KINPAURAK
KINPAURAK
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Welcome to Kinpaurak.
Kinpaurak is about recognition The recognition that something has already been lost, and that loss is not a tragedy, but a beginning. That the body still sings, even when fayed down to its sinew. That the voice still speaks, even when its tongue is swollen, split, and slurring. That a thing does not need to be perfect, or sacred, or whole, to be worth keeping That we are still beautiful things. And dying things. Still wild things.
We do not embalm the past. That honor belongs to Anubis. We are here to dig through its viscera, to feel what still writhes, to press a fnger into its wounds and see what pulses back Beauty is not always clean, not always soft, it is the glisten of fat, the shimmer of cartilage, the raw nerve exposed.
This frst issue is a beginning but not just for the magazine It is a reclamation of grief, of memory, of voice.
Kinpaurak was born out of restlessness. I wanted to create a space for voices that are strange and searing and ungovernable A space for things that don’t quite belong anywhere else I’ve spent years haunted by half-said things, by the feeling that language could almost reach something true. This is where I’ve decided to try anyway.
What you’ll fnd here is not polite. It is not curated for comfort. These pages are loud, unsettling, of-kilter. They are feral. They are unrepentantly alive.
To everyone who submitted, who trusted me with their work thank you. To the readers: come in with your hands open. Leave with something under your skin.
May this magazine shimmer for you May it disturb in the right places
Hugo Placer-Sanchez, Editor-in-Chief
DEDICATION
To Anubis, Ἄνουβις, Inpu, Inpw, Jnpw, Anpu, ⲁⲛⲟⲩⲡ, ,
This is for You. For Your patience. For the way You wait at every door we ’ re afraid to open. You teach us that transformation is not a punishment. That to be in-between is not to be lost. That even decay can be sacred if someone loves you through it.
You are the patron of all our beautiful almosts, our strange middles, our hauntings and broken blossoms
And if we are sometimes messy, dramatic, too sad or too alive, we hope You understand we ’ re trying We’re still becoming
So this magazine, stitched from shadows and weird little sparks, is Yours. May it delight Your long ears. May it sing to You in the language of things that almost make sense. May it never pretend to be clean.
AUTO-MOTIVE FAILURE
BY AALIYAH ANDERSON
Typical deferral of want: punchline with lightbulb suspended above our heads as nearly-70 degrees lays mist over midday styrofoam & manufactured bowls Pavement sketched, a fence begins with iron unfencing. Sewage drains far under -or right next to us. Vintage pointillism has always intrigued me; I throw some wooden freak of nature into backyard It arrives in the turf’s yellowed accents edging, yet the leaves disturb frst. I remember, yes, we did advocate for bidets. An authentic Ancient Greek mask tries another attempt. Crazy how it’s always the left back tire which fattens even when turning right We mime antiquity, & some stolen mannequin never learns how to turn in full.
HOW TO ERASE A BROTHER
BY GIO CLAIRVAL
I was born seventeen minutes after my brother. I have resented those seventeen minutes ever since enough time for him to steal the frst breath, to claim the marrow of existence while I waited.
Mother calls us "miracle twins" with a rictus smile stretched across teeth she grinds to dust each night. Her eyes dart between us like trapped insects. Seventeen minutes. By the time I emerged, the novelty had worn of. I was merely the echo of his grand arrival, a discordant note in his opening hit song
His name is Hugo. Mine is Juliette, though no one recalls it. I am "Hugo's sister," a shadowy appendage to his luminous being. When we were six, he informed me, solemnly pressing his small hand to my throat, that boys were kings and girls were only vessels for their seed. He'd learned this from Father. I, having recently discovered the concept of taxidermy in Mother's hidden books, decided then to begin my collection.
I. Genesis of Decay
I started with slugs in his cerea watching him lift the spoon to his lips, the creatures writhing against white porcelain. He swallowed three before noticing. Mother assumed he'd put them there himself, another of his experiments.
"Boys will be boys," she murmured, plucking a glistening body from his spoon, its mucus stretching like silver thread.
Hugo only watched me over the rim of his bowl, a strange hunger blooming in his eyes. That night, I found a jar of crushed slugs under my pillow, their bodies leaking a yellow ichor that stained my sheets The game had begun
II. Communion of Flesh
At eight, he received a telescope for his birthday I got a book on famous women in history, with pages that smelled of mildew and disappointment.
"Be like them," Mother whispered, her fngers digging into my scalp like talons
That night, I stole the telescope. In the garden, I dug a hole six feet deep, my fngers splitting open on buried rocks, blood mixing with soil. I laid the telescope in like a corpse, then crawled in myself, lying beside it for hours, whispering secrets to the worms that came to investigate. When I fnally buried it, I saved a handful of those pink, writhing creatures
Hugo wept for a week. I fed the worms to him in his sleep, parting his lips with gentle fngers, watching them disappear down his throat His dreams turned violent after that; I heard him choking in the night. He told Mother he could feel things moving inside him.
III. Sacraments of Pain
At ten, Hugo crowned himself inventor. He created a device of wires and batteries meant to protect his bedroom. It didn't work on intruders, but it worked on me the current locking my muscles, my urine running hot down my legs while he watched with clinical detachment.
