I can state with confidence that I’d never kick a robot. But then again, I’m the kind of soft-hearted fool who relocates spiders and bugs instead of killing them. (I once decided not to spray a cockroach because it turned and looked at me. It saw me, we shared a moment, and I balked.)
Every few rotations of the bicycle’s pedals, the front gear clicks and the chain jumps a link. Slow drums fill your head as you roll down the asphalt hill. Soon you’re rapping along. I just wanna race the Lambo’. Let’s roll the dice and gamble. Concentrate on the scarred concrete in front of you, be sure to dodge the cracks and potholes; to fall into one, you’ve decided, is to tumble into and beneath the earth’s crust, through the mantle, and melt into the core.
I was almost certain that the neighbor was a serial killer. The small doubt came from the fact that we both watched Game 6 of the 2011 World Series together – the same night the neighbor’s television broke – and got along famously. That doubt was erased, when, on that same night, I was bludgeoned to death with a remote right as David Freese hit that game-winning home run in the bottom of the 11th inning.
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.