ROLLING EMPTY by Roger Leatherwood

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ROLLING EMPTY by Roger Leatherwood Walking home from the theatre starting at 11:40 at night, I’d be 20 minutes out when I passed the hillsides and into the canyon with the single four-lane connecting the suburbs, through the open land and sky that opens up over the far-off desert over San Diego county. Singular cars drive past, a Thursday night away from downtown. Along the incountry where the railroads laid their track a hundred years ago, freight trains still run at night through here, often a dozen cars or more running empty back to terminals in LA or farther north, in approximate echoes of the freeways traced to get the commuters to the industrial center built where the water could be piped in from the bay. Inland and away. Slow walking at night, with no buses (they’re 55 minutes apart at this time of night). To go home and only … chop! chop! read more!

DISPATCH FROM THE CAT SHOW by Jamie-Lee Josselyn

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DISPATCH FROM THE CAT SHOW by Jamie-Lee Josselyn Pulling into the parking lot of The Riveredge, a banquet hall in Reading, Pennsylvania, a wave of glee rushed over me. I scanned the rows of SUVs and minivans for the now-familiar “I ♥ my Persian” bumper stickers and “Show Cats on Board” placards suctioned to rear windows. And, of course, there were many variations on those popular stick figure family decals: Stick-Dad with a baseball cap, a Stick-Mom with one long curly-cue for hair and a coffee mug in hand, and no fewer than three Stick-Kitties. Sometimes a Stick-Kid or two. Sometimes just Stick-Lady (Stick-Cat-Lady?) with any number of Stick-Cats. The license plates covered the Mid-Atlantic region, as well as Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Ontario. We made our way into the lobby, and I presented two cans of Fancy Feast to the woman at the registration table. “Oh, donations!” she said … chop! chop! read more!

DUCKPIN BOWLING WITH CAITLIN AND BUFFALO BILL by Timothy Kenny

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DUCKPIN BOWLING WITH CAITLIN AND BUFFALO BILL
by Timothy Kenny

Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
— E.E. Cummings

398px-Atomic_Duckpin_Bowling_EntranceCaitlin scoots first into our local bowling emporium (small town/duckpin only), where we are met by the same musty/mildew odor that has always greeted us, despite a new birthday-view rug that rolls colored confetti and pointed hats and noise-making horns across the floor. The old indoor-outdoor carpeting has fled, leaving dead air to hang in its place, a week-old washcloth on a sink.

We grab shoes. Caitlin slides on the polished lanes, a “watersmooth-silver stallion,” which kick-starts Buffalo Bill inside my head. The bowling guy — a high school kid, really — drops the bumpers into the gutters and we’re off: first her, then me, then she, then me, back and forth, we’re counting pins, writing down numbers, carrying ones over into the next column. A half hour later it’s the tenth frame and the final score is Caitlin 73, me 72, a dad’s duckpin-bowling miracle.

We go to pay. The gray-haired lady behind the desk who earlier handed out smooth-bottomed shoes that Velcro for convenience right off the bat tells me about the senior league that meets Monday and Thursday mornings.

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TWO POEMS by Bill Brown

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TWO POEMS by Bill Brown OPENINGS Blessed is the sick day. / Blessed are things that open / for no reason. –Lorraine Doran Let’s say a brother’s left hand opens and closes on his coffee cup. A lover’s face opens when someone enters a room. The blessed day, being sick, needs such nurturing, such openings— a crocus blossom in the snow, a door of an abandoned house, a coffin without a corpse. All open— not like a switch blade, fast and deliberate, but like a heart valve, its blood nutrient rich— so the frozen crocus will re-blossom, the abandoned house welcome stray cats and phoebes, and the coffin, as always, awaits to be filled like the blessed day waits the unexpected so long it becomes expected, a birdfeeder surprised by a chickadee that grubs the bottom for the last seed. A C-section births the next day, pulled from the night … chop! chop! read more!

Three Poems by Randi Ward

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THREE POEMS by Randi Ward CLOTHESLINE Thank you, gentle breeze, for reaching out to me through his indifferent sleeves. PEONIES What do honey bees and black ants discuss inside drooping peonies? SPRING Threads its jagged hook through my budding backbone— violent squalling. Randi Ward (“Peonies”, “Spring”, “Clothesline“) is a poet, translator, and photographer from West Virginia. She earned her MA in Cultural Studies from the University of the Faroe Islands in 2007. Her work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Beloit Poetry Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Cold Mountain Review, Vencil: Anthology of Contemporary Faroese Literature and other publications. For more information, please visit her website: www.randiward.com.   Image credit: Randi Deuro on Flickr

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YOU WERE GOING TO TELL ME by R. C. Barajas

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YOU WERE GOING TO TELL ME
by R. C. Barajas

I’m sorry – you were going to tell me something shocking. I’m ready to hear it, but I may sleep instead. I know you won’t take it personally.

I’ve been listening to music. Tiptoeing across the albums of my recent youth, times so far gone they show themselves to me in crayon colors. Of late, it’s been 60s stuff, and my stereo serves up a docile, or raunchy replay of memories. Convenient, because as you’ve seen, I doze off so easily. I’m tossed back and forth from then to now without much warning. Sleeping and waking are so entirely alike that I scarcely bother to differentiate anymore.