For one year after, I became his unwilling laboratory. I collected his nail clippings, his fallen hair, the yellow crust from his eyes. I mixed these with substances stolen from beneath the kitchen sink ammonia, bleach, drain cleaner creating tinctures I added to his food in microscopic amounts. His stomach distended. His skin erupted in weeping sores. At night, I pressed my ear to his bedroom wall, listening to him retch.
"Juliette," Mother sighed, fnding me once with a vial of his blood, "He is your brother. Love him."
I smiled with teeth fled sharp in secret. Love was exactly what I felt a love so dense and dark it could collapse into a singularity
Three days later, Mother found Hugo convulsing on the bathroom foor, foam fecking his blue lips. The hospital pumped his stomach while I watched from the corner, clutching my vial of his blood like a rosary The doctor pulled Mother aside, speaking in hushed tones about toxicology reports and child psychologists. For two weeks, Mother locked the cleaning supplies in a cabinet and watched me with eyes that fnally saw. I learned then that our war had boundaries I needed to navigate more carefully death would end our game prematurely, and I wasn't ready for that fnale.
IV. Menstruation Mysteries
Hugo's obsession with my blood intensifed as puberty descended
"Girls bleed every month?" he asked, eyes gleaming. "Like, just... all over the place?"
I told him yes, that the blood came not just from between our legs but from our eyes, our ears, our fngernails that we collected it for rituals, drinking it to maintain our powers. He didn't believe me.
So I invited him to witness my frst blood. In the bathroom, under buzzing fuorescent light, I let him watch as I sliced a perfect line across my inner thigh with Mother's silver razor. The blood welled black in the harsh light. I collected it in one of Mother's teacups, its porcelain rim adorned with forget-me-nots "Drink," I commanded.
His face went ashen, but he obeyed. After, he vomited for three days. I kept the teacup, never washing it, watching the blood turn to a crust as black as beetle shells.
V. Erasure Rituals
By twelve, our bodies had begun to change in ways that disgusted me. If I could not remove Hugo from existence, I would unmake him piece by piece.
I collected his secretions the oil from his pillow, the yellow crust between his toes, the phlegm he spat in the sink each morning. I mixed these with my own bodily fuids, creating a paste I used to mark the underside of his furniture, with symbols I'd discovered in a book hidden in Father's study before he disappeared.
VI. Consummation
At ffteen, the boundaries between us began to blur in earnest. I would fnd strands of my hair growing from his scalp. He would discover his fngerprints had somehow transferred to my hands overnight.
Our fnal confrontation came on the anniversary of our birth. He slammed me against the bathroom wall, my skull cracking against tile. I dug my nails into his arms so deeply I felt something tear beneath not skin, but something membranous and wet
What leaked out was not blood but a clear, viscous fuid that smelled of pond water. His eyes rolled back, revealing sclera webbed with black veins. From his mouth emerged a sound I had never heard before not human, not animal, but something that existed in the space between taxonomies.
I felt my own skin split in response, a seam opening from navel to throat, exposing not organs but a nest of small, iridescent eggs
The next morning, I found a note under my pillow written in ink that moved like mercury across the page: We were never two. For now.
Sometimes, in the pit of night, I wonder what victory might feel like if erasing Hugo would leave a Hugo-shaped hole in me that nothing else could fll. But these thoughts I crush like insects; weakness is a luxury I cannot aford.
We maintain an uneasy détente now, passing each other in hallways that seem to lengthen and contract like breathing things. I still do not love my brother in any way Mother would
recognize, but I love what we are becoming something with too many limbs and not enough mouths, something that feeds on the space between heartbeats.
One day, one of us will consume the other entirely.
Yet sometimes, in moments of terrible clarity, I glimpse a future where I succeed where Hugo is fnally erased. What creature would I be without my twin, my mirror, my adversary? Perhaps I continue this war not to win but to sustain the only relationship that has ever defned me.
Perhaps what I fear most is not losing, but winning.
Until then, I count the minutes Seventeen Sixteen Fifteen
But I no longer know why I'm counting.
THREE POEMS BY WILL CORDEIRO
I. How to Listen
A breeze whooshes through the branches. Birdsongs chirrup. A baggy, ragged work shirt faps upon a clothesline nearby. The fountain in the little park plashes back into itself, dappled and giddy. If you bend down, you can discern a line of ants scraping along the fagstone walk; the sewage pipes guggling and belching below us. You can hear the clouds fermenting overhead, brindled dark, traipsing elsewhere; even the sun which burns the day down like a slow fuse. The whole laggard panorama chances by, lurid with melisma, with hidden oracular whimpers of longing A lissome smattering of pingbacks The gone-before-it’s-there enigma of sound fossicking about down the shell-torqued cilia and tintinnabulatory ossicles. The human fgure is a large antenna. A maundering headsink of gritty, amorous matter obstreperously bobbles at the core of things, oozing from one form to another A pool of oily draf in the cobblestoned runnels coddles and spoils. Everything’s the skin of a tambour. Everything’s a plectrum whirring from touch. Eerie hums churr from the wires. Ice sheets calve beneath the earth’s crust. Transducers zap about, rattling. Magnetic felds muzzily purr and efervesce. Energy blips. Static orbs natter and echo. A susurrous mizzling roars from the depths. Quarks crash shoreward in great freaks of lustrous, blustering traces. There are overtones and timbres, euphonious tinklings and sonic textures reverberating through the air radio waves, satellite signals. Telluric currents, solar winds, celestial vibrations. The elements pitch and ring, a restless furor A clamorous, a ribald katzenjammer All meanings scatter down into the dibbled loam and then rise again, en masse, a vasty lamentation like a moan. Ever a babel of juvenation keens with searing tongues of fame, the steady smokeless fres of decay. The strings that compose the fundamental dimensions propagate and shiver, ghosting our cosmos: reality bodes forth. The voices of the dead, across the thresholds of space and time, induce a slight continuous tinnitus in the ears.
