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thwack

thwack

  • Joined: December 27, 2012
  • Articles: 2319
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COSPLAYERS, a graphic narrative by Dash Shaw, reviewed by Helen Chazan

Throughout the pages of Cosplayers, the new book by noted cartoonist Dash Shaw, the narrative presents a series of illustrations of the titular subject: people dressed in costumes based on favorite characters from popular fandom—comics, television, video games, all the things that we like to call “geek culture.” Set against increasingly baroque pop-art patterns, Shaw’s cosplayers will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever perused photos of a comic convention—dynamic figures from popular culture evoked by the mundane reality of fans in uncomfortable outfits under the harsh lighting of the convention floor.

THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and William Sulit Interview Each Other

THE JUNCTURE INTERVIEW Beth Kephart and William Sulit Interview Each Other

For many years, my husband, William Sulit, and I have collaborated on projects for corporate America—annual reports, commemorative books, employee magazines. When corporate America changed—when the cultures shifted, the ideals, the relationships—we began to explore a new idea, a company we could create and manage as our own, a company through which we could define the quality of the product and the nature of the conversation. We have called that company Juncture Workshops. Through it we offer memoir retreats, a monthly newsletter, and video essays that showcase the work of memoir masters and offer ideas and prompts.

As with most things, of course, it all sounds easier than it has been. Here we provide a behind-the-scenes look at our memoir-steeped lives, post video production.

STONER, a novel by John Williams, 50th Anniversary Edition, reviewed by Michelle E. Crouch

This edition of the 1965 novel Stoner arrived with a gold band around the front cover printed with exuberant blurbs that call it “as sweeping, intimate, and mysterious as life itself” and “the most beautiful book in the world.” Such loud praise seems almost at odds with a quiet, serious book; it’s the sort of praise that its hero, William Stoner, neither receives nor (for more than a fleeting moment) desires. Following Stoner from birth to death, the novel presents a seemingly unexceptional life as a subject worthy of the closest examination.

ON THE EDGE, a novel by Rafael Chirbes, reviewed by David Grandouiller

Regarding the difficulty of starting a novel, Umberto Eco writes, in the appendices to The Name of the Rose, “...there is an Indian proverb that goes, 'Sit on the bank of a river and wait; your enemy's corpse will soon float by.' And what if a corpse were to come down the stream–since this possibility is inherent in an intertextual area like a river?”

In On The Edge, Spanish novelist Rafael Chirbes, who died last year, activates this idea. His corpse appears in the first pages, in the mud of a lagoon bank, under the feet of a fisherman, in the mouth of a stray dog. The central character and narrator, Esteban, extrapolates from this opening scene, revealing a world of which decaying bodies are the natural product. His world is full of corpses, living and dead, full of ghosts from the past speaking over one another to fill the novel with noise.

A SLEEPLESS MAN SITS UP IN BED, poems by Anthony Seidman reviewed by Johnny Payne

When Oswald de Andrade, in his Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), spoke of “Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality,” he might have been speaking of Anthony Seidman’s delighfully profligate A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed.

The sheer exuberance and sense of endless imagistic invention is exhaustive and vivifying. Each word is a firecracker thrown at your head, as you run through a maze—both mystic and vulgar, blissful and grotesque, enjoying a scary magic that leaves you rapt.

EMOTION IS NOT PLOT: Using Detachment to Create Powerful Fiction, a craft essay by Claire Rudy Foster

Here’s my greatest fear: that I will never be able to name the essential emotions I perceive in myself and others. Our shifting tide and all its smells and sweat and words and secret hidden codes and eyelashes and old letters and emotional ephemera that moves across the surface of the human world like that gyre of discarded belongings and trash that is so large it could cover Texas and is comprised of plastic, the things made of plastic that surround us our whole lives, including baby pacifiers and Barbie dolls and old soccer balls and parts of cars and rubber duckies and condoms and tiny things collected by the swale of the sea the way we will accumulate a hundred precious objects and love them as though they were anything but trash, our collection of special garbage with our memories attached, our stories which burrow deeply into our minds and tell us that there is more to this than plastic, more to this, more.