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THEY SHARED A FISH by Eva Lomski

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  THEY SHARED A FISH by Eva Lomski The girl wondered if he was naked under the sheet. The young man lay on his stomach on a bed trolley positioned in the sunniest spot in the courtyard. Weeds shimmied in the cracks. The girl watched, waiting for the right moment to serve morning tea. He was on his elbows, the sheet covering his backside. Freckles splayed across his shoulders. He had a biker’s moustache and a tattoo of a snake on his forearm. The braces on his wrists resembled a street weapon. She pushed aside the sliding door. The young man’s cowboy hat didn’t move. “Coffee or tea?” She smiled. She wasn’t sure where to look, so she looked at her shoes. Calligraphy sprouted from her feet and ran into the path where it followed the cracks in the concrete. She tripped over it, but recovered and caught a bench … chop! chop! read more!

AIR CONDITIONER by Daniel Torday

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AIR CONDITIONER by Daniel Torday I recently had a difficult argument with my Aunt Lucille about turning up an air conditioner. My wife and I were staying with my aunt in Baltimore for a weekend where, after all, air conditioning was necessary in the summer. Lucille asked if I wanted her to turn up my air conditioner before bed. I said no, I didn’t like it too cold. So? she said. So, I said, I didn’t want it turned up. She stated rather forcefully that turning up an air conditioner meant making the room warmer, not cooler. “Turn up the air conditioner,” she said, as if using italics would solve the thing. I speculated it meant the opposite—to turn up the air conditioner’s powers was to make the room cooler. Not turn up the thermostat. Turn the machine up. My aunt was indignant. What kind of feckless legerdemain was this? … chop! chop! read more!

NIGHT SWEATS by Jen Karetnick

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NIGHT SWEATS by Jen Karetnick They rise upon you, flood you in the neighborhood of sleep where once-solid canyons of breasts, hips, knees, parched from breath, west of age, have slipped, begun to crack. It’s not that there’s a lack of cool breezes or even air conditioning; matter of fact, it’s like you booked a room in an ice hotel, framed yourself an igloo. Still you melt, puddle, a tongue so svelte, velvet before fusing to steel, teaching you reversal, how to tread betrayal, ride luck before lightning strikes, bringing rains. Jen Karetnick is the author of three poetry chapbooks, includingLandscaping for Wildlife (Big Wonderful Press, 2012), and six other books. Her mango cookbook is due out from University Press of Florida in fall 2014. Her poems have appeared in journals including Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, The Greensboro Review, North American Review and River Styx. She works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts … chop! chop! read more!

from APOSTROPHES by Anna Strong

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from APOSTROPHES by Anna Strong “Hockey” This poem will be mostly about force. With one finger on my knee my science teacher tells me I can skate better than half the guys on varsity and I should really try out for the team. In class I’m called on (caught doodling) and asked which muscle group is most responsible for the slapshot and all I want to know is what happens when you give a poet a stick of gum, twenty cents, and point to the cigarette burn on your wrist? “Mouth” In my yellow room, I slipped a spare button into my cheek and held it there all through dinner. Between bits of carrot there was also button, peas and rice were also button, ice cream and spoon became button despite the cold that should have frozen all else away. I was discovered when I let it click against my … chop! chop! read more!

TURID by Rachel B. Glaser

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The girl was bored and wandered. She did not care if she was tagged, no one could force her to play. If she was It, she would not react, she would continue looking at the Wilsons’ plants, at the rows of bright flowers. She could hear her sister yelling after their neighbor. Her sister had been It for a long time. She was only a kid so could go in everyone’s yard. She spoted a stray cat and for a while tried to get it to follow her, but the cat was uninterested. She saw her neighbor running for base. Base was any large tree. The girl walked past a bunch of flowers and one of the young flowers stretched out to her and whispered, “Take me with you, my family is boring!” The girl stared, then yanked it from the ground. The other flowers were screaming. The pulled-flower cried … chop! chop! read more!

CROCODILE HANDS by Amber Lee Dodd

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CROCODILE HANDS by Amber Lee Dodd Like blind men feeling for pictures Anna and Chloe had felt for differences in their matching faces. Eyes closed Anna could feel the little kink in the bridge of Chloe’s nose, a dimple when she smiled that she could not duplicate and lips that curved higher into a pert cupids bow. Eyes open they were identical but eyes shut they knew every variation. As children they had played their game of reflection as if an act of praise. Hours spent mirroring each other under the plastic garden table. Capturing each other’s grins, grimaces before turning to hands that mimicked and mocked each other. Two sets that touched fingertips before twisting and turning into other shapes, one hand trying to keep up with the other; hands that turned into white knuckled fists before springing back to open up into flowers petals. The fingers stretched back, … chop! chop! read more!