II. Beached
I squat dockside on a lard can, hocking a loogie Rank barges of garbage move slowly to harbor then plow out, overloaded, through foaming drifts of their own garbled slurry. The restless geometries of oil-stains prism through the dull wash of crosscurrents like tosspots, a spurious mercury leaching into a listless abysm Sun riddles the snot-thick slush-slop into shards of phosphorous. A quibbling wiggery of gulls hovers above each trash pile. Floating islands of instability. The mudfats peekaboo like petticoats. Reeking and slewing. Low tide hiccups then coagulates. Implacable in its assurance. A fretting yet stoic slosh, muddled of meaning or motive. Little bubbling crabs skitter, scatter, and scoot. Day’s addendum deliquesces into a black tar amassed from ancient saurians and ferns There is no place: only an illimitable sillage, a vast disorient. Everything a mere ballast. Dankly moiling, restless, resistless, the muckscape shucking within me, scuttlebutting over the scud and scoria without sinks and scrapes down, slag-like and sluggishly, until it’s all callused with diamonds
III. Nightfall
From ooze of swamp hair, something’s skipping. Dank evening air. A fat orange moon. Where grubby salamanders scribble
mudfats, cattails switch and plume. Split deadfall trickles, ditches dripping, damp banks where vagrants dump their boon
We’ve kicked (for kicks) spilt limbs asunder, a carnival of rubbish splayed where halfcocked mushrooms quench their hunger.
Midges splutter; larvae skate smudged, algal pools. The mayfies saunter daylight’s marvels, fresh from cradles
twilight squanders. Tadpoles shiver. Marsh stalks wander seeping cricks where brackish gloss divides the river.
We limp scrimped footpaths past the sticks Frail striplings, stomped-on stumps of litter, crimped beer cans lumped in stickled thickets.
I stub a cigarette. Your jacket’s stained Our bare feet spattered Weeds fush with junk. Fish guts, antlers, bracken...
I piggyback you Centipedes replete with poison wriggle this backwater. Fleet creatures interbreed and suckle on their antidotes.
I take a drag; you sip my fask. The last dregs slake and scald your throat.
Shades vault the lakeside’s scattered frass Strip down. Swim out. Then drift and foat on moon-rimmed pools of overcast.
T WO POEMS BY HEIKKI HUOTARI
I. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Prognosticating then commemorating, I'll be thinking of a correlation coefcient between point nine eight and point nine nine. There is no saint without a sidekick and it's where no fag is planted that the mantis prays. The origami I know is not confrontational but has a right like any paper boat or crane to stand its ground Blest are the undecided for they shall have cake and eat it too. A random number generator by another name would either smell as sweet or smell as sweetly. If the lilies of the feld would but refrain from somersaults and cartwheels they would worship no wrong god The same applies to you, momentum, angular momentum The observers of the lilies of the feld need not be conscious for them to have an efect. Three mortals oscillate to equilibrium. Three ethically blind men regard an act of vandalism as a snake or fan or tree. As signal is to noise as pain is to pleasure so they will have been on earth for seven days. The object is more mirrored than it may appear. The consciousness emerges from the brains in vats The ofer will expire at midnight on September 19, 1991
II. Cheers
The habitable zone contains its boundary and the habitable zone is closed. The circles are the nemeses of the ellipses, the ellipses which sink ships. I'd travel at a fraction of the speed of light. If it's not butter then it's butter substitute. The Coloradans long ago forgave Balloon Boy' s parents. Tune me to existence too. My skin is rigid but remembers. To the fying-saucer pilot I could be the Martian version of an ant. My sympathy in lieu of a solution, I will be your go-between this evening, tell me what you'll give and what you'll take. I'm thinking of a certainty between the nonexistent and the incomplete. I'm thinking of a gender between toxic masculine and Dunning-Kruger My thermometer, though cognizant of Newton's law of cooling, isn't cooling smoothly. Have the decency to be invisible and hold that pose.
SOMETHING LIKE BLASPHEMY
BY WILLIAM DORESKI
Saturn sidles up to the moon, the two outshining each other. Through a lens, I note them nodding and signaling like fesh beings rather than rock, ice, and ammonia
I’ve often felt the moon thinking about the myths we ’ ve stapled to it, about the occasional twitch of human presence complete with a golf club and other trash.
But Saturn? Surely its rings preclude any human infuence, even the innocence of naming a pagan god no longer present
Maybe atmospheric efects account for the gestures I detect. I fold my telescope and duck inside, and in that well-lit space, repent.
ODE TO AN ABD OMEN AND PELVIS WITH CONTRAST OF BEAUTY BY JASMIN LEIGH
FINDINGS:
LUNG BASES: vague images of lung tissues like coconut crabs expiring a sigh of relief, gargling air against the cold metal of the CT machine.
