Visitants

“She” and “Dear Future” by Marc Shapiro

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  SHE   She used to like to do it in the morning When sunlight knifed through curtains Highlighting her movements Cat like Like cool easy jazz Then one day something left her Died A single tear tarnishing cheek It rolled down Moving her into the dark Where she continues to do it In silhouette In emptiness Alone       DEAR FUTURE   I am Juan I am barrio I am Washington I am ghetto I don’t ball I don’t bang I am the neighborhood freak And I have the beatdowns to prove it I see a future  In … Continue reading “She” and “Dear Future” by Marc Shapiro

Visitants

“i found a dead poem and watched it rot” by Neha Maqsood

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    in the purple hued sunsets of london, I found a poem dead, its words crystallised to form bones. we observed, picking the letters through our teeth. the most carnivorous of us searched for the femur. they told us not to look too long at the corpse, ‘shove it in the morgue, keep it cold’ they said. don’t look at the rotting carcass of obscure words, they said. not because its traumatizing, but because of how mundane and ordinary it is. unremarkably similar to life.               Neha Maqsood is a journalist who has … Continue reading “i found a dead poem and watched it rot” by Neha Maqsood

Visitants

“Ground 0” by Russell Hemmell

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I blink, the dormitory’s white light like a slap in my face. My vision cone is restricted to pinhole-sized view but still sufficient to remind me where I am. The hospital room, stinking of chloroform and green waxed sheets, a familiar setting for a feeling that never becomes any easier to swallow. Nausea grabs my stomach and I feel migraine’s bites into my head like claw-sharp blows. I sweat blood, and tears sting my eyelids in salty rivers unable to overflow.  It is 3 am, Sunday, November 2. I’ve been sleepless for 75 hours, yet my brain refuses to switch … Continue reading “Ground 0” by Russell Hemmell

Visitants

“Esoteric Epigrams” by Lorraine Schein

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The occult wants you to know that it doesn’t want you to know.    “Reality” is bad for your health. I respect science but prefer the occult.   The unknown does not know it is unknown.   God is one name we give to our ignorance. The other is magic.   The moon is a reminder of the almost forgotten.   Poets and witches are machines built for similar energies, but at different intensities.   Poets are receivers, witches are transmitters.   Magic is control of the cathode ray of reality, and some can tune in to any station.    … Continue reading “Esoteric Epigrams” by Lorraine Schein

Visitants

“The Most Beautiful Petrol Station in the World” by Oscar Mardell

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Art by Kate Shaw     It is the Fiat Tagliero building  in Asmara, Eritrea, planned by Giuseppe Pettazzi, fascist aesthete, and built under his watch in thirty-eight.   On either side the central concrete spire,   are fifteen-metre cantilevered wings, the premature arrival of a future long expired, and stationed in Asmara,   Eritrea. Some bureaucrat insists this soaring flight must rest, during construction, on state-approved supports. Pettazzi asks, Have you no faith? Have these removed, or I                will build out here Asmara’s own Golgotha,                 … Continue reading “The Most Beautiful Petrol Station in the World” by Oscar Mardell

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“The Ladder” by Fred Pollack

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Art by Kate Shaw The joke you had to explain. The vision that moved no one. The pedantic tone. The embarrassing confession abandoned halfway. When across freshened skies jetpacks jockey and curtsey, and solar-powered dirigibles preside like funny gods, you’re not invited.   It’s possible in your room with effort to detach yourself progressively from time until you see it whole for the troll it is; and at the apogee of spirit forgive the stucco and silence of that room, and sleep. There’s a party. Composites talk wittily and with power you half-hear though contributing fully. Hors-d’oeuvres, urgent gossip, vivid … Continue reading “The Ladder” by Fred Pollack

Visitants

“Is this the right way?” by Finn Janning

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Art by Kate Shaw   Late one August evening in a small provincial town, a woman steps out her front door. In her hand, she holds a slim leather briefcase, probably containing a laptop. When she steps down from the small landing in front of the door, a mild breeze fills the air, gently tousling her long blond tresses. She tries to pull her hair back behind her ears without any luck. From the back pocket of her jeans she pulls out a bandeau and ties those unruly locks into a simple ponytail. Now, with no hair interrupting her vision, … Continue reading “Is this the right way?” by Finn Janning

Visitants

“Dream I Had About Never” by Tomasz W. Wiszniewski

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Art by Kate Shaw   May 16, 2019. Gone to Rita, saintly brick.   At wit’s end thumbed thru the mall my viscera become tightrope-walking rhombuses. My weariness goes headfirst. I’m divested of all sibilants, clubfooted, the mall seamy and windswept, familiar in a wet casket kinda way. The rain could have been my dying breath.                      I see sex simulators in disrepair, emoticon affection vended to paper cutouts of dads—tarry treacly castles in their creases.                   I smell hair heat-rolled, crabs wedged into … Continue reading “Dream I Had About Never” by Tomasz W. Wiszniewski

Visitants

“zero/one/light/lake/trees  (we’ve been dreaming this for five hundred years)” by Razielle Aigen

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Art by Kate Shaw   0   in search of clarity , a definitive all caps nope is preferable  to the conceptual form of you who sleeps with people posthumously.    the you that goes to bed as a one & then wakes up more as a zero .  that you , but in reverse .  more absence than presence .             in your dreams you’re you ,  but the B side written in code .     1   encoded in a forest there’s an embedded lake . sometimes  you bring me to the edge & then walk away . … Continue reading “zero/one/light/lake/trees  (we’ve been dreaming this for five hundred years)” by Razielle Aigen

Cyber Pamphleteer: Imagined Stations

“artifacts” by Wes Bishop

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Art by Kate Shaw     when the end came we did not save everything there was barely room for us and so what we deemed us was saved what was not us was left behind and thus we learned who we really were by the mountains of  archives, artifacts, and ways of being, that we left for the destruction   what was not we was who were them, and the gulf between, was engulfed in a difference between necessary preservation and required oblivion   why had we worn for so many years the cultures of another? we had learned … Continue reading “artifacts” by Wes Bishop