Issue 7- The Unconventional Courier (April 2023)

LIT FOR HEAVY HEARTS AND HEAVIER MINDS

ASHWINI GANGAL

JOHN GUZLOWSKI

S.T. BRANT

MARK J. MITCHELL

WILLIAM DORESKI

GERRY FABIAN

MICHELLE LIZET FLORES

FABRICE POUSSIN

NICK YOUNG

BLANKA PILLAR

Acknowledgment:

We at The Unconventional Courier wish to thank the writer/artist/photographer Tetè DePunk for her bright photograph of Trinity College (University of Toronto at St. George, Ontario, Canada) for this month's cover.

You can follow Tetè on Instagram:

@tete.depunk and Twitter:

@punk tete

About the Photographer

Teté is an unconventional writer, artist and podcaster, whose passions run gamut from comics to literature, to 80's Synth music to Pol-Sci to chess to tarot-deck collecting.

She is currently working on novels, such as "70 Fierce Years"(on hiatus) "The Road Beyond The Hill", as well as poetry works, "The 40-day Eulogy" and nonfiction "Christofascism Killed My Father".

Teté is the creator and host of her own podcast, "The Real Stuff", available on Spotify and Anchor.fm.

Keep up with Teté:

@ Instagram: tete.depunk

@Twitter: @punk tete

Boomerang

By Nick Young

Joy, a frustrated young woman, attempts to leave her fly-speck of a hometown. But can she ever leave where her roots are?

Hotoli and Botoli

By Ashwini Gangal

Twins Hotoli and Botoli reflect on their differences- and their similarities.

Postmodernism

By John Guzlowski

Author John Guzlowski explores the definition and substance of Postmodernist Literature in our current age.

Scenery

By Blanka Pillár

A moving vignette reflecting on the everchanging nature of love against the trials of time.

Poetry

"Games They Play" and Other Poems

By Fabrice Poussin

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual"

By Michelle Lizet Flores

By S.T. Brant

By Mark J. Mitchell

By William Doreski

By Gerry Fabian

and Other Poems

Country" and Other Poems

Discord" and Other Poems

Cruelty of Yaweh" and Other Poems

Boomerang by Nick Young

Boomerang

By Nick Young

(Twitter: @NickYou87166031

Instagram: @zenblues)

“It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place.”

Cornell Woolrich, The Black Angel

As she passed the city limits sign she stepped hard on the gas. No more town speed limit.

No more fucking town, she said to herself, reaching for the cigarette lighter.

Joy Tallmadge was two months shy of thirty and two hours past her vow of never blowing out the candles on another birthday cake in Creek Bend, a dirt-bag dot on the road map. Yes, it was the place. Mostly it was him.

She lit her cigarette and nudged the side vent window open so that the smoke was sucked out into the cool April night.

No moon.

Joy did not much like driving after the sun went down, not on that twolane blacktop, not in her state of mind.

Fifteen more miles and I'll hit Route Three.

Then? It wouldn't be Sikeston. She was done with Missouri. Now, she was done with Illinois, too. Three hours I

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

If her nerves could take driving in the dark that long.

She feared a creature, maybe a racoon, scuttling across the pavement, freezing in her headlight beams, causing her to swerve.

Worse, it might be a deer leaping without warning from the trees that crowded each side of the road. Or, what if her car broke down with her all by herself? There was so much that could go bad.

And if it can go bad, it'll damn sure go bad for me.

Nervously she took a deep drag off her cigarette and pulled it away. A flake of tobacco stuck to her chapped lower lip, and she began working at it with the tip of her tongue.

Goddamn him.

Running. Again.

She had been in Creek Bend for a year-and-a-half, and she had made her peace with the town, drab as it was. At least there had been no melodrama in her life.

Not like Sikeston or Cape Girardeau before that. Not until she had hooked up with Travis Freeman. That started it all over again.

Now, with the pavement spooling out in front of her, Joy was desperate for some distraction from the thrum of the car's motor and the anxiety and anger squeezing her chest like a vise. She clicked on the radio and began spinning the dial up through the frequencies.

Through the crackle and fuzz, she finally caught the signal and the tail end of "Higher and Higher."

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

"Jackie Wilson on the Mighty Ten-Ninety, KAAY, where the hits never stop, night people!" And while disc jockey rocked, he rolled into "Born to be Wild." Travis liked to crow that it was his theme song.

That station in Little Rock where was it? Nine hundred?

Oh, fuck me! I can't even get away from him on the goddamn radio!

She snapped it off, took a last drag from her cigarette and flipped the butt out the window. It was pushing one and the thick clouds that had been rolling in steadily for the better part of an hour began to open up, fat drops that drummed heavily on the windshield.

Just what I needed.

She turned on the wipers, started them whipping across the glass, throwing off thick ropes of water. At the same time, she eased up on the accelerator as the rain began washing down in sheets. This stretch of road was especially treacherous asphalt, unmarked, snaking through hilly terrain.

There were no good places to pull off.

Joy didn't trust the shoulder, which was narrow, falling away sharply into a deep ditch. So, with the beams of her headlights cutting a murky wedge through the downpour, she white-knuckled the steering wheel.

Her eyes flicked to the rear view mirror, worried that the heavy rain would find a way into the trunk of her shitbox Corvair, where she had hurriedly thrown her clothes and what few possessions she called her own.

Goddamn him!

"I can't take it no more, Mace," she had said to the other girl working the lunch counter that night at the truck stop on the north end of town.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

"He gettin' rough with you again?" Macy asked, knowing the answer was always the same with Joy.

"Sometimes I just want to kill him."

"I'da done it already. I don't let no fucking man raise a hand to me."

"This is it. The last time. I'm outta here this crummy-ass job and this dead-end town and my shitty life with him."

She finished her shift, took her paycheck from the back room slot labeled with strip of masking tape that had her name written on it in ballpoint and went straight to Travis' trailer, gathered up her things and climbed behind the wheel.

As she drove away, she cast a look back at the rundown single-wide that occupied the lot nearest the road at the mobile home park.

'Scenic Vistas.' What a joke!

A dozen or so trailers old, poorly kept up, with more cracked red clay than grass for any kind of yards to speak of. It was dismal, a place that blighted the outskirts of the town like a fly speck.

Joy had known such places before, really had never shaken them since moving in with her boyfriend a month after she quit high school.

He was twenty-one; she was seventeen. Her father had no use for him, but she couldn't have cared less. The old man never paid her one day's worth of respect or affection.

The same way he treated her mother. He was, plain and simple, a lousy bastard who drank himself into dark rages, until the night five years before, when he put both barrels of an over-under in his mouth and ended everyone's misery.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

Joy hadn't bothered with the funeral.

But her corrosive relationship with the man she'd taken up with Jim Tatum was his name set a tone for her life that kept repeating, a bad dream that had unfolded yet again, forcing her to cut and run.

Jesus, I can't see a thing!

She had slowed the car to a crawl and turned on the high beams. But with the windshield starting to fog up, it made the visibility worse, so she quickly switched the headlights back and swiped her hand across the glass, clearing it enough so that she caught the outline of an overpass up ahead.

She tapped the brakes and eased to the side of the road beneath its shelter.

Abruptly, the pounding of the rain stopped, leaving the frantic wheeze and creak of the wipers.

Joy shut them off, slipped the car into park and lit a fresh cigarette. She let herself slide down until her head rested on the back of the seat and drew in a deep lungful of smoke. She didn't think it was possible to feel so bonetired.

My life is nothin' but a broken record.

Sometimes she wished she could cry and this was one of them but there were no tears. Not any more. She was all cried out. What remained was anger at herself. And frustration.

Why?

Each guy had turned out to be like the one before, and all of them carbons of the old man in their skill at inflicting heartache.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

Travis? Well, it had seemed different with him in the beginning. He was back from two tours in 'Nam, poor like her, struggling to make some kind of life as a mechanic at the truck stop.

The war had left deep scars.

He was edgy, suspicious, withdrawn. But she knew he was hurt and vulnerable, and while he pushed others away, he let her in; and she salved his wounds, calming him, making him feel whole, at least fleetingly.

