Story
The Battle of Skinner Butte
Ray Jicha
Moving north from San Francisco I slept on the beach near Arcata then made my way to Eugene where I got dropped off around 10:00 p.m. I found a little downtown bar, ordered a draft to pay for the stool and washed down t...
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Two Poems
William Lessard
Paul Kelly
First time I saw you
you were riding
a stolen motorcycle
down the middle
of our baseball field,
the cops in hot pursuit.
Last time I saw you
...
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Some Poems
Les Bridges
Stuck on a Runway
Thunderheads loom over Dallas.
Stranded planes mill
like nervous, 100-ton cattle,
blood streaks across silver flanks.
185 strangers and I marinate
...
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Evergreen
How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen-thousand-two-hundred-and-eighty-seven Seconds, Usama
Chavisa Woods
I asked no questions about anything. i just wanted to smoke cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes.
I come back once a year to visit. I only stay a few days. I try not to ask too many questions. There’s noth...
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Story
If You Play and If You Die
Jim Feast
Artemis Brewster owned a large retail store in New Jersey, the Bargain Toy Mart (Toys for Less!) And he loved science fiction as much as what he sold. But his was not the doting, immature love of the geeky fanboy, it was...
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Todd Colby—Eight Poems
Todd Colby
Peace & Good Order
Okay dear, whatever you can manage
will be propped up in a boat next to you
full of apologies and texts from some cabin
pumped with nitrous oxide next to the oce...
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Interview
An Interview with New Monsters
New Monsters
The New Monsters are a Bay Area combo lead by bassist Steve Horowitz (The Code International) and tenor sax “monster” Dan Plonsey (of Daniel Popsicle, and composer of Leave Me Alone, an opera with libretto by Harvey ...
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Story
If You’re So Special, Why Aren’t You Dead?
Jim Greer
Alphonse samson stood before the mirror in his bathroom for a long time before deciding to. The mirror had no frame but its edges were beveled and the soft light from the neighbor’s bright room shining through a small squa...
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Story
Pardon My French
Thaddeus Rutkowski
When i arrived in paris by train, I tried to place a call to a friend, someone I knew from my home city. Surprisingly, there was a phone service with a human attendant in the train station. I gave the phone woman the numb...
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Story
Medium
Jennifer Adams
The notice was small, a half-sheet of paper tucked, unauthorized, into the frame of the subway map.
“Mrs. Taylor and she says DON’T GIVE UP.”
Elizabeth leaned closer, oblivious to the discomfort she was ...
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Classics
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius – Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
I
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called Th...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #17: Beer Party Trumps Tea Party Any Day
bart plantenga
A discussion with activist cartoonist and BEER MYSTIC host, Ken Avidor [here posed as Greek God of Mini-Golf, Nkolfus, in Asbury Park, c. 1984].
I knew Ken [aka Weiner] for many years in NYC, during its – or was it jus...
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Meaning of the Dance
Mark McCawley
Fortunately, not everyone has to experience the daily life of madness and insanity of a spouse with a severe mental illness. It's akin to watching a portrait you adore manifest into something you no longer know or even recog...
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The Stabbing Game
Sean Flaherty
They switched the time of day
but every day for one year,
Monday through Friday
we had seventh grade science
with Mr. Stern,
after school,
Neil Brown and I
would tear over to Friendly’s or
Burger King
in his mom’s Camar...
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Essay
In-depth observations on eye floaters – a challenge to ophthalmology
Floco Tausin
For centuries, scholars try to find an explanation for the mobile, scattered and transparent spheres and strings in our visual field. Early on in ophthalmological tradition, the origin was thought to be in the eye. The pheno...
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