our day-to-day living with our families, our neighbors, and ourselves.)
Thus far, death and destruction have been the preferred choice for
salvation, and when we are close to death, most of us appeal to a god to
show us the other half of the equation, immortality. The atheist is not
immune. In fact, it stands as hypocrisy to obey the laws and (im)morals of
such fettered societies.
While there are fragments of religions and various philosophies that
emphasize 'turning the other cheek' and 'non-attachment', most of us pay
lip service to these concepts, remaining trapped in the cycle where more
death equals more power, as if, I will not survive, if you do, an ancient fear
and resolution to scarcity and oppression. But the scarcity and oppression
of today is more psycho-spiritual than it is physical. At least, that's what
we tell ourselves from our easy chairs and IT mentality, until we visit some
third world country, which relatively few are wont to do, and experience
first-hand the reality of scarcity and oppression.
But, that, we will not abide. So instead of looking at how we have abused
and wasted their resources, we try to impose our solutions on their
circumstances, forgetting that what we have created as physical comforts
are seriously defective, due to our addiction to Death-dealing, as a power
and force to supplement our godly inheritance.
So the next time you complain about those greedy, corrupt, vengeful
warmongers who want to control others, which, of course, is not you, think
about what, and who you worship, and why, if you can move beyond the
expired words of gods. Selah…
Author bio: Virs Rana is a writer of testamentary proportions. His
deconstruction of de rigueur bastions of propriety begs one question one's
identity and reality. This has been a reflection of his lifelong attempt to
achieve sanity, yet his writing permeates with integrity and logic that
belies his world of chaotic order. He is a published writer of articles,
reviews, and a comic strip in a few free press venues, along with an adult
novelty book, and a just completed children's picture book currently up for
grabs.

His Beautiful Bones
By Simone Keane
When he died they
kept his skull.
His bone structure was
perfect.
It would be a shame,
the people said,
to cover it in earth
for only worms and fungi
to play amongst.
So they encrusted the hollows in his divine cheekbones
with rubies, sapphires, diamonds and gold.
With love his skull would never grow old.
People came from all around,
to kiss his perfect, rounded crown.

Upon that kiss -
They understood.
The beauty of their own
Bones.
Editor’s note:
Simone writes:
When David Bowie died, I watched his film clip 'Black Star' for the first
time. In it, a woman with a tail discovers the skeletal remains of what
appears to be Major Tom. The skull is encrusted with jewels. She takes the
skull to a ritual where only women are present.
This ritual sparked a fantasy which I hope might be real, where David
Bowie's skull is kept in a secret location, adorned with gems. He had such a
beautiful bone structure. It would be a shame to discard it.
Author bio: Simone Keane is a singer-songwriter from the southwest coast
of Western Australia. She is a WAM Song of the Year recipient and is
currently working on her third CD, a collaboration with writer Giles
Watson. Occasionally Simone dabbles in poetry and writing.

Killer Water (Polemic) by Alison Ross
Mmmm, lead-tainted water. Aren't you just dying to drink some?
Well, now you can! You and your kids can grab a flight to Flint, Michigan,
and drink all the lead-contaminated H20 your heart desires.
What's that, you say? You're not poor and black and so you don't fit the
demographic for the lead-water-swilling fiesta? You're not privileged
enough to gulp down formerly-clear fluids that are sludgy and reeking?
Hm, you may have a point.
Governor Snyder, of course, loves poor black people. So much so that,
under the guise of saving costs, he cut residents off from the healthy,
treated Lake Huron water and instead allowed untreated water from the
Flint River to flow from Flint faucets. The "plan" was to treat the water
from a source plagued by pollution from the auto industry! But guess
what? The pipes became corroded and the stripped lead deposited right
into water glasses - the same ones that poor black kids were drinking from.
Can I get a collective "Yum!" up here in this motherfucker?
Only 8,500 children were affected. Just a handful, really, suffering from
high lead toxicity in their blood. It ain't no thang at all! Sure, they're poor
and black. Sure, Synder ADMITS he knew about the lead toxicity beginning
in the summer of 2015. As we've already established, Snyder LOVES
African-Americans, especially ones who are impoverished, with no real
voice in, well, anything!
Never mind that citizens were complaining about the noxious odor and
color of the water. Never mind that doctors were claiming the water was
not safe for consumption. Never mind that Snyder claims he would bathe

his own grandchildren in the poisoned putrescence. Well, why doesn't he?
Maybe he could make them drink it, too, so that they would develop
learning disabilities and hearing loss, and suffer from vomiting, high blood
pressure, pain and numbness - and best of all, infertility or miscarriage.
That way, they would be prevented from breeding any more evil freaks like
Snyder!
Because, you see, Snyder's blood is already poisoned, and he's passed his
toxic DNA to his offspring. So yeah, let's make Snyder and his entire family
drink lead-tainted water from Flint faucets!
The entire malevolent scheme is a ploy to privatize water. Because, you
know, access to clean water is not a human right or anything. Ask the
citizens of India! Just because water is a natural resource doesn't make it
immune to gentrification. Only the rich deserve things like clean water.
DUH.
And it's a ploy to kill off black people. POOR black people. Who needs 'em?
Welfare leeching darkies.
Genocide and gentrify - it's the American way!

Two Days, One Night of Hell
(Film Review) by Alison Ross
By far the best movie I saw last year was the Oscar-nominated Belgian film,
"Two Days, One Night." Indeed, it's one of the best movies I have seen in a
very long time. Its visceral verisimilitude strikes at my very core. Its
progressive, feminist message is hope-inducing, and for cantankerous ol'
me, that's saying a lot.
The story concerns Sandra, a Belgian mother, who is suicidal because she
loses her factory job due to some very cruel circumstances. Basically, her
depression rendered her unable to work for a time, and during her leave,
the company discovered they didn't really need her services. So, instead,
the company lays her off and agrees to pay her co-workers more. Their
salary bonus means she's out of work.
This outrageous scenario is further compounded by the company's
insistence that in order to win her job back, she must convince all 16 of her
co-workers to forego the bonus. She has one weekend to perform this
humiliating feat.
Marion Cotillard, she of "La Vie En Rose" fame (she played Edith Piaf
excruciatingly well), is devastating in her role as Sandra. She plays her in
a straightforward, unembellished manner, to the point where she fluidly
melds with her character. She is stripped of dastardly female stereotypes -

make-up, affinity for child-rearing and homemaking - and imbued with
transcendence usually only granted to men in movies. She is shown to feel
a strong sense of identity and responsibility through her work. She is also
developed as a character who refuses to submit demurely to her
circumstances, and rather shows gritty perseverance in the face of
distressing odds.
The movie, too, is bled of adornment, and shot in a cold, quasi-documentary
style. Not only does that heighten the anguishing reality of Sandra's
situation, but it also serves to make a point that while this story may be
fictionalized, it is not so disconnected from the truth in today's relentlessly
corporatized world.
The ending gives us respite from the tension, adds an unexpected flourish,
and comes full circle in only the way that the best dramas do. Highly
recommended.

The Case Against Reincarnation
By Marie Lecrivain
There were-at first- the signs
and sighs that escaped her lips
like dissidents from a gulag.
And then there were
those achingly familiar moments
when his warm hand,
draped over the back of her neck,
became a collar
that tightened against
The questions she tried to ask:
Why was she here? And when did
love become a punishment?
At night, his body reeked
of apnea and privilege,
and polluted her dreams
with a fog so dense
that not even dawn
could dissolve from her memory.
Once in a awhile
she'd almost catch it
in the sick smile that spread
across his face
at the sight of her tears…
the cruelty, so dear and forbidding.
Almost - but not quite.
Author bio: Marie Lecrivain is the editor of The Whiteside Review: A
Journal of Speculative/Science Fiction, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and
writer-in-residence at her apartment. She's the author of several works of
poetry and fiction, including The Virtual Tablet of Irma Tre (© 2014 Edgar
& Lenore's Publishing House), and Grimm Conversations (© 2015
Sybaritic Press).

Two Poems By Brian Wright
Reality TV
Jack’s in his cubicle.
Jill’s down the hall
at the coffee machine.
They’re killing me.
Say you understand and you can expect
a knock on your door tonight.
The boy’s downtown
want to have a talk with you.
My bathtub hasn’t worked for years.
That damn body is as bloated
As a toy doll.
But boy I could tell you stories.
Leather pants and patchouli oil.
Oh you kid.
Peer out your window.
Are your eyes burning yet?
Do you shiver when someone walks on your grave
Or is it something else?
The mad bomber opens his mouth for a kiss.
His woman is wrapped in a black curtain.
Paranoid or realist?
Now you can be both. Your vote means
Nothing anyway.
That ball field is so ugly,
they must have a built it just for us.
This could be our year.
The ranting madman ain’t no artiste.
But he knows what he’s talking about.
Episiotomy
This is no birth—
but a scalp peeling—
skin, shit and blood—
grey matter spilled
on white sheets.

Remember the dark—
the warmth
The placental joy of
the uterus?
Where is your track
your purpose now?
Why this journey
so late in your day?
Better to pause
at the fleshy threshold
before you have eyes
to see,
or voice
to give—
There is much to decide—
Who signifies you?
What comforts you?
And what if any, Gods,
will worship
you?
Nails can’t
piece this skull
together.
No bandage is
big enough
to hide such a
massive scar.
All you are
is spread out
on a silver tray.
And Salome
will not be tricked
to dance.
Author bio: Brian lives in Ireland with his wife and two sleepy Pit Bulls who were
rescued from a dog pound. All four moved to Ireland from New York about six
months ago. Brian was an advertising executive but found the purposeful deceit
and long hours disheartening. He walked out of what had become a trap and
hasn’t looked back.

Heel (Satire) by Marie Lecrivain
"What do you want?"
"I want us to talk."
"Your attorneys and their cease-and-desist order say differently."
"It's important."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to come back to work for me."
"What?"
"You heard me. Let's end the strike. I want you to come back to work for me."
"Why?"
"I want to have things between us be the way they were before."
"You think that's possible?"
"I'm prepared to make things right. I've got a contract right here."
"Let's see it."
"Here. Let me know if you need me to explain anything."
"I have a degree in international labor law."
"I didn't know that."
"I've got a wealth of outside interests."
"Then why aren't you working as a lawyer?"
"Shoes are the family business. And I love a good stiletto."
"I see."
"I have a problem with part one, section six, sub-section D."
"What problem?"
"Working days. And weekends. We're nocturnal. And we never work weekends."
"But I need to increase production."
"You'll have to expand the facilities and hire more elves. The overhead will be
cheaper in the long run. Also, you'll save on wear and tear of equipment."
"Fine."
“Then, there's part three, section two."
"That's just boilerplate."
"It needs to be removed."
"Why!?"
"Our designs are proprietary, hereditary, patented by our forefathers, and
redefined through each generation. You've no right to our intellectual property."
“They're shoes!"
"Yes and if it weren't for us elves, human beings would still be walking around in
bare feet."
"You can't stop other cobblers from making shoes."
"We can stop innovation. Don't test me on this."
"How can you do that?"
"We're elves... magical elves... need I say more?"
"Fine.”
"I like the additions: paid maternity leave, 6.5% cost of living raise over the next
three years, a scholarship program... Profit-sharing? Very nice."
"I'm not unreasonable."
"No, you're greedy."
"I'm not greedy. I'm a businessman."
"Six months ago, you were a broke cobbler with the bank about to foreclose on

your house. We saved your ass!"
"I said thank you!"
"That doesn't make up for the fact that you tried to cheat us in the name of your
bottom line."
"I agreed to every condition you asked for."
"At first- then you went back on your word. "
"I don't understand why you're still mad about that. I said I was sorry."
"That doesn't make up for the fact that you tried to steal from us."
"You said we were partners."
"That didn't mean you could secretly try to film our patented process. You broke
your promise to keep away from our workshop."
"I can't believe you're still angry about that. I gave you the footage."
"Under a court order!"
"I know, and I said I was sorry. What more do you want?"
"I want you to remove part six, section one."
"Why?"
"We're unionized."
"But we're in a right-to-work state."
"EVERY state is a right-to-work state. That doesn't negate the need for a union. In
fact, it reinforces it."
"I can't budge on that point. My attorneys were insistent upon it.”
"You'll not get one elf to cross that picket line. We're ALL unionized, including the
Keeblers."
"I miss their shortbread."
“We're not budging. There's another thing. I want some additions made to this
contract."
"Like what?"
"Our own bathroom. Yours is too big. We need ladders to use the urinals."
"That'll cost me."
"Empty bladders make for happy workers. And we get our own breakroom. The
alley with the dumpsters is not a designated employee recreational area."
"Fine."
"Also, tell your wife to stop stapling religious tracts to our paychecks."
"She means well."
"Yes, but she's violating our First Amendment Rights."
"How so?"
"Freedom of religion, which includes keeping Jesus fanfic out of the workplace."
"Okay."
"Finally, we want ALL cameras and spyware removed from the workshop."
"No.”
"Why not?'
"It's my store. I have a right to know what goes on in there. Those cameras are for
security."
"Well, we have a right not to be spied upon, filmed, tracked, or monitored. We
never stole anything, or lagged behind quota."
"No."
"Then you can take your contract and shove it up your ass."
"That's uncalled for. Why are you being unreasonable?"
"I'm not. I'm trying to protect what's ours."
"Look, I've agreed to everything, but the cameras have to stay. It's not like you can
see them."

"I don't have to see them to know they're there. And it interferes with our magical
patented process."
"I can't."
"You mean you won't."
"No, I mean, I can't. My wife insisted. She's the majority stakeholder."
"Then we've got no deal."
"Won't you think it over?"
"Nope. Once we compromise our privacy, then we've no room left to feel safe and
to be our magical selves."
"It's a workplace."
"Yes. I understand that, but if you don't put your trust in your employees,
especially those who haven't done anything but right by you, then why should we
stay?"
“Why did you come in the first place?"
“Excellent question. Unfortunately, our branch of the elf family is cursed with
seven generations of compulsory acts of kindness. It's one of the reasons I studied
labor law. My great uncle ended up an indentured servant for the Rothschilds. For
the last hundred years we've worked carefully not to be ripped off."
"I don't understand."
"Of course you don't. You're a businessman."
"Well, then shouldn't you remember your kindness and come back to work? My
business needs you. I NEED you."
"No, I don't think so. If the kindness is not extended by the recipient, or returned
back to the elves in full measure, we have the right of forfeiture. Therefore, our
partnership is ended."
"But I need you!"
"That need is not mutual. Adios."
Author bio: Marie Lecrivain is the editor of The Whiteside Review: A Journal of
Speculative/Science Fiction, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and writer-in-residence in
her apartment. She's the author of several works of poetry and fiction,
including The Virtual Tablet of Irma Tre (© 2014 Edgar & Lenore's Publishing
House), and Grimm Conversations (© 2015 Sybaritic Press).

Two Drawings by Jay Passer
Artist bio: Jay Passer's poetry and prose have appeared in print and online
publications since 1988. He is the author of 10 chapbooks. This is the first
representation of his visual art online. Passer lives and works in San Francisco,
the city of his birth.

