October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Dublin’s rowdy streets surround me, shops shackle me to my routines, Rome’s old Kyries rape me, England’s imperialist memories break me, America’s black and white fifties families flash ever before my eyes. I find the key, gasping for breath, no more breakdowns or suffocating, flying-driving-running through dirty demonic Dublin pubs, roadlines-shrines-bright green fields yield to desolate dead Skellig Michael and the end of the earth apocalyptic Aran Islands, searching-grasping-finding-…What? Delphic Self? No anything but, knowledge and college already teaching me Joyce’s universality of particularity. Then what? Why go on in the caged rat race? Selfless saintliness led to several nearly successful suicide attempts. So why- balance? Really, back to ancient Aristotle again? No no, this time no balance, no monastic saintliness, no hedonistic selfishness, all of it banished like Baudelaire, ripping apart and reveling in the ravaged earth like Rimbaud, drunk on wine, drunk on water, drunk on poetry, drunk on sodomy, drunk on virtue, drunk on vice, drunk on creating, drunk on destroying.
by Ross Knapp
Ross Knapp is a recent college graduate with degrees in philosophy and literature who’s also an MFA graduate student in creative writing and poetry. He has an experimental literary novel and various poetry publications forthcoming. Originally he was planning on law school or a PHD in philosophy before deciding to pursue poetry and writing as a career. Some of the poets he admires most are Sappho, Virgil, Li Po, Hafiz, Francois Villon, Dante, Keats, Whitman, Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Pound, Crane, Millay, Thomas, Sexton, Lowell, Ginsberg, and Plath.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
The moon’s red-faced hymen is crestfallen;
eclipsed by a trilogy of cloven sol kisses.
Our universe is not one.
Mechanical bulls are wrangling in ‘The House
of the Rising Sun.’ The sorority girls are all bowlegged
from bar shopping their reversible jeans. Their frat
boys left snipe hunting for lost birds of paradise.
‘Where have all their trappings gone—
long time passing?’
‘Stoned People’ are awakening in their old sweat lodges—
changing cubic zirconia cornerstones into granite ballast
rocks and new altar tops.
Near Nowata, Oklahoma, a shaman rolls the tombstone
blocking Cutfinger Cave over maggots passing through
on a sacrificial cat—
and the spirit of Chief Pokegon wanders.
by Kevin Heaton
Kevin Heaton is originally from Kansas and Oklahoma, and now lives and writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in a number of publications including: Guernica, Raleigh Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Vinyl Poetry, The Adroit Journal, and Mixed Fruit. He is a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
October 2014 | back-issues, fiction
Miss Sandy is the kind of equestrian who requests the counsel of her gelding, Saul, on matters she involves herself in. “Saul,” she asks in a tiny voice that is compelled by the standing on her tippy toes. “Saul my darling boy, what should I say to the diggers?” She told him they’d been there this past afternoon, that they’d cupped their hands over their foreheads and looked out past fenced pastures and the stock dog pen, and said that they’d be back with instruments and warmer coats. “They said the purpose was to relieve any assumed debt and it’s wrong of them to assume anything.” She put her hand through the gate, resting her palm on his nose. “What do I do?” The horse ruffed his ears, bent down, sniffed the fertile ground, and thought of rain.
by Chase Eversole
Chase Eversole lives and writes in the Midwest. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, The Brazen Review, and others. He blogs on the weekly at chaseeversole.tumblr.com
