October 2016 | nonfiction
Walking through Bombay among blue flags makes you feel home among the tall skyscrapers. They make you feel a sense of deep power which makes you realize why only in Mumbai among all the other cities the blue flags still capture and resonate while the financial databases speculate on trade commodities, derivatives. The blue flag stands for very different things than the red. But the two colors cannot be thought without each other. If red symbolizes life, blue the essence of life.
Though the days of Dalit Panthers is long gone and Dalit movement has seen countless debacles, twists and turns, it is in Mumbai that the politics still holds the imagination of the urban-scape, visually. Among my first two visits to the city, I was largely caught up with work, but it was the blue flags and the impending hope of the them that I couldn’t help but be drawn towards.
When the Beats first came to India, they had noted the divergent preference and style of the Bombay and the Calcutta poets. The first were modernists obsessed with mastering the form while the second were political. One can only wonder what the Beats might have felt or said if they had met the Dalit poets of Bombay and not the English poets. How would Ginsberg have navigated his oriental fascination among the Dalit Panthers? That’s an event which could well be an alternate fiction that Deborah Baker might have wondered too countless times I feel, when looking at the blue flags of Mumbai juxtaposing the orange ones, the color that found its way to the West with so much ease.
Debarun Sarkar
Debarun Sarkar sleeps, eats, reads, smokes, drinks, labors and occasionally writes and submits. He spends most of his time juggling between freelancing and writing while halting at Calcutta for the moment. Recent works have appeared in or are forthcoming in Visitant, Off the Coast, Your One Phone Call, Literary Orphans, Tittynope Zine, The Opiate, In Between Hangovers, Wild Plum, among others
October 2016 | fiction
She gave you a lot of different looks from the start. Did that throw you off? How cold it got on the final drive?
There are always variables you can’t control and sometimes things go wrong. Can’t blame the conditions, that’s for sure.
Did you get an explanation?
Some of our moves weren’t as smooth as they could be, we had communication issues and, let’s be honest, she knows how to avoid contact.
There have been some rather significant rule changes recently. You think they affected the outcome?
They were taken into account.
She suggested at one point that you were not very imaginative, like she knew just what would happen beforehand.
We try and take what they give us and make the most of it. Each night is a different challenge and, let’s give her credit, she’s tough, she can be a real force out there. In hindsight, of course, there are things you’d like to take back. Things that were sloppy, that you didn’t execute according to plan.
But the way it looked she could anticipate what you were doing before you did it. You think you’ve become too predictable?
You’ll have to ask her. We’re on to Saturday night. Anything else?
Did you feel you got unfairly penalized?
We’re not getting into that. Saturday night. One more.
Let me rephrase: she intimates there was some kind of breakdown at the end. What accounted for that?
Well, if that’s what she says. You’ll have to ask her.
Alexander Block
Since 2015 Alexander’s stories have either appeared or are forthcoming in Buffalo Almanack (recipient of its Inkslinger Award for Creative Excellence), Umbrella Factory Magazine (a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee), New Pop Lit, DenimSkin, Per Contra, Constellations, The Bicycle Review, Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Flash Frontier, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Contrary, the Blue Bonnet Review, The Nite Writers Literary Arts Journal, and The Binnacle, the latter of which won Honorable Mention in its Twelfth Annual International Ultra-Short Competition.
October 2016 | poetry
All is quiet…finally
after the two sisters quit re-living the day
and drift into hide-a-bed snoring.
Until 4 a.m. when the brother
rattles the unfamiliar bedroom door knob
and slices light into the hall
where he bangs the bathroom light switch on
and spotlights my room like the cops
cornering an escaped convict,
and he stands there
suddenly unsure where the toilet is
or emblazoned by super nova flash
off white porcelain
like I am by his skinny ass in the doorway.
Eventually he slams the door shut
as I flip the blanket over my eyes.
He flushes that late-night roar
of water down the drain,
fumbles across the hall
before releasing his lifeline
on the bathroom light,
and I dream of watching
my morning TV show
at just the right volume.
Diane Webster
Diane Webster grew up in Eastern Oregon before she moved to Colorado. She enjoys drives in the mountains to view all the wildlife and scenery and takes amateur photographs. Writing poetry provides a creative outlet exciting in images and phrases Diane thrives in. Her work has appeared in “The Hurricane Review,” “Eunoia Review,” “Illya’s Honey,” and other literary magazines.
