Story
Afro-Surreal Excerpt
D. Scot Miller
Let me tell you how I met Sham Black.
West Virginia, Dunbar Jr. High School football field, 123rd Annual Commode Bowl, Riverside Rats versus The Hillside Rams.
photograph by Kym Ghee
Every Thanksgiving morning...
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Art
Gretchen Faust – Photographs
Gretchen Faust
Gretchen Faust is an artist and performer. She’s had multiple solo exhibitions at the Pat Hearn Gal- lery in NYC and Greengrassi in London, where she is currently represented. She has performed at the Franklin Furnace and ...
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Story
The Year of Our Lord Quetzalcoatl
Margarita Shalina
The morning of the first day in the Dark Zone, I wake, still dreaming in black and white. I am Joan Crawford. I am Mildred Pierce. In the black of night, a storm is raging. I am in a bungalow by the ocean. The white foam wav...
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Poem
Plants at Work
Lynn McGee
Plants at Work
Sunflowers bob on a raft near Chernobyl,
roots leaching atoms humming with intent
to harm, but diffusing like sugar in the slow
surge of some big flower’s stalk,
its face tilting to follow the s...
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Comics
The Late Child and Other Animals by Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger – a review
Norman Douglas
The Late Child and Other Animals
Written and colored by Marguerite Van Cook
Adapted and drawn by James Romberger
Fantagraphics Books
The Late Child and Other Animals opens in the middle of the blitz with two wide-eyed ...
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Poem
Two Poems by Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
AFTER YOU SAID I ALWAYS LOSE THINGS
The red birthstone fell
out of my ring, leaving
its crowned prongs empty,
a perfect chip chiseled
from my heart’s bones.
I dreamed being stopped by
the long dark walkway
w...
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Art
New Paintings – Stephen Lack
Stephen Lack
Expressionist, impressionist, symbolist. Pop imbued with guilt, political outrage, occasional indignation, existential disconnection and an overriding sense of loss. These works celebrate where I have been with tenderness, s...
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Essay
Vladislav Khodasevich: Midlife Meltdown in Paris
Jenny Wade
During the unusually hot Parisian summer of 1924, 38-year-old Vladislav Khodasevich—regarded by Nabokov as the finest Russian poet since Blok—was suffering from an identity crisis. One of 3 million exiled from Soviet Rus...
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Story
The Earring
Alan Kaufman
I first saw the gold crescent of renegade freedom dangling from the lobe of a nameless hairy hippy Goy, his scrawny, insolent neck bound by a red bandanna. He leaned with outthrust hip of impertinent American coolness agains...
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Evergreen
Ballad of a Lousy Husband
Joshua Mohr
I should probably tell you more about the night Blue pushed me off the bar because that was really when our marriage ended. Sure, we stayed together another nine, twelve, maybe fifteen months more, but nothing was ever goo...
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Review
Found in Phoenix by Amy Ouzoonian – A Review by Jim Feast
Jim Feast
Found in Phoenix by Amy Ouzoonian (New York: Fly By Night Press, 2014)
It’s a good thing Amy Ouzoonian put her name on her new book of poems, short stories and plays, Found in Phoenix, because otherwise a reader would t...
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Classics
The World of Wrestling
Roland Barthes
The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life's great occasions.
--Baudelaire
The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient th...
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Story
Caravaggio, Baby
Deborah Pintonelli
I have a date with Henry Henderson. We worked together one long summer canvassing for Greenpeace. Yes, I was one of those annoying young people who stop you on the street when you are rushing to your next appointment. He was...
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Review
The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones: A Novel by Stewart Home
Barbara Adair
The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones: A Novel by Stewart Home (Test Centre, 2014)
In June 2013 Stewart Home, an (in) famous London author/writer/performer, receives a parcel. There is no return address on it; or a name to ind...
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Poem
Silent Calls: Short Poems from Sparrow
Sparrow
Silent Calls
You know how sometimes the phone rings and when you answer it no one’s there? Many of those calls are made by cats.
Science Virgin
“I’m a science virgin,” said Adele. “I’ve n...
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