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.