September 2024

Originality is the original sin.

JEREMY TENENBAUM, FOUNDING EDITORwith ALEC CALDER JOHNSSON, ARIA BRASWELL, DEMREE MCGHEE, EMILY ZIDO, AND LUKE CONDZAL

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From PHILADELPHIA, the WORDSHOP of the WORLD

Cover image advertisement from Weird Tales, c. 1940s

BEE LB
Three Poems

“femminineo”

mask abandoned for an empty courtroom
ex parte between young lawyers
& the judge watching golf on dual monitors
trivia about the 2nd strangest trophy
bench approached & conspired over
sir do you believe me
or would you like to unholster your gun
prove me wrong or make me
taste test? endless
polite smiles & lenient sentences with stern
& meaningless admonitions
have you seen the death museum?
great restaurant across the street
skip anger management classes but don't
skip the museum it'll scare you straight
behind me a scared woman with a no contact order
disobeyed healed bruise strangulation & an illegal voicemail
remember the vodka in erie?
the sexy cocktail on the way back
from st louis correctional facility? fourth habitual
felony automatic life sentence
that's my bird boy big brother you know?
what can i do but
throw back sweet shots
turn my phone off
decimate i mean separate myself
from the outside world
for as long as i'm still living
countdown indefinitely extended

“falling in place”

i make simple work of this. if a monday were a friday.
an alarm goes off and signifies nothing new.familiar sounds through worn out speakers. a syringe
enters the hole it was made for.tubing winds and unwinds and i cannot help
but think of knots or a noose.relief is shuttered by wooden blinds clacking closed
over a sunless day. the window is stainedso i see through it. a mound of dirt made soft and new.
once there was a wall, now there is no barrier.still, the sound of crumbling.
cutting. edging something ugly into somethingless ugly. beauty was here but now it's gone.
i wasted it, waited too long to use it and lost it.my hand is empty, you know the one i mean. a vial is warmed
then emptied. an alarm goes off and signifies nothing new.

“i am barely an animal”

if you book the plane and i book the car and we bothcollapse into the absence of ourselves.if i open myself to concrete and yellowed infection.if you close yourself to all but your name.i'm guessing at the world because i cannot touch it.the future is curling into itself as if it has a body to protect.my fog cleared in time to visit a bird in prison.to see wendy's doordashed to an ambling guard.to peel back my wrap to show i am hiding only a wound.to have hands enter my waistband, touch me from chest to ankle.i can't say when you will return, if.we plotted a month that may not come.the lakes are waiting for us to touch them.

Ken Poyner
Six Drabbles

“Achievement”

Quibble finally gets to slip into Thole's Hardware basement with the girl Thole hired to run his cash register. Quibble does not mind that every other man in town has been down in Thole's basement with the girl. Our town is very democratic, filled with problems and concerns and willing to share miseries. Once Quibble heard that the new girl was tripping with customers, when business was light, into Thole's basement, he knew he would have his opportunity. That is the type of town we are. In this town, all the wives, girlfriends and mothers know Thole's has no basement.

“Adjusted Situation”

Natalie did not know that Quibble had been pricing clown harems. Sure, some nights, he would come home from his prowls with a bit of pancake makeup on his shirt, or with a stirring of ash from an exploding cigar in his hair. He might at times chuckle inconsolably to himself. But she assumed all symptoms came from random encounters -- brushing against a bar clown, being aggressively pursued by a street clown. This night, Quibble is standing in the bedroom doorway, naked except for a peppermint-wrap bowler hat and size twenty five shoes, leaving Natalie without doubt. She craves the competition.

“Incorporation”

Casey's carts are metal, Thole's are plastic. Each consider themselves the superior cart, by use and instance. They have been known to wander, find themselves pushed by a practical customer to the nearer store, rolled by the wind from one lot to the other. Some perhaps have changed allegiance of their own volition. Amongst the metal carts there has been discussion that the product of cross-mated carts could turn out better suited for most cases. So far, however, no metal cart has been able to distinguish the appropriate sex of any plastic cart. All carts stack roughly the same way.

“Collateral”

First, it was the doorknobs. Then it was the taking of the knobs. Hobbies evolve. At one time, it was enough for Quibble to have two dresser drawers of doorknobs. Knobs he could reflect himself in, arrange by size or shape or the character of the originating entrance. The unimaginable mixture of purposes exhausts Natalie. Originally ancillary, but now growing prime, has been the difficulty in acquiring the knob. Not something hard and fast, but only in memory, it becomes the lore that ties Quibble to his collection. Now, he seeks danger in the collection of feral doorknobs. We worry.

“Consideration”

Should the tyrannosaur be the town's tyrannosaur, or Quibble's tyrannosaur? Signature collection to put the question on the ballot was going quickly along until, at an appearance at the annual fair, the beast ate two children. In the fuss to adopt the one-of-a-kind specimen as our mascot, no one thought of liability, and what one suit -- let alone two -- could do. Quibble is finding now whether the damage is covered. There are so many angles. An otherwise extinct species displayed off the owner's property. Paying customers at a public event? Who knows? But surely Quibble's homeowner's premium will go up.

“Disapproval”

Quibble's daughter is dating a feral violinist. He visits on the back porch, grieving his music, seeming happy to have collected the affections of a girl not musically inclined. Quibble does not leave them alone for long. When the godawful screech of his instrument pauses too long, Quibble taps on the nearby kitchen window, or steps onto the porch to openly assess how negotiations are progressing. The neighbors shut windows and doors to keep the notes abandoned. They disapprove, but understand. Last month, a local boy took up with a gang of oboists. He could not breathe with them long.