And giving to him allowed her to renew the sense of herself that the other men had tried so hard to crush, the belief in her worthiness beyond the sad trappings of her existence.

For a few months, the hard angles of life became softer, with a glimmer of hope that she just might have a future with this one. But then the old pattern began again. The more she offered of herself, the angrier he became.

When it happened, especially when he was drinking, he took it out on her verbally, bitterly.

"You needy little bitch! You want to suck the life out of me!"

Then it turned physical. Not every time, but lately more often than not, sometimes when she least expected it. The bruises she could cover with makeup or long sleeves and high collars. Inside, her soul curdled.

It never failed that the remorse followed. He would break down, baring his shame, begging her forgiveness, and she would relent because he held her in a way that pulled her from the lip of the abyss of extinction.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

And in those moments, filled with soothing words and passionate caresses, she absolved him, fearing abandonment more than his cutting her heart yet again.

Joy sat up, threw her cigarette away and laid her forehead on the steering wheel.

Outside, the storm seemed to be losing some of its fury. She sighed and reflected on her slender prospects.

There wasn't much money to make a new start. She had managed to squirrel away a few dollars, tips mostly, which she had wadded up in her haste to leave. She picked her purse up from the seat and snapped it open, pulling out the bills and folded pay envelope. By the dim dashboard lights, she counted out the bills: ninety-eight dollars.w

God -- that's it?

All the rest of the money she had in the world was in her last check.

No way that's going to make another hundred.

She saw that the flap on the pay envelope had already been opened, so she folded it back and reached inside.

Along with her check, out came a small piece of paper. It was smudged and smelled of motor oil, lined, with a frayed edge, torn from a spiral-bound notepad.

With her thin fingers she angled the paper to catch what light there was inside the car.

The writing was nervous, a pencil scrawl: I'm sorry, little buttercup. I truly am. I love you like sunshine in the morning. T.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Boomerang by Nick Young

She closed her eyes, her lips drawn tight.

Not this time.

The downpour had subsided into fitful showers, bursts of lightning and intermittent thunder. Joy tossed Travis' note onto the seat beside her, shifted into drive and pulled slowly back onto the pavement and out from under the overpass.

She thought about the radio again but decided she preferred the slow rhythm of the windshield wipers.

He must take me for a real fool.

She drove on for several more miles; but there was no exhilaration, no feeling of triumph or liberation that welled up within her.

We started out so good together.

There grew a sadness more profound than any she had ever known, and a yearning for human touch so strong she thought her insides would burst.

He wrote. He never done that before.

She resisted her first impulse but finally relented and reached out until her fingers found the scrap of notepad paper. She lifted it up and read it again, then put it close to her nose, inhaling its smell.

Maybe it was me after all.

Another mile, maybe two and in the Chevy's headlights, Joy spotted a mailbox on her left at the entrance to a gravel driveway that cut into a thick stand of trees.

The Unconventional Courier

Boomerang by Nick Young

She slowed, pulled in and sat, feeling the ragged, low rumble of the car as it idled.

A dull half-moon slid from behind the last scraps of storm clouds.

The rain had moved northeast and the wind had fallen away.

After a long moment, she took a deep breath, then turned the car around.

The dashboard clock glowed green: 1:25.

He'll be waiting.

About the Author

Nick Young is a retired award-winning CBS News Correspondent.

His writing has appeared in more than two dozen publications including the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fiction on the Web, Bookends Review, the Nonconformist Magazine, Sandpiper, the San Antonio Review, Flyover Magazine, Pigeon Review, Fiction Junkies, Typeslash Review, The Best of CaféLit 11 and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies. He lives outside Chicago.

You can find him on Twitter: @NickYou87166031 and Instagram: @zenblues

Boomerang by Nick Young

Hotoli and Botoli

Written by Ashwini Gangal

(Twitter: @writerashwini)

“Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.”

– Sam Levenson

It was an entire month before Hotoli could articulate, to her twin sister Botoli, or even to herself, why moving to their new house, deeper into the city centre of Rajahmundry, made her feel so uncomfortable. Not in any startling way, but in a more chronic, diffused sort of way.

She was relieved to have moved away from the rural belt of Andhra, where cement homes were an anomaly amid dense foliage.

Besides, the new house, like their old home, stood along the banks of the pythonic Godavari River, so there was a sense of continuity, but only in an intellectual sort of way.

She didn’t feel it viscerally in her limbs, her belly, her gut. It wasn’t about feeling culturally out of place either; the sisters, originally from a faraway hilly region, now in their 50s, had been living in South India for four decades.

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

There was something else.

It became clear to her one morning while bathing.

Hotoli was standing under the shower, scrubbing herself between her legs as the water pounded her head from above.

In their old home, where they collected bath water in a bucket, she would squat on the bathroom floor and clean the open folds of her vagina with one hand, while liberally throwing mugs of water on it with the other. It was an intimate cleansing ritual that left her with a sense of complete control.

Though the water available to her was finite, she had more agency over how she used it.

Now, the gushing flow above her head was oppressive in a way that took her farther away from her own body. She couldn’t bring the water, despite its abundance, to her crevices while standing like that, and never felt clean enough.

When she mentioned this to her sister over dinner one night, her profound epiphany was met with loud, witchy cackles.

Botoli, the more practical of the two, had no time for such shallow concerns and was more preoccupied with household matters, like fumigating the new place and, more importantly, procuring the right meat for their meals, for the kitchen was her department.

She was deeply interested in sourcing the finest, healthiest and most tender meat and cooking it right. She always used historically approved combinations of spices, herbs and roots – ginger and bamboo went with only some types of meat, garlic and mustard were used only if the dish was cooked a certain way, turmeric and ghost chilli were used during some seasons only… all these intricate recipes and rules, carefully curated

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

and preserved by Botoli, were lost on Hotoli; her palate wasn’t nuanced enough to receive these flavours in all their aboriginal glory. When she was hungry, she ate whatever was prepared.

It wasn’t just culinary disinterest that kept her out of the kitchen. Hotoli couldn’t stomach the gore of the cleaning process all the blood, bones, cartilage, muscle, organs, skin… she’d rather encounter the animal for the first time as a fully cooked meal on her plate, not as dead flesh in the kitchen sink.

But this was hardly a point of conflict for the two. Like most duos do over long periods of cohabiting, they too had found a rhythm around their insipid existence. She made up for her squeamishness by doing the dishes.

Even to look at, Hotoli and Botoli were ordinary. There was nothing wrong with the way they looked, but they belonged to the proverbial audience; the spotlight never found them. Still, there was something reassuring about them, like there is about all ordinary people, things and occurrences.

While gazing at the likes of them, an onlooker’s mind is instantly reassured that everything is as it should be regular, normal, plain, ordinary, medium… snugly nestled in the middle of statistical safety.

Pleasing as they were to behold, extremely attractive or wildly talented people, just like very rare events, are disconcerting, because they tend to jolt you away from the crowded average and fling you towards the lonelier, more dangerous fringes of the bell curve.

For Hotoli and Botoli, the press of ordinary living was comforting. The spell broke only when their well-oiled routine was disturbed, by unwelcome neighbours, guests, sometimes well-meaning strangers.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

They kept to themselves and didn’t take kindly to these interruptions by “other people” as their long dead mother used to say, in her characteristic nasal voice that became pronounced during arguments.

For her, as for them, this applied to everyone who wasn’t immediate family; even friends and distant relatives were mercilessly othered by her.

Now that all manner of close family was either deceased or estranged, the twins operated as a self-sufficient, insular unit, with no ties to anybody else.

They never held regular jobs; their mid-sized inheritance was always enough to meet their daily expenses and spare them the horror of meeting other people every day.

This kind of asocial life came more naturally to Botoli. Even as a child, she preferred spending time by herself or with her sister.

Once, a classmate told her she had dreamt of her the night before. Botoli, just six at the time, came home howling, because she felt being cast in someone else’s dream without her permission, with no control over the film that played out in that person’s head, was an unacceptable invasion of her privacy.

