Cover image: “Mornings” by Patrice Sullivan
Below, we have featured a small selection of work from Issue XII. The full issue is available for online viewing with the link above.
In addition, you may offer a “tip jar” contribution to our PayPal account. All support is appreciated, as it helps keep this project spiraling out into the unknown.
If you like what you see in the issue, you may also want to check out our ongoing Maya’s Micros feature. As the name suggests, it will be curated by contributing editor Maya Highland and will exclusively feature micro-poetry and micro-fiction pieces.
If you are a writer or artist and want to be considered for upcoming issues, see our Submittable page for the current submissions that are available, including an entry for the cover and artist feature of our next issue.
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Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows.
― Jane Hirshfield
Featured Selections
Cristina Hoffmann
Martina Reisz Newberry
Desiderata
Whatever it is you do
with wrinkled clothes,
do it with summer mornings—
that you did not earn because
you could not sleep.
Whatever it is you do
with spilled water,
do it with passion which fled
your conscious mind
dampened your sheets and nightclothes.
Whatever it is you do
with broken mugs,
do it with your hard dark words—
the ones you used to season
your myths of self,
the ones that named
and preserve your dire failures.
Whatever it is you do
with dry stale bread,
do that with the past.
Know that it must have use;
try to find where it might
do some good. Then
move on to other places.
Diego Llerena
Natasha N. Deonarain
An Alternate Universe Where It Just Doesn’t Matter Anymore
After R.
There’s no meaning to the phrase time is running out; first and foremost because time doesn’t know how to run and secondly, there’s no such thing as out when compared to in, the implication being that time could be trapped in some sort of dimensionally recognized tiny or expansive space, contained against its will, or otherwise stopped altogether since it wasn’t running in the first place. Neither is time a noun, if the meaning of the word noun is defined as a person, place or thing when thing is then defined as an object or entity that cannot be named specifically, since time is neither the adjective or noun tangible, a thing perceptible by touch and isn’t therefore an entity, entity being defined as something that exists as a particular and discrete unit or the fact of existence of being. Whether time does and doesn’t exist at the same time trying to occupy the same space at the same time or trying to crowd itself out of its own existence, then begs us to contemplate the following two questions; why on earth do we define noun in the way we do and then use time as said aforementioned noun, giving rise to the naively misdirected albeit incredibly satisfying conclusion: Babe, you have all the time in the world.
Susan Rose April
Samuel Gilpin
Into the Slow Air
you’ve looked away
as a barbarian stranger looking,
your voice clotting in words
other than english,
full of departures,
barbed half-light across
your face taken up by sleep,
your words knotting
like weedy grass.
blackened sticks lie in fireplace.
this language wrenching already,
this light seemingly apart
from mine in the open globe
of dawn verging on pale roseate.
it’s snowing again
and I can’t get around it,
the molecule of its own cloth
cresting again and drawing out.
the coffee drips
and the snow comes.
you’re looking out at me
and there’s a feeling in it, of it.