Abhishek Udaykumar
“Kashmiri Pulav”

I reached Honia's street and saw that the power was out, and that the evening there seemed duller than the rest of the city. The heat had slowed me down. There was a skinny shopkeeper with spectacles dropping fish food into his tank, his pet store was invisible beyond the entrance and its birdcages and shelves of fish bowls. A woman stood by the parapet outside her flat and spoke to her friend in the balcony of the next building. A group of children took turns running up a concrete slope, showing off their skills in the lightless gully. I reached the corner with the iron lady and her cart, but I still couldn't remember where Honia lived. The street looked different there, it seemed less chaotic than the rest of the locality. The old apartments sat on an elevated plaza, their ground floors had been turned into barber shops, pharmacies, jewelers, bakeries and grocers, breaking off at intervals where the street was intersected by finer alleys. A staircase ran through the heart of each building, leading up to the flats. I was fatigued when I finally found her waving from her third-floor balcony, it was darker now and it struck me that she had yelled my name when I was on the street.'I've started collecting candles now,' she said, leaning against her kitchen counter and biting into a breadstick. 'I use the plain ones mostly. I sometimes don't realize when the power comes back.'She snacked on a few more breadsticks before we went up to the terrace. I could see that she had been working all day and I wasn't sure about when to tell her. There was a plant growing out of a crevice and a pink plastic ball in the corner that caught my eye.'It's out again,' she said, gazing at a puppy in the opposite building as it ran around in circles in a square balcony. 'It's growing up fast.''Do you remember the time we went to the pipe factory for your last photobook and the white dog there that played with us?'Honia was still watching the puppy. She let out an enormous sigh before she smiled a little to cheer herself up. Her straight hair fell with ease in the humidity and sat evenly on her eyebrows as she spoke to herself.'Yes,' she whispered, marching along the perimeter.Honia and I were the kind of friends who met once every six months. We had been closer a few years ago, until I realized that she just needed a subject for her photo essays. I sat behind a flowerpot and let my feet dangle around it. The sky was illuminated by a light source beyond the world and we looked up like marine creatures enraptured by the ocean's surface.'There's a swimming pool nearby. I discovered it when I went out to buy some beer. And you know what, I'm going to start going. They close at ten.'I considered the pool for a long while.'I wanted to ask you about what you said the other day when I called. That monochrome is a timeless cliché of photography, and that it renews itself each time someone picks up a camera. And yet, it reeks of pretension, like why do…''I just meant,' she had begun to make her way up the ladder when she stopped midway to cut me off. 'That black and white pictures are great for presentation, whether they work in favour of the idea or not. And presentation isn't the point of photography.'Honia looked like she wanted to pace up and down again but the tank was the limit and if she took a step further, she would fall of the building.'I'm hungry, have you eaten much today?'I was about to say that I had eaten my lunch when it occurred to me that Honia faced a power cut and that she couldn't have cooked anything.'Shall I go down and look for something?''No.'Honia got busy on her phone, scavenging for food inside it. All I could see was her face as I craned my neck to look beyond the ladder, with the sky stretched behind her like a slender plum peel.'Have you ever observed an old person and tried to imagine how they must have looked when they were young.'She hadn't heard me but I continued.'It's the central idea in my new story. And I'm writing it in short phrases, with no description. I've realized that most of what we produce as work tends to be expressionistic. We're conditioned that way, I think, it's the contemporary ideal.' I stopped to watch a lone stork as it glided past her, capturing the world's silence and turning it into a deeper hole of desire. 'I think the cliché of photography, or any kind of visual representation, is that it is expressionistic, and monochrome is just a part of that.''Look who's the cynic now.' She hadn't looked up from her phone and it seemed as though she was talking to it or trying to make it speak. I ignored her abrupt remark.'And then I realized that…' I wanted to say that I had drunk two glasses of white rum before I left the house that evening, because I wasn't sure of how to be myself around her, and because we always ended up talking about things besides ourselves, and I felt like nobody in the world knew me no matter how much I tried. The rum had worn off along the way and I had to stop at a local pub and top myself up with a double brandy. There was a little boy there playing with a toy car as his father drank his beer quickly in his three-piece suit – and kept turning back to tell his son to stay inside the grey line.Honia seemed to have made her order. She scaled down the ladder and hung around me in her heavy black shirt and ill-fitting sports shorts, kicking the pink ball around and being noisy. I took a deep breath and thought about how courageous she was to follow her instinct and do what she believed in. She looked disoriented and seemed to be thinking about little beyond food. I felt a surge of affection for her and took her by the arm, leading her downstairs as she grumbled about her dying battery.She had left the candles on and the shadows that had danced about the walls in our absence dissolved as we made our way across the hall. I flipped through a journal of Raúl Cañibano's photographs of Cuba and stopped when I saw a man in a hat with his face bent down behind an open window, the sun beaming on his wooden house and casting a big shadow of the clothesline against it. I thought about how inadequate it felt to live in the city, though the whole world wanted to be there.'So, what else do you do when you have a day off?' Honia asked, smiling a little and coming into herself as she saw my involvement with her book.'I try to write.' I felt the need to repeat myself. Then I adjusted my body to face her, resting my shoulder against the sofa and letting myself relax. 'It isn't easy to do something when you finally get a break. All you want is some peace.'She nodded but she didn't take her eyes off me.'It's hard to do anything other than what somebody else wants you to do for them,' she whispered. 'In exchange for a little life.''We live in a poor country.' I wanted to say more but the idea sounded self-explanatory.'But time is short,' she murmured. Her voice was so low that I thought I had imagined her speak. She lost herself in thoughts and stared at the dying candle and its dramatic flame, her shelves and desks of books and pens and lenses and prints subdued in the granular dark.'I've gotten a transfer to Japan,' I whispered back, doing my best not to disturb the stillness, as though it could extinguish the flame and drown us in abject blackness. She turned towards me a little, tilting her head and letting her hair fall heavily to one side. I had never seen her in anything but a half-pony tied with a black rubber band.'You should go,' she said, as though I had asked for her approval. 'You should go.'I blushed and readjusted myself, becoming momentarily self-conscious in her presence. Her existence belonged to a mental geography I had of the city, and our detachment over the months had made me doubt if I would miss her more than I would miss the idea of friendship with her. Until that day. Her passion for her friends wasn't different to an innate talent. She didn't need to think about it, and she never spoke about the past.The food arrived. Honia had already kept the plates ready and a big bowl for the main dish. It transformed the old flat into a rustic dhaaba¹, waking the ceramic idols on her mantlepiece and the crockery in the lower shelves of her bookcase. She emptied the package and shovelled a sizeable portion onto her plate, eating quickly with her hand. She didn't like eating on the sofa and preferred laying the food on the mantlepiece and sitting around it on the floor. She watched her food intensely as she ate, her forehead sweating as she licked her fingers. I held my plate on my fingertips like it were a flower and ate a little at a time.'You fasted all day and finally ordered pulav² ? That too Kashmiri Pulav³. You could have at least ordered a gravy with it. It's as good as eating curd rice.'She couldn't help but smile, and she didn't stop smiling till she finished her first serving. We both knew that her choice of food emerged from her need to keep herself light so she could work for longer hours. I watched as she saved the raisins for the end, and measured her hunger as though it were a recipe. She had a show coming up and a publication due later in the year. I knew I wouldn't be there to witness either of them, but I had a feeling that she wouldn't live in the city much longer. It was impossible to tell when and where she was headed, but she was nobody's person and the world would find her a place, if she didn't find one by herself.'There have been a few people seeing me off late,' she said, grinning mischievously at herself. 'But nothing has really stuck.' Her eyes gleamed for the first time that evening, as I grew a little tired and felt the alcohol wearing off. But I didn't need another fix. I had considered leaving after the meal, but it seemed like our time together had just begun. I watched her dig a ladleful of rice and twitch her eyebrows at me, speaking solemnly with a hint of drama.'There's a shop down the road that has swimsuits. Wanna go buy one for yourself on the way to the pool?'