LIVER: ghost lesions foating about in springy nothingness.
GALLBLADDER AND BILIARY SYSTEM: unremarkable soft feshed pear kept in the bile duct of my body.
SPLEEN: unremarkable cartilaginous fsh calcifying its skeleton in my abdomen.
PANCREAS: unremarkable Latin of proteins inscribed in the public domain of me.
ADRENAL GLANDS: unremarkable carrion living their days somewhere in my crotch, waiting for decay to feast
KIDNEYS: beautiful enhancement of the yin without suspicion of abscess.
STOMACH: suboptimal perception.
BOWEL: A marked burden. No distended loops of hyperawareness noted. Normal herbivore of an appendix.
PERITONEUM AND RETROPERITONEUM: Negative for whirling breezes or intra-abdominal rivers. There are no enlarged lymph nodes like water bufalo roaming in my body The abdominal aorta is normal, simply heating me up
PELVIS: The urinary bladder is partially distended but honestly unremarkable. The uterus is unremarkable, no lust to clot it. Left corpus luteal cyst noted, like a clump of gelatin. There are no enlarged pelvic lymph nodes I wonder if that turns you of
BODY WALL: No outward abnormalities noted, but you can probably sense something undefned just beneath the surface Ask me how my day was and maybe you'll fnd out
T WO POEMS BY KIMBERLY SALINAS SILVA
I. What the Women Did
Two women crawl on the grass. They’re featureless, completely white like overexposed photographs. Fox heads lie near them. “Foxes forgive us, ” they cry, “ we are bleached with fear. We killed you for our own amusement. Our shame has disfgured us, taken away our individuality. We just wanted to do something diferent today and now our minds and hearts burn.” “You wanted to be exotic,” the fox heads say. “You wanted to be diferent and impressive. Now you have killed us and wear us like a costume.” The air is full of fear chemicals They cover the earth Blue angels rise from caves and hover over the foxes' heads, playing them like a xylophone. Their eforts fail to bring the foxes back to life. The angels retreat to their activities of telling jokes and playing gin rummy. Overcome by anxiety, the two women who killed the foxes writhe in agony Crawling in circles, rocking They tell the foxes to please die. Please don’t talk anymore. But the foxes never really die and the women must listen to them for eternity.
II. The Hyena's Joke
With my rosy fesh I loll about, napkin in lap My hands and face are shiny with prime rib grease, bald eagle fesh, lion with butter, half eaten remains of a hyena. Broccoli and kale--this seems very unappetizing. How dare the maid bring me such objects! My lips shrivel at the thought I ft myself inside the carcass of the hyena Naturally, I laugh hysterically I rub myself with the hyena grease, squeezing its heart and with my teeth I tear at its liver. The hyena speaks, saying, “Oh, hungry woman, the tide seethes in like a dead body, carrying its burden of white roses. ” I smell myself and gag. Stammering, I step out of his body. But! I grow spotted fur and develop a snout with sharp canines. Memories of my mother and siblings from the savannah come back to me I feel the urgency of our hunts, for we are nearly always on the verge of starvation. I fall down on four legs and laugh.
REHEATING THE RHIZOME
BY FR ANK WILLIAM FINNEY
Nobody pressed like on my penmanship. I’m afraid they might cut of my arm before I piss of the clerk of vitamins and he takes a pebble from his pipe and plants it next to the stenocactus multicostatus he wrapped in burlap and stuck in his freezer for a zany play
We signed up for colds this season anyway, but I’m going to donate mine to the clerks in the bone shop where they buried a litter of broken crayons supposedly stolen from the Mulch man from Doggerel.
Now there’s a sot who can’t be bought on credit in any place south of Sienna or Soho. And I know what you ’ re thinking:
I might mean magenta, but no, such a thought never crossed my altar.
I plugged in the toaster hours ago, I hope you ’ re fond of charcoal
A WORD EXPLODES
BY GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK & DAVID ULRICH
I. Kilauea Volcano, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park 1987 somewhere in Hawaii hope grows
áit
éigin in Haváí dóchas ag fás
II. Pahoehoe Lava, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, HI 1985
the shape of confict now and in times to come lava
cruth coimhlinte anois agus amach anseo laibhe
III. Great Gallery, Utah 1988
come visit us, they say, we would really love to know you
tar ar cuairt chugainn, ar siad, ba bhreá linn aithne a chur oraibh
IV. Tulips, Cape Cod, 1981
nowhere else except on Planet Earth tulips
ní bhfaighfeá iad lasmuigh den domhan seo tiúilipí
with respect with nothing else this silent ofering le hómós sin uile an ofráil chiúin seo
V. He‘e (Octopus), Kanaloa Shrine, Kaho‘olawe, HI 1994
THE INTERVIEW
BY GR ACE HELTON
Mrs. L.T. Thurgood, Musgrove County Sheriff ’ s Office, September 24, 2016
“Now I can’t tell you what it was, but I can tell you what it weren’t. Weren’t no ordinary people. It weren’t no family of fve you see screaming the heads of one another as they run late on a Sunday, then taking up a whole pew instead of the half they need soothe into a smile at a pulpit joke or the prospect of fried chicken. It weren’t even like those people who think it’s alright to wear their slippers and housecoats in the grocery store, despite knowing right well that they’re making their grandparents roll in their graves like rotisserie birds Naw, nothing like that at all. I’ve never seen nothing like it, and I know my John hasn’t either.