She never spoke to that girl again and concluded that “others” were a breed best kept at bay. Hotoli’s experiences while growing up were not that extreme, but as they entered adulthood, they fell in sync and inherited their mother’s dislike for people in general, with effortless passion.

Neither sister had taken a lover in over two decades. Given their isolation from the outside world, level of interdependence, constant companionship, and division of labour around the house, they were almost spousal in their spinsterhood.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

They didn’t feel the need to let anyone into their dreary domestic bat-cave, a space where time moved in a slow, dull loop, almost like it were a third, catatonic entity in their midst.

The more romantically disposed of the two, Hotoli thought about intimacy sometimes.

On idle afternoons, after she was done cleaning the tough grease off the utensils they used for lunch, when she lay on their sofa in her post-meal torpor, she mused about what being with a man would feel like after all those years. The bacteria on her body, she surmised, would be overwhelmed by the sudden burst of alien flora and fauna native to her lover’s skin, tongue, breath… it was microscopic, but that’s what it came down to, Hotoli knew.

Making love, she thought, was the coming together of not two human bodies but the billions of invisible creatures, indigenous to each lover’s mucous membranes.

Sometimes she amused herself by imagining what it would feel like to have magical vision that magnified all the microbial life on the surface of her skin, scalp and hair, and watch as it moved around in its own ecosystem, at a pace much faster than the reality she and her sister had created for themselves in that house.

One evening, as Hotoli was in the middle of one such idiosyncratic daydream, Botoli walked in on her, a large bag of wet meat in her hand, and asked her what she was thinking about, sitting motionless like that on their rocking chair, dressed in her favourite blue nightgown.

She didn’t want to say, “I just imagined a squishy green worm sliding between the gap in your front teeth,” so she simply shrugged and smiled, glancing at the plastic bag, grateful she didn’t have to help with the skinning.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

Though their days and nights were all alike, Hotoli was occasionally subversive.

Sometimes she let her creative urges leak out of a crack in their daily routine and spill all over their timetable.

Barely a fortnight after they moved into this place, she sat up all night painting the walls.

She picked a shade of off-white that looked very similar to the original colour of the walls, but painted over every inch anyway. She missed her morning chores and Botoli was upset with her for an entire week, her mood mirrored in the food she prepared… chewy, under-cooked, underspiced and rubbery.

Another time this was in their old house Hotoli decided to try some sort of macabre village art she’d read about in an old book about ancient tribal paintings.

It involved melting a bowl of sugar and using it instead of paint on a blank white canvas, then leaving it out in the open for a while and stepping back as ants crawled onto the canvas, giving shape to the strokes, morphing it into artwork that is alive.

Finally, a transparent plastic sheet was placed on top of this monstrosity, trapping the writhing, swarming mass of insects underneath it. This experiment really irritated Botoli not just because of its inherent morbidity, but also because it derailed that day’s routine by several hours.

She refused to carry that ‘painting’ to their new house. The final image was of a disproportionate buffalo that looked as dead as the black bugs that gave it shape.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

Though she didn’t express it, Hotoli was very affected each time her sister got angry.

Till the passive aggression between them subsided, she felt trapped inside her own cranium and jailed behind her own ribcage. The house either felt like a sanctuary or an asylum, depending on the quality of their relationship.

They usually resolved their fights over meals, cooked by Botoli with special care. When she felt she had punished Hotoli enough for something and wanted to dispel the unpleasantness between them, she made soft, perfectly roasted meat, garnished with a blend of condiments she seemed to save for such occasions.

One such morning, after a week of silence between them, Botoli stood on their veranda, looking at the eastern bank of the river. The water looked choppy and dirty. Deciding to end the fight that day, she idly watched a family of four walk along the road that ran parallel to the river. Soon, more people gathered around them and it was hard to keep track of that family.

Then, Hotoli woke up and joined her, matching her gaze to look at the people below. As she stood next to her sister, she sensed the tension of the last few days dissipate. She placed a hand around Botoli’s shoulder.

The morning sun was getting brighter by the minute and the two squinted as they looked at the scene below.

From that height it was the fifth floor, but felt higher, somehow – the river, the road and the junction at the end of the lane looked like an enlarged map of some kind, not an actual place with real people and vehicles passing through it.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

“I was thinking about what you told me about the shower,” Botoli said.

“Yes, please buy a bucket on your way back from the market today. I need to change the way I bathe. I feel filthy all the time,” Hotoli said.

“Okay,” Botoli said, lifting a cupped palm above her forehead to shield her eyes from the sunlight.

“There’s a hardware shop very close to the butcher’s gully. I’ll get your bucket from there… Also, I’ll cook something special today – there’s a discount on leg pieces this week. Let’s get someone chubby for a change, similar to that dark one there,” she said, pointing to an obese, middleaged woman, in a yellow ‘half saree’, an attire that teenage girls in that region usually wore.

It was odd to see it on a fully grown woman. She had stopped walking momentarily to pluck a pebble out of the sole of her chappals, the fat around her tummy moving as she leaned forward.

Hotoli nodded, with a hungry smile, feeling a rush of saliva in her mouth. She had skipped dinner the previous night. It was impossible to eat when harmony eluded them. “We haven’t had juicy cellulite in a while, anyway.”

“I’d better leave before the market gets too crowded,” Botoli said, ruffling her twin’s hair affectionately.

She hummed as she gathered her purse and draped her overused red and purple cotton shawl, that belonged to their mother. She left.

Hotoli stood there, staring at the road that was waking up in earnest now. More cycle-rickshaws and pedestrians kept appearing, making that part of the East Godavari District resemble just about any busy, semi-urban street, anywhere in India.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

“She spotted Botoli stepping onto the footpath, making her way through the mass of people going about their morning errands.

Within seconds, she disappeared and became one with the crowd.

A cloud appeared out of nowhere and covered the sun, taking the sting out of Hotoli’s eyes.

Only a narrow ray of light washed over her, as she stood there surrounded by countless motes of dust apparently suspended in eternity.

Hotoli and Botoli by Ashwini Gangal

About the Author

Ashwini Gangal is a media journalist from Mumbai, India, who now lives in California.

On most days she's a bumbling migrant desperately looking for her literary voice, her sanity and her own brand of genius.

She recently quit her full-time job as managing editor of a business daily to pursue her passion words, rhymes, stories, poetry, make believe.

She’s also passionate about mental health, gender-power dynamics and all animals except humans. She’s an insatiable reader. Empathy is her superpower.

John Guzlowski

My life in post mordernism

Written by John Guzlowski

(Twitter: @johnguzlowski)

“Literature is news that stays news.”

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading

On Tuesday, August 24, 1973 at 11 am.

At that exact moment, I walked into a class room in Heavilon Hall, Purdue University, and sat down before the standing Professor Chester E. Eisinger, author of Fiction of the Forties and an unpublished and unpublishable multi-volume history of fiction since January 1950.

He and I and the fifteen or so other students were there to create something new out of the bits and pieces of contemporary fiction.

That semester was divided into two parts. In the first part, we read novels we had labels for: novels by Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, novels of the grotesque, the east coast existential, the southern agrarian, the Jewish Chicago intellectual sort.

All safe country: this is the stuff I and the others in the class had been reading about on the front page of the New York Times Book Review or on the covers of the Saturday Review.

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My life in post modernism by John Guzlowski

The second half of the semester was different things we had no labels for, authors whose names were whispers, books that if they were mentioned in the Saturday Review were buried among the crossword puzzles and the ads for trinkets and knick-knacks from the Andes.

Sooner you would hear moans from the grave and cries from the sky than you should read about Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, William Burroughs, John Barth, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Ishmael Reed, Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

Some of us, of course, had heard these names, others had not, some had heard these names and dismissed them, others had not.

So what was this stuff like? Well it was funny, complicated, dangerous, difficult, annoying, surreal, absurd, stupid, excessive, amateurish, blue, low class, fartingly offensive, politically incorrect, politically left wing, politically right wing, and drugged.

So what did we call it? Well, it was easier to describe than to name.

We were grad students and we wanted something we could call it.

Something we could feel confident about on a test or in a bar or in a corridor when someone asked what the hell is going on in the 900 plus pages of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Eisinger wouldn't let us name it.

