Story
POETRY DAZE – Minimalist Poems, Millionaire Dreams, and Andrew Wylie Before He Became “The Jackal”
Jeff Goldberg
Andrew Wylie is as rich and powerful as he always wanted to be, a super-agent known in the publishing world as “The Jackal” for stealing writers from their longtime, loyal agents and publishers. Victor Bockris—who spun...
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Story
The Other Dave
David Larsen
I wasn’t eager to open the door in a motel room at three in the morning. I may be foolish, but I’m not stupid.
“Who the hell is it?” I shouted through the closed door. I pushed on the door to get some idea as...
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Story
Summer-Rain
Alhana McNutt
My feet, as if acting on their own, start running towards the Ocean. They take me to the center of the beach and come to a halt. I take a moment to catch my breath and look up to the sky, my eyes filling with tears. After a ...
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Story
Three Years
J. Boyett
Bob didn’t really think the three girls were going to fuck him. But if they’d been three twenty-something males who’d knocked on the door of his isolated backwoods house after dark, he likely wouldn’t have invited th...
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Story
A Tiny Seed
Michael Gray
There’s a huge thingamajig outside the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock. I reckon you’d call it a sculpture. It’s a big old pair of glasses nearly as tall as me. You could fit your body behind just one lens. I do that and...
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Story
To See a Man About a Dog
Amber Baird
Daddy texted that he got a surprise to cheer me up, something u always wanted, he said, so on the Greyhound trip home after a terrible semester at college, options line danced through my head. Maybe a Harley Davidson with st...
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Writing
What I have seen that you have not
Vira Sofia Pitkofska
My friend on the unit, in the silent room crying. Fists beating against glass. let me out let me out he pleads.
His Tears, a flash flood. I was sixteen. He was too.
Fourteen year old girls having flashbacks of fathers bro...
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Review
THE BOOKSTORE BOOK, KARL MARX PRIVATE EYE & NAMING A HURRICANE – 3 Books Reviewed
Lehman Weichselbaum
The Bookstore Book
Ron Kolm
Pink Trees Press, 2023
Karl Marx Private Eye
Jim Feast
PM Press, 2023
Naming a Hurricane
Madeline Artenberg
Pink Trees Press, 2023
THE BOOKSTORE BOOK
In The Bookstore Book: A Memoir, prolific poet and prosaist Ron Kolm submits his own version of looking back. For Kolm, speaking through prose essays and "poems" (really prose essays in chopped-up lines), the life of a bookseller was both a career choice and a special window to the world. As always, if you're a writer, you don't have to look for experience, experience will find you. From early adulthood, Kolm would hit town, and, like the rest of us needing a job, went shopping for one. And like many people of letters, he knew that a job in a bookstore would make the best personal fit. More often than not, Kolm's quest was rewarded. He found his jobs with often ridiculous ease, earning him a not overly strenuous workload, a sustenance paychec...
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Review
On Barbara O’Brien’s OPERATORS AND THINGS
Neil Martinson
In the early ’60s, Ace Books, a publisher known primarily for science fiction, released a small paperbound edition of a 1958 book called Operators and Things by a woman writing under the name Barbara O’Brien. Although ostensibly a work of non-fiction, it reads a bit like a missing Philip K. Dick novel; its subtitle “The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic,” while no doubt enticing to some readers, does no justice to this mystifying, true-life initiatory tale.
The author starts out by describing her experiences in the competitive, male-dominated business world of 1950s New York, detailing the various “hook operating” methods by which her aggressive coworkers would ascend the corporate ladder: vicious techniques redolent of Cold War paranoia that ranged from simple slander to complex, backstabbing daisychains of Machiavellian proportions. The institutional sociopathy she details hinges on adroit, covert manipulation and contr...
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Essay
Roberto Mannino – the Paper Maker
Nicholas Skaldetvind
Roberto Mannino was born on 21 June, the Week of Magic according to the Vedas. At 16 he ran away from his family home in Rome, getting as far as the Netherlands with designs on catching a freighter bound for the Congo. Onl...
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Poem
Navalny Blues
Valery Oisteanu
In a narrow cell padded with silence
On the gulag corridors to Purgatory
Walks the last hope for Russia without Putin
The cruel wind whistles through the cracks
Kafka trials stretch sentences beyond life
Cannibalistic t...
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Interview
JOHN WATERS AT THE PYRAMID CLUB
John Waters
I heard John Waters speak at the Pyramid Club in New York’s East Village on December 4, circa 1983. He was there to support a gay men’s magazine called Straight to Hell, published by Boyd McDonald. He...
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Story
The Chelsea Hotel
Elizabeth Morse
Diana realized that she’d had a one-night stand with Ben at the Chelsea Hotel twenty-five years ago.
When the realization hit, Ben and Diana were at a restaurant eating enchiladas, comfortably ensconced in a ...
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Story
Tutoring
Lukas Tallent
There are only the past and the present. That’s because tense denotes time, and is morphologically based, which means construction—letters, prefixes, suffixes, etc. Take the verb to touch. In order to make it pas...
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Story
Anus Horribilis
Jim Cory
One morning, in Week Five of a six-week treatment regimen, I stepped before a mirror to discover my pubic hair had absconded.
Gone. All of it. Along with 35 pounds of body weight.
A few months before, I’d ...
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