“I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.” So says the plagued with guilt narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It is a statement, however, that is not merely applicable to the literal so much as the more abstract, emotional death blow that can be delivered to a person right before you do … Continue reading Emotional Death Blows in The Tell-Tale Heart
In the Acre night, young Palestinian men sat outside shopfronts smoking water pipes and drinking juice. As I walked past them on the streets near the Old City, they may have wondered what sort of crusader I was. Napoleon’s army had tried to mount these walls, where six centuries earlier his ancestors had been more successful, albeit, only temporarily. After walking through the Old City … Continue reading Crusade, or Historic Other by Peter Crowley
Adjective, the writer’s sapphire though apostate to the editor, who conducts adjectival ethnic cleansing The air should be as it is. Not amorphous, pollen-replete, warming, hallucinogenic or stultified. The person shouldn’t be awe-inspiring, loquacious, demeaning, exploitative or a bore. They should simply fit into employment application checkboxes– gay or straight, black white or Hispanic. And they should probably have tattoos, use drugs or have interesting … Continue reading Lit Crit by Peter Crowley
Once upon a time an angel sublet a room in the ghetto. 250 a month. She had grown up with everything But unlike many souls, was curious about those who had nothing. Her heart did not subscribe to standard AMA cardiology. This angel’s blood pumper was shaped like water, possessed other aqueous properties, too, on such a scale ‘twas obedient only to Newton’s laws sensibly … Continue reading Heart Shaped Like Water by Joshua H. Baker
She walks under summer foliage. White hair, soft as the clouds. Her features caught in time’s net of wrinkles. Warm remembrance swept. Memories roam, in sunlight — a blue tit logged all it saw. Her search, real or unreal is not known. In the passing breeze, rimmed with tears, eloquent with pain, perhaps, it is here- in the thick softness of greens, flowers and earth, … Continue reading The Search by Amy Barry
Perhaps even more eerily accurate and increasingly prescient with the passage of time than George Orwell’s 1984 is his essay entitled “Politics and the English Language.” As only Orwell, in all his deftness, could describe the core of the problem of how we wield language, he commences the thesis as follows: Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English … Continue reading Per Orwell’s Warning, Language Continues to be Rendered Meaningless as Evidenced by the Meeting of the “Minds” at the Oval Office
Empty of empathy, a room of sycophants, listen to the emperor of doom and gloom. Thick lies are strewn about. It is a sad thing coming out of the face of that lying mouth. The house will crumble. Each day there’s a new crack. The emperor’s paranoia, fierce as a flood, storms through orchards and the city streets. Everything he touches will rot before it … Continue reading The Emperor’s Paranoia by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal
When you plunge into overwhelming darkness, the beckoning tunnel, your face ghostly, almost alien in the scratched and scuffed window reflections, nothing is secure. Grab a metal strap or pole and don’t dwell on germs, because losing balance and falling onto a splayed lap or atop a moist reclining passenger is infinitely worse. There’s a roar of sound and forward thrust. The clack-clack-clack forms a … Continue reading Downtown by Max DeVoe Talley
Though it is often difficult to ascertain precisely what century we’re in at the moment–nineteenth or twenty-first–the one thing that the Oxford English Dictionary can’t be blamed for (entirely) in its recent additions of Altmanesque, Tarantinoesque, Spielbergian, Lynchian and Kubrickian (all of which are, in case you couldn’t tell for yourself, indicative of a sausage party) is that the film industry is the entity at … Continue reading The Oxford English Dictionary “Can’t Help” Its Sexism In Its Latest Additions, There Just Aren’t Enough Female Directors
My feelings for men reach out from the highest parapet in this oasis of cleansing sin in the heart of this desert Djinn. Not five times a day like the muezzin, not five times but continuously. The raccoons on my desk pay no attention to the flowers in their saintly makeup standing so desperately near. Flowers and coons train their eyes on my kissable Adam’s … Continue reading Update 1 2016 by Timothy Robbins
