ISSUE 4

Contents

POETRY

..............................................................................................................................................................................4

I Say

brock bernard

.........................................................................................................................................................................................7

The Western Affront
Henri Caputo

……………….......................................................................................................................................................…............... 8

How to Make a Man
Angela Feeherty

…………...................…………………............................……...........................................................................................… 9

Downbeat

brock bernard

…….............………………………………….............................................................................................................................. 11

Cryptic
Kei Tse

………........……………………………….............................................................................................................................….. 12

Jake
Vincent Saint-Simon

ESSAY

……..........................................................................................................................................................…. 15

In Defense of a New Literature
N.T.

FICTION

…........................................................................................................................................................ 19

And Strawberry Ice Cream Sandwhiches
Oedipus Jones

Lovingly shuffled together under the direction of Nikki Rainey, Matt Siemer, Brock Walker, and Curt Bozif.

I Say... (p. 4)

I say…
brock bernard

What i know of this so-called ‘love’
is somewhat limited to warbling along with
nigh forgotten singers from the eighties,
hands in gloves,
wisping jazz through brass, and
creating questionable photographs and poems, yet still
clicking buttons and pens and keys,
never to the tune of any erstwhile success.
i ‘love’ to gaze in some pretentious state
of admiration into the meticulously alphabetised
books on my shelf
which i have yet to read.

It wasn’t that aforementioned, specious passion
which caused me to forget entirely
what i was going to do with the remainder of
the day that you gave me;
not the kind that got me lost in
your green eyes
that i didn’t think would make such a big deal of themselves
during that introductory
palaver over pancakes;
not the kind that made me chary
of my proclivity for daftness,
and more nervous than a fresh cup of coffee
set in front of a busy graduate student.
Much like my closet must feel
after a day’s worth of laundry,
when there isn’t an empty hanger to be seen,
i became whole again, and full of colour.

Now there is the everpresent somethingnew,
which they sang about
in those lofty rock-ballads of yore.
At least to me it’s somenewthing
of which i don’t think i can sing with a
February voice.
Rather, i write the time when we were both ill,
when Joni Mitchell sang us into a
deliquescing mass on black canvas;
i forgot which hand was mine.
Every day, i am surprised by you,
how you manage to catch me in every innocent lie,
the way that you seem to voice what my mind is scribbling in it’s pages
and you always seem to find a way to
complete what i’m supposed to be.

What i know of…
is your hair playing lambent upon my shoulder,
my cigarette smoke rising from
tangerine tendrils like wisteria caught fire,
when the only thing aflame was something behind my sternum
that i have never known.
It’s something as ubiquitous as
Grass in Amsterdam and equally wondrous,
so much so that i am not surprised that
you catch me staring at you,
evidently ensorcelled.

You remind me much of hummus in a
rainbow bowl
and everything else is just carrots to me,
only an excuse to get to you,
to touch your hand,
to hear the canorous susurrations of your voice,
to see you blush when i can’t seem to abscond with my eyes.

i thought that i was going to cry,
or perhaps float off into some airy dream
while i was waiting for you, watching
as you performed the cell-phone pace
under the lamp post,
a fantastic, refulgent dandelion
turning snow into coruscating motes falling to the ground,
only to shimmer again under slivers of
moonlight through agreeable branches.
i surprised myself that i didn’t collapse before you
very much due to the efflorescing
somethingnew.

i didn’t think that such beauty could exist,
and so close to me.
This is not to say that a word such as ‘beauty’
or any word at all could be used to describe the singular visage that is
you. Even now, you pour forth as much as i from these lines
that are just to say
that i love you, more than any pen could ever find the perspicuity to scrawl.

The Western Affront (p. 7)

The Western Affront
Henri Caputo

The clouds were as gruel exiled from its water base
It looked as if they were poised to go to war with the rest of the sky,
except where there seemed to be an opening cut out
in the ranks of wispy warriors where the sun sat vainglorious,

grinning into my face,
so close to the ground I thought
I could lob a rock hitting it
in the centre of its smug mug, but
instead I just threw it a squinty glare as rain began to cool my head.

