Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #4: A Weird, Bloody Barroom Ritual Remembered
bart plantenga
Beer Mystic Burp 4: A Weird, Bloody Barroom Ritual Remembered
Imagine this, you walk into your local bar, a place where you know where to hang your truss, and upon entering you instantly sense something is amiss, awry –...
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Journal Entry- Mexico, 1970's
Jonathan Shaw
Mexico–
A song of the Caribbean fading and a rusted burned out car shell laying under the sun in a lot of weeds behind the house. A fly buzzing around my head but too lazy to bother me much. A fly will meet his spid...
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Story
Late Night Phone Call from the Used to Be
Carl Watson
An excerpt from backwards the drowned go dreaming
People like to blame things—they like to pretend life is an accident, that it’s not their fault. But accidents can be intentional. We make ourselves magnets by o...
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Essay
Sex, God and Violence
S. A. Emmons
The stars must have been aligned when, entirely by chance, I happened upon The Spitters way back in 1994. I had caught a short blurb on them while flipping through some metal magazine or another in a grocery store. It was ac...
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Poem
Ice T Spit on My Foot & other poems
Sean Flaherty
Ice-T Spit on my Foot
I have been going
to night school
after work
so I can learn
some new things,
to broaden myself
at forty-three,
I met this roofer
at school
who told me that
all the roofers and electrician...
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Story
On the Customs of Whey-Guts
Patricia Eakins
An excerpt from The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last
Now the DEROGATIONS by means of which the whites belittle the honor and dignity of blacks are very well known, among them as a...
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Story
Botanical Man
Bonny Finberg
I'm sure there was a moment when I realized it was about to happen. But I can't remember it. It snuck up on me, like snake bite—sending you into a delirium, and just when you realize what's happening you’re dead. It was...
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Essay
Love
Mike DeCapite
I went to St. Louis and stayed with Ted and Kit for the weekend. They’d been there a couple of years, I guess. Ted had bottomed out in Brooklyn and they’d moved home to St. Louis for him to get straightened out. Their...
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Story
The Best Night of His Life
Max Blagg
an excerpt from 101 Nights
Every two weeks the exterminator came by the bar to suppress the vermin that swarmed beneath the sinks, behind the kitchen walls and in the basement. There were no rats, but the place had a fluc...
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NEW
Self-Portrait as Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth from Blue Velvet
Jose Padua
After turning on the television one sleepless early
summer night, I realized that many of the sounds
I make, as a re...
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Art
Toward Reasoned Promiscuity: Chester Brown’s "Paying For It"
Jane Does
Review
Chester Brown’s new book, “Paying for It” (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011) will be found among the graphic novels at your nearest bookstore, but it merits cross-shelving in literature, sociology, and gender studie...
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AfterGraph
D. Scot Miller
Awakened brother catatonic
deified expletive
flayed gargoyle
heathen icon
jack-of-all-trades jaded jalouse jargon
jejune jewelry jiggle joker jockey
jouissance journeyman juvenile joyride
jubilee juke jump juncture juxtapose...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #3: Pivo is Czech for Beer
bart plantenga
Pivo Is Czech for Beer But Also An Alter-Ego
In 1993, you could live like a bastard prince in Prague – if you had dollars to spend – on a pauper’s wages. Beer was 15 US cents – and we would repeat the names ... Pi...
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NEW
MacArthur Park
Jose Padua
When I was a kid I thought
that the greatest record ever made
was the 1968 mod orchestral rendering of
of Jimmy Webb’s lost love opus, MacArthur Park.
For me, MacArthur Park was a flash of wisdom, an epiphany a...
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Waiting For The Red Lady
Jonathan Shaw
2AM Saturday night, Buenos Aires.
Lost in a rancid late night whirlwind of saggy asses and rock hard smiles, my friends upstairs shaking up the night, the tired parade is running out of fun. Tired of the sad old games an...
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