NOTES1. An Indian restaurant that sells local foods like parathas and Mughlai food, often found in North-India.2. Flavoured rice made with spices, peas and carrots and garnished with cashews3. A special kind of pulav that originates from Kashmir and uses additional ingredients such as raisins, nuts, candied fruits and saffron.

Sheila Murphy
Four Poems

“Mete Au Jus”

Prevaricate at your peril. Come clean, blaspheme with me. The moment that I saw you, I saw gauze overcast just blur what may have tingled."In a minute, honey
will be scarce alongside
royal jelly on the half
wit."Cleave to how we were when halfway to the eighties at the Fontainebleau I lost my tooth. You lost your Ruth, and blessings were diminished as we practiced looking up.What do you say to an altar boy who seems destined
to be floundering (at sea
yet benediction-prone, or just as
white
had lifted
out of style.What do you sing to him to help him sleep, good by my rock-a-bye bay bee,
may choice over-
come
your chances.And then the coma starts to seize up,
everything that made you
wince has gone
to seed.The funny thing about indulgences is that they're plural.That's the first thing that appeared out of his mouth,
in a bubble the like ones
that hover just above
the drawings in cartoons
you would rewrite if you
had ink.I thought if I could just be an apostle
I might skip the status of apostate.
We clasp what we accumulate beneath what ac-
u-
men
we might have grasped.In a minute granule
of honey
can be found
the only wound we need
not sweeten
to accommodate the optimistic
heartbeat
big and round.Filtration passes muster
as the learning's tamped
down by the river's constant
hush amounting
to a sound associated
with a rush
of washing.When the act of cleanse
becomes the only
life we see forth
coming to a theater near you.

“The Store E Marilee”

Marilee wore a horseshoe on her hat. It was a yellow hat with corpulence she had branded on the brim. Her mother told her luck obeyed the hand that fed the lamb. A lambent afternoon arrayed her pretty heart. Our Marilee liked finger sandwiches to share while art came of the Fond du Lac routine that she took on as a way of honoring her father-mother-moth wing repertoire. That came of French relations who had scampered down from Canada. Her aunts had answers. Marilee remained their pride and joy, while learning to like, too, the peanut butter jelly glue on whole wheat to conform to Auntie Sue's oppressive courtesies. Impending present tense with Sue meant chastity that meant, too, overeating. Marilee found fortune where she looked. The lake without a single scar meant halo from the moon and a canoe ride toward the pine yard. Marilee imagined clipper light amid the luxury of silence, gift of a small will certain as the candle in her window sill.

“Broth Means To Me The Pisces Rising In My Heart”

Soft like moth.
Taken by mouth.A manger without sacrifice.
The light is right to lie down in.Thin across a shallow pool
More sweet than that in thought.I silhouette my cherished prey becoming
What I already am in you a tall start.Up the brick line go the flimsy quaffed excuses
For repair that constitute a sadness in my longing.Many days I am alone with you and listen for the rain dots
All across the shelving that roofs over our twin headlines.I have learned to leave the contents of caboose where they are stored
And handle precious gems while looking in your eye light speaking back.

“All My Pauses Have Been Pregnant For Nine Hundred Years”

Sign posted in the window reads "Gone window
shopping."Meditation often amounts to afterthought.Now and at the time of our depth,
perception, triumph starts absorbing
local color.All new lanterns have ethnicity,
and back bends replenish
mirror images galore.Freshmen remaining
in short supply
eventually season
into people like ourselves.Is there any reason for continuing
once bookmarks have been shuffled
via legacy implanted?Saints for decades have said yes
when they intended to say no.Meanwhile, present tense is overrated,
under heated, under service
warranty, with checks incoming
and alarm outgoing,
underneath presumptive surplus
of untidy amenities.We learn best while shutting up.

Jaina Cipriano
Ten Photos

These photographs are of worlds built with my own hands. The concept of how space affects internal life is central to my process. Fabricated spaces or events have a theatricality that thrills me. This work connects us, reminds us we are never alone in the intensity of our emotions.When I am doing a self portrait I follow my instincts, ending up messy and exhausted. But that is where the transformation happens -- I am different than I was when I started. Then the image must be shared. The audience is important -- once I am witnessed, the transformation is solidified.I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian cult and was kept separate from the world. The camera became a way to embrace that separation. Through the lens I was able to begin reintegrating myself in the world.I put a piece of myself into these photos for others to see. If we can’t see ourselves reflected back in the world around us, how can we figure out who we are?Creating these works puts me in new pockets of my mind, connecting me to who I am without the heavy influence of my past. I am mapping the darkness of my psyche, illuminating areas and eliminating fear.The cult kept me in a vacuum and without human interaction all I had was the space around me - I played pretend a lot as a child. Now I build my own spaces, ones that reflect my inner state and make me feel safe.

Jaina’s photographic works forgo digital manipulation; everything is created for the camera. She takes an immersive approach to working with models, approaching a shoot like a documentary photographer as her subject is let loose in a strange designed space.

“You Get To Make The Choice”

“Last One To Leave The Party”

“Power Prayer”

“The Garden Of Eden Is Hot”

“Seen”

“Lucky Day”

“The Devil Walked Here”

“I Will Put You In A Box So You'll Never Grow Up”

“Work In Progress”

“The Rapture”

Jason Visconti
Two Poems

“About The Wind”

“When I Told You I Loved You”

A.N. Grace
“Fix Me”

The ideal time to start a business is during a recession, David. That's what my father told me. Well, that's what a father would have told me, I was sure of that.