THE SONG IN A CLOUD by Kate LaDew

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THE SONG IN A CLOUD by Kate LaDew Willard was always humming to himself. Whenever Tom saw him, he was humming and looking up and smiling and sometimes not smiling, sometimes looking even sad, but always humming. Tom thought Willard might be what his mother called simple and so was always very gentle when he saw him but never got very close, just in case. One day, the day after Tom had his heart broken by Elsbeth White, a girl he had known more than half his life, he saw Willard lying on the ground in the little space of grass behind Wake’s Hardware Store. Bentley Wake owned the hardware store and always kept it very clean and orderly and kept everything around it clean and orderly too. Tom was not feeling very good because of his heart. It was only the second day he felt truly aware of it … chop! chop! read more!

WASH, RINSE, REPEAT by Carly Greenberg

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WASH, RINSE, REPEAT by Carly Greenberg There are so many cycles to choose from. Bulky, delicate, perm press. The dial shifts from one setting to the other. Darks, whites, colors. It turns clock-wise and back. Hot, warm, cold. A tablet is loaded, a button pressed, the lid lowers with a click. Time seems to drag on with just a few grumbling quips, this metal box mocking you for your peculiar fixation. A few moments more until you hear it- the rush of a miniature tidal wave. The metal cube begins to shift and scrape and tear at the Spanish tile beneath its feet. It is time. You slowly lift your hands until they hover over the clear yet reflective lid. To hold them for a moment, to feel the humming of water, metal, and tile on the soles of your hands. A forceful push past the magnetic hovering and you … chop! chop! read more!

BiPRODUCT by Leah Koontz

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BIPRODUCT: Drag, Societal Identity, and Gender Equality by Leah Koontz BiProduct is a project I embarked on which considers drag queens, art, female expectations, and the media. This series features four of my works which address gender roles, equality, and social construction. BiProduct features sculpture and performance, created from nylon, spandex, foam, digital media, and plastic. Drag Queens possess many progressive qualities. However, I feel that certain aspects of Drag should require more careful consideration. Over the past two decades, drag has transformed tremendously. What exactly is drag in 2013? A drag queen is a man, usually homosexual, creating a female illusion through clothing and performance. This illusion ends when the costume comes off. There are many genres and subgenres of drag. Not every drag queen agrees or identifies with all of the categories and genres that have been named. Some queens do not approve of various terms that are … chop! chop! read more!

CAREFULLY WRAPPED FESTIVAL OF DISCOVERY by Rich Ives

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CAREFULLY WRAPPED FESTIVAL OF DISCOVERY by Rich Ives There was a sadness and hearts went in there where it was waiting               a small boat on the riverriver of what’s next                 the rope you can’t see rope with a private moon at the endthere was a consideration of smallness and it grewa hat enclosed certain structures of thinking               what it did to us was living in its imaginary thimble              a hat enclosed inside itself still room for a thought                                   the head wound round with it the hat saving us from certain conclusions there was an ancient winged accommodation             which flew inside the sadness and attached itself                        to the rope and the river and the moon at the end                      all at once like the private hat and it could wait for a long time                     we knew that there was a recognition of recovery and it left us a private rope with certain … chop! chop! read more!

MEMORIAL DAY by Luke Stromberg

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MEMORIAL DAY by Luke Stromberg When you were a boy, did you dream that street And wonder where it was? Did you dream Of death in an exotic locale? Iraq— its bicycles and minarets. Its men And their sweat-shined, mustached faces On the television. Women in the hijab, Weeping in debris. Did your temples throb In its dry desert heat? A roadside bomb, Assembled there—in that ancient, wasted place— Scheduled you and others for oblivion, Claimed you, even at home in Conshohocken. We’ve never met and never will, But this afternoon, I sit at a picnic table Under a tree with my brother and nephew And think of you. The street parked up On both sides for a soccer game. Cheers rise harmlessly above the music. Strangers here are less strange. Nothing here is quite mysterious— Even the shadow pattern of the branches On the walkway. This is the life … chop! chop! read more!

BEATING PLOUGHSHARES INTO iPODS by Anya Lichtenstein

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BEATING PLOUGHSHARES INTO iPODS by Anya Lichtenstein As a Conserva-dox Jew by upbringing and agnostic by nature, I don’t know whether I believe in the afterlife. Sometimes I’m certain that we are all just worm food. Other days I can feel my grandparents looking down on me from heaven while I’m opening a grad school acceptance letter or trying on dresses at Bloomingdales (my maternal grandmother believed above all in the god of retail). In my hunt for a compelling afterlife scenario, I found that several cultures have done a thorough job figuring out where to send their dead and how. The ancient Norse believed the soul could wind up in a number of places: Helgafjell, the “holy mountain,” where the dead go on with their lives pretty much as usual; Hel, which is not as dreary or painful as its fiery Christian homophone; and Valhalla, which is essentially a … chop! chop! read more!

JOURNALISM by John Carroll

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JOURNALISM by John Carroll No one in my family talks about Uncle Terry, or why there never was a funeral. We did have a wake. We gathered at his house. The priests came in turtlenecks and polo shirts. My mother hovered by the basement door, ushering me away when I pleaded for just a minute at the pool table. My cousins suffered a similar fate. We soon gossiped to one another, only to find we’d been told the same story: Uncle Terry was working in the basement and accidentally stuck his finger into an electrical socket, a Saturday morning cartoon turned fatality. This lie, which we later individually pieced together, was pre-meditated, passed around in the hours and days after his death. It was a family contract: if they couldn’t know why, we wouldn’t know how. The coffin we never saw was stuffed with the facts of his life. I’ve … chop! chop! read more!

