somewhere closer a storm
brews my colicky
gut.
i am all nerves
in my nightgown
of marrow.
COMICSMr. ButterchipsAlex SchumacherSeptember 2018
Mr. Butterchips takes on Comicsgate in the latest strip from Alex Schumacher
I shouldn’t talk about the throbbing, finger condoms,
the high of pain relief.
Like, as a married woman,
I shouldn’t talk about my first love’s.
backseat overdose. The droplets
on the window, the smell, his bloated body.
i am nursing a body
that is only a seed
i am chitting a membrane
in pine
dresser drawers
my log
This is my chance. I place my blazer over her shoulders. At the end of the song, I let her wear it back to her seat. When all eyes have returned to me, no one notices her take eight metal rods, a roll of duct tape, and some wire cutters (all smuggled into the prison inside a specially made electric guitar) from the pockets and hide them in various parts of her tracksuit.
the tin bowl is kept
between floorboards, full
of sticky dimes, full of paper cranes – full. these girls
talk of death like they know it
When she handed it to me, brown and bulbous like an onion, I didn’t expect it to juice with perfume at first taste. A kiss from the pink mouth of a flower grown inward.
The Happytime Murders is Meet the Feebles-lite, and while it's obvious scenes have been scrapped for whatever reason (I'm guessing time), it's still a worthwhile movie to watch if you're not in the mood to think too much while having a few guilty laughs. Melissa McCarthy delivers as Edwards and Bill Barretta once again shows his puppetry mastery as Phil, her curmudgeonly ex-partner. Come for the murder mystery, stay for the copious amounts of puppet ejaculate.
Canese Jarboe’s dark acre is a surreal delight that slays acutely, unapologetically: they put vivid images in my brain. They investigate intersections of gender, desire, and grapefruit. They leap quickly with short, crisp lines on one page & spread imagery completely across the next. While Jarboe’s technical skills gleam—precise line-breaking, clarion voice, proper pacing—the poems speak fiercely. In “The Rodeo Queen”, the lyric pieces (“glittery, pink hooves”; a blowjob; a saddle) weave like braided bread. Jarboe bakes a delirious, surprising, yet serious morsel. Come to this book for evocative imagery, stay for a forceful excoriation of gendered trauma.
I wasn’t expecting great literature from A Newfoundlander in Canada and I didn’t get it. What I got was an endearing, entertaining, examination of a very strange country. Written by Alan Doyle, the book follows Great Big Sea as they venture forth from Newfoundland. There are plenty of struggling musician stories featuring cheap hotel rooms and crappy gigs, as well as a bizarre amount of those Cadbury creme Easter eggs. Don’t read this for the prose - that’s adequate, at best. Read it for Doyle’s ability to connect with strangers, and how simultaneously foreign and familiar Canada feels through his eyes.
In his latest column exploring religious themes in horror films, Sean Woodard breaks down the Lucio Fulci giallo film Don’t Torture a Duckling.
A fascinating interview with film historian and folklore expert Mikel J. Koven on the impact of Italian Giallo Cinema.
Editor-in-Chief Kolleen Carney-Hoepfner on poetry-world drama, the August issue, and what lies ahead.
COMICSMr. ButterchipsAlex Schumacher
It’s a harsh time in the dating world for Alex Schumacher’s Mr. Butterchipos in the latest comic adventure.
I, ever rational, handled my alcohol.
I took what I wanted; sovereign,
stoic. I marked my boundary lines.
I was one of the guys.
Thirteen is the age I learned that my body was a burden. A target, a distraction, an invitation. A reason to not be taken seriously. Not a powerful, cohesive part of my being but rather a collection of parts that were somehow attached to me. Parts I was expected to share.
The heat drove people to unprecedented candor that year. This was around the same era that I pinched the skinny flesh around my humerus, the preoccupation with being infatuated acting as my food. The short-lived inspiration and admiration bloomed in my stomach where favorite snacks used to live. I ate starvation because I couldn’t digest anything but my many romantic fixations.
The effect of the owner’s possibly slightly sarcastic response was not lost on Retribution’s face. He spent a moment collecting himself and then said, “I’m here to tell you a little bit about myself. Now, I can either do so verbally or another option is I can provide you with a pamphlet detailing the relevant information.”
She feels as though she has been at this camp for a year instead of a month. Each day owns its unswerving, inevitable routine, like the sandy desert tides. She’s certain now that her schooling is a diversion, that less than a kilometer away, these boys are being prepared to shoot rifles, perhaps even missiles. Maybe she can save one or two lives.
This was different from his initial story to the cops. He told them he had heard someone shout “gun!” He’d turned to the woman behind him, who only a moment ago had asked where in the mall the women’s shoe store was, as if that were something a guy like him would know. “Gun,” he hissed to her, afraid his voice would alert the shooter. Then panic: “Gun!”
But in the later tellings of what he alone called the Galleria Mall Shooting he definitely heard the shot as he was shopping for new headphones. A blast that’d make you taste foil.