Below are highlights from the pieces included in Vol. 8. We hope the pique your interest.
Fiction
“God’s Country” by Robin MacArthur
The article is front-page, the headline in bold. It says they have found two signs, rough plywood with spray paint, nailed to trees along one of the two blacktop roads that run through their town. Both have said, “GOD’S COUNTRY IS WHITE COUNRY”
“Epsilon” by Julia Friedman
He never kept money (how?), never had sex (how?), and never exhibited interest in anything besides numbers (why?). He also created an idiosyncratic language all his own to better understand human interaction.
Non-Fiction
“Scenes from an Expat Dorm in China” by Elizabeth Horneber
When he died, Zeus’ son Aeacus became one fo the guards at the gates of the Hades, holding the keys and sentencing hell to those ants-turned-people.
Thats fucked up, I say to the Swede.
“The Fall of All Things Made” by Jaren Watson
It’s common to go into shock at the death of a loved one, but I don’t think I was in shock. I just remember thinking there was a slippery uncertainty in the phrase, “He’s gone.”
“Intruders” by Kristina Moriconi
I was ten or eleven when my father taught me how to catch butterflies, how to kill them and mount them on boards.
I confess: for years I will consider myself complicit. I’ll be preoccupied with words like accomplice, conspirator, accessory.
“Kumari Amenorrhea” by Lawrence Lenhart
Even now, as the new Kumari settles into her monastic palace at Durbar Square, Western activits are trying to dismantle this ritual virgin worshiping, claiming it is a deprivation of childhood.
Poetry
A stillness like an unreciprocated
crush. A stillness like the empty Steely Dan
Can’t Buy a Thrill record sleeve I found
by a dumpster one day.
– F. Daniel Rzicznek, “Two Men: One Has Never Managed A Clear Thought“
I wield italics when I want you to listen amo re amore
I operate them when I love you when I’m turned on amo re
amore
– Lucy Dunphy Barsness, “Ardent Ligature“
So much of the body stays hidden. The inside
bound in skin, in cloth and wire,
shushed against an air like this.
-Brianna Flavin, “Cathedrals“
I thought that if the Russians invaded all we
would have to do was act as evil as they were, just
wrinkle our noses and say words like damn and shit
and hell. The Russian invaders would pop out of their
tanks and go–Oh, you’re evil too. Our mistake!
– Daniel Bourne, “The Alien“
We Jews don’t fuck around with death.
If you’re a Jew and you die, three people sit and watch you
Curse that day for failing to shut my mother’s womb,
for letting me be born to see all this trouble.
-Josette Akresh-Gonzales, “There was a Man Named Job“
Names change,
and appetites,
and things
end badly
for the calf
either way
-Andrea Cohen, “Salad Days“
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