Oh, we used terms but they were never he assured us the right terms. We tried to call it the terms we found here and there: meta-fiction, maximalist fiction, the literature of exhaustion, surfiction, fabulation, black humor, the fiction of the absurd, etc.

But as I said, he wouldn't let us call it any of these things: we were allowed officially only to call it "recent fiction."

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My life in post modernism by John

Guzlowski

So where did it come from this odd recent fiction?

Well, Eisinger really didn't know. He talked about this and that, talked about the resurgence of the High Modernist impulse, talked about Samuel Beckett and the 6,000,000 Jews who died in the concentration camps, but really, he didn't have much of a clue.

After all, he was only an academic, ready to tell you what the white whale was like once it surfaced, but less comfortable telling you where the whale had come from to get to this surfacing place and time.

But I knew where it had come from. I might not be able to tell you what it was called but I knew where it came from. I had been reading, living, talking where it had come from for the last ten years.

It came from the beats, from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from their hallucinated, spontaneous sense of "the what" it is we are talking about, a sense without breaks, or curbs: the ultimate bus ride through the canyons of the American night without Keanu Rives and Sandra Bullock along to strap us down into the strait-jacket of American consumerism and what Saul Bellow calls "special effects."

It came from Science Fiction from the zaniness of writers like Philip Jose Farmer, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Alfred Bester and directors like Roger Corman, Ray Harryhausen, and Ed Wood: Artists, all artists with a fervent belief that you could only get to this reality by getting out of this reality, writers with a fervent belief that you could take lowclass junk and transform it into art, into something James Joyce could pick up or see in Trieste and say, Yes this is something like it.

It came from a peace gone bad and a war gone badder, a peace gone to boosterism, babbittry, and blank faced blandness a peace that would

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My life in post modernism by John

Guzlowski

give us Ronny Howard in Happy Days, Penny Marshall in Laverne and Shirley, and the Mod Squad as the moral equivalent of Martin Luther King's Dream of having a Dream.

It came from a childhood wasted watching the 3 Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbot and Costello all those Jobs with a comic hard-on. What is the famous routine about Who's on First but Wittgenstein writ funny?

What is Laurel and Hardy's Music Box but Camus' Myth of Sisyphus in comic drag? What is any 3 Stooges comedy but a treadmill on which we experience the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune while drowning in a sea of slapstick. Auschwitz with canned laughter?

It came from drugs nights and days of marijuana, Benzedrine, peyote, LSD, maybe heroin, but definitely hashish: what is this fiction I've been talking about but a series of mind-altered realities, irresistible munchies, and talk between me and Bill and Nancy and Mike and Bob and Jim that just won't stop.

Yes, I knew where this stuff came from and even though I didn't know what to call it, there were one or two other things I knew for sure:

This thing was only the beginning!

During the seven years I spent in grad school thinking and studying this thing which I didn't have a name for, I became convinced that this would be the NEXT BIG THING, this would become the canon of the 21st century (even though at the time we didn't have the word canon). These writers were an avante garde that would drag everyone into a new consciousness, a new perspective, a totally new world order.

(George Bush and the Unabomber were in Eisinger's class with me). All writers would be as mad, pretentious, cerebral, self-deprecating, verbose, wild, and difficult as Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow and Barth in Letters.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

My life in post modernism by John

Guzlowski

There was a force coming and I was a disciple of that force, and as a disciple I was there to prepare the way for the coming. I wrote a dissertation on Hawkes, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barth, I co-edited a bibliography on Kerouac, I published articles on all of them and others. I did presentations at regional and national conferences.

And when I edited a little art and literature magazine called Karamu, I even snuck some of this wild stuff into its pages. If you don't believe me, go back and check it out.

Then something odd happened in the 80's.

I realized that this force was dying. Barth rejected the wacky stuff he used to write, Pynchon fell silent, Gaddis started writing for sit coms (I exaggerate), Coover, Hawkes, and Vonnegut started sinking into the same old, same old.

I realized another thing: Now there was a name for what it was we could never find a name for in that graduate class I took so long ago: It was called Postmodernism.

I realized another thing: My students weren't much interested in this thing.

Oh yeah, they liked the idea of taking a course called Postmodernism, but reading a Postmodern novel, a 900-page white whale about a guy who gets an erection every time a V-2 rocket falls in London during the last days of World War II well, it was a little much.

I've taught the Postmodern fiction class six times in my twenty years as a Prof at Eastern Illinois University (three times on the grad level, and three on the undergrad level) and what I've discovered is that every time I teach the class there is just a little less interest in actually looking at Postmodern novels.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

My life in post modernism by John Guzlowski

The first time I taught the class, there were eight Postmodern novels and two non-Postmodern novels; the next time the ratio was six to four; then five to five; then three to seven.

Also, the Postmodern novels I chose for the class were changing, getting shorter, less Postmodern, less wacky, less what ever it was that those novels of the movement without a name had.

But this isn't to say that Postmodernism is dead. What I like to call the First Generation Postmodernists are still writing.

For example, after almost an eighteen-year silence, Pynchon published a so-so novel called Vineland, pronounced vine-land, or maybe its called vin-land and another novel called Mason & Dixon (I own a copy but haven’t had time to read it yet. Maybe over the Christmas holiday). And there are American writers who I like to call the Second and Third Generation of Post-Modernists.

The Second Generation Post-Modernists are working in a vein that Barth calls the “Literature of Replenishment” (a mix of postmodern and nonpostmodern elements): here we have writers like E. L. Doctorow, Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, and Isaac Singer.

The Third Generation Postmodernists are attempting to blend the wild/wacky stuff with Marxist, feminist, anarchic, anti-sexist, anti-racist ideology: here we have writers like Criz Mazza in her short story collection IS IT SEXUAL HARASSMENT, YET, Curt White in his devastatingly funny examination of father and son relations and TV called Memories of My Father Watching TV, and Kathy Acker in her high school montage novel Blood and Guts in High School.

And then there are the British Postmodernists. As the Americans have been falling into a slump, the Brits seem to be picking up the slack. Just as 70 years ago, the American modernists took the torch from the British modernists, we now see a renaissance of Postmodern fiction in English.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

There's Salmon Rushdie, Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge (and these are just the ones I've read about in the New York Times Book Review).

And what these writers can do is something American Postmodernists are pretty much unable to do: reach a mass audience, both in England and in this country. This is a feat that (with the possible exception of Kurt Vonnegut) no American Postmodernist has been able to do since 1975 when Robert Coover's "unreadable and offensive" Public Burning destroyed the American market for the Postmodern novel.

But there are some hopeful signs that Postodernism in the novel may still reach a mass audience: note Alan Lightman's delightful Einstein's Dreams and the recent successes of David Foster Wallace whose Infinite Jest (A 1079-page maximalistic homage to and pastiche of the First Generation Post-Modernists) won him a full page-and-a-half in a recent TIME magazine.

And I better mention Don Delillo’s Underworld here if for no other reason than the novel’s prophetic cover features the World Trade Center and a menacing airplane.

But in all of this talk of the rise and fall and possible rise and resurgence of Postmodernism, my life in Postmodernism seems to have gotten lost. You may or may not be wondering if I am still committed to Postmodernism.

Well, I am and I'm not. I'm interested in Postmodernism but it isn't the consuming/burning interest I showed when I wrote my dissertation twenty and then some years ago on Postmodern fiction, radical psychology, and the disappearance of CHARACTER.

I'm interested in Isaac Singer (who may or may not be according to my own definitions a Second Generation Postmodernist), and ethnic poets

My life in post modernism by John Guzlowski

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John Guzlowski

and writers (primarily Polish-Americans ones), and the forgotten American poets (Archibald Macleish, Amy Lowell, Robinson Jeffers, and Vachel Lindsay).

And I'm still reading the Postmodernists, checking in with them to see what they are up to, but not as I said with the same impassioned interest or urgency as my failure to read Mason & Dixon in a speedy manner suggests. And maybe my eclectism is also Postmodern. Probably.