Kanley Stubrick by Mike Kleine reviewed by Justin Goodman

When you check out the latest novel by Michael Kleine, Kanley Stubrick, on Goodreads, you’ll find that an anonymous reader asked the author if “this book is going to house the Mystery of the 17 Pilot Fish play.” Kleine answered rather grandly, referring to this play set to be released at the end of August, and the rest of his oeuvre: “Kanley Stubrick and The Mystery of the Seventeen Pilot Fish are all part of the same universe, yes, but also, so is Mastodon Farm and Arafat Mountain. Everything--the characters, locales, events, situations, demises, dreams--everything is linked.” But Kleine doesn’t address by what means and to what end “everything is linked,” nor if this is a benefit to anyone involved. Kanley Stubrick doesn’t elaborate on it much. Rather, the experimental novel turns out to be a display of the picturesque absurdity of Samuel Beckett and David Lynch without the uncomfortable laughter; Klein borrows sitcom’s episodic format, lack of continuum, and commercial approachability for ends that forcefully lack those very same traits. Such is Kanley Stubrick’s impressive and precarious balance.

A MEAL IN WINTER by Hubert Mingarelli reviewed by Jeanne Bonner

A Meal in Winter by French author Hubert Mingarelli is a subtle book that quietly but methodically stalks the reader’s sympathies. It does so through a beautiful, spare prose style that begins with the first line: “They had rung the iron gong outside, and it was still echoing, at first for real in the courtyard, and then, for a longer time, inside our heads.” This is lovely writing (deftly rendered from the French by translator Sam Taylor, himself a novelist)—yet a bit ominous, like something that can’t be escaped. Later, setting the scene for the winter’s walk that takes up much of the first part of the narrative, he writes: “A pale sun hung in the sky, as distant and useless, it seemed to us, as a coin trapped under thick ice.” Trapped. What is trapped? Or who?

THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON by Kelly Barnhill reviewed by Mandy King

There’s something compelling about orphan stories and Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon draws on this fascination. When I look back at my favorite childhood books, they all have one thing in common—main characters who are orphaned or abandoned. Barnhill’s story opens and immediately draws the reader in with the tragic, forced abandonment of a baby girl in the forest, an annual sacrifice meant to appease the Witch so that the villagers of the Protectorate may live safely for the next year.

This middle grade fantasy is a story with a magical twist. Baby Luna is not completely abandoned because a good witch saves her. In fact, the kind-hearted witch Xan has been saving the babies of the Protectorate every year and taking them to towns across the forest where they are beloved by their new families. These are the Star Children, so called because, on the journey, Xan feeds them magic from the stars. During the journey with baby Luna, two unusual things occur—one, Xan falls in love with Luna and decides to adopt her as her grandchild, and, two, she accidentally feeds the child from the moon and not the stars, infusing her with powerful magic.

Nathaniel Popkin: in Conversation with Translator LEE KLEIN

NP: You’ve traveled to El Salvador, the subject of Revulsion. Did you know about the author Castellanos Moya?

LK: In 1995 I traveled by land from Austin, Texas (where I lived at the time) to Costa Rica and spent about a week in El Salvador en route south. I visited the beach at La Libertad described in the book and experienced San Salvador but I don’t remember seeing any book other than the one I was somewhat inappropriately reading at the time (Cheever’s big red collection of short stories). I hadn’t read Bernhard at that point. I hadn’t even heard of him. But six years later I became exposed to the Bernhard virus and started reading him like mad, hunting down copies (Vintage hadn’t re-issued new editions yet and the University of Chicago editions weren’t so easy to find, not even in NYC; in Iowa City, circa 2002 or ‘03, I found a first-edition hard cover of Gathering Evidence but not a single other Bernhard book in any of the town’s many bookstores, which, at the time, may have excessively disheartened me about humanity, as though I needed Bernhard to raise my spirits during the first G.W. Bush administration).

BRIGHT MAGIC: Stories by Alfred Döblin reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer

Bright Magic—a powerful concoction of black humor, harsh beauty, and dark fabulism—marks Alfred Döblin’s first collection ever to be translated into English (here by Damion Searls, a master of his craft who’s also translated the works of Proust and Rilke). Döblin (1878–1957), now a classic of German literature, was a pioneer of expressionist writing as well as a respected neurologist and army doctor. His short stories show a tremendous bravery of form and a willingness to experiment with things that today would be called flash and micro fiction as early as the 1910s. He also demonstrates a deep desire to mirror the absurdity of all that surrounded him—the horror of world wars, the destructive power of ignorance—by wielding absurdity in his stories like a joke, a sword, a punishing assumption. In this collection, we see Döblin lift up fascinations with memory and things forgotten, with morality and violence, with descents into madness and those dizzying moments of painful, exquisite clarity.