Caroline
By Ben Finateri
You tell me you have the body of an old street cat.
I look at you next to me on the bed, lying on your back, naked;
"I don't see it," I say.
"No," you tell me, "Look.
My skin is wizened, leathery, tan and tough."
You trace a finger over the scar on your knee,
move your hand over the scars on your legs and stomach and breasts
and the one on your chin.
"My body is worn," you tell me. "Stressed and torn.
I have been hit, kicked, chased, cut, bruised, broken.
I have fallen and not always landed on my feet.
Time, and the elements, have taken their toll."
You roll your shoulders forward and back.
"Look," you tell me. "My injuries have earned me a free-floating clavicle.
Maybe I can squeeze through tiny spaces."
You smile your Cheshire grin and roll onto your stomach.
"You know," you tell me, "the old street cat masks her injuries.
She ignores the paresthesia and pain in her neck;
she forgets the cysts growing around her sacroiliac joint,
the burning down her leg.
She must in order to survive.
But look, you'll see."
You place your hands flat on the bed, and push up, lift your chest,
raise up onto your knees. Your joints crack, and yes,
you have a tiny paunch belly,
but you arch your back, let your head fall to your navel.
You breathe, straighten your back, lift your head.
You inhale, exhale, and return to your stomach.
You tell me, "Like the old street cat
I have not lost the desire to run, to jump, to hunt.
Rather than wither and starve, I've kept my body moving, active.
But look: the winging scapula caused by the stretched thoracic nerve;
the bulging discs, the degeneration at C5 and C6,
the seratus weakened from trauma."

You get out of bed and stand in front of the mirror.
You pose, hips turned slightly forward, one leg in front of the other,
knee bent, arms up, showing off your biceps.
You're lean and muscular, the toughest street cat I know.
I watch you posing, look at the body you've built to fight the pain.
I look, and what I see is beautiful.
Author bio: Ben lives in San Francisco with his wife, Gretchen, and their
two cats, Caesar and Loki. Previous poems have been published in the
2014 Poets 11 Anthology and Clockwise Cat, issue #29. Stories have
appeared in Every Day Fiction and Fiction on the Web. Ben also reads his
poetry at various Bay Area venues. When he’s not writing or reading, he
teaches English as a Second Language at City College of San Francisco.
Visit him at benfinateri.com

Two Poems
By Alisa Velaj
Author bio: Alisa Velaj was shortlisted for the annual international
erbacce-press poetry award in June 2014. She was also shortlisted for the
Aquillrelle Publishing Contest 3 in January 2015 and was the first runner
up in this contest. Velaj’s full length book of poetry, “A Gospel of Light,”
was published by Aquillrellle in June 2015. Her poems are translated from
Albanian into English by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj.
THERE WHERE I DANCE
My homeland is
There where I dance
The wind’s shadow dances through trees
It dances to me
It dances to you
My temple is
There where I keep quiet and pray
The wind’s shadow implores
A leaf’s mercy
(Thousands of onlookers walk in city streets
Without knowing why they cry
Without knowing why they laugh)
My repentance is
There where I implore love
The autumn’s embers
Burn the shadows to ashes…

PENINSULAS
I swiftly caught a bird on the shores of silence.
That rare singer refused to sing me any melody,
Be it the shortest one.
‘Songs let out mute echoes
In the night’s lonely islands,’
It said to me.
When darkness melts into sea glances,
And islands become peninsulas,
Deafness begins to sing a longing song.

Clockmaker
By Michael Lee Johnson
Solo, I am clockmaker
born September 22nd,
a Virgo/Libra mix insane,
look at my moving parts, apart yet together,
holes in air, artistic perfection,
mechanical misfits everywhere,
life is a brass lever, a wordsmith, an artist at his craft.
Clockmaker, poet tease, and squeeze tweezers.
I am a life looking through microscope,
screenshots, snapshot tools,
mainsprings, swing pendulum, endless hours,
then again, ears open tick then tock.
Over humor and the last brass bend,
when I hear a hair move its breath,
I know I am the clock waiter,
the clockmaker listensa
tick, then tock.
Author bio: Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the
Vietnam era. He is a Canadian and USA citizen. Today he is a poet,
freelance writer, amateur photographer, small business owner in Itasca,
Illinois. He has been published in more than 850 small press magazines
in 27 countries, and he edits 10 poetry sites. The author's website is
http://poetryman.mysite.com/. Michael is the author of The Lost
American: From Exile to Freedom, several chapbooks of poetry,
including From Which Place the Morning Rises and Challenge of Night
and Day, and Chicago Poems. He also has over 77 poetry videos on
YouTube as of
2015: https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos

Livin’ It Up!
By Brad Nolen
we
Goliath's
deluded
minions
and
serfs
do
enjoy
such
dainty
treats:
profiteroles
and
viscera
Author bio: Brad Nolen is a Southern writer currently taking liberties with
words from the shelter of an overturned, glass-bottom boat, in the rainiest
place in the land.

Photography by David J. Thompson
Artist bio: David J. Thompson grew up in Hyde Park, NY, and has been
living mostly in Chapel Hill, NC. He has traveled extensively in Europe,
Asia, and the U.S. His poems and photos have appeared in a number of
journals, print and online. Please visit his website at: ninemilephoto.com.

DON’T LOOK BACK
By Everett Warner
I set this tree on fire in the woods and her cigarettes flared up
and singed her lips, and all of her lovers’ lips scorched and all
of their smiles burned away to wide football grins, to these
wide Chelsea grins. I’d learn some bartenders lift out bottles
from these grins, from these holes where their mouths should
be. They just lean backwards and pull out a bottle like a
dagger. Then their ghosts follow her home from the bar and
their nails grow into long lines pulling her legs away and she
unravels, Eurydice, into a statue looking backward in fear, the
moon silvering the white slivers of their nails, red trailing
down the lines where she has become liquid and in the hands
that hold the nails is the bottle of her that they swallow with
their dislocated jaws to give to another spirit seeking spirit.
Her name echoes distant, bottled. But she is a stone, never to
find home--Eurydice. Her stretching smile is a finger stroking
a broken harp string or a knife unsheathing.
Author bio: Everett Warner is a recent graduate of Berry
College. He lives in Lilburn, Georgia and likes wolves. He can
be found @danielwolfer.

I Don’t Want to Be Sad Today
By Diana May Waldman
I don't want to be sad today. I don't want to linger … I want to be aware and
remember … want to keep my compassion, empathy, cry, then let it go. I
don't want to hear the blare of the television, the noise of the radio ... the
talking heads. Don't want to listen to the arguing - the Republicans - the
Democrats. Should we take the refugees or not? When we fail to remember
when we wouldn't take the Jews and they died. And how we have so many
Vets that are homeless and we seem to always be caught between a rock
and hard space. I don't want to see the memes of people terrified someone
is going to take the Christ out a Christmas or take their fucking guns. I
don't want to judge you, roll my eyes and declare that I see so much fear in
you. That is what scares me. That would you die for being right.
And I hate pretending that I love Thanksgiving ... hate pretending that we
gorge ourselves and forget what really happened. Hate knowing the truth.
I don't want to be in a mall, pushed up against someone else carrying
packages of things we don't need or really want, but feel we should have. I
don't want the "best of."
I don't want to slice an apple and think about Monsanto or fear chewing on
a blade of grass.
I don't like poverty and the children who live in it --and the people who
judge those on food stamps, when kids have to eat.
I don't like that sometimes I say stupid things out of fear. Or that I love too
much sometimes and people don't always love me back. I don't like that at
times - I am this open bleeding wound wanting to fix everything all the
damn freaking time.
I don't like that I trust way too easily and take people at face value and
then feel crushed when they aren't who I thought they were.
I don't like that moms used to be able to stay home and raise the children,
giving them the family values and morals.
Dad or Mom should be able to stay home until kids go to school ... and
young people have to work twice as hard just to afford a home, while
landlords gouge the rent.

I don't like that macaroni and cheese is cheaper than vegetables and then
we complain about obesity in this country.
I don't like that social media and texting have taken over a simple phone
call and we just don't connect anymore –not even with our neighbors, and
nobody borrows a cup of sugar anymore.
The world is in secondary love. We are falling apart. It seems we have lost
our connection to one another .... and I really want it back.
Author bio: Diana May-Waldman is an award-winning journalist whose
articles and poetry have appeared in numerous journals. She was also coeditor
with her husband, Mitchell Waldman (author of PETTY OFFENSES
AND CRIMES OF THE HEART) of the anthologies HIP POETRY 2012 (Wind
Publications, 2012)), and WOUNDS OF WAR: POETS FOR PEACE, and is
Poetry Editor for Blue Lake Review. She is a strong women's and children's
advocate.

The Joust
By Marie Lecrivain
And who can bear to be forgotten? - Ricochet/David Bowie
She likes to take a walk every day to clear her mind, jump-start the metabolism
and get the circulatory system evened out because hot flashes are a bitch. She's
worn out three pairs of tennis shoes, logged over 400 miles in four months and
lost seven pounds. She's mapped several routes through her neighborhood that
equal up to three miles without having to cross traffic stops. She's peripherally
aware of the growing homeless population, the one entrenched under the 10
freeway. She sees them often as they lounge against the concrete support in the
shade, or set up tents and hot plates, but like most people, she prefers to forget
they exist.
He wanders down Venice Blvd, wipes his brow and wonders when the bus will
come. He doesn't like crowds. To him a crowd is more than five people and there's
15 people cluster-fucked together at the bus stop at Venice and Cadillac. He
wonders when his relief check will come. He forgot it was Labor Day Weekend.
The post office is closed on Sunday and Monday. His stomach growls. He's not
eaten since last night when he spent the last of his money on a pack of cheese and
crackers and a bottle of water. He needs to make it to the beach where there's
sympathetic tourists with food and money.
Anger rests in the pit of stomach and grows larger like a runaway lump of
yeasty dough. He came to L.A. to make music, to make people dream of the notes
he wove together with his guitar. Even now, fingers clutch for that Telecaster that
used to be his constant companion, but along with his brain, was irrevocably
shattered in the car accident from years before. The doctors told him that he
might recover his ability to play - in time - but traumatic brain injury is tricky to
treat.
He can't play anymore. He sees the notes. He hears the music, but he can't
channel the music from his mind into the instrument. He can't hold a guitar for
very long. His left arm was broken in five places. He lost his place in the band, his
apartment, and his sense of purpose. He can't afford the meds he needed to keep
his cognitive functions running. His family are dead, except his brother whom
he's not close to and his friends have vanished into thin air. He can't remember
the last time he had an actual conversation, or when someone would speak to him
directly. People flow around him like water. He's a stone in a creek to be stepped
on or over. His anger deepens as he wanders further east.
She walks along the east side of Venice, and daydreams about people she's
known; in particular, an old boyfriend who's been appearing in her dreams; an
intense man with a yacht full of emotional baggage and an insatiable libido. She
remembers how she put her life on hold for three years to became a bi-weekly
booty call, a sounding board for his problems, and a vessel for his rage. She drifted
out of his life and she's not heard from him for over a decade. She wonders if he
remembers her and why she's dreaming about him now. Does he dream of her?
She likes the idea of connection, of a far away longing simultaneously generated
with the possibility of fulfillment.
She crosses the street at Fairfax, while she keeps an eye out for errant drivers

who believe pedestrians don't matter. Since she started walking she's had at least
one near miss a week with drivers who treat traffic laws as a set of guidelines. She
uses up the first seven seconds of crosswalk time to triple check the traffic flow
before she steps out into the intersection.
As she crosses Fairfax, she wonders if she should call the old boyfriend, but
then she remembers she doesn't have his number. She could do an Internet
search or see if he's on Facebook. She starts to compose an imaginary email: Dear
____, I hope this letter finds you well and happy. I, too, am well and happy. I have
an active, happy life. I'm always on the move. I was wondering; I know it might
sound weird, but I've been having weird dreams lately. You've been in my dreams.
Nothing strange is happening. You just appear in the background a lot. I wonder...
have you been dreaming about me too? Really? Wow, that's great! What am I
doing in your dreams? I'm doing WHAT?! Really? Don't make me blush!
Seconds before, he spotted the woman. She walks fast and with a purpose, her
head held high, her stride confident and almost impudent. As he takes in her
expensive sneakers, Ipod, and chic sunglasses, the ball of anger expands into
rage. Here's was another one, another person who'll walk around him like he's
nothing, a blip on the radar screen of her consciousness. I'm a person,
goddammit! She doesn't own the fucking street!
She's deep in her imagination, having turned her imaginary email into an tetea-tete
as she walks west on Venice Blvd. She doesn't notice the man as he alters
his trajectory to match her exact steps and
SMACK!
BAM!
In front of her is pair of eyes blaze with anger and accusations. She stops,
flustered. He takes another step, closes the space between them and leans
forward. She stands her ground, curious, and also irritated by the interruption of
reality.
“Why won't you talk to me?” he demands.
She pauses. Her mind races. She frantically searches her memory, tries to spot
him in random corners. She wonders where and if they've met, in what context,
but she comes up with nothing. She takes note of his cadaverous frame, ashy skin,
the pronounced veins on either side of his forehead, and the MTA bus pass that
hangs pathetically around his neck. She sees his shoulders underneath a tatty
blanket are tense with rage. She knows he's not going to leave her alone unless
she gives him an answer.
“Hi! Um... Well, I've been busy...” she begins and then tries to dodge past him.
His left arm, a dark steel bar, rises up with the speed of anguish to stop her.
Panicked, her right arm rises up to block his. They connect in combat on Venice
Blvd. For a second, she flashes back to jousting matches at Ren Faires from years
past. He remembers holding his arm up in triumph to adoring crowds at the
Palladium, at CBGB's, at the Hollywood Bowl. For nano-seconds, they look at each
other, and wonder why... why... why…
Author bio: Marie Lecrivain is the editor of The Whiteside Review: A
Journal of Speculative/Science Fiction, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and
writer-in-residence in her apartment. She's the author of several works of
poetry and fiction, including Grimm Conversations .

