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OCTOBER 2008 | |
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Peter Anderson Barry Graham Mary Hamilton Tom Mahony Josh Olsen Peter Schwartz |
By Charles Logan, Aug 20, 2008  |
Mike Faloon Roland Goity REVIEW: Jason Jordan |
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to the cynic
By T. M. Stringfellow, Jul 11, 2008 comfortable in your sarcasm you ask me why i even try. companionship is a plague. love is byzantine. sperm, at best, absinthe. your last, he cheated, your yellow tonsils scream to the cynic, life must be hitlerharsh for you— a nickelodeon of whippings and death with pain, a pandemonium migraine of only pillars of salt. outside my building, brown stupidbird has flown into a window and now rests at my feet. cinnamon tuffs of feather lie in an ignorant mass. the one wing left stretched outward, upward, resembling something like a fist, resembling something like triumph. T. M.Stringfellow lives in Chicago and is a recent Northwestern University graduate. A budding poet, her first poetry book is entitled More than Dancing and is published by Third World Press. She works as a trading assistant for a hedge fund. MORE LIGHTBy Howie Good, Jul 08, 2008 I’m going away tonight. I’m going over the valley. I must get to the station. Boy, fetch my fiddle. Where is my clock? All compound things are subject to breaking up. Only one man ever understood me. And he didn’t really understand me. Codeine...bourbon. Nothing soothes pain like human touch. More light. Open the second shutter so that more light may come in. The Earth is suffocating. (Assembled from the last words of Salvador Dalí, James Brown, Cosmo Lang, Babe Ruth, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Siddhartha, Frederic Chopin, Bobby Fischer, Robert Roy MacGregor, Tallulah Bankhead, and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe.) Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of five poetry chapbooks, Death of the Frog Prince (2004), Heartland (2007), and Apocalypse Mambo (2008) from FootHills Publishing, Strangers & Angels (2007) from Scintillating Publications, and the e-book, Police & Questions (2008), from Right Hand Pointing. 
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Leave
By Drew Kalbach, Jun 26, 2008 You leave love and the love you leave is real. It is covered in beans, soaked in soda, and baked until the crusty midnight protrusions, the awkward handshakes and faces solidify into something much less human and more like a computer left on for years. You leave the party smashed into a very thin pancake and you taste yourself and you wonder how it is you’ve made it this far. We claim that there are other wheelbarrows to push and thinner bushes to prune and larger flowers that won’t grow because you planted them wrong last year. But this isn’t a cheap board game being played naked on a backyard porch. There’s a pain in your chest, probably from the sobbing, but maybe it’s all those times you lifted yourself off the bed half-dressed to find the blinds are shut and there is some boring music playing on the television. You say I never figured it out, that he was a show, that when we danced last week on the 24/7 dock you were thinking about the ducks we saw earlier and how excited you had been to quack and to chase orange-beaked ghosts across a field full of forgotten Frisbees. I left it cold and there it was at four in the morning eating cheese and begging me please just stay online, just stay online. Drew Kalbach lives in Philadelphia. He dreams of becoming a poet that trains wild bears to hunt down murderers and maul them. In CoyoacanBy Travis Blair, Jun 18, 2008 the cobblestones are coated with Kahlo’s footprints. I walk on them, feel the texture of her toes beneath the primaveras on Londres street. I pass among her ghosts their spirits so near I smell their breath- the scent of molé sauce on Diego smoke from Trotsky’s fine cigars Tina Modotti’s glossy lipstick a hint of mint tequila on Paz. From Hidalgo Plaza I stroll among them to Frida’s enshrined House of Blue where her persistent spirit rubs against me so close I reach out my hand and touch her on the hip. In Coyoacan I wander the narrow streets where pastel houses reek of history and Bohemian worshippers of life dance around the Jardin’s coyote fountain. I try to stop time but feel it speeding past me escaping like helium hissing from a balloon. I try to plug it slow it to a stupored halt but it runs up my arm and leaps into trees a wild spider monkey off its leash and Frida leans against me laughing. Travis Blair is an old outlaw who lives a mile down the road from the University of Texas in Arlington where he graduated back in the Dark Ages. For thirty years he worked in the movie industry before taking up writing poetry. His poems have been published in Znine, Taking a Chance, South Africa’s Kreativ, Plain Spoke, and July’s Instant Pussy. His collection of poems written in and about Mexico is being prepared for publication this fall as his first book. 
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Buried in Vienna
Ananda Selah Osel writes autobiographical poems from his home in Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in
dozens of literary magazines. New work is forthcoming in Word Riot, The African American Review, and
The League of Laboring Poets. You can visit him at his
website.
Emily Hane is an undergraduate at the University of Kansas where she studies Political Science and English
Literature. She is a member of the University Honors Program and was recently selected as a University Scholar.
She works on the campus where they pay her too much to do too little. In her spare time, Emily enjoys
volunteering and gardening. 
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