And you may also be wondering what I've learned from a life in Postmodernism. Let me tell you what some of the things I learned are:

1. The printed word as a technology that demands respect or attention is finished.

2. People no longer think that literature (a reading/book based representation of life/reality) can change the world/reality/life.

3. People no longer feel that they have to read the latest novel, book of poetry, or play.

4. People no longer have to read literary criticism or take it seriously.

5. People no longer have to take seriously people who read the latest etc. or the latest etc.

6. People can make up their own cultures.

7. They don't need me or you to tell them what it is.

8. And finally, Postmodernism is a theory you make up as you go along.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

My life in post modernism by John Guzlowski

About the Author

John Guzlowski’s writings appear in Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and other journals here and abroad.

His poems and personal essays about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany appear in his memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues. He is also the author of the Hank and Marvin mystery novels and a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America. His most recent books of poems are Small Talk, Mad Monk Ikkyu and True Confessions.

He has also recently published a novel about two German lovers separated by war entitled Retreat: A Love Story.

Scenery by Blanka Pillár

Scenery

Written by Blanka Pillár

(Twitter, Instagram: @blankaiza)

“In a world full of temporary things, you are a perpetual feeling.”

Sanober Khan

I forgive him for the little lies. The little fibs that slip away and the broken promises that go unkept. He always tells the same lies, and sometimes I believe him because the story paints itself like a vivid oil portrait; first, the figures are painted, then the background, then the corners, edges, contours, and finally, it becomes as if it were a real scene on the canvas of life, but only the immensity of human imagination has made believable what could never be real.

It tells me what I most desire, so I reach for it with all my heart, stretching out my soul's arms to preserve all its lips say and hold it within me for eternity. I love him with all my heart, but when my reality is keen-eyed, it sometimes smells like the scratch of jagged-edged infidelities in the dawning light or the wistful night. The cold realisation slips into bed beside me or touches me as I walk.

Today we take it into our heads to walk around the riverbank. We get caught in the cool January breeze, and he starts coughing. I take off my thin pink cotton scarf and wrap it around his neck with careful

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Scenery by Blanka Pillár

movements. He gives me a weak half-smile and walks on.

My chest gets hot, even though my whole body is shivering from the winter's minus temperatures.

Sometimes we stop. We look at the broken-legged seagulls on the slippery waterfront stones, the sloppy sidewalk ahead, and the footprints of giddy pedestrians.

He rubs his hand as we spy on one of the old buildings covered in melted snow. His fingertips are almost purple, so I tug off my black fabric gloves and slip them on his frosty palms.

He thanks me quietly. His silent words creep into my consciousness like angelically soft notes, wrapping my trembling body in a gentle embrace.

Barely perceptible, the milky-white sky opens, and it drizzles, but we are unperturbed.

We sit on a stinging bench and stare silently at the glistening toes of our wet boots as they tread the snowy ground before us.

Somewhere in the distance, expensive hand-painted plates clink, light pages of newspapers crinkle in the city breeze, the iron bells of a dilapidated church jingle, and a delicious golden-skinned duck in a warm oven is being prepared.

I feel him move beside me, and I put my head down. He sways back and forth with folded arms while tiny particles of dripping snow fall on his knitted flame-red angora sweater. I slip my thin arms out of my expensive loden-lined coat and place them on his back.

He looks me in the eye.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Scenery by Blanka Pillár

My tongue curls and confesses at seeing his delicately delineated perfect face.

It humbly confesses the truth it has admitted so many times before and hopes. It hopes that, for once, its love's answer will not be a lie. But once again, he replies, I love you too. I-love-you.

He utters this gracious lie delicately. The first syllable is trust, the second is passion, and the third is loyalty.

fHe feels none of these, yet he testifies to them. He savours the shape of the voice. First bitter, then sour, then finally swallowed. After all, it's only one word. But for me, it's so much more: I put myself in his hands.

Maybe that's not how it all happened. I've been sick for a while now; my lungs are weak from the January freeze. Every time I close my eyes, I try to remember our last story.

Embellish it, add to it, rearrange it, change it.

Maybe one day I'll grind it to perfection, and that word won't ring so false.

Or the memory will turn yellow, like old letterhead, and no longer matter.

Or maybe ‘‘I love you’’ will become just another fluffy word to be whispered in the harsh winter, bored, picked up by the wind, carried far away, across the world, to where it means nothing.

Far from the eager, greedy arms of my soul.

Scenery by Blanka Pillár

About the Author

Blanka Pillár is a sixteen-year-old writer from Budapest, Hungary.

She has a never-ending love for creating and an ever-lasting passion for learning.

She has won several national competitions and has been a columnist for her high school’s prestigious newspaper, Eötvös Diák.

You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @blankaiza

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"Games They Play" and other poems by Fabrice Poussin

"Games They Play" and Other Poems

By Fabrice Poussin

(Facebook: Fabrice Poussin)

Games They Play

They rush to know the outcomes glaring at neon lights in the arcade their mecca as they invade the palace filled with the latest fashion in clothing, electronics, entertainment.

One silver coin is all it will cost to experience an adventure with avatars in battles to the death for one minute of adrenaline pumping heavy in bodies made to last perhaps decades yet.

Maybe they will win big, beat all the evil ones and play for another thirty seconds staring at the running clock on the screen.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"Games They Play" and other poems by Fabrice Poussin

Tomorrow, in the classroom they will repeat with high anxiety staring at the wall clock wondering when they will be set free.

Racing home, they might avoid a family meal stuff their faces with detestable substitutes for food and cloister themselves within the shell of their den.

They only think of what will happen next eager to know, excited to win, at any cost even when this means life will continue on at the speed of light little particles without true meaning.

Thirty seconds for a game, an hour for study six to visit the grandparents, a month until summer eighteen years before the children find a mate

and at last time to begin again under the grey of existences they seem to have wanted completed all along.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"Games They Play" and other poems by Fabrice Poussin

Courting For One Day

It was a short journey to the court a brand-new world for a fresh heart the scent of sweat and sandpaper permeated a grand dream.

In all his majesty he walked to the stage bearing a joy visible to the dancers all around unusual in numbered blue jerseys colors of a gentle hill in Appalachia.

Dressed in the glory of evening celebrations shining to the delight of a young princess he stood to face the duelist ahead certain of a well-earned safety.

Soon he would return to the wooden slats contemplating distances to conquer after a little stop in the mirrored room of strangely identified masses of heavy metals.

Little did he know of the coming hours rushing to put out a great flame little boy lost in the clouds on his way to a meeting with the divine.

44

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Five Poems by Fabrice Poussin

Little purses

They walk down the hall little finger up as if holding a precious earl grey in the company of royalty.

But it is rigid purses they carry rugged like accordion cases treasures they can never abandon even for a minute instant of depravity.

Head up to size a lowly world five feet above a ground too low for them to squat and kiss in due adoration.

What possessions they hold in the portable safes that they never part with the pinkish leatherette and rhinestone incrusted even in their delicate palms.

Five Poems by Fabrice Poussin

Proudly they ignore the multitudes wallowing in such grim poverty insignificant as they suffer with fierce labor while they do nothing but laugh at their stench.

Pocket books at the size of their true heart they lack the wholesome vision of this lonely planet hugging the power of a few fake gold nuggets their poverty so much worse than that of the populace.

Frozen smiles tight upon their thin lips like gleeful cadavers they walk in in colorful disguises to hide their darkness yet soon enough they too will be forgotten.

The wealth of despair

Into the darkness the rope dissolved so solid in the house of the living she held onto it tightly to keep him there. Powerless beneath the brittle heart

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Five Poems by Fabrice Poussin

perhaps he hoped she would prevail too weak to assist in these final days.

In the sterile prison he still dreamed of his home where warm by the hearth he laughed with Calvin but his destiny was no longer his to define.

The machine had done its deed it was time to rest within a kinder realm would there be time to bid farewells?

The pull was so very strong she could no longer fight her sight drowned by tears she let go to collapse in a flood of gentle pain.

There she stood wondering how so soon the verdict had fallen why her prayers were not enough.

Now she rests in the comfort of what he was father, friend, fighter for all to love a legacy never to be forgotten.