Ask June: Bereft in Burlington & Wit’s End

Ask June Cleaver

I am a middle-aged woman, currently living alone—my children are both launched, and their father decamped long before they did. Last month my beloved Lab, Vulcan, died suddenly of a heart attack just after his ninth birthday. It was a terrible shock to come home from work and find him lying there, and since then I have not been able to get over either the trauma of that moment or just not having him around. He really was my best friend. We travelled together, went to the park together every evening, ate in the kitchen together, and slept side by side. The house feels empty and a little ominous. I have been thinking about death a lot—not as something I desire, but because my lonely house makes me remember that life is short and scary.

Wit’s End: June Opines on the 2016 Election, continued

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,

Maybe you don’t do politics, but every time I run into someone that I thought had a modicum of sense and they tell me they’re going to vote for Donald Trump, I find that I have no resources except to tell them they are stupid and are not thinking straight. I mean do they really think Donald Trump can deal with ISIS? The issues of the Middle East? Aren’t they terrified as I am even at that remote possibility? Well, I’m not writing you to talk about those that are enthralled by him. I guess stupidity is the norm in America.

I’m writing about my cortisol level that I can’t seem to control when dealing with this subject. (I don’t even want to mention his name again.) Rational discourse on my part seems to fly right out the window. And why can’t people see what I see in Hillary? Her smarts, her determination, her dedication to this country, her experience as a Senator and a Secretary of State?

Should I just crawl under the covers until this election is over, or is there a way for me to have some reasonable conversations about this election?

Cordially,

—At Wit’s End in Wilmington

LOST WORDS, a novel by Nicola Gardini, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

What is experienced and what is retained can be wildly disparate; a revolution is distilled to a single detail, as Nicola Gardini reveals in the lovely novel Lost Words. Gardini explores the cultural and political revolution of 1970s Italy through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy.

Chino—his given name is Luca—is a doorwoman's son in a working-class apartment building on the unfashionable side of Milan. “The doorwoman was not to be away from her post or distracted for a single instant,” Gardini explains. “If something required her to be away from her post, like taking out the trash, then her son should fill in for her and guard the lobby and the front staircase.” The tenants of 15 Via Icaro make Luca's mother miserable; with the mildest touch of bitterness, Luca watches their messy, entitled lives as they trail through the lobby. Like most details of childhood, they are simultaneously fascinating and utterly forgettable—as soon as Luca moves away, he will not think of them again. He is growing up, and Gardini describes his slow inheritance of other people’s nostalgia.

BOILING LAKE, flash fiction by Sharon White, reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

The short flash pieces that comprise Sharon White’s Boiling Lake read like dispatches from a dreamscape—or perhaps a nightmarescape. Surreal, dark, and unmoored from time, these journal entries are well-crafted machines that merge fairytale, myth, and history into concise forms spanning no more than a page and a half. While some of these stories build narrative bridges—recurring characters include a girl nominated for sainthood and New World explorers reporting back to higher-ups—many exist as discrete moments, indulging in provocative imagery without the expectation of elaboration. There is skill in this work that allows one to dwell in the temporary, to savor the fleeting.

BRIGHTFELLOW, a novel by Rikki Ducornet, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

“The linoleum swells with stories. As he plays, darkness rises from the floor and slowly claims the room.” With these unsettling, intriguing first lines, we enter the mind and story of Stub, a six-year-old who observes the broken, embittered adults in his world. Growing up, he’s learning, requires giving up not only childish things but childish wonder, too.

Abandoned by his mother, neglected by his father, briefly cared for by Jenny (a sweet but “crazy, sort of” young woman just sprung from the local “madhouse”), the boy becomes a refugee on the college campus where his father works as a plumber. By nineteen, he’s left home for good and is raising himself there, eating food purloined from faculty houses and wearing “preppy discards” he finds in the student dorms. He spends his days roaming the library stacks and reading the works of the reclusive anthropologist Verner Vanderloon, a Werner Wolf-ish character who writes that mankind is divided into people “who know how to play, are full of mirth and fellow feeling, and the ones who are killjoys and combustible.” Play is a powerful form of magic, Vanderloon says, warning that its suppression leads to catastrophe.