The Dilemma of Democracy
The Dilemma is That of a Government Trying To Be an Authentic
Democracy with the Populace Not Having the Knowledge or Intelligence
Sufficient for the Task
By Edwin L. Young, PhD
An examination of America’s range of I.Q.s and highest level of education attained
suggest that only a small percentage of the American population would be able to
sufficiently understand the vast and complicated issues that are set before the
voting public. It is a reasonable surmise to say that the illusion of an intelligent
voting public is perpetuated by the corporate owned media giants since these are
the ones who mold the voting public’s opinions on the vital issues put to voters. It
is probably likely that when the general public votes for a candidate whose
‘platform’ is agreeable to them, the reality is that when in office the substance of
the issues upon which they act are extremely remote from what was publicized by
the major media channels during the election campaigns and what the populace
vote for. The substance of the issues that determine actual domestic and foreign
policy and action are unknown to and completely mentally out of reach for the
minds of those who make up the vast majority of the populace. Democracy,
therefore, is a complete and total illusion.
Furthermore, the officials elected by the public are not beholden to that public but
rather to unknown extremely wealthy elites who fund candidates campaigns and
who determine, precisely, how those office holders will vote on major national and
foreign issues. These modern multinational elite billionaires are the ones who
actually run the US and the rest of the world save, possibly, some of the
Scandinavian nations, China, South Korea, Canada and maybe a few others that
are cited in the referenced chart. In the beginning to the US, the leaders were the
landed gentry, most of whom owned plantations and their workers were almost
exclusively Black African slaves. Many of those landed gentry who constructed
the new republic were probably, as was certainly the case with Thomas Jefferson,
not just extremely well educated but had genius level intelligence. However, their

value systems were descended from or, one might say, relegates handed down
from the prior long history of civilizations; the one exception being the ephemeral
Greek City States such as the early Athenian’s version of the first democracy.
If democracy is not the recommended form of government, what
is? Autocracy? Perhaps democracy is not the only problem or even the main
problem. If one considers the histories of civilizations from their earliest
beginnings, haven’t their evolutions been under control and direction of those
men who had the most intense drive to dominate, control and use other men and
women to do their bidding such as fight other countries for them.
This pattern of domination by the few certainly persists today. These men have, I
do not hesitate to suggest, been driven to expand their power over others, to
exploit and insensitively kill, or rather give the command to kill, even
indiscriminately kill other innocents and not just enemy soldiers, and also to
pillage their goods of their enemy nations and sexually use their women. These
dominant leaders of past and present civilizations and nations delegate the
geniuses of their nation to refine weapons, design military strategies, collect taxes
from the populace, manage finances, control resources, and conscript young men
to be their armies. All the while, those armies of men under their command, they
who carried out orders without a moment’s thought of any ethical considerations
regarding whether or not they should carry out those orders. These men never
give thought to what the consequences for their aggression would be. They are
typically oblivious to the vast harm they are inflicting upon enemy
populations. They do not consider that the victimized peoples that were being
decimated were people just like themselves and their own loved ones. The so
called enemies were essentially people just like themselves but who had done
them no harm. That has been the effectiveness of the commands of top leaders
passed down through their military and governmental hierarchies for one
civilization after another.
In the past, there were no democracies. With the arrival of the United States, the
label democracy was given to its government. The phrase “of the people, by the
people, and for the people” may have made ‘the people,’ or a sizable minority of
Americans feel that this new country with its new government was truly a
democracy. In spite of that Native Americans, negro slaves, and women were not
allowed to vote. Only property owners could vote. Not only that, but the framers
of the !Constitution and the new heads of state and governors of the new states
were all among the elite, those few men who were wealthy and had advanced
education. the new rulers who were voted into office in the government came

from the aristocracy. How different was that from the monarchies from all
previous nations from the dawn of civilization to the newly minted United States
of America. In fact, was little difference between US democracy and the
autocracies over countless previous millennia, regardless of how their
governments were labeled.
How then are the people convinced that the US has a democracy? At first in this
new nation the media was limited to the territory surrounding wherever the new
printing presses were located. Readership was a small minority. Much later,
radio came into being and it was soon followed by movie theaters that would
show short news briefs. And whom do you think controlled these new forms of
media? Of course these were almost exclusively controlled by the wealthy elite.
Soon after World War II, newspapers, radio, the movies, and then television were
controlled by a new class of intellectual elites subservient to the wealthy
elite. This new class soon became the masters of propaganda. Edward Bernays,
nephew of Freud, switched from being a populist to an elitist and first major
advocate of controlling public opinion through skillful use of the then emerging
forms of media to propagandize the masses. Propaganda became a vast new
industry which now virtually controls what the people of nations across the globe
will believe about what is going on in the world. There are very minimal sources
presenting alternative news. This is now a new perfect way of controlling peoples
everywhere. They can shape whatever ‘knowledge of the world ’ the these
propagandists allow the nations of the world's’ populaces to access. From the use
of non-disclosure, as in the beginning of the US, to a brief period of having to use
police force to contain huge public demonstrations, to the current omnipresent
televised propaganda, the wealthy elite have found ways to keep the general
public in the dark about real happenings around the world and to control the
belief systems of entire populations using modern media’s masters of the art of
propaganda.
In conclusion, if democracy is impossible in the modern world, what new form of
government could supplant both democracy and various forms of tyrannical
autocracy. As a cockeyed optimist, or rather idealist, I would propose something
resembling a more truly democratic innovation that in some limited sense
resembles the ancient Greek City States.

The Carefully Constructed Chaos
of Heller Levinson’s Wrack Lariat (Book
Review)
By Alison Ross
Just thinking about writing a review about Heller Levinson’s Wrack
Lariat frankly induces a bit of panic in me. Heller seems to inhabit another
dimension altogether, a frenzied domain where language and ideas trippily
transcend time’s pesky constraints, where they are given free reign to be
as “unhinged” as they were innately meant to be. And although “unhinged”
is perhaps the paradoxical antithesis to the word “hinge,” at least as Heller
means it, the two words seem to have the same connotation.
Because, you see, Heller is the pioneer of Hinge Theory. As I
understand it – and sometimes I think I do, and other times I am sure I
don’t (Heller’s ideas are both elusive intellectually and yet intuitively
sound) – Hinge Theory is a poetics that posits that words and ideas “hinge”
on intrinsic associations, and these associations, once activated, propel a
poem forward. Language acts as an artistic equation. Language is
malleable mathematics, if you’ll permit the oxymoron. With Hinge Theory,
language is both technically precise but also cosmically expansive.
(Of course, Heller may disagree with my flaccid interpretation of his
grand theory, and I’ll just have to live with it.)
Wrack Lariat seems to take Hinge Theory to unfathomed extremes.
When I reviewed Hinge Trio, which was a collaborative work between
Felino Soriano, Heller Levinson, and artist Linda Lynch, my brain felt
mightily befuddled with the labyrinthian language. After reading about

half the poems in Wrack Lariat, it felt as though a category five cyclone
had hurtled through my cerebrum. The frenetic energy, the tumultuous
urgency of the verse – these were sensations not easy to shake off. I had to
take a hiatus.
After my Heller hiatus, I returned more prepared to tackle the
daunting dissection of Wrack Lariat so that I could place it into some sort
of proper perspective. But then I realized, how does one sculpt coherence
out of utter anarchy? And then I had an epiphany as I was finishing up the
book: it’s only anarchic on the surface. Wrack Lariat is actually the product
of deliberate control, where chaos is tightly contained within an orderly
context. A tornado bouncing off the walls of an asylum. Hell, even Linda
Lynch’s cover picture and the illustrations within hint heavily at twister
activity. Elegantly woven whirlwinds.
Okay, so now I can do this.
I think.
Wrack Lariat is divided into ten sections, each with its own milieu. In
the inaugural chapter, “How Much of / wHoosh,” Heller asks a series of
rhetorical anti-questions, some absurd-seeming, but most with pointed
purpose: “How much of commotion is arrangement misconstrued” (a fitting
inquiry for his style of verse); “How much of earth-cunning is dig”; “How
much of tongue is flappable”; “How much of circumstance is
circumstantial”; and so on. These are interspersed throughout the section
that teems with turbulent verse perhaps best epitomized in this poem,
quoted in full:
nevertheless the preposterous has a way of gaining garnering
gathering given the extremities subsequentialities galore glorify in
underweight in the achievement of molasses spaghetti with
marinara sauce sailing at full tide hardly a template to modify so
many concerns alight the brow afflict scowl parsimony is a
declining tautology a life of the mind a sacrosanct search for
signature serious seriously
The rich wordplay in such poems, the alliterative and associative
properties, is staggering to the point of discombobulation. Each poem’s
surface illogic has a Jabberwocky-esque internal rationale, which noisily
declares, “I make sense unto myself!” Each fragment of verse exists as a
screaming statement against stagnation in poetry and art. Hence, the
“whoosh” of each piece.
The next section’s title, “moreover hardly sometimes of if ever
obviously,” recalls the cerebrally whimsical style of e.e. cummings, who
clearly viewed language as his own giant intellectual toybox. Heller, too, is
enamored of language’s perpetual possibilities; he is concerned primarily

with molding his own linguistics, a sort of Chomskian poetics, where our
brains are already hardwired with the template of such a feral vernacular,
and Heller is just teasing it out of us.
Each poem in this section begins with a word from the title, and it
moves sequentially. For example, some of the lines begin, “moreover &
besides furthermore is no longer preposterous bearing deceased
decadence”; “hardly original in his approach to procedure”; “sometimes
you just have to step back a grain gain lawfulness”; “if ever you take a
notion/lubricate with lotion”; “of if as pertaining to equality equidistance
equilateral quasimatter”; and so on.
Each word spawns a new thought which races the poem forward in a
dizzying motion, in a never-ending speed-induced tango across the floors of
infinity.
Sections three through five are titled, “Corner of ____&_____,” “Four-
Play” and “Gerundial Geist,” respectively. The corner poems investigate
intersections between, among other topics, seemingly antithetical ideas,
such as “Corner of Propaganda and Philanthropy,” or related emotional
activities, such as “Corner of Ponder and Brood,” where “gestation” is
“pensive/like/ fish/glued/to a malevolent tide.” The four-play poems are
each – you guessed it - four lines, and explore mundane or minute abstract
matters (parsimony, distances, realism, wilderness) in mock matter-of-fact
or even deadpan ways:
relationships are composed of compromise. compromise entails
giving in or giving up. elasticity is a prerequisite for compromise.
compromise sucks.
The gerundial poems contain gerunds as the instigating lead-ins, as
in “calculating sulk on dismissive freeways,” which imagines “ a drone in
the garden of conspiracy,” and also in “cultivating lachrymal,” whose “in
skeletal Unclutter this Nepenthe” culminates a brief series of inquiries
about underdogs and outlaws.
If all of this is making your head swim in amused bemusement, you
might be relieved to know that the next section, “Accidentals,” proclaims
not to follow any particular pattern, but rather, is a collection of random
“restlessnesses” plucked from the archives of Heller’s documents.
The problem is, these poems ultimately don't provide any respite
from the madness, despite the earlier perceived promise. Indeed, the verse
in this section elevates the sense of lucid lunacy, as epitomized by the
lengthy, restive, tonally capricious, “The Infra-Intra-Ultrapolational
Migration.” This quasi-prose poem not only quotes Billie Holliday lyrics,
but it manages to reference Rothko, children coloring, Zildjian Cymbals,
money markets, cannibalism, suicide-bombing, democracy, ornithology,
verb conjugation, Pound, operas, meter, horses, coupons, laundry, Matisse,
among many many other disparate topics – and yet, they are all credibly
interconnected via Heller’s magical locution.

In the subsequent section, “Wrack Lariat” Heller proclaims the
thesis of his audacious undertaking: "[It] is meant to suggest the Artistic
Mission. A mission that is compelled to reject all that is stale, handed down
- habituated ... intolerant of falsehoods, of the trivially redundant, of the
Uninspired Quotidian." He goes onto state, in a footnote of sorts: "The
authentic artist ... is committed to injecting freshness/new vigor into
Art..."
Heller excels at his own mission, to say the least. The "Wrack Lariat"
chapter features poems that concentrate on several artists, mostly visual -
Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso - and one musical (Joan Mitchell), all of whom
he apparently feels infused "freshness" into art.
In "did Picasso strum?" he inquires whether Picasso actually played
the guitar or merely mimicked it in his paintings: "What happened is he
played the guitar - Visually. Compositionally. He eye-strummed, retinally
fingered, optic-nerved."
In the proceeding "The Dot Soliloquies," all verse was inspired by an
artist friends' dot-laden notebook. The poems are meant, I am assuming, to
serve as the individual "speeches" of various dots.
In, for example, "with dot this circumference," Heller asserts the
raison d'etre of dots: "the ground of being a dot is/round surround/this
round surround/this/bound round surround ground/sound sonic like a
circumferential/dot..." A bit later in the same poem, it is stated that it is a
"soliloquy in dialogue," an oxymoronic qualification if there ever were one.
The penultimate chapter in Heller's epic enterprise is entitled, "Linda
Lynch," which is basically an homage to his collaborator, someone who is
clearly his artistic soulmate, a sort of creative twin who serves as his
visual translator. But in this section, Heller acts as translator, "hinging to"
Linda Lynch's presented drawings, and transforming them into words.
The final chapter, fittingly, is called "Aperture." These poems don't
necessarily take Heller's work into new directions, but they do provide a
large "opening" into which we can peer or fall at will, spying on his process
or taking a brisk walk through the "landscape" of our imagining, since "the
landscape plus what we bring to the landscape becomes our point of view."
After all, he cautions us, "Language achieves landscape both
combinatorially and singularly..."
And this, really, is what Wrack Lariat is all about: Language as
landscape. Heller creates landscape through language not just through
how the words appear on the page, aesthetically - in jagged, frenzied lines,
in tidy prose pieces, or in hybrids of zooming lines and neatly cultivated
prose - but in how he curates and arranges words to fit with each other,
like a puzzle constructed by MC Escher, where everything simultaneously
does and doesn't make sense.
Wrack Lariat is the very definition of "controlled chaos," and Heller
Levinson is a word-Cubist.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN WROTE
By James Babbs
Richard Brautigan wrote
The Pomegranate Circus on
the same day I celebrated
my very first Christmas
I got a string of bells
from Mom and Dad
and a dollar
from Grandma Walker
it says so right here
on page 34 of my baby book
Author bio: James Babbs continues to live and write from the same small
Illinois town where he grew up. He has published hundreds of poems over
the past thirty years and, more recently, a few short stories. James is the
author of Disturbing The Light(2013) & The Weight of Invisible
Things(2013).

Anne Tammel’s Endless: A Literate Passion
(Book Review)
By Rehan Qayoom
In Endless: A Literate Passion, Anne Tammel has offered poems to the
world that heal through their complex evocative consonantal process. The
poems are intricately woven and depict unique experiences perfectly
matched to individual words that conjure and elucidate in ways that tie
them to every reader’s own subjective experiences with astonishing clarity
and deft:
a crisp pear, fleur
de sel beurre, truffle,
pate, indogo herbs –
milkweed honey,
newly ripened figs – pure
saffron desire…
(‘Moon an Open Book’).
Vivid and visual, Tammell looks past the mortal life in compliance with
Dante’s command in ‘Dante and the Silk Journal’. These poems are deeply
immersed in the experiences of great writers and artists of the past; they
skilfully inhabit spaces that resonate with Genius Loci processing into the
soul almost alchemically with:
unmentionable
words, as if
we could
ever

touch those
dreams.
(‘Proliferate Ashes’).
It is not one of those books that can be read just the once or casually,
rather it is to be kept treasured, to hand and to keep coming back to for
emotional connection and reference points to live by as different poems
would appeal to different times and in different situations.
Endless: A Literate Passion is available through Saint Julian Press.
Author bio: Rehan Qayoom is a poet of English and Urdu, editor, translator
and archivist, educated at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has
featured in numerous literary publications and performed his work
internationally. He has published 2 books of poetry and several works of
prose.

TWO POEMS
By Kathleen Latham
Cubism
I picture you on my bed,
that water-faucet face of yours
dripping
with self-pity.
I can’t remember your eyes,
though I know we argued
about their color.
I can’t remember
the feel of your hands
on the small of my back
or the sound of your voice
with another
excuse.
These things were mine once.
I thought I would carry them whole.
Yet here I am,
seven years on
with only
the
drip
drip
drip
of a
man
to haunt me.

Closure
I would fly three thousand miles
just to stand outside the place
where you get your coffee.
I’d drag my luggage to the market
and duck behind the grapefruit.
Linger outside your work and talk
to the bums. Throw a twenty
on the sidewalk and buy everyone
dinner.
Three thousand miles. Coach.
If only it would show me
that you’ve grown fat and bald
or old and ugly. That you’re mean
to small children or cheat on
your taxes. Anything, anything
to help me get over you.
In the economy of love,
that would be worth the price of the ticket.
Author Bio: Kathleen Latham is a fifth-generation Southern Californian
who upset the family tree by moving to the Northeast and giving birth to a
pack of very pale hockey lovers who believe deeply in social justice,
comedy, and a really good argument. Between raising her brood and
working on a novel that never seems to end, she has won multiple awards
for her short fiction. Her work has appeared in The Southeast Review, The
Lascaux Review, and Alehouse. There would be more, but she gets easily
distracted by computer solitaire and her cat.

