Our bravest contributors have shared with us some of their more earnest efforts from the misty past. Scary Bush should not be reviewed while in the process of drinking liquids, and the reader assumes all risk.
In the Land of the Broken Hearted
Charlie Brown
doo wa ditty dum
Juliet Cook
Stream of Consciousness: A Kiss
Amorak Huey
It's still alive.
Jessica Cory
One Minute
Peter Tieryas Liu
For one minute, everyone in the world died. When they came back to life, no one noticed except for Zheng. Zheng was disappointed to find that the afterlife wasn't flowing with chocolate and strawberries. Instead, a drowsiness that felt like passing out in a nightclub filled with hermaphrodites lost in the ambivalence of identity. Outraged that death had been so mundane, he decided to start a cult worshipping tequila and UFO's. Unfortunately, his anger overwhelmed him after four shots and he started a fight he couldn't win, violence being a poor, but necessary, absolution for his existential angst. "The light at the end of the tunnel is just a q-tip the doctor's use to dab blood from your eyes!"
Bruised and beaten, he sought rest, but nocturnal city workers were rebuilding the road outside his apartment, leaving him in an insomniac's coma. When neighbors later found Zheng drowned in a toilet of chocolate milk, they assumed he'd committed suicide. Investigators, however, would uncover that a woman believing she was a crustacean murdered him over a grievance about misplaced plankton. Unfortunately, no one who heard the news cared because they were too distracted by a squirrel on YouTube that could speak Mandarin.
Untitled
Melissa Eleftherion
Spring
Dolphin clouds wash
Glazed marble pharaohs
The egg of Egypt cracks
Upon his skull
As the owl coos
They call her priestess
Ebony
Tower
Guardian of a fountain
She ripples her shadow
behind pyramids
Summer
A rainbow headdress to coat
Our hands salve our bruises
Fall
Octopus embryo
A purple leaf
from a tree made of hearts
Bark swirls teardrops in bronze
Saturn ropes its coil upon our tongue
Winter
White ripple of wing
Slushes
Sunflowers hunch shouldertoshoulder
A silhouetted couple
Marks their place
with lightning