. . . each strange and magnificent in its own way. Welcome to issue One Hundred and One; we’re thrilled to have assembled this mixed six-pack of peculiarities for you.
Calvin Celebuski’s “A Legend Is Born” packs lots of birth, death, and surreal humor into a short space, and Devin Taylor befriends a summer squash in his poem “These Things—They Just Happen.” T. S. McAdams explores “Creaturehood in Contra Costa County” in his hard-boiled tale of canine cops. Gary Moshimer returns with bowling balls and flatulence in his flash story “Lar-a-bowl,” and Alex Pickens takes you beyond the infinite in his playful sonnet “Stardumb.” Finally, Terry Tierney explains “That Buzzing in Your Ear” in a flash piece with a scholarly seventeenth-century cleric and bugs. This month’s untitled cover art from Adika Bell speaks for itself.
Devour it online or chomp down on the pdf.
Alex Pickens
Snorting stardust and cracking hyperspace
Tearing up time continuums with a drag race
Running rings around Saturn and blue Neptune
Speedsters shootings stars of hydrogen fusion boosters
Slingshotting out of groovitational fields until our smiles
Stretch tight across our skulls, and smoke leaks out
Of the amplifiers and nostrils with our doobies askew
Later we’ll get loose and hang from Orion’s belt
And make wishes and flick coins into black holes
Watch them stretch while we down another moonshine —
Wake up in Laughing Sam’s Astroid with some android
A few stars misplaced, nebulae-brained, with stretched face
Space is dark and empty, but we laugh when they tell us
Because where there are supernovas there is stardust.
ALEX PICKENS graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in economics from James Madison University. His poems have been published in Tuck Magazine and Gardy Loo and his screenplay Black Friday was an honorable mention at the national 2017 Screenplay Festival. He is currently working on a novel and another screenplay and writes poetry when he is mentally unstable.
Devin Taylor
I’m walking down the street and
thinking about things and thinking about people
and wishing that people are things.
I go into a store and buy a zucchini
because it whispers to me: I’m happy.
I buy some toothpicks and also a knife.
I sit in the park and stick toothpicks in the zucchini;
it is not a Voodoo doll — but it is a zucchini.
I carve a smiley face; I smile my carving face.
I name my zucchini: Zucchini Friend.
It belches thank you, sir.
With a twinkle, I belch you’re welcome, friend.
It barks. I look into its slits. I gush;
I flush red flesh; I know green.
I can’t contain my happiness so much
I’m coughing with joy all over my zucchini.
DEVIN TAYLOR is a recent Washington College alumnus with a B.A. in English and minors in Creative Writing and Psychology. His work can be found in Gargoyle, Five 2 One, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He lives in the DC Area where plays his electric kazoo mostly alone.