How to Make a Man (p. 8)

How to Make a Man
Angela Feeherty

Knead with the knuckles then
open the palm and press.
Turn the wad of flour and dye
close to your eye and
carefully in your hand,

push with your thumbs
from flat pizza to umbrella
and then pull the sides
like the sheets of your bed
at night until they converge
to a head just like yours.
Kneel over a fingerprinted
body of red on the floor

in the sunlit space between
the dark blind stripes
squishing the two parts until
the light is filled with life.

Brush your curls back
to admire what you've made,
then with a smile in your
dream-filled mind
go outside to play.

Downbeat (p. 9)

Downbeat
brock bernard

On the street near the closed-down book store
there stand the twin trees
who, when seen under cloudless skies of Midwest autumn,
bend towards the brown green patchwork
like mother birds in search of sustenance,

eager branches and limbs rising toward the gelid moon,
spread wide
as earthenworn seraphs stretching sleepy.
My lips are aflame and

the soft smoke of inspiration
dutifully sifts up through the roof of my mouth,
manoeuvring like the legless
throughout a darkened labyrinth,

spawning the nearly obvious notion
that from the beginning,
the first welcoming light that immediately went out –
as my body began to covet moving air –

I was having a nearer death experience
as I breathed it all in
Now I no longer appreciate the tacit pleasure
of leaping from rock
to stone,
with charred predilection toward staying afloat,

lightly alighting on each
stoic grey face
that grimaced at me and those damn kids,

and I go home sixteen years later
to shoot into my arm
selectively objective information –
while the somnolent fog rubs its eyes,

lingering above the ballad-imbued uptight grand, dizzying each
fresh . hatched . one . fourth . note
as they lackadaisically erected gravestones on my ashen eyelids,

the cowards

Cryptic (p. 11)

Cryptic
Kei Tse

Clawing at extensions of youth
bleeding out from hollowed cavities,
we rip out our eyes in wonder,
drinking nectars of self-sufficiency and trauma.

Orphaned fingers curled around a pallid canvas,
folding delectably with bursts of colours blooming
out of the Fahrenheit and paradigms of our bodies, shifting.

Fragilities,
somewhere in the space between two broken mirrors.
This is eternity, passing.
A cryptic astrology.

Jake (p. 12)

Jake
Vincent Saint-Simon

When St. Louis was
young and her
belly got
big; when her
eyes would squint
shut with pain,
when the columns
of vomit she
would deposit into
the toilet had developed
into a hated ritual,
the water rose
to the bridge-marked
borders
and broke.

The doctors decked
in masks and sterile eyes,
adjusting their glasses
like monkeys
over a rotting boy,
ripped off her skirt
and pulled down her
stockings so the
stench of shit
stood almost as exposed
as her labial lips
opened wide to his
crowning head.

I doubt that she, self-absorbed lady,
was ever aware the fortune she bore.
That now in these, the fields
of blood, her child stands
stripped of human rights
against the backdrop of a country that acts
the way that toe-jam tastes.

But if I could tell her
of the son she fed
on her poorly-paved
nipples that secrete only ash,
I would tell her of the Jake I saw
on a thunder-filled night when he
climbed to the top of the lightning tree--
that when God and radio evangelicals
trained arrows on us both,
it was I who tearfully ran to her
and he who had the courage
to laugh.

In Defense of a New Literature (p. 15)

In Defense of a New Literature
N.T.

Lately I’ve been considering the connection between publishing and puberty. Each can only be traced as far back as the Latin (publicus and puber, respectively), but I don’t find it entirely out of line to suggest that that “pub” root comes from some concept of public space. Shared space. Community space. Publishing being the initiation of a literary work into the public intellectual space, just as puberty is the initiation of a person into the public sexual space.

At the risk of sounding overly clever or smug, I’m willing to compare the present state of publishing with some sort of hyper-organized institutional prostitution. Not to belittle prostitution—the oldest profession must clearly serve a necessary social function. This is not the point. The point is that prostitution is not the sexual norm and I’m willing to again put myself out there and say that this is probably a good thing. The point is that the visible publishing world—like prostitution—is more concerned with money than with human connection.

