The explosion shatters the night. The room shudders; windowpanes rattle like the chains of the damned. Another mortar attack in East Asia. The echo of screams, the gut-punch blast of a grenade rips Stanley from the depths of sleep. Another day of horrors. His eyes snap open, pupils dilated in the darkness, senses sharpened to […]
Poetry: both by Jeff Hartnett
both how wrong the aloneness of my Father’s body, slumped in the reverberant too-small bath. and Mother, cupping His head, mapped with violent-violet scans, explorations of hope, reduced, a crown of purple thorns, a porcelain throne, draped in linen terrycloth. damn God! he’s unskinned, out of his shell of Fatherness, adrift, washed into the sea, […]
Poetry: Market Manufacturing by A.R. Arthur
Market Manufacturing Maroon husks with sutured eyes darting under thin skin give way to the great slumber, The closing off of the pineal gland now doused in copious concoctions of pharmaceutical intrigue- Late-stage Capitalism’s gain is our loss as our souls are surrendered to birth certificates and our skin is rendered cheap paper to be […]
Fiction FEATURED AUTHOR: Ruth Ticktin’s Returned
At a stuffy banquet honoring soldiers who fought the Great War, a man approached Mollie and whispered in her ear. “Casualties, thousands needing immediate treatment. Transporting them to an old monastery. Working crazy, all hours. Death, over and over.” His head drooped low. “Too many dying. We loaded soldiers on stretchers, train cars to makeshift […]