Ask June: Resentful in Rhode Island

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, I am so angry. I live in a comfortable suburb, with old trees and well-kept houses. Most of us make a good living and work hard for our money. Now I find out that my next-door neighbor, a…

Ask June: Baffled in Baltimore

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,

My mother-in-law has never liked me, even though I helped her pampered son grow up for the past 35 years, and produced three reasonably presentable children for him (and grandchildren for her). Last month, Nanny-ma, as my kids call her, went to her eternal reward, no doubt still bitter about the trash that her Sonny decided to marry.

Though I feigned grief for as long as I could, after a couple of weeks, I had had enough. I told Sonny that the fraud had gone on long enough, and that, frankly, I was happy to be rid of the Old Bat. That was a dumb mistake, but as I said to Sonny, she is impervious to real or imagined insults these days, and we should move on with our life....

THE TRANSMIGRATION OF BODIES, a novel by Yuri Herrera, reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

There’s something about summer heat that pounds the world into a flat, dusty slab. Your mouth dries out, and your brain loses its moisture and turns to lizardy thoughts instead. Compassion? It’s in short supply. “For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring,” Shakespeare said. Yuri Herrera’s short novel The Transmigration of Bodies is all blood and madness, a noir fantasy set against a hard-baked Mexican landscape.

HOT DOG TASTE TEST, a graphic narrative, by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Matthew Horowitz

Purists beware: this book contains very little analysis and comparison of actual hot dogs. Perhaps best known as the designer of Bojack Horseman, Lisa Hanawalt draws the way children laugh. In Hot Dog Taste Test, she brings haphazard looking outlines to life with vivid watercolors to depict an exploration of sensory staples. Breakfast is moralized, street food is ranked and deconstructed, horses are ridden, otters are swum with, birds are everywhere—some with exaggerated human genitalia, some with understated human anxieties.

RITTENHOUSE WRITERS: Reflections on a Fiction Workshop by James Rahn reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf

That desire to be better—to be a better teacher, partner, father, writer—threads through James Rahn’s part-memoir, part-anthology, Rittenhouse Writers, an account of his work to develop and sustain the Rittenhouse Writers’ Group for nearly 28 years. Rahn is the author of Bloodnight, a novel based loosely on his experience growing up in Atlantic City, and his short fiction and articles have been published in many literary magazines. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania for fifteen years and, in addition to leading RWG workshop sessions, maintains a private practice for individual writing and psychoanalytic consultations.

Ask June: Boomer in Millennialville

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, Is there a polite way to let someone much younger in years know that they’re wrong? Especially in a heated political argument, where you want to avoid insulting the person’s lack of historical knowledge and perspective while encouraging…

PEPLUM, a graphic narrative by Blutch, reviewed by Helen Chazan

The French cartoonist Blutch is known for creating beautifully illustrated graphic novels in response to great works of art and literature, and Peplum is one of his finest. The comic is a postmodern refashioning of Petronius’s mid-first century proto-novel The Satyricon, which ditches the original's gluttonous decadence under Nero’s reign in favor of the chaotic end of the Late Roman Republic.

THE DEAD IN DAYLIGHT, poems by Melody S. Gee, reviewed by Claire Oleson

Communicating soreness, strength, weariness, and victory by tapping a reader’s own muscles for empathy, Melody S. Gee’s latest poetry collection, The Dead in Daylight, uses language to both construct and dismantle bodies and lives. As if preparing an animal for the table, Gee’s poems divide “body” from “life” and “muscle” from “meat.” Divided into two halves, “Separate Blood” and “Bone,” this book reaches out to its reader with both life and decay, fingers extended from the pages to read the pulse of its audience. In what can be understood as taxonomies, eulogies, butchering instructions, and ways to heal a nerve, The Dead in Daylight confronts life and death directly and sharply and softly, a heartbeat edging out from behind every line.