And this is fine.

Just as prostitution fills a needed social role, so does commercial literature with mass appeal. It will always be there. It’s fine. The problem is that there is this prevailing social understanding that commercial publication is the only option. While this understanding is easily disproved (small-scale self-publishing companies, independent literary magazines, or even just the internet offer considerable opportunity), it will continue to prevail until frustrated writers are willing to organize to a level of public visibility. The bad news, writers of the world, is that this will require not only time and energy, but money.

I cannot honestly see the internet as a viable option for subverting the system that currently exists. If people are not presented with a product that they can consume, then it will never be real enough to draw the public eye. Magazines are better, but they still seem somewhat expendable. What a new literary movement will need to be successful is writers who are willing to invest (or literary-minded people who are willing to invest) in their work. Small publishers will print your work if they are paid. The bigger problem is distribution.

This is another point where I do not see the internet as an effective option. Though online sale is probably the easiest and most direct result, it is not enough. If a new literature is to succeed, it needs a community of writers and like-minded individuals who are willing to back it up. It needs a network of people who will put faith in one another’s work and push that work onto other people. The option to buy directly from an author means nothing in the stale isolation of internet world. If it is not understood that there is a person behind the sale, an open sense of discourse between reader and writer, then they might as well be buying from any other giant, impersonal conglomerate.

The real issue is money and it is, regrettably, not an issue that will go away any time soon. It has perverted the public intellectual space by taking it over and leaving the social need for human connection through personal intellectual discourse unfulfilled. A new literature may be the only way to grasp a decent share of this public space. At its best, this could revitalize the present state of intellectual thought, revolutionize education, initiate social reforms, etc. etc. In the very least, it can prove to be an interesting failure—which, really, may be more than could be said for most.

-February 15, 2006

And Strawberry Ice Cream Sandwhiches (p. 19)

And Strawberry Ice Cream Sandwhiches
Oedipus Jones

“Move closer, corpse of Catherine Tekakwitha, it is 20 below, I do not know how to hug you.”
-Leonard Cohen

I’ve fallen in love. I’ve fallen in love and I can hardly bear it. It’s not that I never expected to fall in love--that maddening, sickening, 4:43-in-the-morning-and-I-can’t-stop-writing-about-it kind of love. It’s not that at all. I’ve always had a sort of disgusting flare for the romantic (no matter how hard I’ve tried to hide it, tried to run from it), and it was never anything but a matter of time.

I just never thought I’d fall in love with a postcard.

But if you could just see this postcard, then you would understand. My God! You couldn’t believe the art, the love and the care and the passionate cries that must have gone into this postcard. The shortcomings of language could never be more apparent than in the frail attempt of a writer to capture in paltry prose the very essence of beauty (when even beauty itself, with all its array of nuance and connotation, seems a bastard misnomer in this particular signifier). My love is more than just cardstock and stamp, ink and idea. My love is a life all its own… but what kind of life is a life unrequited?

Forgive, if you will, an inevitably doomed attempt at an explanation (with the utmost poeticism, of course).

I live in small apartment in a small apartment building in a fairly busy section of a fairly small town. The placement of my residence is only relevant in its relation. This relation of relevance is found exactly sixty-six feet east of my building’s front steps, ninety-nine feet north of the town’s post office, cleverly standing in clear view of heaven, mockingly hiding the gateway to hell.

The structure in question, while known by many names, bears the official title: Infoshop and Community Resource Center. Its primary function, for all intents and purposes, seems to be amassing hippies and anarchists, the socially conscious and the consciously social (without mention to the undoubtedly present poseurs (with whom your admittedly unacclimated author would certainly fall akin)), for the fulfillment of a collective unconscious desire for rock and roll music. Those endless summer nights of loud interruptions from my reading have long since extended through the fall and now winter months.