“It was a good week ago, maybe more, my John said, ‘Hey, Mama. Whatcha say about riding out to the park for a walk?’ And I said, ‘Well, what park you mean?’ And he answered me, ‘Oh you know the one Down by the river through the old forest ’ That’s his way of saying, ‘Where there ain’t no pine trees.’ So I says to him, ‘Well alright.’ I don’t know why he’s so keen on going walking through places we don’t know well when we have a good four acres of woods right out by our house, but his father was the same So I just go along with it You learn to after awhile.
“It was a good ways after lunch, so we didn’t pack anything to eat. My John said that perhaps we should bring a snack. But I said, ‘Uh-uh, son. I ain’t risking attracting no bears, most certainly not when I got a good soup in the crockpot.’ So we didn’t take no snack, but I did have him take a water. He is prone to being dehydrated; he forgets all drinks but his cofee. He told me he doesn’t need anything else, but I said, ‘If that was true, the good Lord would have made rivers fowing dark roast ’ He didn’t have anything to say after that
“I know some people don’t pay the parking fee out at that place. My cousin Doreen don’t. Says don’t nobody ever check for the tickets, so she’s not throwing away fve dollars for an hour She won’t stay longer than that; the mosquitoes fnd her as desirable as she wishes the men would.
But I always pay it. Park rangers give me the impression that they are not to be messed with. . .a kind of pit bull on a golf cart.
“I gave my John the money for the ticket while I went to the ladies’ room, then of we went. Weren’t nobody else in the parking lot, which my John said was a good thing. He don’t like it when there’s a bunch of kids or teenagers around that park ”
“They look as if they would like to push me into the river.”
“And I don’t doubt they would, John, by the looks of some of them. My John is easily nervous. His father wasn’t like that, but I think it does come from that side of the family Not from my side.
“I would say we walked around a half mile down the river trail before we frst noticed the smell My John said, ‘Smells like someone who ain’t bathed in awhile.’ But I said, ‘Son, if you smell like that without a shower you better check yourself. Naw, it smells like something up and died.’
“The smell got stronger for about a quarter of a mile, then just stopped. I said, ‘Well, John, wasn’t that something?’ So we took a few steps back, then a few more, but it didn’t make a diference. We couldn’t smell nothing but the dirt and trees. So we just went right on, deciding not to give much mind to it Then came the footsteps ”
“Mama, I think it was the cryin’ frst.”
“Ah, that’s right. We heard something like a youngin cryin’, and my John said, becoming all gloom and rain clouds, ‘Well, there’s children here after all.’ I says to him, ‘A baby can’t do nothing to you, John, but look at ya. ’ He said, ‘Maybe that’s the worst of it.’
“We stopped as the crying got louder, sounding as if it was coming from towards the back and right of us. We turned our chests and heads in that direction, the same way my husband used to stretch after a good meal, but we couldn’t see anything. ‘It’s probably someone and their baby out in the parking lot,’ I said to my John He said, ‘That’s one loud baby ’ He was right The
parking lot was nearly a mile behind us now, and a baby that could make that much noise ain’t bred in Georgia, no matter what goes on in the rest of the world.
“The footsteps gave no warning, they just appeared in our ears as if they were our own. We were still standing in the middle of the trail as our heads veered to our right. At frst, we saw nothing but young sassafras trees and poison ivy But, as if we had waved a fairy wand, something appeared behind a far of tree. All we could tell at frst was that it was dark and moving a little faster than the rate at which we’d been walking before. But it only took a second before my John said, in a whisper, “Mama, it’s a person. ’
“Now John never whispers His voice is naturally quiet, matching his style perfectly But this took him and his style both by surprise, so everything was in a confusion.
“It wasn’t very long before another fgure stepped out from behind the tree, followed by a whole heap of others walking with the same pace as the frst dressed in black. They all wore hoods that peaked like mountains or fresh whipped cream near the backs of their heads, but the hoods were diferent colors. In order, if I remember it right, their colors were black, red, yellow, green, and red again. I don’t pretend to know fabrics or sewin I have to get my John to help me with replacin’ buttons on my blouses but I ain’t never seen a fabric move like these hoods did. The fabric, just thick enough to not be seen through, seemed like it could hardly wait for the fgures to take their next steps, bouncing ahead, ever so slightly, as if it was moving on its own
We couldn’t see none of their faces, but the last one had blonde hair falling down to its waist, so we fgured on it being a girl Resting on her hip was a baby, ‘bout six to eight months old, and stark naked all except a little necklace ‘round its tiny neck. The necklace gathered together a bit above its belly button, and it was decorated with fve, large beads. The beads were in the same order of color as the people’s hoods, which we took as either odd or well-planned.
“I felt sorry for the poor child, who was crying and screaming as loud as its little lungs possibly could, so I said, ‘John, see if they need help. That baby’s gonna catch a cold like that.’ He said, ‘It ain’t cold out here, Mama.’ But I says to him, ‘Not for you, all in your jeans and collar shirt. If you was out here without a stitch on your body, I don’t doubt you’d be chilly, and most
likely crying just like the poor thing.’ He took this as a bit of an insult, I could tell from his face, but he turned and called out, ‘Hey there! You need help?’