October 2016 | poetry
New Model
My high rise tops real rubber tread and interstellar from toetip to ankle Converse Chucks no knockoff logos faster than reentry orbit more powerful than a charging hamstring laced halfway up my post gravity butch striptease calves come for a ride with me I’m jet propelled and ready for liftoff.
Noizeland
-after reading an interview with Non
The deaf spark shrill speaker groan shrieks feedback epilepsy landscape shudders the concrete battlefield spilled beer old blood and crushed aluminum after the set the doom psychosis switchboard operator asks the soundman how he got the drone reverb effect he answers you mean out of the amplifier you just destroyed
Conspiracy Fact
–after the Abbey Road controversy
Look closely see Paul has no shoes moonwalking listening to his wireless headphones time warping backwards against shoeless left hand traffic the original Smoothest Criminal fourteen years before twinned dimensional Volkswagens on either side of film set street this has meaning proves time travel faked moon landing Paul Michael Illuminati.
Hypnogogic Blues
On the tangerine lips of rippled sleep curdled past its expiration date the Pringle pop top takeout bag crackle muscles spasm migraine like Cronenberg Scanners vintage Windows boot-up meme violet hallucination hum of supersonic extraterrestrial burnoff sounds like thin Theta sounds like Paul Anka Put Your Head on My Shoulder.
Genelle Chaconas
Genelle Chaconas is a 2015 MFA Writing and Poetics graduate of Naropa University. Their first chapbook is Fallout, Saints and Dirty Pictures (little m Press, 2011). Their work has been published or is forthcoming in WT Paterson’s The Asylum, Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers, Menacing Hedge, Futures Trading, Crack the Spine, Weirderary, Dirty Chai, Third Wednesday, The Fem, Crab Fat Magazine, Door is a Jar, Five 2 One, Bombay Gin, Calaveras Station, Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets and others. They hosted Red Night Poetry series in Sacramento California.
October 2016 | poetry
Let’s start with this coffee I just spilled,
stain spreading, steadfast as the walnut floorboards
that must still swell with moisture
in the room my family swarmed for dinner as a boy,
window shades filtering the adamant,
decaying sun of summer evenings.
I focus all attention on the earthy, robust smell,
that seems darker than the coffee,
and I refuse to recognize the way something dark,
and completely simple,
like this now half-cup of coffee, trembles,
then stills a second as I hold it,
and stare into it a long time,
until I am remembering that man¾
how heavy he was that morning
he dropped from the South Tower¾
and that house where I watched him on the television,
ten years old, with a certain sense, bewildering
and paralyzing as the takeoff of a plane is to a toddler.
And despite a looking back
that said goodbye before I could say anything,
and his deep breath, his wave,
he still turned carefully away, forever,
scrutinized the skyline, face tilted upward
as if supported by the feeble sunrays
girdering through the smoke,
and stepped off.
Like light he desired darkness.
Sometimes, when I try to imagine myself as that man,
I feel released for seconds,
and if that release persists, terrified.
And to be honest, as a child, I was terrified of everything:
clowns, bad grades, the filthy fingers of a family friend all over me.
But that other fear is different.
Even so, I thought I could forget that man
cascading through the chaos¾determined, free¾
and whether or not his fall was peaceful.
Bathed in the television’s tide of light, I sat,
a moth fixed to the flame of what it wanted,
and watched as the camera trembled,
going out of focus…
Then came a reporter, sweat glistening her forehead
as she talked, calm as habit,
the microphone shaking in her hands.
And all the youth I felt,
whatever left me in my nervous laugh,
did not return in the deep breath I drew in,
slowly, a second later,
the first breath of a young man.
And who knows where that boy went,
too numb to speak about what he thought
was only a someone’s cowardly surrender.
But maybe, after all, he’s here,
in this coffee stain on the carpet¾
its shape not a body flattened on concrete,
but only the random result of gravity,
a blind design whose silence and force
transforms everything.
Domenic Scopa
Domenic Scopa is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poetry and translations have been featured in Poetry Quarterly, Reed Magazine, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Belleville Park Pages, and many others. He is currently an adjunct professor for the Changing Lives Through Literature program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and at New Hampshire Technical Institute. His first book, Walk-in Closet (Yellow Chair Press) is forthcoming in 2017. He currently reads manuscripts for Hunger Mountain and Ink Brush Publications.