GUNS FOR ONE AND GUNS FOR ALL
(SATIRE) By Martin H. Levinson
Brazil, a nation that has the distinction of having more gun deaths
annually than any other country, recently held a referendum on a nationwide
gun ban. Before the vote, polls indicated more than 70 percent of Brazilians
supported the ban. Then the Brazilian gun lobby began running
advertisements that suggested that if the government could take away the
right to own a weapon it could appropriate other civil liberties. This argument
took gun control advocates by surprise, and on voting day, 64 percent of
Brazilians voted against the gun ban. It turned out that a lobbyist for the
National Rifle Association (NRA) had played a major role in imparting a
“they’ll take away your rights” strategy to local gun advocates.
I say thank God for that NRA lobbyist because if you give the
government the right to take your gun from you, what’s to stop them from
taking away your right to free speech, your right to own property, and your
right to peaceful assembly? If you don’t have a gun it certainly won’t be you.
Let me expound a little on the situation here.
Let’s say you invite the government to your house for dinner and over
drinks you get to talking to them about how you don’t like the fact that they’ve
raised your taxes and that there are too many special-interest groups. The
government, which has been downing vodka martinis as fast as you can pour
them, tells you to shut your trap and mind your own business. You reply it’s a
free country where everyone has the right to speak his or her mind. The
government laughs and puts duct tape over your mouth. Conversation then
ceases and the feds enjoy the excellent food you’ve prepared, while forcing
you to listen to their tirades about how the American people don’t appreciate
Uncle Sam and why President Bush honestly believed that Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction. After the meal the government leaves your
house, and on the way out they take your TV, sofa, La-Z-Boy recliner, and
collection of Playboy magazines. They promise to bring the Playboys back
when they finish reading the articles.
Here’s another scenario. You and your friends are hanging on the
corner watching all the girls go by. Your group likes the ladies and

appreciative remarks are made like “Hey baby, nice set of legs.” “What a
bodacious booty!” “They certainly look real to me.” Two politically correct
police officers stroll over and tell everyone to cut the crap and move along.
You’d rather stay and make a fool of yourself but because they’re cops, and
they have guns, you and your buddies reluctantly go home and watch porn on
TV.
The examples I have given could only take place in a world where guns
were outlawed, because if you had a gun the government would think twice
about gagging you with duct tape and cops wouldn’t tell you to scram so fast.
The fact is if we all owned guns the world would be a better place. People
would get quicker service at the motor vehicles bureau and individuals would
listen more respectfully to each other in the office. Subway rides would be
great adventures because if someone was accidentally jostled, that person
might pull a gun. (I doubt they’d use it though, since everyone on the train
would be packing.) The meekest among us would feel tremendous selfconfidence
knowing that threats by bullies could be easily handled by firing off
a round or two.
This may be hard to imagine, but there are actually some people around
who actually favor gun control. They argue that every year a number of
children die in gun-related accidents; that guns and domestic violence make a
deadly combination (in the US over half of family murders are caused by
handguns); and that individuals do not have a basic right to own weapons that
shoot. My answer to their arguments is this: kapow, kapow, kapow!
Lily-livered-liberal loons cannot be allowed to take away the
fundamental, God-given right that each of has to own a gun. Hey, if the good
lord didn’t want us to have guns he wouldn’t have given us trigger fingers.
And why do you think human beings are at the top of the food chain? It’s
because we got to the ordnance first, ahead of the chimps, apes, and all the
other beasts. If those guys had gotten their paws on the hardware before us,
we’d be the ones in cages at the zoo. Guns are also good for clam digging,
stirring soup, and they make excellent paperweights. There’s nothing like an
AK-47 to keep one’s documents in place.
Author bio: Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National
Book Critics Circle, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General
Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in
various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills and
Riverhead New York.

FROM THE BOWELS OF UNSCIENTIFIC
THOUGHT:
OBESITY
(SATIRE)
!
By John Alexander
!
!
Obesity is a big problem in the United States- one-third of adults and 20% of
children are affected- and I have a theory about where it all started.
Now, I’m sure you’ll all agree that except for a handful of old people
hanging around, everyone that we see today is either a descendent of the
baby boomers or a baby boomer themselves.
You see, obesity started with the baby boomers- and this is how it
happened.
Back in the day- when the boomers were little kids- the playgrounds were
pretty simple. There was the swing set, the monkey bars, the slide- maybe
a merry-go-round- and most importantly- the see-saw.
There were also- in each classroom- maybe one or two kids who were
teased because they were overweight. Today, it’s called bullying, but back
then, it was just the way that it was- par for the course. So, not only were
these kids teased in the classroom, but, on the playground, these
overweight kids were at a serious- and significant- disadvantage. They had
trouble climbing the monkey bars; they couldn’t get the swing to go as high
as the other kids; their weight made their trip down the slide absurdly
slow; and they couldn’t run fast enough to get the merry-go-round spinning
in a way that made being on it fun. So, everything on the playground held
the potential for ridicule and derisive laughter- everything except the seesaw.
Yes, once they were on their end of the see-saw, they were both
unmatchable and unsurpassable- and that’s where obesity started, on the
see-saw.

For you see, all the “skinny and fit” kids just hated that they- by
themselves- couldn’t get the “fat” kids up in the air- and keep them there.
So, they doubled and tripled-up on their end of the see saw to try and beat
the “fat kids.”
It was this psycho-emotional-social-schoolyard trauma that was so
profound that it took up “residence” in their psyches and led themsubconsciously,
of course- to take up eating in the excess in order to win in
life- in order to win at the see-saw.
Then, after the boomers had kids, their children- through subtle social
learning and not-so-subtle overt example- became just like their parents,
doomed to obesity.
I know, I know, it seems simplistic- and maybe even unfair- to place the
entire blame for obesity on the see-saw. But, when you think about it- over
time- can there be another explanation for the phenomenon of obesity?
Yeah, maybe. Maybe they can blame it on genes, hormones, emotions,
medications, an inactive lifestyle, fast foods, smoking, cable television,
video games or social media- maybe. But me? I’ll blame it on the see-saw.
That said- and, so- goodbye- until the next time- from the bowels of
unscientific thought.
#
#
#

The Murderers and Rapists You Hate to
Love: Why the NFL’s Narrative Needs a
Radical Rewrite (RANT)
by Adam Phillips
When Teddy Mitrosilis of FOX Sports says, laudatorily, that Jameis Winston
had “fully embraced his role as villain in college football, and is now feeding off the
animus directed Florida State's way,” you ought to be deeply disturbed, and here's
why: this scintillating aura of villainy can only emanate from one possible source.
Winston didn't tie a lady to the train tracks or hold the president for ransom. His
dastardly reputation stems from the public perception that he's a rapist. That's
the element of his persona that has elevated Jameis Winston from superstar to
folk antihero.
Winston, according to Mitrosilis, not only reveled in his role as reprobate, he
absorbed our Puritanical hatred, distilling it into power on the gridiron. Following
this logic, the accusations of sexual assault have not only bolstered his
reputation, they’ve transformed him into a better football player.
The writer then encourages us to reflect, for a moment, on our diminished
college-football-watching-life-after-Winston, now that we no longer have access to
these off-field “antics” that have produced such “an incredible on-field character.”
He then predicts, with nostalgia and a hint of recrimination, that we’re going to
“miss [Winston] more than [we] realize.” And here we start to feel a little foolish.
With all of our high minded moral objections to sexual assault, we’d lost sight of
the true meaning of rape, which is to generate heightened interest in Seminole
football games.
Apologists frequently return to the spurious idea that athletes exist under
such hot media lights that even the tiniest of indiscretions, unremarkable in
civilian life, tend to imprecate severe punishment upon the superstar. Now, to a
certain point, this reasoning is sound. If I walk through my place of work rubbing
my fingers and thumbs together in a “show me the money” gesture, people might
think I'm an idiot, but crews of fully grown men won't sit around arguing the
morality of it for six months. This rationalization falls apart, however, when
applied to a hypothetical scenario where I've stolen, destroyed personal property,
been accused of sexual assault, stolen again, then sexually harassed and
intimidated everyone within earshot by standing on a table screaming “F**k her

in the p***y.” Similarly, just because I'm Joe Blow doesn’t mean I can drive
around with the blood of two stabbing victims in my car, destroy my presumably
blood-soaked clothing, tell a bunch of witnesses to keep their mouths shut, and
then skate because neither myself nor my buddies (which, when added together,
equals the sum total of anyone who could possibly have perpetrated the murders)
can quite remember just who did what to whom.
After the violence and the canned apology, cue the platitudinal chorus that
“everybody deserves a second chance,” and “everyone loves a good redemption
story.” There’s something distinctly American, we’re told, about a man’s right to
atone for his sins and begin anew. Really? Is that what we genuinely believe,
minus the football? Let’s check.
Let's say a new neighbor comes calling to deliver his court-ordered
introduction as a sex-offender…Let’s say his name is Ben. Big bastard. Seems a
bit slow-witted. Are you going to take him under your wing, offer him that
second-chance job at your small business? Would it assuage your apprehension if
he explained that the sexual predator wasn't actually him, but an alternate
personality named Big Ben? What if he told you that none of it was his fault,
because the rapes only occurred after “Big Ben just kept building up […] kept
taking over […] Superman kept taking over Clark Kent and you just never saw
who [I] was any more.” (Compare Roesthlisberger’s explanation to that of
Roberto Herrarte, who murdered his wife and son while they slept: “I am Otto.
But I have Roberto inside of me who is responsible for everything I did that was
bad.”) Would you let him date your daughter? Would you let Jameis Winston
date your daughter? Would you hire Adrian Petersen to babysit?
Michael Vick is generally presented as the ultimate example of rehabilitation
via the “second chance.” Technically, Vick earned absolution through his
remarkably erumpent moral fortitude, evidenced I guess by the fact that he
hasn't ditched his legion of handlers and snuck into the backwoods to breed and
train and murder some dogs. In reality, of course, we're extrapolating the
resurrection of his dog-slaughtering soul from the fact that he's still okay at
playing football.
And Vick is just one figure within the bizarre equation that success on the field
expiates off-field evil. Which is why the Roethlisbergers of the world rush to
declare a negation of the past, calling everyone's attention back to what really
matters, in the bigger picture, which is football, repeating (and always, bizarrely
enough, with an air of wounded moral superiority) some variation of “I don't
intend to discuss any details […] I'm more determined than ever to have a great
season [...] I'm happy to put this behind me and move forward.” Well no shit. I'm
sure Phil Spector would have preferred everybody just turned up The Ramones
and left him alone, and I'll bet Bill Cosby is more than ready to tell some jokes. In
fact, I'm guessing nearly every rapist and murderer in the history of rape and
murder would rather we forgot about his past. But they have to earn our
forgiveness. Only those who can come back and win are assumed to have passed
through the chrysalis of redemption. Which is why Tiger Woods is still perverted
damaged goods, but Ray Lewis “has washed away his sins...because we
understand that what we all got to watch him do was special.”
Which brings us to the odd recurring insistence that an athlete’s personal life is
sacrosanct, off-limits, and absolutely unrelated to his job. This is completely
hypocritical for two reasons. First of all, the proposition that you can’t be fired
for actions outside of the workplace applies to literally no job in America, from
bus boy to President. Secondly, this supposed right to privacy is only ever

selectively invoked to stave off condemnation and punishment. Athletes enjoy a
great deal of political and cultural sway, which they utilize to great effect.
Immense swathes of the population who wouldn't have given a rat's ass about
Ferguson or Eric Garner were forced to educate themselves after the St. Louis
Rams held up their hands and Lebron wore his “I can't breathe” t-shirt. Michael
Sam and Jason Collins and Orlando Cruz have rendered an entire slew of
homophobic stereotypes inapplicable. Athletes recruit volunteers and donations
for disaster relief and The Boys and Girls Club and children’s hospitals and a
thousand other causes of great merit by modeling the generous behavior that
their fans, thankfully, emulate. But you can’t promote the positive and then
declare the whole forum voyeuristic and irrelevant when somebody does
something disgraceful. The job of “professional athlete” doesn't exist without a
passionately dedicated audience, and every athlete, as a performer, an
entertainer, has signed on for a life in the public eye, like it or not. You don’t go to
work and then selectively choose which duties you will and won’t be discharging.
To insist “I just play football, I’m no role model,” is akin to a landscaper
announcing “I just mow grass, I’m no hedge-trimmer.”
Kierkegaard says, “Once you label me, you negate me.” A fan from Wisconsin,
when asked about Ben Roethlisberger's moral turpitude, says “He's a football
player. His responsibility is to know the playbook and win football games.” And
here we have the root of it. The athlete is supposed to be simplistic and
subhuman, suitable for fast, easy consumption. When we sit down to watch the
game, we don't want to think about Ferguson, and we don't want to evaluate why
we’re wishing health and prosperity on a violent criminal. Can't there be a single
facet of life that isn't complicated by ethical controversy?
And the answer is no. Not a facet of public life, at least. And not when the
pertinent ethical issue is the institutionalized condoning of brutal violence, and
not when the collateral damage includes a generation of young athletes who grow
up thinking sexual violence and domestic abuse are ubiquitous and excusable
accompaniments to success.
The solution is for ownership and the league to stop posturing and fire the
perpetrators. There might be a few “gray area” casualties, but those will more
than justify themselves in the long run, by encouraging a more stringent
unofficial code of personal conduct. It's not as if the Duke lacrosse team or Colin
Kaepernick were blindsided by wild accusations while reading to orphans. If this
new policy forces athletes to choose their company more carefully, or impinges
upon their right to party with strippers, I think we can live with that. Penalize
the team. If tomorrow's newspaper runs a story about a waiter pissing in the
soup, that restaurant's finished. Even the billion-dollar corporate juggernauts
that are NFL teams would be terrified of a one-year post-season ban. If one of
your players is accused of a violent offense, and sufficient evidence exists to
obtain a conviction or a plea-bargain or a settlement, then you're not going to the
playoffs that year. Imagine the hysterical reaction of die-hard fans to their team’s
banishment. Sport is rare, as an industry, in that a hell of a lot more power lies
with the ticket-and-merchandise-buying public than with the oligarchy. When
teams can no longer risk taking a rider on a player who comports himself like a
violent moron in college, pretty quickly we'll have a lot fewer athletes acting like
violent morons in college. And for those players who are too good to pass up, but
too psychotic to corral, the organization could assign a battalion of round-theclock
babysitters. As strange and pathetic as that scenario might sound, there
are quite a few innocent people who would have been a lot better off if Aaron

Hernandez or Ben Roethlisberger would have been contracted under house
arrest, collected only for games and practice.
When this year’s version of Jameis Winston is taken off the draft board, more
than one dolt of a commentator will declare that he’s been “vindicated,” having
“overcome off-field adversity.” He’ll be given a microphone and a moral platform
to call out everyone who has doubted, everyone who has hated. He’ll thank his
family and he’ll thank God.
And another story will come to an inspiring conclusion.
Author bio: Adam Phillips currently splits time between Boise, where he makes a
living teaching and coaching at-risk junior high students, and Rockaway Beach,
Oregon, where he doesn't. Both venues are shared with his all-around impressive
wife and pair of small strepitous sons. You can currently see more of his sportsrelated
work at Blue Monday Review and Blotterature.