When Bunny Hawthorn first messaged, she did what I guess she'd seen in the movies.Hello,I hear you solve problems.Best, BunnyI'd always been fascinated by the idea of maximalism. I thought it left little room for ingenuity, especially when there’s a monopoly on power -- the government, the school principal, the Mob. The guy owes $250? Whack him. The head of the housing association won't approve your new driveway? Whack him. A long time ago, when Obama was whacking people left right and center in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, everywhere, I used to wonder if the amount of power one holds directly correlates with the simplicity of the solution chosen.Dear Bunny,No need for the cloak and dagger. I charge $500 in Bitcoin for initial fact finding. I hope you find this acceptable.The FixerTwo years in, my little business on the dark web was flourishing. I was gaining a reputation as a problem solver. It helped that people had lost trust in institutions. Police. Judges. School boards. Everyone always seemed focused on the world burning on a macro level, but at a micro level, things had really gone to shit.Dear Fixer,I run The Delicate Cake bakery on Burdette Street. We have queues out the door every morning! I want to franchise. My business partner Irene disagrees. She’s refusing to sell me her stake.Best, Bunny

The cakes were magical. Iced buns with intricate gothic detailing, hot round balls of puff pastry filled with chocolate cream, thick slices of marzipan with ginger icing. It was Tuesday morning, and just like Bunny said, the place was heaving. There were two people serving at the counter. A boy of no more than seventeen or so, and a heavy-set woman with garish nails and bunches of bright red hair. I spotted the rosary beads on her left wrist: Irene Watson.Dear Bunny,The choux buns were to die for. I’ll be in touch.The FixerIrene lived in a big suburban box five minutes from the bakery. She drove a chocolate brown Ford Bronco that looked like it was made out of birthday cake, and I discovered her son was a mechanic at a back-alley auto shop that had terrible reviews online. All this I filed away, but none of it was particularly useful. Today, something was different. Instead of taking her usual turn off after leaving the bakery, she drove to a place called New Beginnings on the outskirts of town. It had a flickering red neon sign, and big gold lettering on the windows promised tarot card reading for $20.

The boy behind the counter eyed me suspiciously. I was sporting a beat-up brown fedora paired with a long tangerine scarf that set off my pale green suit nicely, and I’d replaced the stud in my ear with a dangling silver cross. Hanging from my neck was a large opal necklace that caught the morning sun flooding through the windows. The bakery was mercifully empty."Is the owner around?"The boy grunted and walked into the back.Irene appeared with a confused look on her face."Can I help?""Can we talk in private?" I said."Who are you?"I noticed her reaching almost imperceptibly for a phone by the cash register."This is going to sound crazy…""Go on," she said."My name is Sampson. I'm a medium. I studied with Yogi XX in Uttar Pradesh."She looked at me blankly, her hand now grasping the phone."He's on Insta’" I mumbled. "Anyway, it's just, I walked past this store and something stopped me cold in my tracks. You're having problems aren't you?"She took a sharp intake of breath and clawed at me with long nails, pulling me awkwardly over the counter and into her bosom. I could smell the cinnamon on her apron and I felt a divine warmth radiating. It was like a mother's embrace, I was sure of that.

Trey Blevins
“An Epidemic In The Age Of Information”

Luke Condzal
“Bum On Stairs”

Every day I saw him there, the poor, poor man. Atop those stairs he was raceless. Just a hunched lump of skin, the bones beneath themselves bitter and atrophied, his voice as he made small call outs for change or the butt of a cigarette a roaring snore. Myrtle Avenue and Broadway, the subway station -- though it's up above the street and the short buildings, on wobbling tracks below only the sky. And no matter the time or the weather, the poor man would be there. The usual droop was sometimes enough to give him a look of spina bifida, too engrossed in his upside down stupor even to beg.This is where I'd come to since I'd been back, back home. But he wasn't here before I went away. Or maybe he was, just upright and inconspicuous.The times went by and I began to wonder if he slept standing up and slumped. Nobody gave him anything, ever, and nobody, the cops sometimes stationed there nor the dozing booth person, ever bothered him.On a chill night, after a brawl in the kitchen which if it hadn't been clumsily broken up would have ended probably with a blade in somebody's face, I didn't find him there. He hovered always by the turnstiles, doing that preliminary death sway. But now his pitiful sprawl of platform asphalt was empty, except for the stampeding feet whose congested mess otherwise would've hollowed out from the middle to avoid the back of his hanging head. I stopped after the turnstile. People behind me fussed and stumbled into my back, a couple-three muttered curses. I was panicked, it felt like losing her all over again, the poor man must have died or been killed, and perhaps if I'd been earlier, if there hadn't been any fight, he'd be here and alive. For a while I stood there while people sighed past me. Then I walked out the swinging door beside the booth. There, at the top of the stairs, I found him. He faced out toward the dead end bars and the perforated city beyond. Suddenly, as people shouldered by to plod down the stairs, I was close enough to touch him. I reached my hand out and groped the tattered gray rag on his back, holes exposing festering yellow sores and scars from years past -- evidence of life. Here all these people had died around me, and when I was gone they died too. Enough of them that I could tell no longer if so many premature demises meant mine was more likely or less. And still this poor man lived. He had something to live for. There were times before when I had something to live for too, but I'd dropped all that. With my finger hooked in one of the stitchless rips I noticed he was a touch less stooped than usual, as though his folded spine had been jacked up a notch or two. I heard the deep interrupted gurgle of what I thought was a groan resisting mucus, then I felt the splatter against my ankles. Between his legs a chaotic trickle which revolved the colored lights of the storefronts below, the urine itself dark and indicating dying insides. Into the winking puddle he hacked up a gout of blood. He did everything here, atop the stairs, shat too I presumed -- unless he'd ceased that function entirely. I went down the stairs. Like I myself had some fearful intestinal malady, spurred on with spices or straight poison, I raced home struggling to contain myself. When I opened the door and let in the slit of street light the tears came screaming out.

In the very early morning on my way to the kitchen he wasn't standing. Curled up on his side instead, where he'd taken his piss. I loomed huge over him. With intermittent shivers, gulping, his red wet mouth torn open, eyes crunched closed, he said something. I stooped low and saw his teeth had been kicked in. Could have been the previous night or a long time before. He repeated in his suppurative tongue what he'd just said. Change, he asked for. Though he'd asked the same of me before, thin neck strained from low to crane its ugly face at me, seeing him spraddled in his own toxic excretions made me sick enough to dig into my pockets, all of them, my pants, my coat and the sweatshirt beneath."A quarter. Have a quarter?"I found a penny in an inside pocket. Feeling it with the tips of my fingers I decided against producing it for him: I could not bear to degrade him further."I'm sorry," I said and rose. The emergency exit was open next to the turnstiles; I went in without paying.

