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.
Why I Like Thursdays
Mathew Slade
Garlic Love
Chad Frame
Blik Nickers
Joe P. Squance
Blik Nickers had an abnormally large heard. As a child, he tried to conceal it under a knit hat or sombrero but the neighborhood hooligans wouldn’t hesitate to jump up and knock it off, then point and laugh as he ran, crying, into the safety of his house. When Blik had aged to prepubescentism, instead of trying to make his head look smaller, he would cleverly try to make his body look bigger with baggy clothes and shoulder pads. All in vain, though, because even bullies can’t be fooled into forgetting omnipresent truths: Blik Nickers had a big head.
Continue reading Blik Nickers
Untitled
Marley Simmons Abril
When immortals die
Mileva Anastasiadou (written several months after Kurt Cobain passed away)
When immortals die,
our grief is not for the mortal in them,
but for the idol.
We mourn the mask.
An archetype broken.
A figment of our imagination.
A visitor in our mind.
When immortals die,
the collective unconscious is wounded.
We miss our old lives
and what they contained
before the loss.
We killed our idols long before,
but some remained alive hidden in
the symbols of our youth,
the companions of our dreams,
the depth of our mind.
The mask has died,
and so will we.
Untitled
Ryder Collins
Let Me Flay These Nonsensical Maladies
Sheila Dong (age 15)
The streets flash with lights,
The broad avenues aflame tonight;
We will crawl into a wooden box that once
Held bananas from Guatemala,
Pick up pamphlets from off the ground and pin them up
To make a home of this place.
Today I went to the therapist again
And we ended up not talking about my problems,
But I had to sort out her sex life for her.
When I left, I walked down the street,
And I thought, it’s hard to believe that this old concrete
Could scintillate and gleam like violent phosphorescent flowers
Bloom and peak in the lipless night.
Home again. The door doesn’t shut right, but it stays quiet if
I tell it to. The last thing we need is the whole neighborhood
Hearing our shame proclaimed like a name shouted out
In bloody blame.
It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright, I tell myself and
The words run all together like fish flurrying past your eyes
Toward underwater coral retreats.
It’s alright, it’s alrightits, alrightits, all rye tits run together
On cold doorsteps bumming lights.
When I was little, my glee came when I composed
Five-note melodies and stories of rabbits with horns and
The wings of a bat.
Now, I can’t remember how all my storied stories ended,
My mind running together off the tracks, zoom, whoosh-whoosh
And slurp-slurp goes the gray horizon, and ah-ha-ha says the fuzzy
Ivory wasteland reclining on its stylish magma chaise.
So let’s run together, wooden crates,
And pillows, and marshmallows and newspaper sailor hats.
So let’s run together, at my old middle school,
The fall air is misty and beautiful,
They will remember me and I shall introduce you,
And nothing nauseous, nothing at all.
Don’t ask to go to my house.
Let me flay these nonsensical maladies from my brain stem,
Let me wear that motley cap, that beret and fedora,
Hats, oh, hats.
Push me into the far ahead, when everything’s slightly
Better, when I get real shiny problems with
Jingle bells tied round their necks.
Please, no more panic, my sailboats’ sails straining
Against the wind. No more fizzy green ocean, just blue in Aberdeen he will die
And throw in a darling soft-focus marina with
Olive trees and red peaked roofs.