THREE POEMS
By Felino Soriano
The city grieves. The City does not alter.
Outside, death. Something is happening:
lives are contemplating the bordering of notions: prominence
or
erasable symbols of dust. Something is occurring:
gunshots are night’s asymmetrical rhythms—
their wind, calm in what misses bodies—
bass drum-kicks/violent thuds
with those inserting triangular hate
into the lungs, the chest, the thigh, the
temple, used to associate light from
the breathless becoming these bodies’
distance from once-loved warmth and
a worn smile, an advent of decoration.
Something is arising: everyday, winter
the rain/wind/cold of striking hands
creates delineation of life’s informal
philosophy: these sidewalks hold
scolding scars, the bodies are
holed, the bodies of occurrences
left to decide death’s culture of

subsequent behavior. Grief.
When considering presence,
I’ve an algorithm
of purpose, orienting pattern a
practice from the childhood acquired atop the roof
of my stuttering. Alone
or exterior to the moment
momentum awakened, curious—
figurines of an hour’s cultivating
hands assist in forming environment
and the fallible origins unable
to purify air’s philosophy of
prolific meander.
When I speak about your
death I
am
untangling
breath from
the spine of
your cancer. I cannot rename
your steps or faith. And the ache in your
shadow
would never flatten or
fade into the dissipation of acclimated healing.
I knew you I
did not,
know you well (as you know) :
our conversations amid
holiday recreations and
distance shaped and etched

days of birth’s annual visitation.
I saw your breath, the last exit
trilogy of prayer
uprise
into a shaping name
sliding onto
the back of my tongue’s ready and portending surname.
Author bio: Felino A. Soriano’s most recent poetry collections include
Extolment in the praising exhalation of jazz (Kind of a Hurricane Press,
2013), the collaborative volume with poet, Heller Levinson and visual
artist, Linda Lynch, Hinge Trio (La Alameda Press, 2012) and rhythm:s
(Fowlpox Press, 2012). He publishes the online endeavors
Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. His work finds foundation
in philosophical studies and connection to various idioms of jazz music. He
lives in California with his wife and family and is the director of supported
living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with
developmental disabilities. For further information, please visit
www.felinoasoriano.info.

Four Poems
By P.T. Davidson
Poem 2358
this
poem
has
been
written
especially
for
you
Poem 3614
this
poem
will
melt
in
your
mouth
Poem 3279
this
poem
might
not
be
here
when
you
get
back

Poem 2249
this
poem
glows
in
the
dark
!
Author bio: P.T. Davidson is originally from Christchurch, New Zealand,
although he has spent the past 24 years living abroad in Japan, the UK,
Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. His poetry has appeared in al dente,
ulcer, Pre-Text and Otoliths. His first book of poetry, seven, is due out soon.

Fading Paradigms?
(CD Review)
By Alison Ross
When I first heard Deerhunter in 2006, I was magnetized by their cerebralpunk
approach to music. I had not been that gripped by a band since the
mid-80s, when I heard The Cure for the first time. Then, when I saw
Deerhunter live at one of their first shows at Criminal Records in Atlanta, I
knew this would be a band that I would end up following closely throughout
their evolution.
Deerhunter's early records were, of course, their most magically
mesmerizing. Eccentric and charismatic frontman, Bradford Cox,
alternately branded the band's style of music as "surrealist punk" and
"ambient punk," and these tags were on-target, as their music harbored
clashing, antithetical features of tranquil immersive atmospheres and
jaded, jagged edges.
Serene and searing: these oppositional qualities colluded to create the
Deerhunter signature sound.
Then along came "Halcyon Digest," which, though not a radical departure
from earlier releases, was still widely considered to be the band's
breakthrough album. Indeed, the songs were accessible and diverse, and
enabled Deerhunter to attract previously unattainable mainstream
success.
After "Halcyon Digest," however, Deerhunter swerved recklessly to the left,
daringly defying expectations, and released an album of visceral and
vitriolic scorchers. Whereas before Deerhunter had tempered their hard-

driving numbers with mellow melodies, now they were simply throwing
temper tantrums and spewing sonic tirades. "Monomania" was brilliantly
bilious and ended up alienating some fans who preferred the band's slightly
softer angles.
If those fans prefer the pillow-smooth, soothing harmonies of Deerhunter's
more sober side, then "Fading Frontier" should resonate well. For me,
it's my least favorite after "Halcyon Digest" (which has some great tunes,
but as a whole it falls flat). I prefer "Monomania's" raw, toxic ear-slammers,
or "Cyptograms' " clever conceit of psychedelic dream-punk.
What's beautiful about "Fading Frontiers," though, is that it sounds like a
true folk album in some regards, highlighting as it does the melodious
contributions of Lockett Pundt, and his lulling duets with Bradford. And
not only does Bradford channel Dylanesque moods, but he manages to
sneak in a 50s-style barbershop number, and he slyly perpetuates the
band's legacy of postmodern indie rock with the first two songs, especially.
The problem with all of it, from the perspective of a hardcore fan, is that
the songs are spare, not lushly layered like the best Deerhunter songs.
The arrangements are simpler, less complex - which is not an innately evil
thing. But in the case of Deerhunter, it certainly saps some of the charm
from the songs. Deerhunter shimmers when their songs are like pyramids,
sounds piling on top of each other until they reach a glorious aural apex.
The standout songs on "Fading Frontier" - the gritty, slinky "Snakeskin"
and the cathartic "Carry On," both of which resemble leftovers from
"Monomania" - should, lighthouse-like, guide the direction of the follow-up
album.
Of course, Deerhunter likes to zag when they are expected to zig, so no
telling what their next album will offer: Perhaps Tejano and Zydeco?
Either way, it's a certainty that the album will be a solid, cohesive
collection, as Deerhunter has ultimately never made a bad album. I just
hope that "Fading Frontier" represents a pretty piece of the Deerhunter
puzzle rather than the band's new paradigm.

Artwork by Allen Forrest
Artist bio: Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many
mediums, such as computer graphics, theater, digital music, drawing and
painting. Allen studied acting in LA’s Columbia Pictures Talent Program and
digital media in art and design at Bellevue College. He currently works in
Vancouver as a graphic artist and painter. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby
Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine and his Bel Red
painting series is part of Bellevue College’s permanent art collection.
The Masters Revisited, Michelangelo, Pieta, ink on paper
The Masters Revisited, John Henry Fuseli,
Lady Macbeth Sleepwalking, ink on paper

CD REVIEW:
Good Old-Fashioned Ways
Atz & Bonnie Kilcher
Reviewer: Cindy Hochman
All Roads Lead to . . . Nome (let me tell ya)
It seems fitting that the remote Alaskan city from which this
multifaceted mosaic of music emanates is called Homer, for it was the
Greek poet Homer who wrote The Odyssey, and the compelling Kilcher
history, eloquently and emotionally weaved into these songs, is nothing if
not an odyssey. For those fortunate enough to have discovered Discovery
Channel’s reality show Alaska: The Last Frontier, which depicts the
rugged, off-the-grid lifestyle of patriarch Atz and several generations of
hale and hearty Kilchers, Good Old-Fashioned Ways can be seen as a
companion piece; that is, an homage to legacy, land, and often uplifting life
lessons.
He was a hard man
and it was a hard land …
only one place to begin
so my mama and my daddy
they dug in

For Atz Kilcher, whose catalyst to create is firmly planted in his
DNA, music is tied to survival on many fronts: from the cold climes of the
boondocks, to the punishing domestic happenstance of being raised by a
tough-as-nails father who emigrated from Switzerland and helped settle
the Alaskan wilderness, to his firsthand brush with the bloodshed of the
Vietnam War (tell me, was it right or wrong, to kill those Viet Cong, thank
God I had my guitar along, and I always took time to find my song).
Accompanied by his wife, Bonnie’s, robust but sweetly feminine tones,
Kilcher’s voice, at once gritty and gentle, with not a scintilla of artifice,
accurately portrays the paradoxical puzzle of navigating the tough
topography of the homestead that is his birthright with his father’s
admonition to “be careful but care” (and add to that the ambiguity of a
Sixties sensibility both violent and mellow). While every song imparts an
earnest and grateful thanks to his rough-hewn parents for teaching him
the rudiments of self-sufficiency, he wryly acknowledges that “their very
best still was pretty bad” (a tradition he sadly, and bravely, confesses he
was destined to repeat). At its crux, Kilcher’s stirring storytelling is a
personal and universal search for serenity.
Fourth of July
and I’m feeling high
but there ain’t no booze or drugs around here
so let me tell you why
it’s a Native American secret
I’m burning some cottonwood leaves in my fire
and I’m bathing in that blue Fox River sky
Dark strains aside, a Kilcher campfire is not devoid of its rousing
moments. The observant music lover will appreciate Atz’s genre-jumping,
self-professed rockabilly beat, as well as the delightful Presley paraphrase
of a little green bug who’s “all shook up in his green (yes, green!) suede
shoes.”* But even here there is a subtle subtext of nature’s divine
spirituality, as this tiny creature’s elation earns him a “front-row seat way
up above the ground,” ostensibly to heaven (where perhaps St. Peter will
dye his shoes back to blue so that Elvis doesn’t roll in his grave).
There’s something about watching a river
as she pours herself right down your hungry soul
In “The River Song,” my favorite in a CD full of favorites, the
perpetual flow of the river becomes a metaphor for the life cycle. The
simple yet philosophical profundity of the refrain (are you running away
or are you running home?) is a literal and musical bridge from Kilcher’s
childhood (and, through personification, the river’s) to his (and its)
maturity, conveying the comforting illusion of immortality. Of course,
there’s also a bit of intimate self-reference which is the hallmark of an Atz

Kilcher song, as he asks are you running away or are you running home,
Atz Kilcher? And significantly, the past blends with the future when
Kilcher’s conversation with the river harkens back to his forebears (are we
running away or are we running home, Dear Mother) and to his own
offspring (are you running away or are you running home, my children),
putting a fine point on the eternal progression of our existence.
In the theme song to Alaska: The Last Frontier, Kilcher sings “life is
good when you’re living like you should,” but admittedly, he wasn’t always.
With trademark candor (“I try to shoot straight and keep my word and I
expect the same from you”) and compassion, many of Kilcher’s songs are
saturated with allusions to alcoholism and self-degradation that have
dogged so many veterans (of the battlefields of both war and abuse). This
leitmotif is most notable in the songs “PTSD” (the acronym for posttraumatic
stress disorder) and “Froggy Went to War,” in which a
reworking of the jocular old Scottish folk song “Frog Went A-Courtin’ ”**
takes a somber (but, in the final stanza, hopeful) turn. While the anecdotes
are certainly personal, he touches on the human condition as well, opining
that “everybody’s trying to get here with a little help or on their own; they
have a drink, fill a script, pop a pill, take a trip, thinking all roads lead to
Rome (but they don’t, let me tell ya).” For Kilcher, though, salvation is
found, once again, through his proximity to Mother Earth.
There’s no last call for alcohol here by this mountain stream
there ain’t no ghosts to haunt you here or drag you from your dreams
just silence ringing in your ears, the air is mountain clear
there’s no such thing as being lost when you’re lost out here
“Good Old-Fashioned Ways” is a heartfelt testimonial to continuity
and endurance, with plenty of kumbaya moments amid the demons, and a
dash of Wild West swagger (courtesy of “After the Gun,” which also has
some very cool syncopated sound effects). In the final song, the haunting,
soothing “Clearwater Slough,” Kilcher comes full circle, proving that, for
him, there’s no place like Homer.
Many moons ago, a talented young singer named Jewel (Kilcher,
that is) asked the question Who Will Save Your Soul? The answer is
intrinsically linked to her own roots, because if her papa’s generous
collection of fiercely beautiful songs can’t save your soul, then your soul is
a lost cause.
____________________________________________________________
*“Blue Suede Shoes” was written, and originally recorded, by Carl Perkins.
“All Shook Up” was written by Otis Blackwell.
** Modern versions of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ have been recorded by
Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, among
others

Alejandro Iñárritu’s
“The Revenant” (Film Review)
by Josh Sczykutowicz
Ice walls and avalanches. Lightning storms and snowfall. Thick forests and
skeletal trees. Packed black dirt and frozen ground. Rushing rivers and candlelit
taverns. Terracotta sunsets and porcelain dawns. These are some of the many
stark images that permeate Alejandro Iñárritu’s latest film, The Revenant,
starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, an 1820’s hunter who is attacked by a
bear and left for dead by Tom Hardy’s partially-scalped, self-preservationist John
Fitzgerald. Suffering extreme physical, personal and spiritual loss, Glass rises
from his wounds intent on revenge, and begins an intense, harrowing journey
through the wilderness that never lets up to the last second.
A follow-up to Iñárritu’s Best Picture-winning Birdman, Iñárritu finds
himself uniting again with acclaimed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who
more than asserts himself as the finest in his field with this film. A technical
masterpiece, tracking shots seamlessly glide and follow characters, switching
points of view, submerging underwater and lifting back out again, swirling into
the sky and chasing alongside men on horseback before becoming crane shots
that look down at the forest below, taking to the air as cliffs reach their end
without warning.
A nail in the coffin in the film versus digital debate, Lubezki’s stunning
camerawork works exclusively with natural light to achieve the gorgeous and
outstanding shots found within this film. A main criticism of digital filmmaking is
that it lacks the immediacy of shooting on film, with little time limits, yet here,
photographing everything with zero artificial light, every scene depends upon the
position of the sun, of the light of the torches carried through frozen tree lines in
pitch-black nights. That immediacy that the timing of film requires is replicated
here, yet with all of the freedom of technique that digital allow for, as shots seem
to blend with ease into all kinds: close-ups, panoramas, aerial shots, dolly and
tracking shots. While the romanticism of film may be its own virtue, Lubezki’s
unbridled technique and command of the art form seem to prove that
romanticism may be the last defense left in favor of celluloid.
One of Lubezki’s past works, the Oscar-winning cinematography for

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, managed to do something few films about space have: it
simultaneously conveyed the absolute beauty and profound depth of space, while
still showing the isolating horror and inhospitality of it. Here, Lubezki’s images
manage to much the same for the wilderness, helping to craft a tale of man versus
nature that rivals the greatest films dealing with the subject. We are seeing
photographs made not by just a talented professional, but by a master of their
craft.
Rather than compromise and decide whether to paint the natural world as
perfect and mesmerizing, or as brutal and unflinching, it presents both
simultaneously, with equal skill, leading to a remarkable visual balancing act. We
watch with Glass as a pack of wolves take down a running bison in the evening
light, sharing his expression of disturbed awe. In the coldest days of winter, a
network of ants move as one to collapse a beetle. Flurries of snow rush into frame
and flakes dot the screen. Vivid close-ups get so near to actor’s faces that their
breath fog up the lens, before we pull back and spin around the subject, changing
gaze to look upon the harsh, gorgeous wilderness the entire cast finds itself
surviving in.
And no character survives quite like Glass does, a man whose journey
through complete torture rivals that of almost any other protagonist in film. Few
have had such motive or justification for the vengeance they seek than Hugh
Glass, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance makes it so. Largely silent, DiCaprio
expresses every sort of pain possible while displaying the desperation, deep will
and inner growth of Glass through non-verbal expressions and actions, diving
into freezing rivers, climbing inside of dead animals for warmth, taking every
blow with weight and challenging himself as a performer in every scene.
Like a wounded animal, he limps, crawls, and fumbles his way through the
expanse, a frozen wasteland waiting to claim him at any given moment. An
immense amount of effort from DiCaprio manages to communicate a history of a
man given few lines via everything else. His mannerisms, sleeping habits,
expressions and reactions all serve to both tell his own private story and propel
the larger narrative forward.
The character of Hugh Glass undergoes not just a physical journey in this
film, travelling back to the hunter’s camp in his search for Fitzgerald, but also a
spiritual one, grieving and coping with all of his losses. Steam and fog rise through
shots of water like the smoke that plumes off of the burning village that haunts
Glass’ dreams. Images of a dead lover haunt his heart and guide his soul. She says
how a tree in a storm may look like it will fall, if one only looks at the leaves, but if
one looks at the trunk, they know that it will remain. For most of the film, we see
Glass at the leaves. By the end, we are gazing upon the trunk.
He experiences deep physical pain, relentlessly mauled by a grizzly to the
death and hurt through various accidents, attacks and incidents as the film
progresses. He endures intense emotional pain, that of severe betrayal, of
personal loss, of having to see the last tethers to an old life stripped away before
his very eyes. And he suffers spiritually most of all; haunted by the very
beginning by a loss he accrued well before any icy flows of the opening scenes
filled the frame.
Like every character in this film, Glass is defending something; in this
case, the most basic possession: his life. Fitzgerald defends his life and dream of a
plot of land in Texas. The bear that attacks Glass, more a force of nature than a
simple animal, is only trying to defend its cubs which Glass stumbles upon. The
Native Americans that attack, scalp and trample through campgrounds are