That day at work the man who'd started the fight with me the night before right away started up with me again. I ignored his taunts till he put his hands on me. With the side of a skillet I knocked him to his ass -- a cast-iron disc to the dome. There was no blood under the purpling cheekbone he clutched with both frantic hands, but an inch up the white of the eye spitting cloudy drool flooded almost instantly with a rich red. Some of the other cooks gathered around him and helped him up and that was the end of that.Later in the shift I cut a chunk off my left pointer finger. I knew it was bad enough to go to the hospital, but I couldn't afford to lose the hours, so I rinsed it and put on a rubber glove. While I worked it would fill, stinging with my blood, till in the sink I'd drain the maroon balloon and replace it with more latex.Since it was busy chef didn't notice. At the end of the shift, on seeing my hand, a florid contortion of pain, though he was fine with the fight, he told me, Crispin, split and don't come back. He paid me for the night in cash.

With four twenties in my pocket I still didn't want to pay for the train. Instead I walked from Chinatown across the Manhattan Bridge and trudged the couple miles east along Myrtle Avenue.I passed under the pavilion of the Myrtle Ave Broadway stop. By then I had no more of the spare rubber gloves I'd taken with me. This last one was almost totally full. At my feet were mounds of white and black shit, a thick Pollock of ornithological defecations -- from the pigeons perched rudely overhead, never cleaned, and ablaze with sulfuric light. Each bird turd was indistinguishable from the next, each new dropping the throttler of the last. I wondered, if all the people who walked this wasted stretch dropped their pants and unleashed their bowels, would they be able to tell, after the days and weeks piled up, which hump was their own, by color, consistency, shape, nuance of odor -- even once the parts making up the human sculpture had been melded into a towering amalgamation where all the curdling and curvature of individual logs was gone for some greater excremental good -- would they, the mothers and fathers and children and workers and the sick and the addicts and gentrifiers and drifters, be able to tell which grotesque collection belonged to the toils of their own colon? Do we know ourselves so well?From the bottom of the stairs I could see the poor man's resting place; though if he were still laid out the angle would've obstructed him. I had to get at least halfway up, to the middle landing, to see. He wasn't there. Not by the turnstiles either. In my pocket I fingered the four twenties, rubbed the rough surfaces; I could feel my hands getting dirtier. I'd made up my mind to give my money over to him. With eighty dollars he could do plenty. But where was he? I realized that in my time coming to this station, since I'd been back at least, this must have been the first time he hadn't been here, somewhere atop the stairs, a broke phantom haunting the masses. I would wait, that's what I would do, in his spot, pacing his filth-stippled domain, until he returned. The night would go by, then the days. Eventually I'd have to spend the money, on a coffee or a sandwich, but if I was careful I could make it last. Hopefully he would arrive again before too much of the money was gone, the poor man, and I could shove what was left into his hand and go. Assuming though that it takes weeks, and soon all the money's gone, and my clothes are saturated with disease and my finger, I've forgotten all about my finger, that throbbing pest, surely by the time my debit card gives out, which won't take long, rancid with infection and ready to fall off outright, lost in a gutter, here and then gone, like she was at roughly the halfway point, and even though I tried to stop obsessing I couldn't help but wonder if the baby stayed alive for maybe a few minutes after she went down the stairs and bled out at the bottom, and what about shitting, would I hold the swollen ball of bile inside me, in dubious purgatorial form, or extract it in secret off the platform, but then my ass would have to fit through the bars, but perhaps by then I'd have lost enough weight to slide my withered hips through and undo with doodoo the day of somebody down below. Eventually I'd run out of money, the money that was meant for him, the poor man, and I'd have to beg like him, but with more resolution, and I'd be begging not for myself but for him. People passed me coughing and I saw how it'd all play out, the clever absurdity of it, yet not without some ironical poeticism, I thought, because then I would have become him, draped over myself and begging, begging in his place and for the both of us.But he was next to me, materialized, his head by my knees. The crowning bald spot within gray curls was barnacled with raised scabs. He scratched at them and screwed his face up at me."Got change?" in the voice of a choking frog."Where were you?""Sorry.""Just now, where were you?""Have a quarter?""You're always here -- where did you go? Just now you weren't here.""Had to take a shit.""You did?""I did. And I did.""Where? Where do you do that?""In Popeye's, right down there, they let me use the bathroom there."I could smell the deep fumes of sweet grease. It occurred to me, also, that he probably used that bathroom to shoot heroin."Here," I said, and I transferred the money from my right hand to the left gloved one. I propelled the bills toward him.His face, with its chitinous eyes, its shot hole of a mouth, the teeth all taken too, at first looked confused, suspicious, lipless, and a moment later somewhat embarrassed. Lousy pouches of air under the ensheathing plastic bubbled toward the thin ring around my wrist and spilled out onto the edges of the bills. He took the dirty money and I went home.The feel of my finger was like a steel rod on fire had been inserted into the skin. Up to the elbow. I was too afraid to take the soiled glove off, so I got into bed hugging myself.I dreamed of a serialized competition, with fickle rules, though the stakes were consistently high, an eternal implication of the death penalty, yet each time I was to perform, I'd be seized with an uncontrollable, savage laughter. When I woke up for real, the sheets cold and soaked, I felt I'd been asleep for months.Turns out it was almost two days. The dried blood inside the glove, when I tried to pry the stiff thing off, peeled flesh. I couldn't move the hand at all, and the finger felt like it had already fallen off. When I finally got the glove off and rinsed the hand, the pointer finger, no longer mine, was that beautiful claret color of maraschino cherries, and double the normal size. With a tap at the tip pus slinked out green like toothpaste from a full tube.Later on I dropped the finger -- amputated at length with a dull knife since I had no sharp ones. But before that I offered it to him, I begged him to take