IN VERY LITTLE TIME ON THE NILE by Christopher X. Shade

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IN VERY LITTLE TIME ON THE NILE by Christopher X. Shade In the distance where the sky met the great desert hills, or mountains, or whatever the Egyptians called them—Howard had no map to reveal what those great masses of land might be—where the sky met the land, it was nothing like Howard had seen in Colorado where he’d grown up among the Rockies, and he was sure it was nothing like he’d ever seen in film, in paintings, in any art anywhere.  What he saw where the sky met the land was the shutter mechanism of a great camera, snapped closed in this instant.  All this was a mere instant.  It was an instant that spanned his existence and all existence he’d ever known and all he could imagine, all of which amounted to little more than nothing in a greater immeasurable passage of time.  Where the sky met … chop! chop! read more!

ON BEIGE by Prairie Markussen

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ON BEIGE by Prairie Markussen She is a palomino in the Nordic countries, her hair scorched to a glow. She is the Northern ice floe, the delicate drip, the dusted broccoli top that slips downward into the sensual sliver. She is the slick of that sliver. She is waylaid at the switching station, the drear, the mold, the scaffolding at the church’s steeple, all within sight and none too dear. She hunches into her polar collar. Boys scoff and scratch at their wrists and blaze into their cigarettes, and push the cold clear of their faces with a match. They are blinded by her flaxen; beautiful, she is imagined into their arms, she is positioned for their deserts—they have deserved this for centuries. There are headstones she will not see, flecked with the writ of farmers, and theirs is a hatred that holds; theirs is a right to destroy themselves … chop! chop! read more!

THE PAIN by Caleb True

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THE PAIN by Caleb True I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. At the moment it was pain but sometimes it was just a sensation. I sat down at the edge of the sidewalk and leaned over to puke. Didn’t. I stood, continued to walk. The twinge came back. I pressed two fingers into my abdomen. Pressed and pressed until I felt bone. I googled appendicitis. Scrolled through symptoms. No excruciating pain. No vomiting. The pain wasn’t getting worse, and sometimes it wasn’t even pain. I wondered if I should stop weightlifting with my neighbor. I knew he had an anger problem. Weightlifting is no anger management strategy, but he also had a gym membership, so. Did I work too much, masturbate too much? Too hard? I thought constructively about masturbating. Zoning out, I cupped my hand near my dick, deep in thought. Like this? I thought. Like this? … chop! chop! read more!

THE MODERNIST CABIN by Emily Steinberg

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THE MODERNIST CABIN by Emily Steinberg I began creating graphic novels or illustrated stories in 2005. I realized that I not only wanted to make visual imagery, as I do in my paintings, but I wanted to tell stories as well. I found that the combination of words and images created a visceral way of storytelling. Most of my material is autobiographical. Stories that have happened to me along the way that have shaped my being. The Modernist Cabin is a story about my family set against the pristine lines of a modernist cabin on Cape Cod. The architecture and the story serve as companions to each other. They are independent of each other but dependent nonetheless.       –Emily Steinberg, June 2013 Photography by Paul Rider Emily Steinberg is a painter and graphic novelist who earned her MFA and BFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has shown at … chop! chop! read more!

THE LAW OF CONSTANT ANGLES by Jason Newport

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THE LAW OF CONSTANT ANGLES by Jason Newport Illustrations by Sarah Andrew I prop one boot on the Mustang’s running board. The car creaks as I lean staring across its soiled white roof at the honey. Freezing November winds off Lake Michigan blast our faces, fluttering her yellow hair like a pennant. She hasn’t looked at me since I paid for her shoes. She isn’t reaching for the passenger door again. Hands buried in my jacket pockets, I try not to let too much hope crimp my asking, “What about after?” “Can’t,” she repeats, already turning away. “I have to work.”   “No, after,” I urge, inviting, not desperate. “Can we?” “May we?” she murmurs, walking off. Or else, “Maybe,” and me too chickenshit to holler after her, hear it the wrong way again. She takes careful, even steps because her shoes are new—brown patent leather that’s stiff, unblemished, her … chop! chop! read more!

THE STRAIGHT WARP OF NECESSITY by Mark Mondalek

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THE STRAIGHT WARP OF NECESSITY by Mark Mondalek Seated on the examiners table, I hold a mouse pad-sized monitor in place over my left breast with assorted electrodes leeched upon my arms and chest and my pacemaker’s memory bank is successfully tapped dry. All my secrets electronically spill onto a sleek computer screen for only my cardiologist to read and the zigzagged data codes become lost in translation to me. I’m soon told of what my nurse described as a tiny short circuit in my electrical system; an intermittent junctional rhythm, to be exact. “Something new,” my doctor keeps repeating rather intriguingly as he continues tapping away at the results. It seems my heart has never done this sort of thing before. He deliberates with his two assistants and begins to adjust my settings with a series of quick taps on the screen. “You might feel a little light-headed for … chop! chop! read more!

