Cartoons by Bupinder Singh Fidoic

Issue 3

Cartoons are easy,
To mock
Create one yourself.
An activist in sex trafficking,
Or two countries at Odds
For your consideration,
A free tote bag.
In conversation with Trump
At the house of Nightmares.
To mock.
Cartoons are easy.

Source text: A combination of New Yorker webpage headlines.

Bupinder Singh Fidoic, a resident of North India, is a Teacher by profession. He writes short stories and poems when at leisure. His previous work has appeared in in The Week, Longreads, The Big Roundtable, and international journals and magazines.

The Most Atrocious Crimes by Kelly Dumar

Issue 3

A Black and White Erasure, for Paris

Kelly Dumar Erasure

The Most Atrocious Crimes
Prayer is
peace and truth
in my wonder.
The true soul
is a free and noble spirit
to rise into the mystery of life
and hold the source
of pure and enduring light.

Source text: J.L. Spalding, “Opportunity,” 1990

Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator from the Boston area. Her poems are published in many literary magazines, including Lumina Online, Corium, and Cape Cod Review, and her award-winning poetry chapbook, “All These Cures,” was published by Lit House Press in 2014. Her award winning plays have been produced around the US and Canada, and are published by dramatic publishers. Kelly founded and produces the Our Voices Festival of Women Playwrights at Wellesley College, now in its 10th year. She serves on the boards & faculties of The International Women’s Writing Guild, and the Transformative Language Arts Network.

Before the Invasion & one other by Shane Cashman

Issue 3

Before the Invasion

Welcome to 2014
sitting on YouTube all day
where you might explode

Before the invasion
I watched a few documentaries
I studied all religions

Before the invasion
I am an atheist
Knock on the roof
Give us money or die
Ruthless dogs

Before the invasion
Lift a hand to help them
Take them to your neighborhood

Before the invasion
the best joke I’ve heard all day
where a cannibal walks into a butchery looking for a human brain

Before the invasion
Throw yourself from a window
Swim like hell back to Germany
Go explode

Before the invasion
Cannibal parade
sadness for idiots
blood pouring right out into the huge city by the sea

Before the invasion
I studied all religions
I studied a cannibal in your neighborhood
Winning their hearts

Before the invasion
I would die for 10 gold chains
Give us money or die

Before the invasion
figure out how to rule a country
run by children plotting to kill each other
Why would god even create the universe?
Before the invasion

Before the invasion
long live a better world
long live that little cat sleeping in the miniature house garden
turned into a rollercoaster park or a parking lot or a nuclear weapons testing site

 

Before the invasion
I’d get beheaded
I wouldn’t last 15 minutes

Before the invasion
Good luck with all that shit

Source text: Youtube comments from Vice’s “Crime and Punishment in the Gaza Strip” uploaded 07/10/2012

Sadie Doesn’t Want Her Brother To Grow Up

I don’t wanna die wearing a princess dress
I don’t wanna die in the morning news
I don’t wanna die so grown up
I don’t wanna die hunting bears with my bare hand
I don’t wanna die a sweet little girl
I don’t wanna die in a boxing ring
I don’t wanna die with ur bullshit of blabla
I don’t wanna die a drama queen
I don’t wanna die with taxes
I don’t wanna die viral
I don’t wanna die a heartless moron
I don’t wanna die in line at the grocery store
I don’t wanna die when I’m a hundred
I don’t wanna die on Youtube

Nevermind
That’s normal

Source text: Youtube comments from “Sadie Doesn’t Want Her Brother To Grow Up (Original)” uploaded 07/28/2014

Shane Cashman‘s writing has appeared in the New York Observer, PEN Center USA, Word Riot, Neutrons Protons, and elsewhere. In 2015, he was the winner of the PEN Center USA 500-word short story contest judged by Amelia Gray.

An August Without Stars by Grace Black

Issue 3

Understand, I’ll slip
Till my thighs are steeped in
A single thought
For the lonesome

May I write words more naked than flesh
Between those black lines of print
Between Solstice and Equinox,
And now I live in a gallery of seduction

I am beating all my wings
To put off the well of darkness
We would enjoy each other, happiness and I, but
There is a space in this heart that will never be filled—

Source text: This Cento is built with with lines from: Rilke, Cummings, Keats, Sandburg, Sappho, Plath, Neurda, Jonny Ox, Sexton, Woolf, Mia Hollow, Bukowski, in order of appearance.

Grace Black is just another writer wearing down lead and running out of ink, one line at a time. Coffee refuels her when sleep has not been kind. Grace writes poetry and flash fiction and has been published in various journals online and in print. Her first collection of poetry Three Lines: All That’s Left is available on Amazon, at www.amazon.com/Three-Lines-All-Thats-Left/dp/1511560312/, and more of her writing can be found on her website: graceblackwrites.com

Loomings & one other by Nolan Liebert

Issue 3

loomings

I thought I would have circulation,
involuntarily, methodically knocking –
striving, pacing, bound,
all magnetic, in the great American desert,
wedded for ever to the landscape,
a hollow trunk, a crucifix within,
a vibration.

I say I am the sea,
I do not mean I have salt or glory.

For my part,
the archangel Gabriel is content
we consign ourselves to perdition:

I should now take it into my head
to go on a voyage,
part of the grand Providence
drawn up long ago –
wild and distant perils,
marvels, wonder,
like a hill in the air.

Source text: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick chapter 1.

cetology

Already we are boldly lost,
unshored, harbourless.

The Leviathan is appreciative
of exhibition, chaos.

“Utter confusion exists among the historians
of our research in unfathomable waters.”

“Impenetrable veil of incomplete indications
to torture us.”

Speak the great anatomy, real,
the science of whales and men –

what purpose have names
upon the throne!

I promise nothing
because to be complete must be a fault.

I am the architect,
not the builder.

It is a ponderous task
to grope down to the bottom of the sea,

to have one’s hands among the foundations,
ribs, and the very pelvis of the world.

I have swam with these visible hands,
and I will try.

I call upon holy Jonah to pretend
to see a difference between a monster and his name.

This uncertain fugitive, I know personally.
I shall be blessed –

full of Leviathanism,
but signifying nothing.

Finally:
I have kept my word.

I leave unfinished. God keep me
from ever completing anything.

Source text: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick chapter 32.

Nolan Liebert hails from the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he lives with his wife and children in a house, not a covered wagon. His literary experiments are scattered in places such as Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, freeze frame fiction, and Plasma Frequency, with work forthcoming in An Alphabet of Embers (Stone Bird Press) and My Cruel Invention (Meerkat Press). You can find him editing Pidgeonholes or on twitter @nliebert.