Memory is Narrative; Narrative is Memory
Ronald B. Richardson
Memory is Narrative
Memory is mostly narrative. I say mostly because there are rare memories that are not, such as olfactory memories: you smell something, and it suddenly takes you back to . . . what? In these memories, ...
Purple Heron of the Night
Raúl Serrano Sánchez
Claudio was only trying to make up for all the years he’d spent yearning for those legs, the ones he was always telling you about over coffee in the newly restored center of the old city, in one of those bars that’s supp...
The Good Shit & Presence: Rue Girardon
Pete Simonelli
The Good Shit
We were told the bubbles should look like little pebbles you could pour clean into your hand.
“Go on, shake it,”
said Peanut, junk dealer, mechanic, and feral-cat wrangler by day,
shiner by night.
...
Peter Shear – Paintings
Peter Shear
What really sends me is artwork containing a spaciousness of address which allows for our looking to become consuming and urgent. In these moments the relationship between object and audience can be truly generative, a p...
The Cherub
E. A. Fow
On the way to rehearsal, Amy thought she saw something flit away. An afterimage lingered in her eye, pink and faintly glowing, but she couldn’t make out what it was. She didn’t think about it again until the next day, wh...
Catastrophes
Breyten Breytenback
No, the universe remains dark. We are animals overcome by catastrophes . . . but I suddenly discovered that alienation, the exploitation of man by man, and malnourishment, will push into the background the metaphysical evil,...
Tenth Between Fear & Trembling
Max Blagg
We lived one floor up from a woodworking shop from which the tools had long since been stolen. It was on East Tenth Street, way over almost to the river, a view of the smokestacks of Con Edison’s 14th Street plant painted ...
Maria Yudina
Jenny Wade
The Russian concert pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina, little known in the West, died this day, November 19, in 1970. She had a fervent cult following in the Soviet Union, partly because of her resistance to the establishme...
Evil Polish Boners & Other Flarf Poems
Sharon Mesmer
Evil Polish Boners
I don’t know what it is about spandex suits for wrestling and rowing,
but they always seem to create the most evil Polish boners.
The Polish boner is a boner that the Polish boner team created
...
Beer Mystic Burp #20: Eddie Woods Has Been Around the Block – With & Without Tennessee
bart plantenga
“If Tennessee Williams doesn’t know what to do with his life, why should I worry?”
~ Eddie Woods, Tennessee Williams in Bangkok
Eddie Woods and I go back to October 1978. It was in Amsterdam at the Ins & Out...
Saving Johannes
Eddie Woods
Johannes van Dam (1946-2013). Journalist, walking encyclopedia, and culinary writer extraordinaire. And one of my dearest Amsterdam friends since we first met in 1980, which was still early Ins & Outs Press days. Johannes, w...
Looking Back: Anxiety’s Greatest Hits
Patrick O'Neil
San Francisco, June 24, 1997
I’m in a dark, trash-filled alley between tall brick buildings. Two men stand in shadows. I can’t see their faces. I hand one of them money and he gives me a balloon of dope. I look up, th...
The Hurricane
Ron Kolm
My Sister is a pastor
For a hospice
In New Jersey—
She’s part of a team
That drives up and down
The length of the state
Helping the dying die.
She spends her nights
In motels and keeps her files
In her car; her...
Road Kill
Drew Hubner
In an alley on the fringes of the march, Glory stuffed toilet paper bits in her ears and got out of danger, whispering to the baby in her tummy, running deeper into the alley for safety.
Text me, she'd said to the fath...
Kill Your Darlings – a film review
Marc Olmsted
The conceit that the stabbing death of David Kammerer at the hands of Lucian Carr would birth the Beat Generation was a premise audacious enough to make me interested.
What follows in the film Kill Your Darlings is beyond...