OF SNAKES AND STONES by Jennifer Pullen

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OF SNAKES AND STONES by Jennifer Pullen I Medusa still dreams of being beautiful. At night on her sheep skin-padded but still cold stone bed she remembers combing her hair, its dark sheen, the heavy still weight of it. She used to rub her hair with olive oil to keep it shiny. Once she had a lover who liked her to wrap her hair around his neck until he almost couldn’t breathe. He said he liked his women dangerous. She thought he was silly, but she indulged his desires so that afterwards she could lay her head on his knee and he would sing to her of meadows and myths. For some reason, whenever he sang she could taste honey on her tongue. Sometimes when she wakes up and feels her hair hissing and whispering along her neck she runs to the corner of her cave and vomits, as though … chop! chop! read more!

BEYOND THE BLUE RIDGE by Grace Maselli

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BEYOND THE BLUE RIDGE by Grace Maselli In spite of the anxiety that flares in my stomach, I get ready to move 300 miles away. The upcoming relocation fills my gut with disturbances—tiny cyclones whirring counterclockwise through the commonly known organ. These feel like hundreds of small cyclones the size of my grandmother’s Lucite earrings, humming and moving excitedly through this interior terrain. It’s a state of abnormality, a place with no homeostasis. I know inherently that my stomach is an environment that prefers the company of dinner rolls, it’s the part of my physical “instrumentation” that would rather be soothed by my fat Nona’s hands smelling of yeast, her body reliably covered in a clean-smelling cotton dress, not the bitter pill I call change. Instead I’m forced to brave a major adjustment (a commotion) that comes at me like a wind-and-pressure system, when what I really want is this: … chop! chop! read more!

AFTER DINNER by Katherine Heiny

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AFTER DINNER by Katherine Heiny After dinner, Maya steered the minivan through the icy streets to their own house, Rhodes silent next to her in the passenger seat, Nash fussing in a low-level but constant way. When they got inside, Rhodes suddenly became drunkenly exuberant. “Merry Christmas, wife, child!” he said, hugging Maya and Nash at the same time. Maya had been peeling Nash’s snowsuit off and now the baby and the snowsuit were caught between them. Nash made a startled noise of protest and Maya propped her free arm against the wall so they wouldn’t all topple over. Rhodes kissed her, and then Nash. “This is the best Christmas ever,” he said. Maya couldn’t decide whether she agreed or disagreed, so she just kissed him back. “Go to bed, honey,” she said. “I’ll be there in a little while.” Rhodes staggered away toward the bedroom. Maya tugged Nash’s snowsuit off … chop! chop! read more!

RITHIKA MERCHANT, Works on Paper: Comparative Mythology

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RITHIKA MERCHANT Works on Paper: Comparative Mythology I began working on a series of paintings dealing with Comparative Mythology about two years ago. My work explores the common thread that runs through different cultures and religions. Similar versions of many myths, stories and ideas are shared by cultures all around the world. I use creatures and symbolism that are part of my personal visual vocabulary to explore these narratives. I am currently continuing in the same vein but focusing now on a branch of Comparative Mythology that deals with Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero/Monomyth. The Monomyth refers to the journey of the Hero. There is a pattern that involves seventeen steps that the hero passes through during his journey. The seventeen step journey is spilt up into three phases– the departure, the initiation and the return. This pattern is found in many narratives from different cultures and religions and … chop! chop! read more!

THIS FILM OF MY LIFE IF I’D PAID MORE ATTENTION TO FRENCH CINEMA by Brian Baumgart

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THIS FILM OF MY LIFE IF I’D PAID MORE ATTENTION TO FRENCH CINEMA by Brian Baumgart Scene I: In the foreground she leans in, plucks her front teeth with her thumb, music like a finger piano, only echoed tones. A man with large fingers and furred knuckles hangs the boom just overhead, listening for any little click that doesn’t fit the narrative. Scene II: Mise en scene, cluttered like a pair of overlapping jungle gyms: the spider web of youth. Reviewers want to use the word entwined, as if the sex between us tied us. The director’s assistant smokes nondescript cigarettes from a white box, blowing tendrils across each camera’s lens for texture with little nuance. Scene III: Waiting at an airport, except there is no airport anymore. No, I’m waiting at the clinic for bloodwork. No, I’m done waiting. Brian Baumgart directs the creative writing AFA program and teaches English … chop! chop! read more!

THE TAO OF WORDS by Timothy Kercher

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THE TAO OF WORDS by Timothy Kercher To my daughter Buddha is a baby. Most everyone is a baby unless you are ma-ma or da-da or dog. Cows she knows, as they stand in high-mountain meadows in the Cimarron, laughter follows our vehicle. Which is bee-eep, these words and parts of words that come and go with the waves of vocal folds—her larynx learning to move, to harness the power of a puff of air, to launch thought into the buffer zone between beings. At two years old, she is a blacksmith forging words that will help her on the journey she doesn’t know she’s on yet— the more she empties herself, the more the words will come to fill in those spaces. Timothy Kercher lived overseas for the last six years—four years in Georgia and two in Ukraine—and has now moved back to his home in Dolores, Colorado. He continues … chop! chop! read more!

