WINTER 1996-97 ISSUE
Submission
by T.L. Kelly
Please consider my haiku (above) for publication in your blah blah magazine. I am the former editor of fifteen zines, including blah blah Is Dead and Battered Penny blah blah Review, two of which were nominated by me for the blah blah Prize of The Century...
With a title like Bound and Gagged, one might assume this is a book of Dominant/Submissive erotic photography. It's not. Bound and Gagged is far more subversive, dangerous and frightening...
Silking Eve
by Pat O'Brien
A lady came to re-felt the roof of the bay window. The exhaust of the tired, blue van woke me. Then the screech and clang of rear doors drew me to watch through the open bedroom window.
Dear Diary
by Lisa Prosimo
Today my dad took Eddie to the lumber mill to buy the wood to build the treehouse he's been wanting. His best friend, Charlie, went along, too. They wouldn't take me, said I would only be in the way. My mother felt sorry for me and gave me this stupid diary...
The hotel bar had the same qualities of so many others I've seen before: dim lighting, over-priced drinks, and clientele consisting mostly of travelers with no idea where else they should go. I took my drink from the bar and found a table where I could kick back and relax.
I will never understand why he chose me. Despite what he told me that day, I know I am not beautiful. Attractive, yes, but not beautiful. My tits are too small. Nice nipples, yes, that's true, and they grew long and hard when he nibbled on them with his hard white teeth, or sucked on me with his wide full lips...
"Skiing is like sex," Bill Kittredge used to say. "There are things that should never be written about because doing them is so much better than any words about them can be." Maybe he was right...
I gave Stephanie the best years of my life and she has never returned them. She says she has forgotten where she put them. I checked the attic and the basement and the woodshed, she explains, but I didn't find them there...
Another dead-end. Dusty had been slowly working his way north and now he could go no further. Not without a long, cold swim. He sat on the wall and looked north. They had sat on this same wall at some other point in time, but he couldn't remember when. He only could remember the dry weeds poking his leg under his pants...
I haven't forgotten what it means to be a warrior. To drink the blood of the enemy, I am still male. Most men have sex and violence linked together at some very basic level. When did I first become a sexual creature? I was always a sexual creature...
Sculpted flesh and sweat. Sweat rolling down your body, the bead of sweat quivering at the tip of your erect nipple. Two plastic clothes pins, one on either side of the tender flesh. Pinching the flesh and causing brilliant pain...
Head dipped
in reflection
hot water
brandishing my back
red
as my lips...
When time gets caught within the moment
and stones cave in within their tide
in silence matter ceases.
Will we still within our minds reside...
Our impulses like beggars have come round and whisper
In our bones, the rich imagination of a lunatic kind,
Mystical pangs of the body and the three cities of Lust
Pass into view, and who hasn't gotten up to stare
Into the dark at the crystal luminous streets...
Having heard about it, knowing of the body,
Having once perhaps been flesh, that memory faint,
Scarcely little more than a falsehood,
And mostly mythical now, the angels came upon
The impulses and could not make of them much.
And what was the body, anyway, what was flesh...