Ask June: Frustrated in Philly

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June, My neighbor Alicia was just born to be a pain the butt. First she whined about my lilac tree, which she was sure was going to crash into her house. Since it was planted eight feet from the…

A TYRANNY of PETTICOATS: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers & Other Badass Girls edited by Jessica Spotswood reviewed by Leticia Urieta

Jessica Spotswood has collected fifteen authors, including herself, to contribute short stories that reflect the perspectives of girls across different time periods of American history, starting from 1710 and ending in 1968. The collection spans different regions, cultures, classes and linguistic traditions. As a writer, I can imagine the challenges these authors faced to create this wonderful array of stories, to compress the unique historical and regional circumstances into one young woman’s voice, and fulfill her story arc in just twenty or so pages. Other authors have written four hundred-page historical novels that have had difficulty accomplishing this task. Beyond that, how does a writer avoid explanation that bogs down the reader, keeps the story suspenseful, and leaves the reader feeling satisfied, while avoiding emotionally simplistic endings?

The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis and The Cowshed by Ji Xianlin, two memoirs reviewed by Beth Johnston

Over the years, I’ve consumed dozens of memoirs of hardship. I’ve accumulated shelves full of first-person accounts of war, revolution, genocide, and slavery, and developed a sideline collection of journeys that end in failure or death. These accounts of people swept up in forces far larger than they are comfort me because their problems dwarf everyday concerns like workday traffic or messy kitchen sinks. Their perspective reminds me that much of human history has been dark and difficult, and that in the face of those difficulties, our only choice is whether to act bravely or poorly. These stories also do what good fiction—and good history—do: they let us glimpse the lives of those whose experiences we cannot imagine.

Ask June: Clever in Cleveland

Ask June Cleaver

Dear June,

While my roommate was away for the weekend her betta fish died. Because I knew that she was very attached to the fish I went to the pet store and purchased a replacement that looks very similar to the dead fish and flushed the dead one away. My roommate is none the wiser. My boyfriend says that I should come clean and that my behavior has been patronizing and deceitful. I believe that I have spared her unnecessary pain. What do you think?

—Clever in Cleveland

SAINT PAUL LIVES HERE (IN MINNESOTA), poems by Zach Czaia, reviewed by Hannah Kroonblawd

Zach Czaia’s debut poetry collection Saint Paul Lives Here (In Minnesota) is a poet’s response to revelations of sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. When the profane is unearthed beneath the divine, long-laid foundations begin to crumble. Perhaps no more clearly has this been observed than within the Catholic Church, where investigations of sexual abuse have spanned decades.

BREAK A LEG by Lisa Romeo

I was doing grunt work at the stable, filling water buckets, dropping bales of hay from the loft, cleaning grungy tack—and shoveling manure.

Kate and I—lone teens among the adults who rode at the small barn—cleaned stalls while horses were turned out to run around the ring, bucking, snorting and galloping, rolling in the August dust. She'd attack one stall, I another, our shared wheelbarrow in the aisle, both of us sweating, smelly, proud to be trusted with real work of horse care.

HOMMAGE À MACK SENNETT by Kathleen Rooney

The nightgown in the painting crosses genres: detective and farce. It has a partial body – breasts – but not a face. You could say it’s peekaboo. You could say it’s diaphanous. Either way, it reminds Georgette of how her husband uses recurring motifs to create a story, or at least a semi-story, for a story full of holes is a story full of mystery, a mystery like lace.

How came Georgette to place herself here: married to Magritte and doting on their dear Pomeranian, Loulou? This question is without a clear beginning, middle, or end, like the short Surrealist films that Mag likes to make with their Surrealist friends.

ON PETER ADAMYAN’S “BLACKFACE BARBIE MINSTREL SHOW” by Tracy Jones

Want to say “nigger” without taking the chance of getting beat the fuck up? Are you a white liberal tired of white guilt? Feeling a little transracial? Does everything about you seem black, but your skin? Do you sketch self-portraits using a brown crayon, instead of peach? Find yourself tweeting #blacklivesmatter, but still getting bussed to the #alllivesmatter side of town? What about that blackface frat party you always wanted to throw? Want to get shot for no reason? Can’t take advantage of affirmative action when applying for college? Is your blackness too hip to be down with that wigger shit?