The building itself is both unimpressive and unimportant. Possibly of equal unimportance (except, of course, to satisfy the unshakable curiosity of my theoretical Reader) is the nature of the activities held at this Infoshop. What is important (and I only italicize (as, I imagine, all great writers italicize) out of my own personal insecurities), is the fact that this building, this Infoshop--has at its front, as all buildings must (especially those ninety-nine feet north of post offices), a mailbox. (An obvious point, I’m well aware. But, I assure you, of dire importance to the story at hand.)

The entire action of the story is really culminated in one action--and a pedestrian one at that. (I apologize still, finding myself untrusting of the wording “pedestrian” to abate the anticlimax of this next statement.) The physical action of this story is perfect and complete in the singular act of checking the mail.

(With the ever-present fear of losing what little credibility I may have with the Reader (masking prose as poetry, feigning enlightenment in the hope of being heard…), I’m going to venture a brief change of tone. Not to suggest a lack of poetry in the mundane, I just can’t self-justify flowery language in the description of finding a piece of mail (no matter how beautiful) that was meant for my next-door neighbors. To cut to the balls of it all, that’s just what happened--I opened my mailbox and found an odd-looking postcard that was addressed to the Infoshop next-door. Curiosity (if not also a bit of that disgusting flare mentioned above) got the best of me.)

The postcard itself was visually captivating. It was obviously hand-made, not just purchased at some souvenir shop or gas station--consisting of a cardboard base with duct tape on the corners (--I’ll spare you the artful details of the duct tape’s tender placement). The front of the postcard was decorated with a shopping list written on notebook paper:

1 small thing milk
1 bg cheddar-n-sour cream
1 bg doritos
1 cake donut
1 strawberry ice cream sandwhich
1 milky way

On the back, written on long white labels with no return address:

Dear infoshop!

I hope everything is going well! I heard a story on the radio about a man who collected as many grocery lists as he could and pasted them in scrapbooks. He would scour grocery store floors—he said there was an “intimate poetry” to them. I think that’s very silly, but at the same time I really love it and kind of secretly agree. I miss you guys a lot and think about you all the time. I know that the space must be going well because I get ya’lls emails—so, good job! Could somebody please tell Ben and Chris that I’m considering purchasing a copy machine? Everybody I know just really needs a lot of goddam copies.
I love you guys!

Yours truly!
and strawberry ice cream sandwhiches,

Nikki R.

As I held the postcard, a tear began to well up in my eye. I haven’t been moved, deeply or otherwise, in years, but when I read that postcard I wept like a child. It wasn’t just the fact that the postcard was homemade. It wasn’t just the fact that the shopping list taped to the front was in a different handwriting and had a footprint on it. It wasn’t just that she spelled “goddam” the way that a spell-checker says is wrong—the angsty literary way. It wasn’t just that there was a real person behind this masterpiece. It was something else that, if it isn’t already apparent, I must not have the capacity to explain. If my attempt at conveying the magnificence of this postcard remains unaccomplished, it can only be said that there must be a more talented writer than myself who should have been the one checking my mailbox on that windy night. Or maybe the pinnacle work of human expression--of truth, of beauty, of passionate squalor and love—maybe that…something might possibly be beyond the limits of explanation. Maybe it just has to be experienced.


* * *


It's been twelve days since I opened my mailbox and found what artists and philosophers have been looking for forever. It's the middle of one of the most frigid winters I've ever experienced, but I don't care. I'm siting namked in my apartment with the windows open, and the cold wind is nothing when I hold the postcard. The floor is covered with pages and pages of worthless literature, torn-off covers, wasted lives. I've searched through it all—there is nothing left for me. Nobody else knows. No one ever knew. I'm the first.

I can hear a band warming up next-door. The hippies and anarchists (aren't we all just poseurs, really?) are waiting patiently as the collective unconscious grows more and more reckless. I know what they're looking for, but they won't ever find it. Not over there, not anywhere.

For a brief moment, I considered going over to the Infoshop. Maybe she would be there. Would I know her if she was? In the very least I could deliver the postcard to its proper destination. No. Proper is the wrong word. Intended destination. The very idea of propriety seems injust...

I'm sorry, Nikki R. (wherever you are), but I'm keeping your postcard. It was never anything but mine.