it.At first I didn't see him, because he was standing tall, if a little slanted. A new hoodie on, yellow and still with a tag slung over the shoulder. And somebody was talking to him -- a man with a lanyard, which he held up from his neck like a shield."Do you need some help?""No," the poor man replied."Some detox or anything? I'm with the -- ""No.""Come on, we can help you.""No."The lanyard man left defeated. I was stunned. Bad hand in my pocket, I approached."What are you doing here?""No, no help," he said."No, I'm not with him. Why are you here?""I'm here. I'm here. You have anything?""I gave you eighty dollars the other day. Don't you remember me?"He looked at me in disbelief."Are you getting ready to go, or what?" I asked."I'm here, I told you.""I don't know what you're talking about. I gave you all that money. You're not supposed to be here anymore now.""I have to be here. This is where I am.""So you don't know me you're saying?""No.""I can't believe this. You're not going?"He made a noise: one exhale of a mocking laugh.I paced the pain away. Every few pivots I'd jerk my head to look at him. A few hours more and he'd scored some drugs. Near the MetroCard machine he openly cooked them in a black spoon with a match before he plugged a rusted syringe into the black callouses of his groin. While he hung I kept pacing. Even though it was cold atop the stairs, freezing, I was sweating, profusely. When he came out of it he glanced at me a few times, with a look like I was a freak, I'm not a freak, or a melancholic resignation to the grim reaper arrived here for him.In the middle of the night he took off his shoes, the flimsy contraptions stand-ins for used sponges, no socks underneath, and rolled up his pants to the knees. His feet and calves were swollen enormously, turned inhuman, prop limbs pumped with oil and set to explode. He scratched at them till they bled, or they were already bleeding. Earlier on the lanyard man had come back, with a woman, to try to lure him to help, at least to detox, but I intercepted them, told them he didn't need their help. He'd been helped and he was going to be on his way, they didn't understand. I wondered what their hours were, if they'd had sex with each other, if so had they ever done it on the job, if someone close to them had ever died a horrible death. They lingered for a while, unsure of themselves. Every time they made a move to approach him again, I took a wild lunge and startled them. Finally they left and it was just the two of us here. In ten or so minute intervals a few people would exit, between us. Presently the poor man left his shoes behind and shimmied to his pissing spot. I followed him there and surveyed him this time shitting."What are you doing?""I need help." His ass was low enough to scrape the steaming head of his robust substance."I thought you shat in Popeyes.""Closed, it's closed."Wanting to grant him cloacal seclusion, I went back to my spot.As the blueness rose at dawn, several more hours of pacing later, I went back out through those doors. Squatting, he'd taken fistfuls of his evil gruel and rubbed it into his wounds."Take my legs away, take them.""Why?""I can't have these legs anymore. They won't take them for me. Say it's not bad enough. But they don't know how much it hurts. It hurts so bad, it kills. If I put it in them it'll get so bad they'll have to take them from me, then I'll be free.""You mean like an infection?""In my legs. I need them to take them.""What if it spreads?""I'll be free. The pain. Oh, the pain…" he whimpered.Absently I'd been fondling my severed finger in my pocket, I suppose occasionally taking it out to study its shriveled rot under the glaring beams, with my good hand."Look," I said, and showed it to him."No, no, no, it hurts too bad," he said."Look what I did." I put my crudely bandaged hand near his mouth and held the disembodied charcoal digit to the gauze. He didn't understand, so I put the finger over my lip like a mustache. "I can do it for you. I can cut your legs off." Stench of rough sodomy with a dysenteric lover, in an abandoned fish market -- I removed the finger from under my nostrils and put it back a few times to determine the source. "You don't have to get an infection then. See what I did? I can do it." The rest of my hand had gone gigantic, I realized. "You said it'll free you. That's what you need, and then you can leave here. That's what you're saying, isn't that right? Isn't it?"He just shook his head violently from side to side, kept up the rub: preparation of a sadistic brisket."Listen to me," I shouted, "I can fix it for you. If you just let me go home to get my knife, I'll come back and take care of it. Isn't that what you want? It's not a sharp knife, or a big one, it's just a table steak knife, an old one. Or better yet if you just give me some of the money I gave you, give it back to me, I'll go buy a good knife. A hacking knife.""No, no.""You're impossible! I'll go get my knife then, that's fine. It worked for me."He toppled to his side, writhing. I yanked him up. "Listen, listen -- you have to be here when I get back. Will you be here when I get back? I won't be gone long."He coughed phlegm into my face. I didn't have time to wipe it away."Here, take this. I'll lend it to you, as a gift."I tried to put the dead finger into his hand but the arthritic fist was shut too tight. "Come on." We struggled together and the finger fell. It bounced and slowly rolled through the bars, darted into the shadows of the street below. If I could get it back and give it to him, everything would be alright, but I couldn't risk leaving him alone. I hooked my arms around him and took a step, to bring him with me. As one crying unit we strode brokenly off the top landing and tumbled down to the middle one, the great limbo between street and platform. My back was thrown out, at least bruised, and he was in my arms, like she had been at the very end, but only I was crying now, and she and I were at the bottom of the stairs, I do recall seeing a mosquito buzzing around the ceiling even though it was nearing December (still cranberry sauce in the fridge), instead of at the middle landing, like now. I panted hard and could see the humid plumes of my sour breath. It was cold but the pain warmed me. I worked to turn my neck, which was stiff with a crick. He was too close to see properly, features in duplicate, so I strained backwards. A perpetual but pivotal step away from death he must have during the fast fall hit his head on the angle of a stair because it was fractured almost in half, the yawning muscle of the tongue like a bicep too big to wag in the goblet of the dislodged lower jaw. Out honked a breath and then came just a hot liquid gush.I went through his pockets. Only found an ancient syringe and some pennies -- nothing worth taking. When at last I got myself to stand, I slogged down the rest of the stairs and went to hunt in the streets for that part of me I'd lost.