simply trying to defend their lands from the white men who have taken
everything from them.
The brutality just mirrors the natural world around it, as every man
operates, ultimately, as a force of nature in their own right. Just as avalanches
topple trees, or wolves dispatch bison, men topple one another just as naturally.
Every force of violence is given the unflinching sincerity they command. Arrows,
teeth, bullets, maws, hatchets, knives, claws, fire and water all cause their own
destruction, and no detail is spared.
While the scope and scale of this film is so thematically broad – nature,
spirituality, torment, sacrifice, the cost of vengeance, survival, the beauty and
brutality of the wilderness, man’s place within the world and the way that we act
as a destructive force just like any other –the narrative focus is so contrastingly
intimate, that both seem to only serve one another. Glass’ journey is one of a
private grief, still haunted by visions of his lost village and family, still grappling
with his inner demons.
Everything that occurs within the film is ultimately a framework for Glass
to work through these issues, and yet, by the end of the film, questions are left:
does vengeance satisfy? What does it take to mend a broken spirit, to make whole
again a broken man? When is the deepest pain allowed to heal, and what begins
that process? Are loss and its pain simply natural, and is pain itself a part of the
natural world?
Iñárritu has firmly established himself as a unique and ambitious director
with few peers to stand amongst, and continues to explore the human condition in
his own way. Few directors are capable of communicating so many themes, and so
many thoughts, through almost purely visual storytelling, and let alone make it
so compelling. With the assistance of Lubezki, Iñárritu forms a portrait stunning
in its scale and painstaking in its detail of a wilderness we may never experience,
and of a man who may never free himself of it.
Full of images that rival that of Planet Earth and driven by a performance
of a lifetime from Leonardo DiCaprio, all pulled together by the unparalleled
direction of Alejandro Iñárritu, The Revenant stands as a truly powerful and truly
beautiful film about nature, man’s place within it, personal grief and suffering,
overcoming obstacles and the persistence of the human spirit. Through its wider
focus on nature, it crafts a delicate and intimate personal examination of grief,
loss, and pain. When someone no longer fears death, what do they become? Can
healing happen, once a certain line has crossed? These are answers Hugh Glass
may learn, but not during our time spent with him. Regardless, what has been
achieved here is a towering work of art, one that gives far more than it takes, and
continues to show that Iñárritu is an ambitious and capable artist in a medium
that he has a complex understanding and command of.
Author bio: Josh Sczykutowicz is a young writer from central Florida.
Most of his work can be described as dark, alternative and literary fiction.
He has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, ExFic, and Polychrome
Ink, among others. You can Like him on Facebook and follow him on
twitter @jsczykutowicz1 and tumblr at
http://joshsczykutowicz.tumblr.com/.

Australia’s Epidemic of Misogyny
by Giles Watson
Between 2010 and 2013, an Australian citizen was subjected to a
vicious, unrelenting public hate-campaign. One popular media personality
(Alan Jones) urged his audience to “shove” this person, along with the
environmentalist Bob Brown, “in a chaff bag and take them as far out to
sea as they can and tell them to swim home”. A Liberal Party member
(Grahame Morris) recommended “kicking” this person “to
death”. Politicians (Steve Ciobo and Peter Reith) advocated slitting this
person’s throat. There were no legal repercussions against any of these
incitements to commit murder. The victim of this constant barrage of
verbal violence was Julia Gillard, the Australian Prime-Minister. Her
antagonists may have disagreed with her politics, but their vitriol was not
political discourse; it was misogyny. These people deemed that she was
worthy of drowning, beating and stabbing because she was a woman who
dared to seek political office.
Our then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, stood gurning like a
clown underneath a protest banner that read “Ditch the Witch”. Days
before his later election as Prime-Minister, he went on national television
to pimp his two daughters, saying “If you want to know who to vote for, I’m
the guy with the two not-bad-looking daughters”. He winked lasciviously
on a radio talk-show when a woman caller told him that she had been
driven to become a phone-sex worker because of his economic policies. He
openly trumpeted his opinion that women should be at home doing the
ironing. This is the same man who, when he lost a university union
election to a woman candidate in his youth, shoved his face within an inch
of hers and punched the wall on either side of her head, and who once
punched out the man who was to become his Treasurer: a violent man
lauded by a rabidly fascist and misogynist minority of the Australian
public who somehow found it in their hearts to applaud all of these defects
of character on the basis that they were “macho”, and forgivable in the
“Aussie male”.
I was absent from Australia while all of this was occurring, on an 18-
year sojourn in England. I had spent my childhood and youth in Australia,
and had thought that as far as gender was concerned at least, this country

was heading in a very different direction. I returned two years ago, and
was devastated to discover the hideous morass this country has waded
into. The vile misogynist rantings cited above are not restricted to the
upper echelons of government and the media. They have pervaded
Australian culture, and the most horrifying symptom of this process is an
enormous epidemic of domestic violence against women: gendered violence
committed with impunity behind closed doors. In my state (Western
Australia) alone, there were 10,648 female victims of domestic violence in
2014. I am writing this at 10.43 in the morning, and so far today, it is
estimated that police in Australia will already have been called to respond
to 293 domestic violence incidents. In my small region alone, 16 women
and children were killed by violent men in 2015.
Nor is this a phenomenon restricted to isolated sectors of society. I
live in a comparatively prosperous, “respectable” seaside town, and I know
people whose lives are blighted by domestic violence on a daily basis. The
perpetrators continue to bash, intimidate and terrorise with impunity
because of the toxic cultural conditions which have been incubated by
media and political establishments intent on spreading misogyny. In the
process, newspapers such as The Australian have also employed openly
misogynist female commentators like Bettina Arndt, a “sex-therapist” who
has in the past advised women who do not want sex from their partners to
give in and “take one for the team”, and who now uses her column to
encourage “Men’s Rights Activists” (most of whom are insane wife-bashers
and gaslighters, or apologists for them) to disrupt the activities of antidomestic
violence groups such as the White Ribbon Campaign. This is the
same newspaper whose female fashion columnists contributed to the
Gillard-hating chorus by relentlessly criticising her wardrobe, and whose
extreme right-wing commentator Janet Albrechtsen argued that Gillard
was not qualified to be Prime-Minister because “She has never had to make
room for the frustrating demands and magnificent responsibilities of
caring for little babies, picking up sick children from school, raising
teenagers. Not to mention the needs of a husband or partner.” [sic:
grammar.]
Much of the blame for this utterly toxic cultural climate must fall at
the feet of the Murdoch media empire. How can any journalist dare to
criticise a woman for choosing to not have children in this hideously
overpopulated world, or claim that she is unqualified for political office
because she has exercised that choice which it is the unquestionable right
of every woman to make? How exactly would changing nappies make her a
better politician? How can a newspaper editor seriously contemplate
publishing such unconscionable rubbish, and then go on to publish the
writing of a “sex-therapist” who tacitly condones marital rape?
These things happen because too many Australian people buy the
newspaper, because they vote for a woman-hating Prime-Minister and sit
by whilst he makes himself “Minister for Women”, because when that
Prime-Minister is deposed and another takes his place, and promotes a

woman who has no place for feminism to the same position, they are too
busy watching the football to take notice. They happen because the
appalling statistics cited above go unreported by the mainstream
media. But they also happen because of a wilful ignorance. One does not
have to look far on the internet to find out the truth. The verbal violence
against Julia Gillard was plain for all to see, and instead of being drowned
out by a chorus of public indignation, it filtered down to the point where
school-children were throwing eggs at her.
The irony of this situation is that I am quite convinced there is a
majority of the Australian public which is appalled by all of this. The
problem is that it is a more-or-less silent majority: silent on the issue of
misogyny as it is on other deeply urgent issues, such as the current
government’s wholesale assault on the environment. We are in desperate
need of individuals who will not sit silently, but who will go on the attack
against a lying mass-media, who will refuse to tolerate the promulgation of
misogyny by public figures, who will have the moral courage to denounce
the perpetrators of domestic violence at the grass-roots level, and perhaps
most importantly, who will work ceaselessly to undermine the roots of the
cancer of misogyny, victim-blaming and violence-excusing in our
culture. We need a vast alliance of conscientious individuals who are
prepared to rewind and reconstruct a whole set of cultural assumptions,
and these individuals need to play an active, not a passive role in this
process. Only then will Australia become the place I hoped it would become
twenty years ago. Only then will the openly murderous rantings of the
Alan Joneses, and the daily sufferings of women I know, become a thing of
the past.

Scientist
By Amme Broumand
list: parts of an atom, speckled with eyes; the foot
of a disfigured carp which—one summer night—crept forth
from its fountain; the ambered body of an earthworm
that once climbed aboard a bee and rushed
towards the sun—
(my treasures, heaped
before me like so much trash, wrinkle
inwards upon themselves, evanescing with a gleam
into the dark (almost as if they were
angry—
Author bio: Amee Broumand is an Iranian American poet from the Pacific
Northwest. She was homeschooled; despite her wariness of academia, she
eventually got a B.A. in English and Philosophy. She loves hiking,
photography, and Finnegans Wake.

TWO POEMS
By SHEILA E. MURPHY
The Negative
Spliced entry points equated
to predicted reminiscence.
Lane change hastened the unpleasant
bog of verisimilitude.
Why purport to grow?
If ever there were mathematics,
sentences would slow to store-bought
logarithmic flow,
thus furnish homes hosting
the leek soup served Count Vronsky,
all noblesse oblige on one hand
about to gel to extant plan.
Might one inspect your lungs?
The moment you retreat begins
illegible commencement.
Does it need a speech?
One doubts the penitence
claimed to fog familiar windows.
Is there a past tense in the house?
“Now I lay me down,” to rosaries
and false panache.
The actuarial tableau
contorts a spun reality
we’ve longed to know.
Heretical mimesis gloms on
to a fortune cookie
read aloud by Laureates.
Ensembles learn to get along.
Until we sweep the carpet
with young rakes.
Voila these semitones gathered in memory.
Watch the sweater after shrinkage come alive.
It’s going to be easy giving someone else’s best.

Jury Rigged Composure
The two teetered
on the threshold of one.
Absence of home seams spawned
the concept of young bliss.
Rasping with Caucasian breath,
she posed against the snow
littering the otherwise
soft grass awaiting season change.
He trimmed the impulse to expatiate.
Held close acts of tremor
amid lack of space,
the realm of choice points
constituted the remaining rigor in the house
toward a cold sense of arrears.
Bodies simply being what they were
in concert with a sotto puce.

Digital Art by K.R. Copeland
Artist bio: K.R. Copeland is a widely published Chicago poet/editor, who
occasionally cranks out audio and visual art.

TWO POEMS
By Bob Carlton
Author bio: Bob Carlton (www.bobcarlton3.weebly.com) lives and works in
Leander, TX.
Say Again
Where you are
symbolic eye
am sin
tactic: only
here in the middle
can we make
cents two
one: an other
Waterbelly Melonbutton
waterbelly melonbutton
upset setup set
scandalize sundial eyes
motes remote reappear picking pears
packing pecks peaking
pressure pleasure leisure leather seizure censure
one won one read read red reed
wed Eden weed
so go floating floes flowing
out to sea to see two
thence to end then hence
a Dios a Dew

TWO POEMS
By harley lethalm
Under-TITLED (LYDIA ATTEMPT 1/3)
I won’t slip through your tragedy without first envying you. Lydia? Why,
darling of my deeps, are you not called Lydia? It is settled then, that when
I am horsed to the electric chair I will lick the icicles of falling neon
fingerprints – my fingerprints – that blow downward like typewritten
confetti, touching my ghost who waits in the burlesque spade to accept my
transportive bones. And my tongue will burn Lydia; it will be excavated
from my mouth that does not know aught but Lydia; it will survive as a
globular idol. Its shape will be Lydian. You are Lydia. I have loved Lydia
and at last when the Sun shrieks us all away come billions and billions of
years, there will remain that one important second where I loved you,
where you were Lydia, and the Earth will rattle like a child’s bobbing head,
smiling and shooting out a tongue of my languished Lydian axiom.
Why Are You Genevieve?
We had played in the sorrel mouths of July
Freshets of teeth, noses, the basicness
Of youth
Where we gathered in smallish kingdoms (the tonsils
Of our Christian intellect jammed spiritedly into the
Gardenia)
Under trivialized amnesty of rust – for the monarchy is
Sometimes not so precious -
You pleasured yourself with the clenchings of a skirling branch
Which to-day is still wet: fifteen years later, the Prov. Journal construes a
permanent

Moralization of your vagina – obit. reads thus: “G., daughter, friend,
Poet, euthanized, Kavorkian dogwood tree in custody.
[Funeral services
Will be held on the
Underside
of Rimbaud’s ballsack.”]
Author bio: harley lethalm lives on the fringe of freight-rails, slurping up God
from the febrile syringe of a lonesome cotton dildo; his work has appeared in
Brickplight, The Bacon Review, Beorh Weekly, Fatso Spider Epistle, The Circle
Review (defunct), and is forthcoming (probably) elsewhere.

This is Not Our Circus
By Carly Anne Ravnikar
I was a lavender on your doorstep, you
a broke back mountain of a climbing dude.
You a fretted hijacker, you a sweating
coin rubber. I was a cool drum mumble,
a stick that pattered on canvas, a brush
that stuck in tangles and pulled at the
root. You were tambourine. You were
cussing in a nursery, cussing up a storm.
I was band candy, I was melting makeup
and limping hair. You were fade razor,
you were sharpened to point pencil. I
was a rabid. I was a put down. You
were a lamp shade with a hole in
the seam. A new model on floor. A
hill to tumble down. I was a bucket.
A mold growing on the wall. I was a
hopscotch on the rocks. A race down
the pier. You were a let go. You were

a stand still. I was a renegade duck,
I was a skid street racer, I was a latex
ballgag. You a drool. You a mongrel.
Author bio: Carly Anne Ravnikar currently lives on the outskirts of a
vibrant arts community in South Eastern Wisconsin, where
she occasionally wanders out of the woods to read from her hoard pile of
poetry or to teach yoga classes. She is constantly singing (often as the
front chick of Bedtime Routines), constantly photographing, and
occasionally “doing mom things.” Her book, Housewifery, is available
through Dancing Girl Press (2015). Other samples of her multi-media work
can be found at delinquentmom.wordpress.com.

