Poem
Twenty-Four Islands
Marguerite Van Cook
Island No 1
This island is inhabited by turtles,
Flowering shrubs linger past the drift stalks
Seashells flock the debris
This is the island where I forgot my sweater
That summer my breasts began to grow
The beach even...
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Poem
How They Fucked (In Three Parts)
John S. Hall
I
Well, yes, they fucked like bunnies, and yes, they fucked as if it was their last night on earth (when in fact it was early afternoon), but more than that, they fucked like so many, different other things completely.
The...
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Story
Mt. Eden 1978-82
Drew Hubner
It started in a pool hall. Juan Colon had a girl friend, and so did the cop, Jimmy O’Donnelly. The problem was it was the same girl. Usually a policeman is issued whatever number comes up, but special requests can be made....
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Story
"Li’l Punks", A Screenplay
Mark Netter
It's 1977 and four upstate-New York high school students who have formed their town's first punk rock band are in NYC together for the best night of their lives. They've been brought to NYC this particular Friday night b...
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Story
Pilgrims
City of Strangers
An excerpt from a novel
I met Dupont at the Bar X, a totally anonymous-looking place with tinted windows wedged in-between a McDonald’s and a pizzeria. I might never have noticed it had it not been for the neon Bud sign i...
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Essay
Unsupervised: My Life as a Bad Girl
Erika Schikel
I recently watched a “reality” show called “The Bad Girls Club” and was saddened to see what has lately become of the Bad Girl brand. The show devotes itself to a lot of scantily clad, cranky harlots who do nothing b...
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Story
Fat Wallet
Díre McCain
As luck would have it, Tecate Flats turned out to be a goldmine. Throughout the duration of my addiction, I had a fortuitous knack for attracting people—more specifically, men—who not only facilitated my habit, b...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #12: Stroh’s Cans to the Head
bart plantenga
I suddenly have vivid memories of survival in Flint, Michigan, Motor City Jr., birthplace of GM. I was a stranger here because I rode a bike with books of poetry in my back pocket and some locals could smell this alienness ...
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Where the Exiles Go — The Canadian Literary Outlaw in a Conformist Culture
Mark McCawley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkoByHco_Ig&feature=related
For as long as I've been writing and publishing in Canada, the concept of a Canadian Literary Outlaw has always been something of a contradiction. Not that ...
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What I Did Today, Carl Watson's Issue
Ron Kolm
After contributing to an earlier issue of What I Did Today, Carl Watson collected three two-thousand word essays to go along with his already published one, to complete his own follow-up issue. Here’s Michael Randall’s ...
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Sadie and Della
Michael Aanavi
"What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked.
And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them."
I couldn't live without them." Naftali said.
—Isaac Bas...
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Essay
Beer Burp #11: Obsolete Drunken Nirvana
bart plantenga
Rich Dana, is not just the editor of the retro-future activist aesthetics journal Obsolete but also a guy doing battle – and making his own peace – with the various seemingly overwhelming forces of displacement, corpo...
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Library of Sean
Sean Flaherty
"We have to distrust each other. It's our only defense against betrayal." - Tennessee Williams
I don’t loan books:
as a rule it removes the awkward event
of returning the book.
You begged to borrow it,
charmed me
with yo...
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Five years in Fleischmanns
Carl Watson
As some of you may or may not know, I have been trying to restore an old barn in the Catskills for several years. I had thought of writing funny little stories about my experiences but never produced anything. This year th...
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