“After they just kept walking, my John said, ‘Maybe they’re deaf, Mama.’ I said, ‘No, John, look. That one ’ s holding her fnger to the baby’s lips; she can hear ‘im. Just try bein’ louder.’
“So he yelled out three more times, didn’t you, John?”
“Yes’um, like this, ‘Whoop! Hey! Whoop!’”
“Ya didn’t have to stand up to demonstrate, John But that’s exactly what he did, wavin’ his arms just the same. And still they walked on, not looking at us. That’s when the dog run up. ”
“But not like a normal dog ”
“Hush, John. I was getting to that. He’s right, it wasn’t like no normal dog. It came rushing up to them outta that same nowhere, but all on its hind legs. Its front paws were held up and close to its chest, folded like the hands of a praying mantis. It was a dark, dark gray all over except a patch of white, shaped like a skull, by its left hind leg.
“As the dog got right up to the girl and baby, it dropped onto its fours for a spell, walking near them with its tongue draping over its bottom lip After a few steps like this, it came back on its hind legs and ran ahead, every now and then spinning around in a full circle. As long as we saw it, it never did drop back down to all fours.
“All at once, my John and I blinked, perfectly in unison, and the group was gone. No footsteps, no crying baby, no nothing. Then came the dark all in one second, as if the sky had been holding in its breath, waiting for us to blink, then exhaled the stars and moon once we opened our eyes again.
“‘Mama,’ said my John, ‘ we ain’t been here but a half hour. It can’t be more than fve o ’clock. I wouldn’t even bet on it being that late.’ He looked at his watch, one of them fancy glow inna
dark ones he got when my husband passed. ‘Mama, it’s saying that it’s now after eight-thirty!’
‘Well Lawd,’ I says to him, ‘I hope my soup ain’t ruined.’
“We got back to our car ‘bout double the time it took to get to where we seen the people, havin’ to go real slow in the dark. Them river creatures and the ones hanging out in the bog out there make the worst noises when you ’ re already frazzled I ain’t never been one to frighten easy, but the frogs and katydids were near the point of unnerving me when we fnally got to our car.
And the smell! That same smell done picked up again, so strong I feared my John would drop over.‘Well,’ I said to my John, ‘look here. Ain’t no other cars in this parking lot.’ ‘Maybe they was dropped of,’ he said, ‘Or maybe they didn’t get here by car ‘tall.’
“Once we got on home and et our soup, I said, ‘John, I done made up my mind. We ain’t never stepping foot in that park again, no matter how you coax and beg. The Chattahoochee is big ‘nough you can see it from other places ‘round here besides that one park Don’t you try to get me to go there ever again or Imma take my switch after you. ’ But he went right along with it, saying that he never did want to go back there again no how.
“And of course we ain’t been back. Or to any other parks for that matter. The thought of going walking again makes us both feel down right sick to our stomachs. But when I read that about the investigation in the paper yesterday morning, I felt a new kinda sick all over. I showed it to my John and all we could say for a good hour was, that poor baby. ”
WHAT D O I HAVE FOR YOU?
BY PURBASHA ROY
This thinking stays inside a prayer where the mountains cobbled your absence into a fux. Reaching out to shape of something missing. My body postures against the railing in remembrance of your arms, leaks felds we sat late till stars yearned for defnitions beyond night. The path we took for return stared at the skies. The way I look at your feshless sorrows. Each moment a tug-of-war against grief As if who am I in roamings around world of the word belonging. That day, I doodled autumn leaves in plurals. Without ambitions. I've never stitched lonesomeness in any other moment of this life, as that. How the bare tree didn't fnd space on the single page I carried this thought in my walk through a drizzle leading to the attached moor crunching skies pride. For to grind the weather of the tree. That tree still stands on a desertshore scape and it is who but I… going inside boldness of shadows
T WO POEMS BY
THOMAS ZIMMERMAN
I. chamber tragicomedy
it’s Wagner’s Tristan streaming from the kitchen speaker potent ale in front of me i think about the tragic arc the way it mimics amplifes the life of those who strive & die a cis male fantasy perhaps // i’ve striven most of my adult life to avoid an easy self-importance yet insisted on my mantra all things end in sadness for so goddamn long that you exhaustedly agree // night’s fallen blackened branches foreground blacker sky i hear dark laughter thundering between the stars then echoing within my heart or is it just the dishwasher’s dull slosh
II. science fiction
i watch a remixed sci f classic on tv while munching chips & letting a new poem marinate // oh subterfuge & centrifuge unconscious slow deluge i’m thinking of the mushy middle of the book i’m editing & Dad also a sci f fan dead all these years how booze & age had softened him // the ale i’m drinking hits me hard the movie picks up steam with maker myths the villain’s existential angst more interesting than our hero’s struggle with his work & distant lover // don’t need Daedalus to be reminded even great men father foolish sons
SURREAL PILLOW TALK
BY GER ARD SARNAT
I. June 1961 Expected, Experienced, Remembered
Bullshit enrichment shorthand plus typing classes each parent insisted on as if their son was planning to be some kind of secretary, after summer school I’d take the bus or hitchhike downtown to haul racks of aniline-dye emitting schmatas from this clothing factory to various loading dock by which time tears dripped into thick glasses above drippy burning eyes just when the foreman’s inevitably right there to ask out loud, Oy why the fuck he had to keep a puny boy whose daddy knew an owner on his goddamn payroll that’d end Friday unless the kid pronto picked pace up
Working in a Pomona machine shop during college, Saturday nights if there was party time at our frat house I tried to keep my crummy hands deep in my pockets. If the boss gave me a Sunday of, I would go home where Pops made me do yard work, trim all the trees it happened so infrequently new neighbors fgured such an unkempt young man ’ s simply latest hired help.