TEACHING by Jason Christian

We all had our money on the metalhead. The fight was supposed to take place in the usual spot, three miles from town in a clearing in the woods beside an abandoned shack and a seasonal creek that happened to be dry that time of year. The other kid, a redheaded pipsqueak about my size, was mouthing off beyond what anyone predicted, and the metalhead, whom everyone kind of feared because of his long hair and self-inflicted scars and tattoos and silent teeth-gritting lack of interest in all of our classes, the other students, the football program, and just about everything else our fourteen-year-old minds cared about—even girls!—this metalhead, whose name I’ve forgotten, was predicted to mop the floor with the redheaded kid in seconds.

BIRCH WATERS by Meg Pendoley

When she first came to Epping after dropping out of art school in Boston, Davi loved the way everything in the farmhouse was old and falling apart, swollen in August, when she arrived, and then splintering all through the winter. Beth gave Davi one of her dead husband’s orange hunting hats to sleep in and Beth slept in a camo skullcap. The kitchen was so cold November through March, Beth wore cotton gloves in the morning when she sat at the Formica table drinking instant coffee. For the first few months after she moved in, Davi sketched the kitchen almost every day, usually more than once. The light was so nice in there. Beth liked the sketches and stuck them to the fridge with magnets from the dentist. Davi was over it now, mostly, and the sketches were a little moldy from the moist air seeping out of the freezer.

THE STIGMA OF BEAUTY, THE STAIN OF GLASS Glass Art by Judith Schaechter

I am fairly certain that many people experience my pieces kind of like this: Judith Schaechter is an artist who makes images in stained glass of anguished women set against highly decorative backgrounds. People often see my works all at once as a group—presented in a show or reproduced in an article—but to me, each piece is vastly different and each one arose over long periods of time. But yeah, I get it: anguished women and lush, decorative backgrounds.

ANGELS HAVE CORDONED OFF SECTIONS OF MOUNT SINAI by John Harvey

Say nothing of this to the doctors of Geneva,
to the folks who rock back and forth
on front porches down in Key West,
or the old woman dreaming of Palestine,

but we hear talk from voices in dark places,
in hiding places, in confusing clouds
how the Lord wants to hang a cow’s
udder in the sky, replace the moon with nipples

spilling the black milk of night. We’re not sure
what he’s up to, but we aren’t going to have it,
and talk is of excommunicating him, or at least
driving him into retirement, let the relic sit

On playing an old Jackson guitar leftover from somebody’s pain in the storage room of a nuthatch and playing the opening notes to a song I didn’t yet know and… by Harley Lethalm

…which was written in ward D4-B at Butler Hospital, Providence, Rhode Island, Feb. - April '12. My arms had been fettered to cloth, disclosing the ruined pink arm, the flesh, the lyrics I had angled in brutality and soft grief. They ran like calloused deer tracks across my arms, lengthwise and horizontal to God. The bandage only gave me a looser image, so that all there would confront me, and my arm would be turned over to inspection. Soon I removed the white press and when I laid out my arm on that table, exposed, nude - as upset-looking as the first pet you cherished, suffering that last peculiar vise of agony, it was something of a shocking sentiment. I had laid out the first Joker’s card in our game of confessional, imagistic Poker. I felt chaste.

GRADUATION DAY by Meggie Royer

My grandmother braids her hair with salt,
forgives my brother for every broken-legged deer
he coaxes out of the brush.
We draw their hot red flanks into our mouths
for every new meal we can afford,
antlers hanging beneath the chipped mantle
like sullen ghosts.
Years later he will graduate
to bringing women home for feasting,
their bodies smeared into want
on the basement floor.

HOMUNCULUS by Lucian Mattison

HOMUNCULUS
by Lucian Mattison

In my mouth a heart beats
fly wings around my chest,
spill fruit juice
down my chin. I feel the impossibility
of previous months spent thinking

I could grow alone,
unhinged from a lover,
my image knocking dumbly about
in a glass of tap water

ATLANTIC DYSTOPIA by Ray Scanlon

Halfway through my seventh decade I realize I have gained in modesty, at least in the sense of exposing skin. It is partly because I have a clearer vision of my nerd body's attractiveness. My face is a thing of no great beauty. My dear Cheryl refers, affectionately I believe, to my toothpick legs, and my cardiologist told us that my sunken chest added risk to the standard rib-cracking heart valve replacement procedure. There is little danger that the sight of my body will be inciting lust in the general public. But, mostly, I keep it well-covered because I'm a contrarian crank playing Canute to our post-modest times, in which a twerking Miley Cyrus thrives.