The Mobile Proletariat (Polemic)
By Kevin Maus
Hang the one who waits for the revolution. Speak to your brother about it.
I am here to explain .... I am in good company these days. Men of men.
Pathological searchers. Outright lost that are scattered the country over.
Patriots who kneel in the dead grass of motherland scraping in the
smelling muck in disgust and fervor, searching roots. Killers, not by
nature, but at the drop of a hat will have you spitting a fine pitch of blood
and grinders if you say one sorry word against them. As good as men in
Christ as the disciples; missionaries, no—preachers, yes. They leave their
families to dog about the country. Have no family, have no home, just the
Holy Ghost that keeps them at constant odds with the world. My point is
that these are the ones — and I am happy to include myself in their
numbers— to undertake the sacred masterwork of revolution; oh yes, I said
it, you stinkers.
The revolution is the people’s masterwork, masterwork of the nonartist
that makes paltry those of men such as Beethoven or Tolstoy. “The
worker”, as history and bearded crackpots have dubbed him, has been
domesticated: hearth and home is his State, and The State, leaves him this,
with its remedies and comforts; while the trucker, as I’ve said, knows little
of hearth and home, he is “the worker” who has not been “domesticated”.
The game is explained in it of itself, hauling freight of every kind: food,
weapons, fuel and every material creation under the Sun. It could be easily
done to have every metropolis surrounded with a great gleaming shield of
truck trailers counting fourteen deep around an entire city, a thing that
would set you marveling until you realized you had accomplished nothing
in your life. The truck-stops would be our barracks. Trucker communes (I
am uneasy to use the word, cause it calls down right derision, but I must),
would come about and humankind would live the pastoral, playing grabass,
drinking from the fresh water stream, etc., all of that cheery bullshit.
All this coordinated by our friend the CB.
I can imagine the General of such a revolution, paunch and
mustached, the hardest motherfucker out — was an Army Ranger

machinegunner in the ‘Nam. A modern day Kutuzov, eye-patched and with
his frock coat unbuttoned because he would be enough of a sweet-dude to
have a military frock coat lying handy for when the advent of the people's
right, Revolution, struck. A Super-trucker. Who has run mountain grades
and hell-on-earth storms of every kind, each second the while, banshee
screaming all the sourness out of his lungs to howl down death.
The military would have nothing to do with us. A great number of
truckers are former servicemen, many of who have seen combat and have
been eager for their heyday since '75. Now their sons are in the service.
We are people of the people of the people, true enough. We’d only have to
deal with the police and the DOT, who hate our guts, as though they were
exposed and noisy. A trucker reminds a cop of the smell of his last shit; a
cop reminds a trucker of something like an old liquor-sick uncle who used
to beat his wife and threaten his children for fun with a polished bone
straight-razor, and who loved his attack dogs better than he did any
human being. Pigs are evil, more cunning than you think. They have to
keep up appearances unlike the trucker; when at heart, the police would
rather just be dressed with rubber raincoats over their naked skin, and
have nothing with them but their batons; but we would manage them,
because we are Legion, the Devil in a pig’s-eye.
In every truckstop across every state you will find a knife-boutique,
‘cause it is a fact that truckers are steel-junkies. We’d gut many a pig
hand-to-hand, because it is one thing with pigs that you can always entice
them into a fight based on a test to see who has the more ponderous
balls...a fight the trucker will win every time, ho, ho.
The Air Force might try and get at us, as it is in its epoch, a great
destroying machine fun to watch on the tv; the Air Force could wreak hell
on our supply lines, but we are the keepers of their jet fuel and we would
use it to fuel our bonfires as we watched their planes fall from the sky, the
pilots choosing to go that way rather than set foot on the ground and have
to deal with us; they would screech from the skies, sending off their
payload: the Incinerator says his Hallelujah in a craze of rockets that
would be meant to soften the ground, where death-ready pilot would
tumble down in an explosion and Black-Out, impact burial, while the fiftyfoot
bonfire we have set burning for the occasion of the sky-falling would
make we observers sweat like three-strike perverts with the keys to a
cathouse. We would solemnly put our hats over our hearts and spit booze
out in the men’s memories.
The ultra-wealthy would simply just leave the county during all of
this, but, of course, not until after we skinned a few of them and paraded
around in their stalks of flesh like drunken heroes. And the beggar’s
banquet would begin. Wein weib und gesang.
But there is no revolution without the one idea, not without the
weltgeist. There’s not been a one to remake the collective mind since
weary man can remember. As I said, masterworks in the arts are not
masterworks at all, but merely a lineage to the one idea…ahhh Over-Soul,

ahhh Genius! how we wait for you, how your little masterworkers wait for
you….And if it comes to be that the men who had led us on to suffer the
World through its labor-pains after a new Creation had deceived us, and
did not care if the rest of us were merely 10,000,000 heads stuck on
cottonwood pig poles, and they turned out to be egomaniacs as it was with
Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; Mao, Castro, Pol Pot—I don’t know where the
list ends, so I will stop….We would not become docile and stand to be
murdered, we would have their blood in an instant. Take a man in the
character of Chairman Mao, we would break into his home: whatever
palatial residence he had chosen for himself in the revolution’s aftermath;
we’d snatch him from out of his bed, drag him—in a rough-sewn sack for pig
feed—to a freshly constructed mausoleum in his honor, where we would
enamel his corpse then buckle him into a egg-white centrifuge that would
spin for eternity, the sound of spinning able to be heard outside the
mausoleum walls by bicyclists and strollers.
All of the pieces fit; surprise, truckers are the Elect.
Hear me well, the revolution will be mobile, and there will be no
stopping it.
Author bio: Kevin Maus is a summa cum laude graduate of the University
of Minnesota and an MFA graduate of the New School. He works as an
over-the-road truck driver but is currently expatriated to Mexico City, in
avoidance of the soul hobbling cruelty of another winter OTR. His work has
appeared in Gone Lawn, Dogzplot and other journals.

TWO POEMS
BY KENNETH SALZMANN
Author bio: Kenneth Salzmann has been active in literary publishing and
programming for 35 years. His poems appear in such publications as Rattle, The
New Verse News, Home Planet News, The Comstock Review, and many more. He
lives in Woodstock, NY, and Ajijic, Mexico, with his wife, editor Sandi Gelles-Cole.
Stage Directions
Read these poems aloud,
only aloud
on days when you tire of ranting in Brighton Beach beneath
the El and in all-night eateries; read these poems aloud
when you are finally clothed in nothing but a cloudful sky
mountain ocean meadow New Jersey.
When you have stripped true among strangers
sound is meaning ebough.
And when you die die naked upon leaves that collect in
dank piles on the forest floor, on sands where seaweed
and driftwood collect on patches of black ice, and let your
bones be seashells.
No truth: not in things.
And when you live live in fierce nakedness, in naked drive,
live in trumpet solos spun through dingy Manhattan
apartments on scratchy 78s and let your nakedness be
meaning enough.
A man can only be, not mean.
And when you love love fears and flaws with fierce
nakedness, love naked need that collects in lovers’ eyes
and trumpet solos, love imperfection and let your lover’s vow
demand oblivion.
The ice-sharp sound of trumpets
melts like ice.
A self is only equal to, not you.
Read these poems aloud,
only aloud.

Cahuita
black sand in cahuita
sucks back the shadows of the new sun and
delicately
slices white flesh
drinking tiny droplets of blood and it
crackles just a bit
beneath the weight of the small ecstasies
of monkeys or flocking parrots dawning
just two dirt roads and a sharp right
beyond miss edie’s patio
where each day
gringas gather
over papaya con leche
to talk of pura vida
black sand and riptides
Editor’s Note: These poems were originally published in Home Planet
News

TWO POEMS
By Wanda Morrow Clevenger
bore for the sale barn
by my mother’s age
they are dropping
like chloroformed flies
brothers, sisters, old
good friends
old acquaintances
old school mates
she tells me names
I don’t remember
some I do
by my age
they are dropping
too, one despicable
disease after another
and I was
on that drop list
next but
shimmied free
my mother watches
me for signs of
relapse, she knows
she’s on the drop
list next too
I read it in her eyes
when she tells me
names
we are
every one
just cattle
dropped, hid out
in remote
gullies,
bore for
the sale barn
we are all
just meat
on the hoof

my childhood best friend’s mom
it was very bad
her cancer
operable but
not survivable
not tolerable
they would rob her
of eating
of not saying
the word
goodbye
when goodbye
came
she chose
the standard
non-intervention
six months
this woman
I’d known
my whole life
my mom’s
best friend
my childhood
best friend’s
mom
and me waiting
these last few days
to hear from
a publisher
about a contract
a possible
probable pass
as luck likes
to have it—
Author bio: Wanda Morrow Clevenger, author of This Same Small Town in Each
of Us. Paypal link: http://edgarallanpoet.com/This_Same_Small_Town.html About
Her: http://about.me/wandamorrowclevenger/#. Her blog: http://wlcwlcblog.blogspot.com/.
Amazon reviews about Wanda Morrow Clevenger:
https://www.amazon.com/author/wandaclevenger

The Margaret collection
By Mercedes Webb-Pullman
They were neighbours in Systrum Street
Because her daddy
loved her and it hurt
the State took Margaret away.
Her next daddy loved her
the same, his sons as well.
It didn’t hurt as much now.
She left at sixteen and drifted
to Kings Cross, a beat on the street,
a habit; life was brutal
as she’d expected
‘til she fell in love
with Warren
who married her.
They worked together;
she turned tricks, he
was the house bouncer.
They dreamed of Lebanon;
her blue eyes and blonde hair
would provide
a Big Rock Candy Mountain
of easy money
and the world’s best smack.
‘Couples with similar interests
who work together for a common goal
are more likely to have
a stable and enduring relationship’.
Margaret
Her hands have held so many men
they feel nothing anymore;
to her the world is made of cocks
unconnected to hearts or minds.
She shoots herself up in my kitchen.

Mechanically she works her beat,
turns and returns to the same spot
as if some program permits her
just this distance and no more;
as if invisible bars cage her.
Her gaze, focused on an inner world
slides over faces sightlessly
like the eyes of an ancient statue
empty beyond even death.
Her husband waits at home.
Warren
Sunday afternoons he’d bang on our door
Lend us twenty bucks, she won’t get up
and he was off to score a whack,
just to get her moving.
She used to be pretty. Not any more.
It was hard to watch
even when I didn’t really know them.
She could have been my sister.
He robbed someone, bought tickets
to Lebanon, We’ll make big bucks there,
they’ll love you but cashed them in to score
before the plane was due to leave. Someone saw
his picture on a police station
poster. Wanted. For robbery
though, not murder.
She was just another
dead junkie.
Author bio: Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from IIML Victoria
University Wellington with MA in Creative Writing in 2011. Her poems,
prose and short stories have appeared online and in print, in Turbine, 4th
Floor, Swamp, Reconfigurations, The Electronic Bridge, poetryrepairs,
Connotations, The Red Room, Silver Birch Press, Otoliths,
Cliterature among others, and in her books. She lives on the Kapiti Coast,
New Zealand.

Three Collages by Bob Heman
Author bio: Bob Heman’s collages have been published by Otoliths, Mad Hatters’
Review, Big Bridge, Skidrow Penthouse, Fell Swoop, Key Satch(el), and others,
and are upcoming in Caliban online and Right Hand Pointing. They have appeared
on the cover of the most recent Brevitas event book, and on books by David Mills,
Cindy Hochman, Karen Neuberg, and Evie Ivy. His other art includes “cut-outs”
[participatory cut-out multiples on paper], as well as drawings and drawing
poems. In the late 1970s he was an artist-in residence at The Brooklyn Museum.

Two Poems
By Catherine Zickgraf
Author bio: Catherine Zickgraf has performed her poetry in Madrid,
Puerto Rico, and three dozen other cities—yet homeschooling her
autistic youngest inspires her the most. Her writing has appeared in
the Journal of the American Medical Association, [Pank], Bartleby-
Snopes, and Victorian Violet Press. Find her blog at
http://caththegreat.blogspot.com
Own your own original
Zimmerman painting!
—created by the hand that shot a young man,
celebrate your white right to shoot dead a black kid
who should have run and hid not stood with confidence,
who forgot which system applied to him.
GUNS Everywhere
Georgia’s governor would like you to know that God
in His Heaven gave us the right to carry guns almost
everywhere so we can shoot
1. the tyrannical government
and 2. people who break the
tyrannical government's
rules. Let us pray.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS (Satire) By Gael DeRoane
REMORA BLACKWOOD lives and writes in Turnip Junction, Oregon. Her
work has appeared in Dogsbody, Amplified Heat, That Great Literary
Magazine, Stout Timbers, Elsewhere, and elsewhere. This is her first time
in Sow Bug.
LON HARTWICK teaches Creative Writing at the University of Texas, El
Paso. “I live on the range with three dogs and a moribund pickup, and I
play ukulele and keyboards in a Zydeco band.” Good for you, asshole.
ALLYSON DOMBROSKY’S chapbook, Yodeling to Byzantium, received the
2009 Darla May Jenkins Award for Hillbilly Poetry. Her work has
appeared in Swelterfish, Nostril Agony, Cthonic Boom, Gorslava Review,
Hobo News, Saratoga Lyre, and White Spasms.
TOBY FINK is the publisher of Duckburg Press, and wrote the introduction
for their most successful book, R. Crumb’s Cavalcade of Big Fat Asses. His
fiction has appeared in Tawdry Lemons, Short Forest Review, and
Schoolmarm. “Cry of the Shuttlecock,” a one-act play, is forthcoming in
Ooh-la-la. Forthcoming—I love it. Should be out any day now, right, Toby?
The stunningly beautiful LORI LIGHT was the gem of my most recent
poetry workshop, and I am honored that this final issue of Sow Bug
features her work in a folio, which is also her first publication. She has
moved on to the MFA program at blah blah University somewhere in the
northeast. I miss her musical laugh and shining eyes. Come back,
Lori! MFA programs are shit. The profs will turn you into cardboard
copies of themselves, posturing losers who couldn’t hack it in big-time
publishing. The job offer still stands, Lori. Everything is a mess here. I
need someone to look after my affairs, and you can have the spare
bedroom rent-free, and I promise there’ll be no funny stuff like that night
when I ate the pot brownies. Please, Lori. Think it over.

CRAIG CZUGASCH, an MFA dropout at Emerson College, says that the only
reviewer who bothered to read his self-published chapbook, Hairy Palm at
the End of the Mind, called it “a phantasmagoria of scatology and
madness.” Welcome to Sow Bug, Craig!
BRAD STILES writes: “Egoless, I find myself where I am, or am not. Each
poem represents a cellular meltdown, a flowing into Brahman.” Have
another toke, Brad, and put on some Iron Butterfly.
RYAN HALSTEAD used to be a big deal after his book, Daughters of
Tantalus (Wombat Press, 2002), won some dopey prize I can’t remember
the name of. One would hear tales of his sexual conquests on the reading
circuit, where he would prey upon starry-eyed, empty-headed coeds. Not
anymore, though. Saw a recent photo. Too many Big Macs, not enough
Hair Club for Men.
ANNE KERCHNER has published short stories in Lepton, Behind the Moon,
Fire Drill, Floating Spider Review, Quack Quack, Literature My Ass, Dark
Hamburger, and Follow Me Home. She lives way up in Alaska with her
husband and two sons. Stay right there, Anne. I’ve seen your photo, too.
SHANNON CRYER’s chapbook, Revenge of the Meatatarians, actually had
some funny stuff in it. But here she is, alas, drowning with all the other
saps in this sinking ship.
Our token person of color and ethnicity, KEISHA WONG-HERNANDEZ, fits
the bill, and how! And it doesn’t hurt that she’s a chick. Soon as I saw that
name on the MS I started typing up her acceptance letter. Her work has
appeared in Blue Salad, Cuspidor, Tell No One, Fever Cry, Machine Elf
Quarterly, and Uncle Fester’s Sweet Shoppe & Literary Review.
Rounding out the quota is queer theoretician SIMON GREGG, who has
graced us with an excerpt from Men in Nightshirts: Homoeroticism in the
Films of Laurel & Hardy, which Truffle House will publish in 2015. Good
job, Simon. I know things were different back then, but did they always
have to share a bed? And when Stan’s feet ended up in Ollie’s face, what
the fuck was that all about?
MAITLAND CARRUTHERS is Director of the Creative Writing program at
South Dakota College of the Arts. His chapbook, Moth Cantatas, was
shortlisted for the Othella Strange Terwilliger Poetry Prize.
ANDY FEINBERG has published four books of poetry: Godzilla Was Here,
Encyclopedia of Bad People, That Darn Antichrist!, and Zodiacticon, all
available from Ankle-Biter Press.

