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.
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.