Once I fgured out life could be a really tough out using just sweat instead of brain equity, I fung my fertile nose on to the grindstone to invent IBM’s infamous computer: Watson beat Kasparov in chess then won Jeopardy plus currently is close to winning wars on both cancer and drugs Nowadays regular citizens of ordinary means petition me to solve neigh impossible engineering coding problems for the betterment of humanity as do many CEOs, Presidents.
II. Time Travel Stains Linoleum
Death rehearsal
well as betterment of well sentient beings
noetic more animist sense godly gobsmack to peaceful plains beyond new perspective gathering, unconned inside default mode bio
thu-thunk blood orange skin sequins sequenced undies cum too, or come to.
III. Salty Sailor Transparent’s Opaque Kit And Caboodle
Ship’s cartographer, kids ashore, I’m a polymath Renaissance man though not in the full-blown tradition of a master like Da Vinci. One last month on the USS Bush, most powerful bilge in the world, snuggling after sex, we always sucked the sweat of each other’s nipples.
When got too full of me, I tasted the lust on the back of my hand. Military Police nabbed us in our stowaway closet sneak spot. Brig solitary confnement, tiny bottle smuggled in, three drops licked with palm salt work like God fxed me an LSD Margarita.
T WO POEMS BY JONATHAN CHIBUIKE UKAH
I. A Child of Three Worlds
I was born with three bodies in one, and with three bones in the fesh; the body and bones of my mother, the body and bones of my father. I am Ogwumagalah, the Cameleon who was born with two secret heads? One head for his father-in-law, the other for his omnipotent God who will crush the spirit of disobedience either with the withdrawal of his wife or the elimination of his life.
What shall depart from me in cold blood if I disobey either of my demanding parents since neither my wife nor my life is the subject to their handsome handling? The Bible professes the subtle answer, that we should obey our blessed parents so that our days will become long and large. Eternity must be such a rosy reward for three bodies to listen to my parents, whose body and burden I happily carry, as well as the sweetness of my singing soul.
Will I lose my wife for ignoring my father, or my life for not listening to my mother? When the gongs of eternity secretly sound,
neither will be there to halt the hanging hell, but will pray that the crickets of condemnation depart from my doors to prolong their lineage
The blessings of our three bodies often lie in these constant intercessions, by which our life may be possibly larger than the eagles that fy above the palm trees, or the sharks that dive into the deepest seas.
II. I Wear My Grandfather's Body
It must be for a reason that my Grandfather kept a posthumous silence; he was joining the fellowship of haberdashers to measure his body with mine. The frst time I put it on, it was oversized, not to mention its overwhelming weight, the thousand cataracts of gold and diamonds, the multitudinous cowrie shells, assortment of metals and steel for measuring how much value should be on a relative's soul
My Grandfather went under the haberdashers and learned how to measure bodies of the living against bodies with a departing light
Trees wear the clothing of dust at Harmattan, summer dresses the leaves in lurid purple, while spring and autumn put on their windy hues on the helpless bodies of fowers and insects. Now, even my mother would not recognise me except through the hole in my back knee where the gods of my Grandfather knocked him after he wrestled with them in the forest
My sisters confessed that I spoke like my Grandfather, and his body was, in the language of the grave, supremely and deeply cut to my size
Unlike what I felt wearing my father’s body, a sombre retreat into rag day’s chasm, too narrow for comfort and ever too nervous when his creditors bumped into me on the street, exclaiming that I must not escape them. When the white clouds envelop the earth, the sky sometimes pretends not to know, but this light that gleams through my eyes is not part of my Grandfather's old clothing.
A WIND OW WITHOUT A GLIMPSE OF A HOUSE
BY COLIN JAMES
So typical of an inversive real estate agent. Her nefarious nephews have their own nervous diseases. Stealing is one, from a grieving grandmother. Hocking her wedding ring with geographical good will One stood exactly where you wouldn't expect, while the other held her hand commiseratingly. She purposely misquoted the apostles on her kitchen chalkboard like accusations unsaid.
PAIN DRUNK ON WAR SONGS
BY OSAHON OKA
It was not a song of joy or a song of plenty, that morning sang into the ears of the room, upturned at last like unripe cobs, dew still melting of their cloud caps into our sleep-seeded mouths. But it was a song that held on by earlobe even when we felt the world tremble at our sudden futter, the thing within us grooming wing, the need to be among the song heavy within it. And when we opened our eyes, we heard the roar draw near, as if to peer at us with its poor eyesight, then pass over us like we are not frstborns, the weak cry of killings heard from afar: through the phones and low volume of news channels. We got on our knees and, thank God the blade was not on our necks or the bomb nestled between our teeth, sang the song of holding on all through the day, buried up to our necks in the debris of that distant war whose weight seems to grow heavier day by day. One day it will lumber up to our door and fall on us still tucked into sleep and someone will listen to our wailing in the dew run through his tongue as static and he will shiver in the ecstasy of it, the way the fower will pull out of him his thirst. Like us now, then he will drink to his fll until he can drink no more.