WENDELL TRUAX has deigned to stoop to our level just this once. A putrid
specimen of his “metafiction,” whatever that is, may be glimpsed within
these sorry pages. Yes, he studied with the legendarily abusive editor
whose name escapes me at the moment, and yes, he’s published his
unreadable dreck in oh-so snooty litmags that pipsqueak writers & editors
coo & crow over on their incestuous blogs. And now here he is in Sow Bug,
and the joke is on him. I solicited the bum thinking his crew might talk up
our humble mag, but now I see that they only care about their stupid
readings and their New York parties. Fuck them all, and fuck you too,
Wendell. I don’t need your kind. My novel will be finished soon, and then
you’ll see.
MARINA SKENK is the editrix of Top Quality Lit and a part-time Bettie
Page impersonator. She lives in San Francisco with her life partner, twelve
cats, and an iguana named Dagmar.
DUANE LEVESQUE’S long poem, One Shoe by the Roadside, won the 2008
Turtle Breath Review Poetry Competition. He resides in Ann Arbor with
his wife and daughter and is pursuing a PhD in Comparative
Literature. He’s had poems in Burnout, Fred’s Magazine, Gegenschein,
Petals in the Abyss, Mood Ring, Dirty Puppy, Carson City Review, Infinite
Pudding, Monkey Bites, Quare Fellow, Karaoke of the Mind, and Too Much
Cake. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Look, Sow Bug is indeed kaput, but I’m
starting a new, even better litmag—it’s called Paramecium Dreams, and for
our first issue we’re having a contest! Send us your best poems & short
stories. The entry fee for each work is $20 (cheap!). Make checks payable
to Cash. Send all MSS to Paramecium Dreams, General Delivery,
Cheesequake, NJ 45802
Namaste, dudes!

TWO POEMS
By Laura Madeline Wiseman
Author bio: Laura Madeline Wiseman’s recent books are Drink (BlazeVOX
Books), Wake (Aldrich Press), and The Bottle Opener (Red Dashboard).
She teaches in Nebraska. Her collaborative book Intimates and Fools (Les
Femmes Folles) with artist Sally Brown Deskins, is an Honor Book for the
2015 Nebraska Book Award.
Our Life in Catnaps
When we move in together, we sleep on
blankets nested on the floor. We sleep on
pillows lined up like dominos, our butts
falling through the cracks. We sleep on a
camping air mattress you bring home
from the big box. It’s part-time, better
than donating blood. We fill the air
mattress, spread sheets. In the morning
it’s flat. I say, Put it under water. You
take out your phone to learn six ways to
find a leak, watch three videos of people
with nail polish and superglue, spray
bottles and valves that won’t shut, spend
two hours getting the kitchen floor wet.
The electric pump whirls. You say, Maybe
we could plug it in all night. You curse.
You take off your shirt. You carry the
wilting plastic into the shower and fill the
tub. The apartment fills with stream.
Your hair curls. I bring you a beer in in a
pint with a cat pattern. I make myself
coco in a mug with the handle in the
shape of a cat tail. After midnight, I say.
Let’s throw it away, not wanting to wake
surrounded by a plastic puff of failure. I
say, My ex-uncle might know someone
with an extra bed. I don’t say he’ll want
to give us cats, he’ll want to play bridge,
he’ll want to get you job as a nurse, even
though you’d prefer to get a job
catfishing. I kiss your nose, scratch your
chin, and pull you to the floor sleep.

Clowder
No one is ready for this photo. Not us, not
the cats we adopted on a buy-one-get-onefree
day at the shelter. We sit on the
futon, confettied by cat fur. The tabby
nuzzles my neck, speaks the growling
rumble we think means love, means
friend, means game on. She meets the
camera’s gaze, paw my jugular, some cat
grip that means hers. The calico clutches
your arm, as if to say, Please let me go. I
need to gamble, shout, Hello world, I'm
yours! We’re all waiting for the timer,
fearing one of us will wiggle free, or that
the timer won’t work and we’ll be sitting
there grinning and holding each other
our whole life. If you look closely, you’ll
see I’m leaning into you. If I look closely,
I’ll see how your leg is pressing into my
own. If we both look, we’ll see how the
cats aren’t really looking at the camera,
but at each other, ears pricked as if they
hear something we can’t hear yet,
nostrils pulsing as if they smell what we
could never smell, whiskers feeling a
movement in the air, an impossible
thrumming that has just started, low and
steady.
#!
!

Two poems
By Lana Bella
CHIASMUS
You no longer feel the urge to
slam the door,
instead,
with a casual flick
of your fingers,
you set them loose,
groaning
toward their final berth.
Things are simple again,
back then you
couldn't have known
betrayal lurks
in the roundness of her curves,
the shame that makes home
when ill breaths
tug at your lungs,
or the chiasmus of triumph
of her exit
with the defeat of yours.
PINK CHAMPAGNE
with one tried breath,
the little red dress slides to the floor,
leaving bare fingers on
skin the color of poached egg,
somewhere near the grooves
of its wordless slither,
the dragon tattoo wraps itself like a boa
around her back,
across the king-sized bed,
breaststrokes of raspy heat turn bubbles
immersed in
pink champagne,

loading her arms
the weight of Plath and good ol' Keats,
she sinks into
the flesh of her bed until
her voice finds enough breaths to ask:
Am I the only one that holds life
like it is words floating in champagne?
Author bio: A Pushcart nominee, Lana Bella has work of poetry and fiction
published and forthcoming with over 140 journals, including a chapbook
with Crisis Chronicles Press (Spring 2016), Chiron Review, Coe Review,
Fourth & Sycamore, Harbinger Asylum, Literary Orphans, Poetry Salzburg
Review, Poetry Quarterly, QLRS (Singapore), Sein Und Werden (UK), Taj
Mahal Review (India), White Rabbit (Chile) and elsewhere, among others.
She divides her time between the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang,
Vietnam, where she is a wife of a talking-wonder novelist and a mom of two
far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.
https://www.facebook.com/niaallanpoe

Llegando by Jack Little
Artist bio: Jack Little (b. 1987) is a British-Mexican poet, editor and
translator based in Mexico City. He is the author of 'Elsewhere' (Eyewear,
2015) and is the founding editor of The Ofi Press: www.ofipress.com
!

THE SUBURB (SATIRE)
By Kevin Maus
[Voice Over]
In major cities throughout the US, due to rapid gentrification of inner-city areas
[People shrieking with laughter, dragging a blue, plastic bag of dog shit on a leash
along the ground, while other people sitting at outdoor tables at a cafe shriek with
laughter into their phones.]
...the criminal and poor element...
[A youth in a red baseball cap turned backwards, and in a silk letterman jacket,
spray paints the word “Hood” onto a concrete brick wall while gunshoots and
women's screams can be heard in the background. Nearby, an old hobo with
wrung out lips and a rat-tail necklace smokes a crackpipe and shakes. Police
lights play in super-imposed transparence over the scene.]
are forced out to the suburbs.
[Title]
“The Suburbs”, in bleeding Warrior's-like spraypaint before an indistinct
cityscape, the sun setting beyond like an inferno.
A synth buzz reaches a crescendo: “There goes the neighborhood”.
[Lead]
A deer is eating grass on the sprawling lawn of a suburban manor, when a
gangster in a pink silk turban, a tooth-pick in his gold teeth, leans out the window
of an Escalade and lets fly with an MP5, obliterating the creature, that whiplashes

its majestic neck and squawks hellishly. Then the Escalade begins to whip
shitties on the lawn as people throw McDonald's sacks from the vehicle's
windows.
An exterior shot of a suburban mall.
Inside the mall, someone has torn the pants off a man dressed as a Lego figure at
LegoLand; he's sprawled out on the floor, as a woman with a giant ass and in a
hot-pink top and matching sandals daggers him. A man shoots a champagne cork
off her sphincter while she is amid it.
A woman bicycler in Capri pants and a mint green t-shirt, with a matching helmet
that has a shock of pink to it too, comes out from beneath a covered bridge on a
bike path, only to have her teeth pistol whipped out.
The assailant unbuckles his pants and begins to dagger the woman's face as she
lies unconscious on the bike-path...the sound of her helmet knocking and scraping
against the asphalt is heard. Til a goose comes from a nearby pond and
aggressively charges the man atop her; he gets up in a terror and swings at the
goose with his gun, then throws the gun at the bird and runs away while the
woman sits up and wraps her arms around the goose's neck.
Trash-can fires on a soccer-field, in view of children in the middle of a game. A DJ
with silver horseteeth and red chains all over him spins records—DJ Delectable—
while a rapper in silk potato sack shorts, and with a nose-splint on and hypno
glasses, pulls a woman's hair who is listening to him rap, then throws a goblet of
malt liquor in her face. Everyone is daggering each other, including small
children.
Cut to a police HQ war-room. A great, black electronic grid with orange streets
covers the wall behind the men in the room, all paunched and in cheap dressshirts
and ties—worn through old men, by years of devilishness...though there is
also a man in full police regalia and dark glasses, his chest overcrowded with bars
intimating his rank.
One of the men leaning over a map, with giant red concentric circles on it,on a
lighted table, screams, “They're barricading the interstates!! No one can get in or
out of the city!” and backhands a cup of styrofoam coffee onto the floor.
To a shot of an interstate bridge on a grassy plain. It is beautiful sky-blue day,
with only faint clouds seen like a haze in the distance. Heaped upon the roadways
passing underneath the bridge are junked, burnt-out cars stacked high. Men
stand staggered on the heaps, holding carbine sharp-shooter rifles, looking
statuesque and bulletproof; while other men circle around in front of the bridge,
driving atv's and Shriner motorcycles, squealing like indians.
The camera approaches as if by vehicle for the shot, centering on a man who's
dressed like Chocolate Moose, who fires his rifle in the air when the camera comes
fully upon him.

Before and after scenes of the houses: people on the lawns smiling and waving;
then to lawns blowing with McDonald's cheeseburger sacks, and with pitbulls
fighting, men in undershirts whipping them with belts...and another pair of dogs
daggering each other.
A man on a Shriner's motorcycle does a wheelie.
Cars are heaped at the neck of culdesacs as gang-warfare explodes.
An exchange of gunfire leaves a young man lain low. A friend weeps over him and
raises his hands to the heavens.
A hundred story tenement building is seen going up on the horizon.
A greed-head talking to greed-head community organizers. The woman from the
bike-path who had her teeth knocked out is there, smiling ridiculously (teeth still
missing), in a glittering red, low-cut dress, her makeup misapplied to one eye.
A family of five in a station-wagon, “WE'RE JUST GONNA GO FOR IT!! WE'RE
JUST GONNA GO FOR IT!!” driving at full speed into the interstate car barrier,
exploding. Men cheer as the dad crawls out of the car on fire, stumbling and
running, throwing his arms in the air; people run with him, surrounding him and
cheering him on.
A furious looking man with white-dyed mustaches coming from the sides of his
mouth, so that they look like foam dribbling loose, entreating his people: the poor
and the criminal.
“They tried to push us out. Now we've got them trapped in.” He has a little cudgel
raised over his head; at the end of the cudgel is a fist, lit aflame.
“They been movin' us around for generations. This is where we make our last
stand....They're going to have to get rid of us the old fashioned way this time; or
we're gonna make a goddamn trade in their skins that will break the bank!
“We're the gate-keepers to their whole fuckin' world now. Nothin' goes down
without our say-so....
“This is how they meet us; this is how they finally see into our eyes.”
He gives a war-whoop and starts circling the flaming club over his head.
“Annihilate 'em!!” shrieks the formerly composed, aged officer in uniform, black
spit shooting out from between his teeth and dribbling down his chin.
A helicopter descends into the view of an airborne shot, a column of black smoke
rising not far in the distance.
The camera following the grid of a street closely from above, showing street-tostreet
fighting: police shooting tear-gas cannisters; national guard running in
tight formation.

A helicopter passes just under the camera, a police sniper leaning out of its door.
Tanks rolling out.
The interior of a little boy's room, with model airplanes hanging from the ceiling
and dinosaur dolls lined up on a shelf. A man, with swim-goggles and a hare-lip,
suddenly comes into view holding a lighted molotov cocktail; the burning rag in
the bottle gives off a guttering sound. He hurls it down from the window, bombing
out two SWAT officers moving in crouched stances across a backyard basketball
court.
A man with an RPG that says “Ghetto Blaster” on it shoots a helicopter out of the
sky.
The outcasts prove to have a secret weapon...
Tanks suddenly turn a glowing blue and burst inward as though crushed by giant
stones. Helicopters disintegrate piece-meal in midair, gently unloading their
occupants into a screaming fall. A SWAT member's head suddenly turns a
glowing blue, and begins shivering like a can in a paint shaker, suddenly
collapsing inward like crushed aluminum, sending streams of white neon spilling
from the officer's face.
A scientist with a hatchet-like, sun withered face and red-blue eyes, a bald head
and wings of stringy, bleach-like blond hair:
“I give the weapon free!” the man says in a German accent, “Only if you promise
to use it,” he says coyly, talking to the gang chieftain, with a bushy eyebrow
raised.
The men step back from an anti-matter device that has a little black ball floating
above it, rolling in place and covered in whispy blue flame.
[Close]
To a shot of the chieftain's sweat-stained face...his glorious eyes hold the vastness
and potency of his people.
He screams, “Tonight we ride for the city!!” and is greeted with a jubilant roar, to
which he raises his club.
The camera lifts upon the chieftain's raised club, showing behind him the old
gussed up police chief, burning at the stake, screaming like an old woman who is a
heavy smoker.

The camera then moves toward the police chief, nearing his red mottled,
screaming head and lifts into the black smoke coming from his burning legs and
torso. ... Traveling through the smoke, the camera comes out above the
continental United States, with more smoke rising from each metropolis to be
counted amid her borders.
Title reappears. Voice-over.
“On [Release Date], Gentrifiers Die!”.
Author bio: Kevin Maus is a summa cum laude graduate of the University
of Minnesota and an MFA graduate of the New School. He works as an
over-the-road truck driver but is currently expatriated to Mexico City, in
avoidance of the soul hobbling cruelty of another winter OTR. His work has
appeared in Gone Lawn, Dogzplot and other journals.

The Living Room
By Christopher Payne
“action figures are pretty cool”
Said the woodpiece to the tool
“and if you have enough to drink they’re almost sidewalk”
Oh, Praise be to the carpet on the ceiling
eliciting sounds in the lightbulbs feeling
Too “shut up i’m finishing my Breakfast” to get anything done
Angels laugh like bowling pins in the fabric above
while The furniture below pushes and shoves
reaching for that thread which clouds them.
to understand
and reprimand those who don’t
shoes pillow what it means to “won’t”
As long as there’s born there’s purple.
Others argue that everyone was manufactured in factories over several
thousand years.
But that’s too…
oh look, here’s mom, elevator music, disco lights with strippers
let’s people the people.
Author bio: Christopher Payne lives in a watch outside a flamingo tent
where you can see him anytime you want by poking your head out the
window. But if you bring your binoculars you could see him flaunting The
Beatles' fifth album. And you can laugh at this. Or look. Either way he
doesn't care. He also does music things:
https://soundcloud.com/christopher_payne/sets/new-stuff "

Winter Past Integrity by Sheila E. Murphy
Author bio: Sheila E. Murphy composes poetry both in tranquility and
fever with equal fervor. She resides in the desert Southwest, where she
writes, draws, crafts keynote addresses about doing business with power
and grace for conferences and conventions. She is a business author and
teacher, as well.