Writing
Cannonball
Ron Riekki
In prison, we talk about film.
We fantasize about film.
We talk about prison movies as if the real prison doesn’t exist, as if there is only Clint Eastwood and Alcatraz, only Paul Newman and his chain gang. Because ...
More...
Story
Archivist
Ian C. Smith
Like being drawn by a soaring choir to an ancient cathedral high on the ramparts of an enchanting city I am in thrall to scungy streets replayed in my mind. I see lampposts disappear into fog in my early boyhood near London,...
More...
Classics
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift
For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland,
from being a burden on their parents or country,
and for making them beneficial to the publick.
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great to...
More...
Story
Solid Oak
Mary Lewis
From her table at the kitchen window Francine glanced out to the road half a mile away to see if the mailman made a stop at their box. A car turned into the long driveway and stopped half way, started again and came another...
More...
Review
TRIPPING WITH A VIPER – by Anne Marie Maxwell – review
Marc Olmsted
Tripping with a Viper
By Anne Marie Maxwell
Mystic Boxing Commission
$29.99
available at: www.sparringartists.com
Reviewed by Marc Olmsted
Much has evolved around Neal’s long lost Joan Anderson letter as the key to Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody. Rediscovered, the big surprise is that it has nothing to do with Kerouac’s streamlined stream-of-consciousness experimental prose. Instead, it moved Jack into writing first person and about actual events with the mad energy of the multiple pages Neal had produced with blazing enthusiasm.
Tripping with a Viper fills in some first-person Beat history that explains some more of the legend that is Neal Cassady. The viper of the title is actually also a “pot-head” as referenced in the song “When You’re a Viper,” written by Stuff Smith and first recorded by Rosetta Howard. Still, the ambiguity of this title can’t be merely shaken off. Anne Mar...
More...
Story
George Street
Ronald Jackson
Under a milky overcast, Tass Warfield crept through the rear window of an abandoned rowhouse on George Street and stood for a time in the silent kitchen. Wide gaps in the worn-down linoleum exposed the old tile flooring, a c...
More...
Story
Discarded
Linda Boroff
The silent, empty cubicles of the Discarded remain untouched, their gray, padded walls still displaying the cartoons, awards, and post-it notes of their late occupants. Computer towers stand inert beside telephones patiently...
More...
Story
POETRY DAZE – Minimalist Poems, Millionaire Dreams, and Andrew Wylie Before He Became “The Jackal”
Jeff Goldberg
Andrew Wylie is as rich and powerful as he always wanted to be, a super-agent known in the publishing world as “The Jackal” for stealing writers from their longtime, loyal agents and publishers. Victor Bockris—who spun...
More...
Story
The Other Dave
David Larsen
I wasn’t eager to open the door in a motel room at three in the morning. I may be foolish, but I’m not stupid.
“Who the hell is it?” I shouted through the closed door. I pushed on the door to get some idea as...
More...
Story
Summer-Rain
Alhana McNutt
My feet, as if acting on their own, start running towards the Ocean. They take me to the center of the beach and come to a halt. I take a moment to catch my breath and look up to the sky, my eyes filling with tears. After a ...
More...
Story
Three Years
J. Boyett
Bob didn’t really think the three girls were going to fuck him. But if they’d been three twenty-something males who’d knocked on the door of his isolated backwoods house after dark, he likely wouldn’t have invited th...
More...
Story
A Tiny Seed
Michael Gray
There’s a huge thingamajig outside the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock. I reckon you’d call it a sculpture. It’s a big old pair of glasses nearly as tall as me. You could fit your body behind just one lens. I do that and...
More...
Story
To See a Man About a Dog
Amber Baird
Daddy texted that he got a surprise to cheer me up, something u always wanted, he said, so on the Greyhound trip home after a terrible semester at college, options line danced through my head. Maybe a Harley Davidson with st...
More...
Writing
What I have seen that you have not
Vira Sofia Pitkofska
My friend on the unit, in the silent room crying. Fists beating against glass. let me out let me out he pleads.
His Tears, a flash flood. I was sixteen. He was too.
Fourteen year old girls having flashbacks of fathers bro...
More...
Review
THE BOOKSTORE BOOK, KARL MARX PRIVATE EYE & NAMING A HURRICANE – 3 Books Reviewed
Lehman Weichselbaum
The Bookstore Book
Ron Kolm
Pink Trees Press, 2023
Karl Marx Private Eye
Jim Feast
PM Press, 2023
Naming a Hurricane
Madeline Artenberg
Pink Trees Press, 2023
THE BOOKSTORE BOOK
In The Bookstore Book: A Memoir, prolific poet and prosaist Ron Kolm submits his own version of looking back. For Kolm, speaking through prose essays and "poems" (really prose essays in chopped-up lines), the life of a bookseller was both a career choice and a special window to the world. As always, if you're a writer, you don't have to look for experience, experience will find you. From early adulthood, Kolm would hit town, and, like the rest of us needing a job, went shopping for one. And like many people of letters, he knew that a job in a bookstore would make the best personal fit. More often than not, Kolm's quest was rewarded. He found his jobs with often ridiculous ease, earning him a not overly strenuous workload, a sustenance paychec...
More...