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.
To this day
I'm swifted back to those lean,
hard-drinking years by the scent
of cigarettes overlaying the spicy musk
of still-crisp, newfallen leaves,
I wanted to learn about colors so I could develop a language for your hair, and how it falls into your eyes in the same way that boys in books that I liked were described. I don’t think you “swoop” it back, but you do something with your colorless hair to get it out of your lashes that deserves to be described.
The breeze passes heavy, carrying
the guttural voices of the daily dwellers.
Their ingrained presence never redeemable,
fossilised within the billboards and bus stops,
which cradle them each evening. They never
seem lost as long as they remain within these
stretched parameters.
Apartment C104 in Wyncote, PA, was born out of the blackness of chaos. An unknowable place with a flat roof and red bricks that shared a parking lot with Michael’s Diner. The apartment was created in the absence of light in the under-dark of Tartarus, the darkness from the bottom of the underworld’s world. Rainwater leaked into the complex during storms. The kitchen sink never drained. When the sink was full of fetid water, the apartment cat, George, would drink from it to gain his powers of disapproval.
I begin to write. Jude, 2 years old, in need of diapers, baby food, formula, teething products, clothing if possible. Signed, Richard M. Gonzales. Great, now I’m lying about who I am to the Lord? No way he’s not looking down shaking his head.
his mother thought
he would be as tall
& violent as his father,
but instead his hazel
eyes softened into the muddy
brown of a warm
house inside a cold
window.
I call the urgent Nespresso line,
whose appointed representative
reassures, as I wish our leader could—
they understand the crisis
Sarah, who was the nicest of the group, turned her body to permit Jolie’s entrance into the circle. The women made her feel impossibly short, but she didn’t mind since the top of her head being level with their shoulders also made her feel like their kid sister despite the fact that she was at least ten years older than most of them.
Select two vials – only two, one per arm, to make the samples last. Carefully uncap, so as not to flick or spill any scent inside. Stroke the plastic wand to my skin, one perfume per wrist.
We grew especially tired, though, of the 15 minutes of sunscreen application my mother insisted on before we jumped in the pool, which in Los Angeles was nearly every day. During these precautionary sessions, my father would stroll past the kitchen table, only to see the two of us standing upright, our arms extended outwards, creating a rigid t-shape with our bodies.
Gabriel Ricard looks at Marvel, The Rock, and low-rent shlock horror in his latest Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo column.
(How I policed me. How I cuffed my own hands and bound my own feet,
shuffling about in my orange shame, sitting myself down in my cage.
Scratching prayers into the cell wall, which my own nature answered)