While she sleeps

He draws arabesques on the parchment while she sleeps.

The quill slowly inhales the dark nectar drunk with senseless ecstasy. Another curve forms a chain and another; words comes alive.

The light is dim around the chiaroscuro of her softly breathing shape.

The gentle brushing of the silky sheets onto her flesh the only sounds about.

From time to time he peers into her aura as it dances with poetry.

Strangely, his writing has become image the curls of her ebony hair the alphabet.

Lines continue across the page in arches as if he had birthed her twin.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Five Poems by Fabrice Poussin

There is no order in the text any longer yet a moving silhouette emerges. Written in infinite details she makes his hand tingle with tremors.

He might hold her in a tightest embrace but she rests in the sleep of the pure.

Five Poems by Fabrice Poussin

About the Author

Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at a university in Georgia, USA. His work in poetry and photography has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, and many other publications worldwide.

Most recently, his collections In Absentia, and If I Had a Gun, were published in 2021 and 2022 by Silver Bow Publishing.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual" by Michelle

Lizet Flores

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual"

By Michelle Lizet Flores (Twitter: @shellyflowers)

Perhaps the issue wasn’t a lack of faith but a forced faith towards a god she never believed in.

For what god would limit her strong liver and curious body to bowed worship at a stoic altar.

No, the issue was a lack of direction which transformed when she took that first sip of the darkest beer the Valencian barkeep could muster.

"The Maenad Learns to Worship"

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual" by Michelle

Lizet Flores

This lack of direction became true after the first kiss with a friend who was never just a friend after a night time bonfire and too many bottles of American lager.

For what direction should the directionless take?

What does lost mean when what you seek is not a place but a moment.

Braided hair collects into vines wrapped into a crown.

She doesn’t just listen to music –she feels it in every stretch of an arm, In every sway of her hips.

Perhaps the issue was never her lack of faith. Perhaps she finally found a god worth believing in.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual" by Michelle Lizet Flores

"The Ritual"

Begin by boiling water. Pour a tablespoon of honey into your mug let a tea bag soak it up. Wait until the kettle whistles before you pour the water.

Pull a plate out of the cupboard. Fill it with freshly rinsed grapes and cubes of cheese.

Find your best water glass the one you bought at the vintage shop the one you can’t put in the dishwasher. Fill it with crisp, cool water.

Set your table [read: altar]

The alimentos to your left.

The poems to your right. Your computer in the center.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual" by Michelle

Lizet Flores

And this is where your mother will speak to you unlocking the words you keep trapped in your chest.

And this is where your grandfather will play his guitar

helping you find the rhythm to each line.

And this is where your visabuela will guide you

teaching you how to heal with words rather than herbs.

Alchemy creates more than gold if you give it time.

"The Maenad Learns to Worship" and "The Ritual" by Michelle Lizet Flores

About the Author

Michelle Lizet Flores is a graduate of FSU and NYU creative writing programs. She currently works as a teacher and co-hosts the What's in a Verse Poetry Open Mic in Jacksonville, FL.

She has previously been published in magazines and journals such as The Miami Rail, Chircú Journal, and Travel Latina. A finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Award for Poetry, she is the author of the chapbooks Cuentos from the Swamp and Memoria, as well as the picture book, Carlito the Bat Learns to Trick or Treat.

Her short fiction can be found in the forthcoming anthology, Places We Build in the Universe through Flowersong Press.

Find out more at michellelizetflores.com. Follow her Twitter @@shellyflowers.

"The Conscript" and Other Poems

By S.T. Brant

"The Conscript"

Thoughts in the blanks of the Collected Larkin

Darkness lunges into day to distort and plague the meaning of a gesture

Step outside and get eaten into the darkness of the universe.

Everything is loud, alerting, brilliant, and freezing to my heart: a captain in a cage. Strung to his stalks, in his cell his dreams pick his bones and brew them into nightmares. Without love things decrease.

I pray.

The heart submits:

Nothing remembered in the wrathful dark

Desolation of the streetlights

Leaving off their purpose to the hour.

I pray.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"The Conscript" and other poems by S.T. Brant

"A Revival Song"

The dead stampede the shore, turnabout, lament And hurl the fleetings of their spirit That they still claim and set them free.

“No more memories!” they cry yet…

By the rhythm in a wild midnight

Everything that distresses leads within. Desire distresses in many forms:

Straight, crooked, burnt, slouched, flaccid, doomedStraight has a carnal power most removed From mental strictures. People held in veils by love, The pure… do they have the nightmares

Of the crooked? They jar themselves

From their darkness.

“Jesus did not forget my name.” Each season Is a Winter, but not all shiver. Salvation cannot be rushed or be undone Or understood or counted on.

"The Conscript" and other poems by S.T. Brant

"A Life of Severe Greatness"

Greatness unprecedented: former possibilities mute. The universe is delicate: The sun comes in excess to excessive creatures.

Wipe the sun, the goodness. Music sings a warning tale: Change Is in the atmosphere. It’s impossible to know

Your lover: loves inspected at a distance. Distrust is a gateway to the grave

Where the betrayed will be revived By the betrayed.

Will you greet your doom off stage, end of scene?

Do we have a choice to not acknowledge?

"The Conscript" and other poems by S.T. Brant

"Turning"

The Homeric rule, the lesson: the Iliadic over the Odyssean. Cunning can save but one man that wrath has put to sea, Wrath, having ruined all upon the shore previously. Orpheus played one note. Every string, one note: why change Perfect

On a lyre made from a palm in Eden. All is recollection, Plato says, stole from Orpheus: all returns From whence it came, no matter its fragmenting on the journey.

If all is as united, or will be, as it began, life is all assembly, Returning all to all, remembering, remembering, remembering.

Living, a nostalgia of ancient days.

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"The Conscript" and other poems by S.T. Brant

"Out of the Dolor Springs the Nascent"

Find your freedom in the greyness legioning life; nowhere’s silver but the Dionyistic instants conscience fractures respitefully to soul. Life split in to tint the dreams that fancy light, the dark-gold Apollo meeting Hades, riding him from earth, the new tyrant, Time’s new Captain.

"The Conscript" and other poems by S.T. Brant

About the Author

S. T. Brant is a Las Vegas high school teacher. His debut collection Melody in Exile will be out in 2022.

His work has appeared in numerous journals including Honest Ulsterman, EcoTheo, Timber, and Rain Taxi.

You can reach him on his website at ShaneBrant.com, Twitter: @terriblebinth, or Instagram: @shanelemagne.

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J.

Mitchell

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and Other Poems

By Mark J. Mitchell

Inthecoolofanevening justoutsideEden,Cain returnedfromthealtar andhismotherasked,Cain, manIbroughtforth,where isyourbrother?

Cain’seyesclosed.Hislips tremblelikeforbiddenleaves.

Mother,Idon’tknow.

Wewerekneelingatthealtar.Yahweh smiledonhim,notonme.So, Ihithim.

Youshouldn’tdothat,Evesays, whereishenow?Beside thealtar,mother,buthe’sgone.

"TheCrueltyofYaweh"

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Gonewhere?Willhereturn?

ShouldIwaitourgoodredlentils?

Tellmewhatyouknow. He’sbesidethealtar,but He’sgone,likethesheep whoseneckhetwisted.

He’sthereandgone.Cain, Eveordered.Leadyourfathertohim. Whentheboyleft,Evelearnedhowtocry.

Illnessisaconventwhichhasitsvalue,itsausterity,itssilence anditsinspiriation.

AlbertCamus

Notebooks,1943-1951

You’reledthroughaconstructionmaze. pastdoors,closed,labeled.Someunmarked. Here,medicalmagicsareplayed byadepts.It’saccidentallydark. thebreakersaren’tset.They’reinparts onsomeone’sworkbench.Equipment ofcuresandsadnews.Instruments ofarcaneartsurroundyou.

"WaitingRooms"

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J. Mitchell

You’recold.It’searly.You’dlikeanew roomwherethey’llproveyourexistence. Whenyouwake,youwon’tbetold youfailed.Dustyplasticwillpart.