Scarlet Mitchell
“A Love Story In Three Objects Sent Through The Post”

Object #1

Post card: 4"x6"Front side: Color photograph. "Greetings from Salt Lake City" splashed over an aerial shot of the Salt Lake Temple.Back side right panel: One US Stamp, post dated July 12, 2018,"Margery Geiger
112 Candlewood Ln
Stone Ridge, NY 12484"Left panel: Affixed with clear cellophane packing tape, one hard yellow object about 2.5" long and .25" wide, resembling a small stick of wood. Also beneath the tape, written with heavy black marker in a bold hand,"Wife,
The greek restaurant on University and S 700 here has really good fries. I saved you one.
-Frank"

Object #2

Bra: Size 42EE, pink, lace sheath, sturdy padding, underwires, thick satin straps. Appears slightly worn.Outside right breast: Written in thin felt-tip on the lace in small letters,"Return - Margery Geiger
112 Candlewood Ln
Stone Ridge, NY 12484"Outside left breast: Written in larger letters,"Deliver to- Henry Geiger
C.O. Birch Garden Inn - Room ???
7007 Mountain View Dr, Flagstaff, AZ 86001"Left side band: A clear, hard plastic rectangle, sewn to the garment with heavy pink yarn through neatly punched holes. On it are eight US postage stamps, stamped with the postmasters mark dated August 2nd, 2018.Inside left breast: Written in very small, neat handwriting,"Dearest Husband,
Please note- This is not my bra, it is clearly too large. I purchased it special to send to you because I wanted to have enough space to write on and mine would have been a bit too small. Not too small, but small enough to be a bit cramped. Unfortunately, I have now taken up much of that extra space I was seeking by explaining why this bra is so large. It's no matter, however, as I guess I don't really have much to say.
What should I write about? Anything at all? Tonight's lasagna? Our income taxes? The moon? They say wolves howl at the moon, but that's not true, is it? They howl for their own reasons. The moon is just there when it happens. (Continued on other cup)"Inside right breast: In the same handwriting,"Did I ever tell you about the time I thought I'd found kindred spirits, but it was just wolves howling at the sun? Yes, the sun. Can you believe that?
I was at the beach, in an attitude of worship and prayer for the solstice sunrise. As the first shaft of light broke the horizon, I heard a commotion, shouting and cheering; someone else celebrating the same moment I was. It soon dawned on me that there was a small zoo there and the wolf enclosure was just behind me.
Have you ever heard wolves howl close up, Frank? Have you ever heard them howling while you were in the height of ecstatic prayer? It will shake you to your very bones and sound like the voice of God Herself. I will never forget that moment.
Kindred spirits...
Well, my cup nearly runneth over, so ta-ta for now.
With love, your supportive wife, Margery"Inside underwire, right breast: Written directly on the narrow casing in smaller, more awkward and uneven handwriting,"P.S. Forgive me, I'm bad at puns. I did my breast."

Object #3

Padded manila envelope: 13"x13", large red sticker reads "Do Not bend" and fourteen US postage stamps in a rough square, post-dated August 23rd, 2018,"Return- Frank Geiger
C.O. Desert Inn
800 Alameda St
Santa Fe, NM 87501Deliver to-
Margery Geiger
112 Candlewood Ln
Stone Ridge, NY 12484"Inside package: One full-sized vinyl record. Cover shows signs of wear. Several stickers have been scraped off with varying degrees of success over the years, leaving tar-like stains and patches of dirty white. "Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose: The Collection". Image of the 1940s French superstar emerging from a brilliant red backdrop, hands raised like a saint.
Affixed over Edith's face, one Post-It note, sea-foam green,"-M
You're right. She does sound like our Laura.
Home soon.
-F"

Contributors

A.N. GRACE lives in Liverpool, England. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.ABHISHEK UDAYKUMAR is a writer, filmmaker, and painter, and works equally in all three mediums.BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. They have called any number of places home; currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. They have been published in FOLIO, Figure 1, The Offing, Harpur Palate, and previously in SORTES, among others. Their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co and they can be found at patreon.com/twinbrights.JAINA CIPRIANO is an experiential designer, filmmaker, and photographer exploring the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Her worlds communicate with our neglected inner child and are informed by explosive colors, elements of elevated play and the push-pull of light and dark. Jaina writes and directs award-winning short films that wrestle with the complicated path of healing. Her second short film, Trauma Bond, took home the grand prize at the Lonely Seal International Film Festival. Jaina’s photographic work has been shown internationally. She is the executive director of the Arlington International Film Festival and the founder of Finding Bright Studios, an experiential design company in Lowell, MA. She has collaborated with GRRL HAUS and Boston Art Review and was a Boston Fellow for the Mass Art Creative Business Incubator and a finalist in EforAll Merrimack Valley. See more of her work at her website and on Instagram.JASON VISCONTI lives in Queens Village, New York.KEN POYNER’s four collections of brief fictions, four collections of speculative poetry, and one mixed media collection can be found at most online booksellers. He spent 33 years in information systems management, is married to a world record holding female powerlifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish. Individual works have appeared in Café Irreal, Analog, Danse Macabre, The Cincinnati Review, and several hundred other places. Check him out at kpoyner.com.LUKE CONDZAL is a writer and filmmaker from New York.SCARLET MITCHELL was born and raised in Wisconsin and has been writing for many years. She is a pagan bisexual writer and has a bachelor’s degree with majors in English, studio arts, and anthropology. She's a passionate cheerleader for the arts and artists of all kinds (and firmly believes that everyone is an artist of some kind!).SHEILA MURPHY’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Hanging Loose, Fortnightly Review, and numerous others. Her most recent book is Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books 2023). She received the Gertrude Stein Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press 2003). Her book Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (USA) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Find out more about Sheila at her Wiki page.TREY BLEVINS is from Ohio, Michigan, and California but is currently New York based. His short stories have been published in 100subtexts, the collaborative anthology Bibliotecha, and The Letters Home Collection.

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SORTES is a spinning collection of stories, poems, songs, and illustrations to help while away the wintery June nights. It’s an oddball grabbag wunderkammer mixtape offering distraction and refreshment.We have neither theme nor scene. Each issue is its own creature. We publish both the sufficiently strange and insufficiently boring: swart stories, hoity poetry, magical surrealism, beatnik travelogues, hard modern haiku, pulp, fantasia, antibiography, crooning balladeering, experimental sentimentalism, and grainy sideways photography.We also host online readings, old time radio performances, and other beloved gimmicks as they occur to us. Previous issues are available via the site’s Archive link.

Submitting

SORTES considers unsolicited submissions of poetry, prose, illustration, music, videos, and anything else you think may fit our format. Feel free to poke us; we’d love to find a way to publish dance, sculpture, puzzles, and other un-literary modalities.SORTES is published quarterly. Each issue includes approximately ten works of lit, visual, or performance art. We like a small number of works per issue: artists and readers should have a chance to get to know each other.SORTES, you’ll notice, is primarily a black-and-white publication, and we like to play with that (by featuring monochrome videos and photography, for example), but we’ll happily consider your polychrome submission.Submissions are ongoing throughout the year. We consider artists with both extensive and limited publishing experience. We accept simultaneous submissions but please inform us if your work has been accepted elsewhere. We publish translations and reprints on a case-by-case basis; please send us a note describing your interest. And while there's no restriction on the number of pieces you can submit, please have a heart.There’s no need for an extensive cover letter or publication history but please tell us who you are, what kind of writing or art you do, and a bit about what you’re sending us. There are no formatting requirements for text submissions. There is no fee to submit. Please send submissions as email attachments whenever possible; multimedia submissions may be sent as links.