ROAD TRIP 1957 by Constance Campana

Your hand brushes the film from the window, believes it can make a place to see through. Your breath changes all that.

You sing alone, to yourself. They (in the front seat) won’t say much. They believe they are used to you.

INSULAR by Jon Riccio

Unknown to the stewardess,
the stroke victim imagining
his fingers in 12-F. Knuckles
corralling a pencil, legs to
annotate a lap. Nerve endings
like eraser strands stowed
under a magazine’s staple.
If a celebrity crossword passes
the International Dateline, does
its star power last a day less?

Unknown to the mortician,

MEMORIAL by Peter Tiernan

My girlfriend Jackie and I came across the memorial in a cemetery near our house in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was a slanted stone slab low to the ground with two plaques on it. The smaller described a 1956 midair collision over the Grand Canyon between a TWA Constellation and a United Airlines DC-7 that killed 128 people. The larger listed the names of the sixty-six who were buried there: three Maags, four Kites, two Crewses, and so on. My eye found the groups of matching surnames, and my mind turned them into stories.

It seemed odd that this sunny patch of grass, tucked away in the aspens, looking more appropriate for lawn chairs and bocce, would be a memorial to decompression and falling and terror.

HOW TO JUMP FROM A MOVING CAR by Ted Lardner

It’s all about thresholds.
When I walked up Shirley Creek trail
I knew some of my friends
to have done some wrong things right.
Blowing up gaslights
on suburban cul-de-sacs
with M-80s is not, once you
have the idea, difficult.
Jamming the gear shift,
both hands into Park,
and hugging your arms very tightly
around you as you throw
your body out the door, once
you have the intention,
is not any more difficult
than hugging something special good-bye.

A COMEDY IN ONE ACT by Matthew Di Paoli

I find myself suddenly and deeply involved in the comedy world. It started with my ex-girlfriend, who is a comedian. She was one of those comics who did jokes that involved her body. I liked the way she moved on stage, like she wasn’t afraid of people staring. She had this one bit where she did this sort of booty shake. Kind of like a “twerk,” but more side-to-side, not up and down. It made me think about asses in a whole new way that I liked.

I’ve never been an ass guy. I believe in my heart that you can tell a whole lot about a person from her legs. Or his legs. I don’t discriminate when looking at people’s legs, necessarily. You can tell how much weight they’ve put on themselves, in like a deep way, not just physical weight, more like the intangible weight of a lifetime or something. It usually sounds better in my head.

In any case, I’m at a show right now, and one of my buddies is performing. He’s got legs like an ox. His jeans can hardly hide his girthy calves. The sheer mass of them holds power over the audience. He does a lot of frat boy jokes. Like stuff about bars and women and women in bars. He’s a self-deprecator, as most comedians are. Some people say it’s to hide their real emotions. I think anyone who wants that kind of abuse probably thinks he really is a piece of shit. They all drink and smoke before they go on stage. It’s a badge of honor. They either joke about how they’re alcoholics or how they used to be, but now they’re taking it easy and only smoking crack.

SQUIRREL BEACH by Kim Magowan

Katrine used to be fun, but ever since she got sober she’s as boring as the rest of them. Now it’s “My sponsor this, my sponsor that.” Now family get-togethers are that much more of a fork in my eye.

Before she became the queen of AA, Katrine and I used to hang out on Squirrel Beach, watching the kids splash around the lake. We drank the fancy $7 microbrews that Seth, Katrine’s husband and my obnoxious brother, bought at Whole Foods, and we made fun of all the ways my parents’ house sucked. Starting with: weren’t beaches supposed to be sandy, actually pleasurable to lie on? Not all rocks, so that even when we brought Mom’s soft, fluffy towels, the ones that were absolutely not for the beach, so we had to sneak them down, it was like lying on piles of acorns? Or the skulls of invertebrates. That was Katrine’s theory, that it was called Squirrel Beach because it was some ceremonial, small beast burial ground. She used to make me laugh, Katrine.

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