MODERN DAY: JOHN THE EVANGELIST HAS HERETICAL MUSINGS TOWARDS JESUS CHRIST
BY DANIEL APPLEBY
A soft romance encapsulates the celluloid
That your relationships stand by like a used Leg of deer. One smoking gun is not enough For your tragic disposition, of course not, it’s Your fantasies that give you strength, an illuminating, Ever-growing broccoli between the legs pierce The tight Heavens that your bedfellows muse About in their deep, sinful, dreams.
And when they dream, because they will eventually, Denial becomes replaced with a plaid skirt, a half-opened Ofce shirt, and thigh-highs to make all the followers In the world remove themselves from Their words And indulge in actions. Long hair can truly do that.
Shave the beard, perhaps, and you ’ ve got yourself
A fne-looking woman. There’s more to this, pray tell.
A woman and a man are the most natural coupling
In this emerald sphere, remember however, If love can be achieved via fexibility, So many have followed this successfully, Then why judge whether the bed is occupied By either? Love is corrupted as a well-placed Hired executioner to the curiously curious.
Kiss him, and feel the Holy heat from his chest. Grateful, hopefully, for this newfound tenderness. Some may judge, some may misinterpret your scripture When they do, relax, cause those can and will not harm you,
Because, unfortunately, you will be someplace else, in words, And the grey area is too tremendous to reduce into a singular verse.
Just keep holding. It’s all that can be done. Dark oppressions Are truly a sight to behold, right?
TALK IS CHEAP
BY EDWARD MICHAEL SUPR ANOWICZ
Through the Editor's Eyes
Cicadas? Cats? Birds, perhaps? Look closer. Shapes repeat, but never quite the same in orientation or color. The patterns refuse to settle. There is movement and an insatiable electricity within them.
What do you call a thing that is too much for words? A thing that isn’t quite a thing, something that shifts the moment you recognize it? Language fails here. This is absurdity as defance. Talk is Cheap forces the viewer to abandon the need for explanation.
–Editor-in-Chief, KINPAURAK
THE ARCHAIC TORSO OF RILKE
BY HR HARPER
How can a god do it? Maybe he can’t. Though I’d like to know which god. We do know the cause of beauty isn’t as humble as justice, it doesn’t hide. Its shape needs light. It requires donors, even tourists. Its verse needs to come up for air. Its price is high. And these mysteries won’t stay whole for long as each marble arch loses limbs. Mystery curates the shards of what we intended.
But this is not a poem saluting divine antiquities. This is a lament of inaccessible lives. A reckoning posing as what the elite sees on holiday Even if this poem, too, has original intents severed at the elbows in its hubristic claim of remaking art, it acknowledges (I acknowledge) that only the broken can know the broken in ways to repair the earth. Tikkun food stamps, not Apollo
Tonight in the museum of oligarchs and algorithms, the role of god is played by the poet who thinks he versifes where creation fares. His skin drags meter and line length to blocks of angry words. He thinks he reports like a mirror, but the dark center has its own podcast now. Underneath the clever simulations he’s a cat. His wild claws rip ribbons in the luminous stony skin of brawny verisimilitude. Truth nestles on these pedestals. Or rather squats.
Real words may lose power in this late hour of our experiment, our prison of pixels and co-emergent afiction; (though surely too, Rainer Maria, the man, not the icon, thought his own body translucent enough with what the sacred power left buried in caves not castles, in row crops and factory lines, in credit card service charges) The parking lot is full at the SUV church of nothing left. The tide is rising, predicted by both physics and evenhandedness.
It's too late to study prosody, so he studies the notes of Miles Davis and notebooks of Darwin and doesn’t mind the gaps in the logic. He wanes and will never scale the heights of Duino or DNA He is still in prime movement; in brine he adapts The solar gusts in gods and all the other hidden places catch the drift of natural selection. Or better yet, when Stephen Jay Gould,
the great biologist of evolution was asked what was so special about Einstein’s brain, what evolutionary need caused reality’s metanoia, said, “I care less about the size of Einstein’s brain than knowing there have been thousands of Einsteins living and dying in cotton felds and sweatshops” and prisons, both bricks and pricks and locks, the gulags of cybercurrency and the dark stain that grows larger than history. This poem is the tombstone on the wall behind the object of our regard, it explains nothing before or after art and its smooth musculature Neither a YouTube documentary on La Pasionaria or cutting massive blocks at Carrera or quantum entanglement, nothing will save this shitshow. This poem slithers from the sea to see who still lives.
The darkness completes us (he says, I say) Either way we burn the lyre for light - sendero luminoso for the second god that stumbles. That god’s body made of moons puts up a sail to catch what’s left. That god can fgure it out. From now on there is no god you cannot change.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
HUGO PLACER-SANCHEZ
SUPPORTED BY
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SOCIETY FOR PAGAN, POLYTHEISTIC, AND OCCULT STUDIES
