Solitary

October 2018 | visual art

Solitary

 

by Jing Lin

In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, in which she is portraying a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see? Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA. https://www.jinglinphotography.com

Heath Brougher, Featured Author

October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee

Eyeless

 

When your eyes suddenly fell out,

leaving you blind as a bowl of soup,

you frantically began feeling around the floor.

 

On your hands and knees, crawling carefully

to make sure you didn’t crush

one of them with your four-legged steps.

 

Feeling nothing but grunge and grime on the that old linoleum,

you became more panicked with each passing second,

realizing, now that your eyes have fallen out,

just how filthy this world has truly become.

 

 

Noisy Noose

 

The spirit has slowly evaporated,

gradually turned jaded throughout the years,

quelled, wrecked by the jarring persistence of cacophony

that pours through the veins and hallways of this world.

Inspiration melted to a feeble pulp by the noisy noose

of the boisterous trucks and verbose dogs

that populate the neighborhood, filling the air,

the never-silent wind, with an incessant clamor.

 

The poet’s soul will soon be laid to rest among the din.

 

 

The Prevalence of Nothingness

 

Churning the nothingness into a somethingness

is tried. Doesn’t work.

Maybe half-works since I see

kids gathered

in the abandoned parking lot.

It’s like they’re living my youth

which allows me to vicariously relive it myself.

Hail pours from the sky.

Gravity still works.

That is, at least, for now.

 

by Heath Brougher

Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Into the Void Magazine, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Magazine. He is a multiple nominee for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. His newest book is “To Burn in Torturous Algorithms” (Weasel Press, 2018). His work has appeared in journals such as Taj Mahal Review, Chiron Review, MiPOesias, and Main Street Rag.

Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya

October 2018 | visual art

Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya

 

by Ben Erlandson

Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is a perpetual skeptic, longitudinal thinker, brewer, gardener, photographer, learning systems designer, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Combinations of his efforts often manifest as technology, visual media, and printable narrative. Having tried nearly every platter on the capitalist corporate industrial buffet, he’s just not found anything to his liking. He spends quite a bit of time in the mountains and rivers instead. Mostly on foot. Dr. Erlandson has published extensively in academia, including several peer-reviewed articles and co-authorship of the graduate-level textbook Design For Learning In Virtual Worlds. He has self-published the narrative nonfiction work Winter South 02014, about a road trip from California back to his home state of North Carolina. With another nonfiction project in the works, he switches gears between fiction, nonfiction, and photography to keep his mind limber. He’s been shooting for more than twenty-five years and writing creatively for more than thirty. Born and raised in Elkin, North Carolina, Ben has degrees from UNC-Asheville, Emerson College, and Arizona State University, and has lived and worked in Asheville, Boston, Tempe, Monterey Bay, Berkeley, and Washington, DC. He currently resides in Glade Valley, North Carolina, and hopes to build an ecological homestead, or just travel around the North American continent on foot, bicycle, and touring kayak, practicing photography and telling stories.

My Last Screenplay

October 2018 | poetry

Whatever they wanted; I didn’t care one way or the other.

I didn’t care if the handicapped wife fell in the well

or the bad guy said he’d save her and didn’t

Or when later, her so over souped corpse

(this discretely off-camera)

was falling off the bone

And the righteous husband, asked by the honest retriever

if he wanted the head…

Take it or leave it, made no never mind to me.

Then…in the distance…the masked rider

galloping towards us

a savior, female,

the tension palpable as she nears…

(think Meryl Streep I’m told)

Could it be?

The return of the white hair woman!

Note for revision:

Introduce white hair woman before her return.

The righteous husband heads off with his young’ns and

the white hair woman to high prairie climes

dusted with snow and newly minted men.

Everything there is for the taking.

Everyone’s a pioneer.

And no one ever goes to the movies.

 

by Mark Stein

Mark Stein’s poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Exposition Review, Eclectica, Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Madison Review and Moment. His plays have been produced at Manhattan Theatre Club, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theater of Louisville, South Coast Repertory, Manitoba Theatre Centre, LA’s Fountain Theater, and most recently an award-winning production at Chicago’s Raven Theater of Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys. He wrote the screenplay for the Steve Martin/Goldie Hawn film, Housesitter, and the New York Times Best Seller, How the States Got Their Shapes, which became the basis for a History Channel series by the same name. His other non-fiction books include American Panic: A History of Who Scares Us and Why; Vice Capades: Sex, Drugs, and Bowling from the Pilgrims to the Present.

 

21 Minutes

October 2018 | nonfiction

I note the time on my phone as I ring the bell. It’s 2:12 p.m. As I put my phone back into my purse, the door opens, and I force myself to smile. I enter the old house and the familiar warm, stale air envelops me.

I am pulled into an awkward embrace. The stink of cigarettes and unwashed hair assaults my senses and I squeeze my eyes shut while suppressing the physical urge to gag.

We pass through the room with the thousand books. Now we are in the kitchen. Now I am sitting at the round wooden table, sipping shitty, cheap coffee from a dirty cup.

I’m pretending to listen, but the complaints and stories have been soliloquized verbatim for years. I am sitting back from the table

(crumbs everywhere, smudges of jam and butter)

holding the mug handle with my right hand while my left awkwardly holds the side, as if I’m posing for a commercial.

I’m disgusted and for just a moment the disgust softens into concern, almost caring, but the moment passes, it won’t stick. I know from a thousand attempts that it will not stick.

My mind starts going back, and I know I need to get out of here.

(Please stop telling me about your uncomfortable bra. Please stop telling me about your friend from 75 years ago.)

“Here, here, take this.”

I take the folded white envelope from the wrinkled, mottled hand and shove it into my purse.

A hundred dollars cash, in twenties. From a lonely, fragile old woman who doesn’t realize she’s paying penance for an absolution she will never receive.

I hope it was worth it.
I know it wasn’t.

But I’m not giving it back.

I glance at the dash of my car as I back out of the driveway. It’s 2:33 p.m.

 

by Anne Alexander

Anne Alexander is a native Houstonian. She is a writer, wife, mother, autism advocate, and rescuer of animals, not always in that order. In a former life, she was a travel writer, correspondent and managing editor of a small town newspaper. She holds a BA in Psychology from Texas A&M University and is currently working on a collection of essays about families, mental illness and other delights.