Rights

You asked and we provide: what's up with publication rights and ownership?Simple: When you publish with us, you give SORTES one-time publication right for your work. You retain all right to your work after publication. Work published with SORTES will remain available via our online Archive.While SORTES retains the right to link to or excerpt your published work, we do not have the right to publish your work in new formats (including print). If we would like to pursue publication of your work in new formats, we'll ask you and hopefully agree to terms.

Mahoffs

SORTES was created by founding editor Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum and emeritus editor Kevin Travers. Current editors are listed in our masthead, Many of us live in Philadelphia, some luckily do not, but we invite writers and artists everywhere to live the SORTES fantasia.

Events

SORTES regularly offers readings and performances. For upcoming events, please check here and our Facebook page.

SORTES appears IN THE FLESH at

WEIRDO FEST

Saturday, October 23, 2024
2pm to Dark

East Kensington, Philadelphia
Philadelphia Brewing Company and Environs

Find our table and be first in line for the 2024 SORTES Spectral Winter Annual -- in postcard form!This year, our Annual has incarnated as four ghastly postcards -- with original eerie illustrations and specially commissioned horror stories:Irina Tall's dreamish drawings
Kailey Tedesco's slicing poetry
Luke Condzal's existential historical story
Nick Perilli's familial ghost warmer, and
Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum's fraternal horror.Keep these Annual postcards, mail them, trade them, preserve them, resell them once supplies inevitably exhaust. Impress and terrorize family.SORTES’s table will be slinging Annual postcards as well last year's Annual, Samplers, and swinging merch. To pass the time, we'll also have readings and performances by SORTES authors.But if you're sadly unproximal to Philadelphia, get your Annual postcards at the SORTES Shop.

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Compare with competition to see value. Event hosted by renowned impresario J. E. TENENBAUM. Send no money. FREE OFFER and open to ALL.

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Announcements and correspondence

Like any genius literary journal, SORTES invites readers and contributors to fight amongst themselves. Please email us to compliment our stellar authors and artists. Spicier fans may want to howl and bellow. Or maybe you have an announcement about a book, art project, impending marriage, &c?Be a part of the problem: comment on our stories and poems, other letters, and the SORTES demimonde in general by emailing

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No Gimmicks

“SORTES continues to ascend the summit of artistic authenticity with every new issue its editors publish, showcasing the works of talented writers in a clean format that is accessible to the reader. There are no gimmicks here or busy links to click through, just the authors and their words. Read em'.”

James Feichthaler, September 8, 2022

James, we appreciate your words mammothly but we delicately disagree: SORTES is one transparent gimmick after another. It's a ruse wrapped in a gambit baked inside a flaky shenanigan potpie.

Missed Connection

“You: M/early 30s olive skin and a nose like a fleur-de-lis, burgundy sweater, pumpkin scarf.Me: F/38 eating olives out of pumpkin rind, lily patterned dress
The bartender sent me a glass of burgundy 'from the gentleman' and you tipped your hat. We talked about SORTES, the paper magazine on the internet, and sang karaoke of our favorite submissions. Drunk on bons mots and pithe, you knocked over the wunderkammer and were ejected by the bouncer. Let's meet and collage a poem!”

Iris Johnston, September 12, 2022

Me: That's the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my nose.

Credit and Debit

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SORTES is a mostly online journal, as you know, but every so often we can't resist existing.

Annual 2024

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Is this... the 2024 SORTES SPECTRAL WINTER ANNUAL? In... POSTCARD form?! IT IS! Announcing four ghostly postcards -- with swirling ookie front illustrations and original horror stories on the reverse:-- Irina Tall's illustrations
-- Kailey Tedesco's poetry
-- Luke Condzal's historical existential story
-- Nick Perilli's familial ghost warmer
--and Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum's fraternal horror.Keep them, mail them, trade them, preserve them, resell them once supplies inevitably exhaust. Impress and terrorize family.

Annual 2023

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The SORTES Spectral Winter Annual 2023 revives the tradition of haunted holiday fiction. This beautifully crafted 44-page paperback anthology features ghastly short stories showcasing a dead man’s special deliveries, a judgmental seaside specter, the pains of an aging table-rapper, the heartwarming war on the poor, and the electrifying end of the year / world, as well as poems celebrating the Jersey Devil's unsung siblings. Authors include Daniel DiFranco, Jean Zurbach, Kailey Tedesco, Max D. Stanton, Mordecai Martin, and Nick Perilli. The Annual makes an ideal holiday present for any dear friend or family member who loathes the living.

SORTES Sampler 2

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A SORTES Sampler 2 is a slender tasty book collecting weird fiction by Max D. Stanton, surrealist collage art by Danielle Gatto Hirano, and a poetry cycle by Uri Rosenshine. It’s a handsomely designed but affordable little snack of a book. We have incredibly limited copies on hand, and every day they become incredibly more limited, so leap today.

SORTES Sampler 1

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NOT QUITE SOLD OUT! We've uncovered a secret cache of remaining copies!A SORTES Sampler 1 was our first attempt to make the ephemeral real. It contains a dystopian farmstead fantasy by Iris Johnston, paper cutout art by Abi Whitehead, and a Coney Island noir by Mordecai Martin.

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Annual 2023 + Sampler 1

Buy both and save $5

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Annual 2023 + Sampler 2

Buy both and save $5

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Annual 2023 + Both Samplers

Buy all three and save $10

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While despairingly slim supplies last. Prices don't include shipping. To receive these special rates, items must be purchased together in the same checkout cart.

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When in Philadelphia, please gobble up your copies from:Brickbat Books, Head & Hand Books, A Novel Idea on PassyunkPlease note that not every publication is sold in each location. If these fine stores are sold out, march to the counter and sweetly demand more SORTES.

BEE LB Three Poems

Ken Poyner Six Drabbles

Abhishek Udaykumar “Kashmiri Pulav”

Sheila Murphy Four Poems

Jaina Cipriano Ten Photos

Jason Visconti Two Poems

A.N. Grace “Fix Me”

Trey Blevins “An Epidemic In The Age Of Information”

Luke Condzal “Bum On Stairs”

Scarlet Mitchell “A Love Story In Three Objects Sent Through The Post”

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BEE LB
Three Poems

Ken Poyner
Six Drabbles

Abhishek Udaykumar
“Kashmiri Pulav”

Sheila Murphy
Four Poems

Jaina Cipriano
Ten Photos

Jason Visconti
Two Poems

A.N. Grace
“Fix Me”

Trey Blevins
“An Epidemic In The Age Of Information”

Luke Condzal
“Bum On Stairs”

Scarlet Mitchell
“A Love Story In Three Objects Sent Through The Post”