Womeninblueaskifyou’recold thenleave.Youhearthewords,“hisheart,“ nothingelse.Justunplastereddark.

Youwait.Findyourphone.Cry.Wait. There’saform.They’dlikeyoutorate yourstay.Youfeelformishungclothes, surethatnow’syouronechancetogo.

Walkthemaze.Leavebeforeyou’relate.

"NostalgicGame"

Playingatstatues,sheturnssuddenlyhard, allnightinherbackyard.Dew

beadsherhair,herskin,hershoes. Morning,hislonghands,coolfromshaping girls,hespotsher,waiting,stands back,toframethings,makeaplan.

Toplaceherlikeastatueoratarotcard leftbehind?Shardsoflightflew

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J. Mitchell

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

fromherdewyface,nothard inmorninglight.Hishandsarefrozen,won’tobey hisdesiretopray.She’llstand fordays.Asilentcommand.

Wemustgiveupeverythingwhichisnotgraceandnoteven desiregrace.

SimoneWeil

TheBBCrangthroughthewardbutGod’s voicecamethroughherteeth.Onlyshe knewhisinstructions.Shesometimesforgot whenshegrewhungry,orwhenthatdeepcough shookherbonesordarkbombsrattledthelonetree outsideherwindow.Shewashungryall

thetimeitseemed.Nottakingrationedfood because TheWar.Theoccupiedhome.Small sacrificefromher.Shecouldn’tgivefood tothehalf-starvedFrench.Shecouldonlycough weakbloodandstareatolddoctorswhostood aboveherbedtoolong.Eat,they’dsay,eat.

"TheEndura*ofSimoneWeil"

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J. Mitchell

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

Abodyagreedbuthertoostrictsoul refused.Shehadendlessprayerstorepeat andvisionsthatwerebrokenbydeepcoughs echoingviolence.Thelongwartolled onlikeanepicsheforgot.HerChrist stillblessedherpaleskin.Oldglassesmisted withthinbreath.Sheaskedfornomysticprize, justGod’swhisperedvoicefilteredthrougheachcough. Shestarvedherbody.Hersoulinsisted.

*Endura:ThewayofdeathfortheCatharPerfectiwasself-starvation.

Histoygrailbroke.Theholyshardsflewwild, coveringhiscold,quitemaculatefloor. Noonecametosavehim.Thefurtherside stayedfaroff.Herememberedhowtopray andtriedthat,butthetoycupstillblocked hispath.Hebelievedthemythofhisdoor foryears.He’dbuildbridgeswithblocksandplayedwith paperboats,stillshapinghissmallcreed ofexodusthatledthroughtheunlocked

"ReligiousEducation"

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J. Mitchell

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J. Mitchell

wayout(hetriedrebuildingthechalice, butfingersfailed).Helearnedthathecouldread children’sbooksjustsavedyoufromanimals, notarelic-pavedfloor.Hegrewfanciful, prayinghiscellintoaflawedpalace.

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"The Cruelty of Yaweh" and other poems by Mark J. Mitchell

About the Author

Mark J. Mitchell has worked in hospital kitchens, fast food, retail wine and spirits, conventions, tourism, and warehouses.

He has also been a working poet for almost 50 years. An awardwinning poet, he is the author of five full-length poetry collections, and six chapbooks. His latest collection is Something To Be from Pski’s Porch Publishing.

He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka, Dante, and his wife, activist and documentarian Joan Juster.

He lives in San Francisco, where he once made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. Now, he is seeking work once again.

He can be found reading his poetry here:

https://www.youtube.com/@markj.mitchell4351

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"Limestone Country" and other poems by

William Doreski

"Limestone Country" and Other Poems

By William Doreski

(Twitter/Instagram: @doreskiW)

"Limestone Country"

If I had died of old age while young enough to enjoy it, the rain would taste of butterflies and the country roads would tangle among ruins left by earthquakes. So you want to relocate me into the deep limestone country of France, where cave artists sketched idealized beasts on the walls.

You want to live in a farmhouse hewn from shallow black soil and dusty with past generations of sheep, cattle, goats, and women.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

You’ve never been to Limoges, Perigueux, Agonac, Égletons. You haven’t seen raptors shade the newborn lambs and enrage sheep dogs trying to keep their jobs.

Yet you want to transport me to that corrugated landscape where others have trampled the earth so flat it’s hard to find footing.

We’d have to rent a little car and negotiate uneasy roads and mutter in shy mangled French while the autumn days collapsed around us, grieving for our loss.

If I had died of old age in my youth, when it mattered, we wouldn’t argue over maps and wouldn’t long for farm lives too eloquent for this century.

Now everything’s recast in plastic, and certain famous dead folks return as holograms to mock hauntings that should define us.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

"Cemetery Pond"

The cemetery pond stretched taut with its rim of weeping willows. How often you stepped barefoot into the mud to savor it despite algorithms of the dead ordered and neatly arranged.

That last time, you fell headlong onto a gravestone and broke a cheekbone and pair of ribs.

How did you learn such an angle of descent? A heron dips a beak and tugs a frog from the sheen. A mowing machine emits background blues of gasoline.

Such music rarely deters us, but with you in the hospital and me in my solitary mood I can’t afford to think too hard about the nineteenth century sprawled around me, its favorite sons and daughters put out to grass.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

The pond might be a massive lens ground flawless by summer sun.

But in another month the ice will blind it and blunt its focus.

Where will the heron go? What of the basking turtles you tried to photograph by posing yourself atop a square but rain-wet stone?

Your slip excited red and blue lights and stretched you on a stretcher.

I’ll photograph the turtles for you. When I visit, you can savor

[stanza break]

the image of their tough old shells trimmed with algae. In return, let me taste a little of your pain so I’ll know how abruptly summer can close its valves when it wishes, shrugging into tragic moods.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

"Sacco and Vanzetti Died for Our Sins"

Flat industrial facades rumple in the glare. Walking to end of the road where forest hems the river, I feel the eyes behind those polished windows watch me with detached envy.

The way factory workers watched the murders of two payroll guards in South Braintree in nineteen-twenty.

I’m not as dramatic. No one violently dies this afternoon, warm October light too cunning to allow another miscarriage of justice to reshape our lives.

With honest work left behind, I step from the pavement and enter the shade of oak and beech thriving in low ground. The river smirks in its gully, warping along without regarding formalities. Sacco and Vanzetti died for our sins, with so many others.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

The path along the river leads north to the college where I labored a lifetime in vain.

Or south to ruined paper mills basking in their spent pollution.

Back in the industrial park, I walk like an innocent man, the crimes of the last hundred years resounding like hammered brass to honor my present tense.

"White Spider"

A white spider webbed on a pane shocks me backward sixty years to a shed behind the general store where prowling for scraps I touch silk and a spider assays me as barely possible prey.

Subverted by this encounter, I assumed a lifetime of fright. Even the tiptoe of fliesf endorsed prongs of imaginary toxins. I’d awaken in a shrivel of damp and cling to the lip of a dream

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

The path along the river leads north to the college where I labored a lifetime in vain. Or south to ruined paper mills basking in their spent pollution.

Back in the industrial park, I walk like an innocent man, the crimes of the last hundred years resounding like hammered brass to honor my present tense.

"White Spider"

A white spider webbed on a pane shocks me backward sixty years to a shed behind the general store where prowling for scraps I touch silk and a spider assays me as barely possible prey.

Subverted by this encounter, I assumed a lifetime of fright. Even the tiptoe of flies endorsed prongs of imaginary toxins. I’d awaken in a shrivel of damp and cling to the lip of a dream

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

until daylight stunned me sober. The white spider of this morning excites no such delirium. It looks utile as a pocket tool, a device with pliers, screwdriver, knife blade, awl, and nail file.

Sixty years ago, I weighed enough to sink at the pool and struggle to dogpaddle back to the shallows. I always felt over my head the spider fear teasing my nerves so water couldn’t relax me.

Those summers flattened into pages of grammar school textbooks no one loved or even respected.