TWO POEMS by M. A. Schaffner

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TWO POEMS by M. A. Schaffner WE HAVE TO TALK Returning to this planet from the road I find the plate tectonics have become disturbingly unfamiliar. But you know how Teddy Bears come home to roost, and how it just becomes awkward for everyone. I used to know a girl, I used to know, I used to, oh well. Dust covers my hands and blood just thickens it. I find my words turning into little time bombs that sit unobtrusively among other souls before their lethal petals unfold, and the solar wind sweeps over the surface carrying me to a rest stop on Ninety-Five where we all look friendly for one day only. Some era, sagas will sing of our exploits on the quiet wards, ones without laptops. I won’t be there, but driving, still en route.   WITH AN ‘OON IN IT The name our wind doesn’t have must … chop! chop! read more!

SOLECISM by Rosebud Ben-Oni reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

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SOLECISM by Rosebud Ben-Oni Virtual Artists Collective, 80 pages reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke It is not difficult to lose patience with the poems of Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Solecism: studded with cultural and personal reference, streets names, and regionalisms – not to mention the grammatical experimentation implicit in a book of poetry – Ben-Oni’s work disorients. The reader clings to disparate stanzas, following ambiguously symbolic sparrows, in a fruitless attempt to add everything up, but the author evades a single style. Ben-Oni traverses her mixed Jewish-Hispanic heritage in sudden turns; just as the reader grows accustomed to colonias and sal si puedes they find themselves in Israel (with side trips back to the States), the parts of the poet divided into cavalier sections. A fragmented poem about Ramadan lives alongside unexpectedly sentimental lines like “and so they fly away / breaking my heart on this cold, cold day” or a sugary ode … chop! chop! read more!

YOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK by Tom Gauld reviewed by Rebecca Dubow

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YOU’RE ALL JUST JEALOUS OF MY JETPACK by Tom Gauld Drawn & Quarterly, 180 pages reviewed by Rebecca Dubow Tom Gauld’s latest graphic novel, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, is a hundred and eighty pages of cartoons about classic literature in the digital age. Many of these graphics have already appeared in The Guardian, but reading each of them back to back is especially satisfying. Experienced this way, his cartoons argue for a seamless intersection of literary fiction and popular culture. A graphic novel is the ideal medium to accomplish this marriage because it has historically been associated with popular culture. In the past ten years or so, however, great works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have demonstrated the considerable potential of the graphic novel as a literary work. Gauld’s graphics are cartoonish and simple, indicating at first that the work would be equally cartoonish … chop! chop! read more!

BOX SCORE by Kevin Varrone reviewed by Anna Strong

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BOX SCORE
by Kevin Varrone
Digital Earthenware, available from iTunes

Reviewed by Anna Strong
Kevin Varrone’s Box Score: An Autobiography spans across form — from autobiography to history to visual art to the baseball rulebook to the prose poem — content, and reading experience. Presented as a highly interactive free iPad and (by early June 2013) iPhone app, Varrone’s text, which he calls an autobiography, does almost everything in its power to thwart that somewhat restrictive classification. “Box Score” is made of a series of prose poems, each of which invokes Philadelphia history, baseball history (e.g. the first night game ever played between the Phillies and the Reds) Philadelphia baseball, a speaker’s personal recollections (“police your area my dad would say as he smoothed dirt around the first base bag w/ his foot after a bad hop ate me up”), baseball terminology (page 78 is simply a line of a batter’s statistics: g: 1 ab: 0 r: 0 h: 0 2b: 0 3b: 0 hr: 0 avg: .000), found language (Harry Kalas’ famous “outta here” long ball call appears on page 73), and lyrical, evocative images that seem disembodied from — and beautifully juxtapose — the rest of the language (“I’d pick dandelions & snap their heads before they turned to wishes,” page 19).

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MISS PLASTIQUE by Lynn Levin reviewed by Michelle Reale

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MISS PLASTIQUE by Lynn Levin Ragged Sky Press, 68 pages reviewed by Michelle Reale I should have know from the cover of Lynn Levin’s book that I would be able to connect with the poems inside on a very visceral level: that blond doll, with the thick cat eye eyeliner, all blonde and coiffed, with head tipped—yeah, I get it. When I played with my Barbie dolls, they broke rules, they were well-dressed rebels, and they smiled in your face, but plotted their escape behind your back. Lynn Levin writes of a generation here—my generation, her generation, our generation, but her themes are universal, though some of the particulars, some details give a throb to the heart because, well, recognition in any form is a powerful thing. She slips in details you think you may have forgotten about your young life long past, but realize they’ve only been coiled tight … chop! chop! read more!

MOODS by Rachel B. Glaser

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MOODS Rachel B. Glaser Factory Hollow Press, 80 pages Reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke MOODS seems innocent enough at first glance: thin and neatly printed, the poems average about two short pages in length, while the cover art – bare-breasted women combing colors from a campfire with hairbrushes – advertises little more than a squishy meditation on divine femininity or the joys of stereotypical womanhood. In a certain sense, Glaser delivers on this front; her poetry is comprised of mystical generalizations about female sexuality, menstruation, and emotion, but the author’s manipulation of these societal tropes is expertly done — they become threatening, subversive. Glaser throws foolish stigma in our faces: and I’m about to get my period maybe I’ll get it now or now Her female subjects are (as they should be) difficult to pin down, at once susceptible to higher powers (God, psychology) and ruthlessly assertive, dominating their male counterparts, … chop! chop! read more!

POEMS FOR THE WRITING by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

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POEMS FOR THE WRITING Prompts for Poets by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin Texture Press, 154 pages reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS In the poetry workshop, we encourage writers to explore their individual potentials, to experiment, and to eschew valuations of “good” in exchange for measures of success as achieving authorial vision.  The instructor must speak to a wide spectrum of skill.  Valerie Fox’s and Lynn Levin’s new book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, supplies a toolbox for doing just that.  The range of prompts makes the creation of art a more accessible act to a wider audience.  Ultimately, this works as a text for how to teach poetry. The book intermixes the prompts with respect to levels of difficulty and formal elements of the resulting poems.  The first prompt, the paraclausithyron, may appeal to an old world sense of “The Poet,” but introductory workshop students might … chop! chop! read more!

MY BEAUTIFUL BUS by Jacques Jouet, translated by Eric Lamb reviewed by Michelle Fost

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MY BEAUTIFUL BUS by Jacques Jouet, translated by Eric Lamb Dalkey Archive Press, 130 pages. reviewed by Michelle Fost Jacques Jouet’s My Beautiful Bus reminded me of an observation by a former teacher of mine, playwright Romulus Linney. In 2011, a good friend, whom I’d first met many years ago in Linney’s class at the University of Pennsylvania, e-mailed me with the sad news of his death. In his obituary, the New York Times quoted Linney, “My writing will add up to the sum total of me. The choices I make with my writing have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is really your destiny.” Linney was an influential teacher for us young aspiring writers, always telling us to “go deeper” with our writing. Even after death, his words stopped me in my tracks. span style=”font-family: ‘times new roman’, … chop! chop! read more!

THE OLDEST MOM IN THE ROOM by Sarah Buttenwieser

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THE OLDEST MOM IN THE ROOM by Sarah Buttenwieser The other day, I took my antsy four-year-old, Saskia, to the Y for Tumble and Play. The gym, outfitted with toddler-friendly stations—a gently sloping soft ramp here, another odd-shaped cushion-slash-mat there, a low, wide balance beam, and some hula hoops on the floor offered cute smalls the chance to toddle or crawl or run about. Their adults hovered or chased or basically ignored, depending. Saskia is on the cusp of outgrowing Tumble and Play. And at 48, maybe I have outgrown Tumble and Play, too. These weren’t my peeps. In the noisy room, I felt very quiet. I stood there and remembered when I’d been one of them, a thirtysomething parent to smalls. I lived in that tot-centric world with playground—and the other parent chaperones—as primary destination. Like them, I routinely over-packed a diaper bag (before I got to the third … chop! chop! read more!

BETWEEN THE FRAMES by Kristen Martin

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BETWEEN THE FRAMES by Kristen Martin My parents never owned their own video camera—in the 1990s, it was the sort of luxury item (like a snow blower) that could be borrowed from a relative or neighbor when needed. With my Uncle Joe’s bulky camcorder hoisted on his shoulder, my dad would record birthdays, vacations, and Christmases. The camera was a heavy machine, much too big for John and me to ever play with; it was obsolete even by 1990, when handheld camcorders became the tool of choice for doting parents. Nevertheless, my dad ignored his bad back on those special occasions and accumulated hours of footage of us running through the sprinklers in our backyard and ripping wrapping paper off presents. The impulse to document stopped around 1997—by that time, I was 8 years old and John was 11. Maybe we weren’t cute enough to immortalize on moving film anymore. … chop! chop! read more!

OUT OF THE BLUE by Renée K. Nicholson

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  OUT OF THE BLUE by Renée K. Nicholson Shorthand we just called it “Bluebird,” but technically the role was Princess Florina. Hers is the tale of a maiden who wanted to learn to fly, and about the prince, disguised as the blue bird who taught her. For the celebration of Aurora’s wedding in the third act of Sleeping Beauty, the Bluebird story, compressed, became entertainment for both onstage wedding guests and audience members. Bluebird was a common choice to teach young dancers advanced enough learn some repertoire. Reminded of many famous dancers who made their soloist debuts as Princess Florina, when given the role in a showcase, I thought of it as a sign of things to come. My costume, royal blue with feathers on the platter tutu as well as a feathered headpiece, did make me feel a bit like a delicate bird. Wanting to stroke the feathers … chop! chop! read more!

GONE by Miriam Sagan

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GONE by Miriam Sagan   After photographs by Nell Dickerson This needs narrative– Who left, and why, And who came back– The photograph The house completely covered in vines, Or vines in the shape of a house. I once lived Where creeper pried apart floorboard Where I sat with my baby in the bath And a flying squirrel Burst out from a hole in the wall Covered by a travel poster Of–of all things–the Alps, Leaping like a circus performer Through a ring of paper. Don’t sleep here, or you’ll dream Of abandoning the human in habitation, Like that night hitchhiking When I wouldn’t camp in the decrepit house And you agreed, Afraid of the fair-haired tinkers Or the unseen Tenants.   Miriam Sagan is the author of twenty-five books, including the poetry collections Map of the Lost(University of New Mexico Press) and Seven Places in American (Sherman Asher, 2012). She founded and … chop! chop! read more!

IRA JOEL HABER, Works on Paper

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IRA JOEL HABER Works on Paper I have always made art including drawings and works on paper. This selection is from 1972 to 2013 and is a good sample of the themes, images and mediums that have always interested me for over forty-three years as an artist. My training was in commercial art. I began working in the advertising field in 1966 upon completing a two year course at New York City Community College, as it was then known. This training was outdated. In any event, I had little trouble in finding jobs. However, these jobs depended on skills that I really didn’t have, and my heart was not really in the ad game. I want my art to go through slow constant changes, but at the same time I want vast abrupt changes. Nature does the same. Since 1969, I have been making small scale sculptures and miniature environments that … chop! chop! read more!

WILLIAM SULIT, Chicken Dance

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CHICKEN DANCE by William Sulit & Beth Kephart Digital 3-D Design A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand Important Subject: A chicken BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with … a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin? WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I’m sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D “art,” I wasn’t going to leave that stone unturned. BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you … chop! chop! read more!

IN HEAVEN by Rachel B. Glaser

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IN HEAVEN by Rachel B. Glaser they could have lived in clouds but so missed houses that they actually built some they missed roads though in life, roads hadn’t really appealed to them in a nostalgic, industrious phase they assembled a touristy street where stores sold the bright t-shirts of before covered with puns and jokes about being half-alive many people re-found their spouses but many more lived with newly-found strangers in a light-weight honeymoon of sweet boredom no one was religious it was a beach town they easily conjured an ocean but they used all their natural resources partly from building the things they drove instead of cars a group of environmentalists formed but they were no fun to have over at parties and there were so many parties     Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the poetry collection Moods (Factory Hollow Press, 2013) and the story collection Pee On … chop! chop! read more!

BIRTHPLACE OF A NATION by Kevin Varrone

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BIRTHPLACE OF A NATION by Kevin Varrone Joe saw your number at Silk City while going crazy in the men’s room. Joe saw your number on the sin wall and understood the irritating itch on his bearish toes to be his own cross, his own three alarm fire. Joe TIVO-ed Casablanca and became immune to commas. Joe’s been paralyzed by the syntax of youth, by his sumo for frankfurters. Joe is a concave bibliographer, a nor’easter cult diva who uses tabula rasa as an ultimatum and asks “Where you at?” Joe loves women. Joe loves a woman the way two broken machines love each other in a landfill.   Kevin Varrone’s most recent publication is Eephus (Little Red Leaves Textile Series, 2012). His current project, box score: an autobiography, is forthcoming as a set of literary baseball cards from Little Red Leaves Textile Series (2013) and as an iPhone/iPad app (2013). His previous … chop! chop! read more!

HEAT by Marybeth Rua Larsen

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HEAT by Marybeth Rua-Larsen for the first thirteen days of August. I’m swimming in lemons, squeezed within an inch of their lives, waterlogged, pressed to the bottom by ice. My lips curl around the straw, suck down the pits in waves of cool, the air conditioner dies its slow death: a whine, a rattle, a sputter. I let it rest an hour then make it come again in electric waves, burning my thighs with the laptop, stuffing newspapers underneath, scrolling through emails as word after word drips humidity in the chatter of children who have questions and answers and dissertations on cloud formations. They lie on their backs and watch them run across the sky. They won’t pull their hair into buns. They want it hanging down rather than bound, the window boxes are watered and green but the flowers are withered and frail. There are no new buds in … chop! chop! read more!

IN A DRY MONTH by John Timpane

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IN A DRY MONTH by John Timpane     Time says have to, time says go to a green place, a space, a peace beyond the outskirts of earshot and streetlight mind of barnacle-bearded whale rears, geysers shattered water, sounds a mile past the din of fish silence where warmth has never been. Infinitesimal in that crush, that loneliness, those lightless ancient canyons, whale hums a half-hour, utter tone that travels shelf to shelf, reef to isle to continent and every whale, oceans apart, judders a little. Beyond the suburbs, where Orion glistens, all sings and oceans of night reverberate: what is in me, what is heavy, holds its breath, dive when the deep calls.     John Timpane is the Media Editor/Writer of the Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has appeared in Sequoia, Vocabula Review, Apiary Mixtape, ONandOnScreen, Painted Bride Quarterly, Per Contra, Wild River Review, and elsewhere. Books include (with … chop! chop! read more!

from FLIGHT OF AUGUST by Lawrence Eby

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from FLIGHT OF AUGUST by Larry Eby 6. A desk melts into the tile floor, the windows cracked and browning. A forest of homes caught fire to dry cold, lightning struck Joshua tree, build the fire, son build the fire, son chilled wind is a devil’s claw. No one is clean out here. Among burning pines, ashen snow mixed in the bottle earth is.                     Crows nest atop                          streetlamps, cawing at the last frozen hand stuck to the curb’s edge. No is loud out here. Echoing off windows, echoing breaks the icicles from the eaves. A fire in the distance counts victims.   9. Billowing endless          clouds            smoke.            dried up forest burning,         … chop! chop! read more!