Now I’m tough enough to wish this pale spider happy hunting. Its evil eye is ornamental, and its many legs no longer seem excessive. I’ll leave that pane unswept, unwashed until frost drives the spider into winter quarters, where it will dream tiny meat-dreams that will merge themselves with mine.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

until daylight stunned me sober. The white spider of this morning excites no such delirium.

It looks utile as a pocket tool, a device with pliers, screwdriver, knife blade, awl, and nail file.

Sixty years ago, I weighed enough to sink at the pool and struggle to dogpaddle back to the shallows. I always felt over my head the spider fear teasing my nerves so water couldn’t relax me.

Those summers flattened into pages of grammar school textbooks no one loved or even respected.

Now I’m tough enough to wish this pale spider happy hunting.

Its evil eye is ornamental, and its many legs no longer seem excessive. I’ll leave that pane unswept, unwashed until frost drives the spider into winter quarters, where it will dream tiny meat-dreams that will merge themselves with mine.

"Limestone Country" and other poems by William Doreski

"Orphic August Landscape"

Spongy boletus mushrooms gather around a pine stump like mourners at a funeral pyre.

Although they’re edible enough, I’m not tempted to claim them their poise and attentive look too poignant for me to disturb.

The brook rattling down from hills the color of antique jewelry expresses itself without shame. Insects with terrible antennae creep up and down the tree trunks.

The last landscape Orpheus saw before descending into Hades looked much like this one but trimmed with belief in the gods.

If I could conjure up such faith I could decipher the stony voice of the brook and understand why following it to its source high on a slope with a distant

Limestone Country and Other Poems by William Doreski view of Boston would answer questions I haven’t learned to ask.

I would also know why the mushrooms ring the stump, why wispy threads of their mycelia have burrowed here and not in the richer soil beside the brook. The mushrooms are only the fruit of this effort. But like Orpheus they linger atop a gloomy underground in which their great dreams fester.

Limestone Country and Other Poems by William Doreski

About the Author

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities.

His most recent book of poetry is Dogs Don’t Care (2022).

His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

You can keep with him, on his site: williamdoreski.blogspot.com.

The Unconventional Courier April 2023

"Surrounding Discord" and other poems by Gerry

Fabian

"Surrounding Discord" and Other Poems

By Gerry Fabian

(Twitter @GerryFabian2 IG: @Gery3397)

I feel the pulsing. in the day; it is in half notes. As the sun falls, it changes to quarter notes. It is usually joined by other rhythms. They are known to mesh in harmony. Sometimes, they stray atonal. Alone, the pulsing is acoustic and hollow.

"Surrounding Discord"

"Surrounding Discord" and other poems by Gerry Fabian

It goes beyond any standard scale. There are no definable measures. It can become nothing less than the genius fingering the fringe of complete recognition.

"Scar Tissue Explained"

I went back to one of the many houses that guarded me during an uprooted childhood.

The trees, I so hated to plant during those hot Saturdays when the other boys smoked and swam and invented curses, had grown tall enough to provide the wind shelter my father designed.

"Surrounding Discord" and other poems by Gerry Fabian

The blood from my nineteen-stitch cut still coated a corner of the outdoor patio where I stood with blood running down my arm. My fears of falling off the roof returned as I remembered that massive antenna. sliding down the roof with me. There’s a different pain, now.

Still inflict temporal pains that need ointment and gauze. Doses of sunlight, cool spring water and hammock rest only solve the current measured malady.

"Superficial Wounds"

"Surrounding Discord" and other poems by Gerry Fabian

About the Author

He has published four books of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts and Ball On The Mound.

In addition, he has published four novels : Getting Lucky (The Story), Memphis Masquerade, Seventh Sense and Ghost Girl.

You can follow him on social media: Twitter @GerryFabian2

IG: Gery3397

R. Gerry Fabian is a published poet and novelist.

Talking Heads

Theme

What role do themes play in your work?

Ashwini Gangal:

Theme is everything. I read in one of the Paris Review author interviews (I can’t recall which one!) that an author only writes one story all her/his life. The rendition of that story may change, but we only ever write one thing over and over again.

To me, that’s theme. Personally, I am obsessed with the plague and with madness. Every century has its own plague; we had

ours in the form of covid. No matter what I write, it’s always the same thing – disease and insanity. It’s always a macabre, morbid slice of the same pie. By the end of my writing career, if you fuse all my work together, it’ll be one large, writhing mass of text about microbes and madness. It’s not like I haven’t written stories about other things, but the mood, colour and climate of the work always ties back to the same theme, albeit tangentially.

Trying to deviate from one’s thematic calling will yield synthetic, artificial work. So, it’s best to stick to the subject that comes most naturally to you as an artiste. People close to me keep suggesting topics to me – “Hey, why don’t you write about this” or “that” – and I try my best to tell them that’s not how it works. For a writer, theme is sacrosanct. It’s an instinct. One cannot cheat on it.

Imelda Wei Ding Lo/Fortunus Games (Editor):

Theme is incredibly important. It gives you an idea of what the end goal is and what you need to do to achieve that end goal.

Without a theme or themes, you can easily get distracted by everything you want to explore in your story, whether that's a character's inner thoughts, their romantic life, or intricate worldbuilding (especially in historical fiction and fantasy).

Unfortunately, when you get distracted, you will have a difficult time getting back on track, and your story may become increasingly bloated and confusing.

What could've been a simple 100-page novella could end up a 500 page novel with no clear beginning, middle, or end. Even if you're writing a story that challenges the typical structure of a story (i.e., a beginning, middle, and end), you need to mould everything in your story around your theme or end goal to make it compelling and above all, readable.

Theme is an intrinsic part of virtually all my work; I cannot imagine it otherwise. So much of my writing is spurred by issues of intolerance and social justice, that theme becomes the polestar for the development of plot and character.

As an example, one of my first published stories, Migrante, deals with the exploitation of Mexican migrant workers in the Midwest, as well as the its underpinnings in the small-town confluence of capitalist pressure and governmental acquiescence.

Nick Young:

Another of my stories, Golgotha, again set in small-town America, examines racial and societal prejudices resulting in the suicide of a gay Black man involved in a hidden affair with a married minister.

Still another story, Boomerang, wrestles with the issue of how some women repeatedly fall victim to physical and psychological abuse by their partners yet cannot free themselves from the grip of these men.

Other pieces focus on different themes – revenge (Strop), lust and hypocrisy (Jezebel), fate (Temblor) and human existence (Colloquy and Exhibition).

Even in work with its genesis in a character or plot line, theme almost always becomes an integral part of the equation.

In short, for me writing without a theme would be akin to being adrift on the ocean in a boat without sail, oars or rudder.

Meet the Editors

Teté is an unconventional writer, artist and podcaster, whose passions run gamut from comics to literature, to 80's Synth music to Pol-Sci to chess to tarot-deck collecting.

She is currently working on novels, such as "70 Fierce Years"(on hiatus) "The Road Beyond The Hill", as well as poetry works, "The 40-day Eulogy" and nonfiction "Christofascism Killed My Father".

Teté is the creator and host of her own podcast, "The Real Stuff", avalible on Spotify and Anchor.fm.

You can find Teté on Twitter @ Punk Tete and Instagram @ Tete.DePunk.

R. N. Roveleh is a writer of prose, artist and doctor in medieval literature.

She is the author of "Lucky Wolf”, a historical novel published in 2021 and set in 10th century Scandinavia, and of a serialised anthology of short-stories published on Tapas.io, entitled "Tales from the North”.

You can follow R.N.'s works on Instagram: @helevorn bor, Twitter: @NRoveleh and Tapas : RobRoveleh.

Meet the Editors

Imelda Wei Ding Lo (a.k.a. Fortunus Games) is a multi-disciplinary writer, artist, podcaster, and game developer.

Imelda's short story, "Mephistopheles Tips His Hat," was published in the Victoria Literary Festival's 2019 short story anthology.

She has also self-published two graphic novels, "Sam in New York" and "The Book of Joel," which are currently being updated weekly on Tapas.io.

Imelda also co-hosts/contributes to "The Nuts and Bolts of Writing Podcast".

You can find her on Twitter/Instagram @fortunusgames. Her website is www.fortunusgames.com.

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton