CONTENT:
current issue
(fiction / poetry)
back issues
nonfiction
free fiction
art

CATALOG:
single issues
subscriptions
chapbooks
order form
t-shirts
sales

ABOUT:
submission guidelines
ev wiki
press
awards
advertising
reviewers
contact

PROJECTS:
chapbooks
anthologies
spilt milk press

web stats

short fiction is not dead

POETRY

    An Affair in Babylon by KJ Bishop

    I’m the ache of harlot’s morning
    I’m the rake of ninety years
    His red light in the river-distance
    Her famous echo clenched in mountains:
    Find me in the fate of horses
    in the bawling cradle-rumpus
    in the ashes of the bandit
    thief of all her diamonds.

    Tell the caudillo I was with him
    in the harebell lake of childhood
    at the back of men and women
    dancing on the journey out:
    All our songs were peacocks, engines
    all our bodies fast, spasmodic
    all our crutches rocking-horses:
    jaguars plundered our shackles.

    A glass locomotive
    scorpion-baron of lucid desire
    brought our sisters and brothers
    from places upcountry:
    Sweet-smelling devils
    competing in scandal
    buried in uniforms
    measured in miles
    occult, decisive
    sick with rebirth.

    (Mother Catastrophe
    rode on a spinning wheel:
    said she was always
    asked to these things.)

    Mine is the mess on Holy Mountain
    mine is the cataract of the Buddha
    mine is the wedding in prison:
    In ajna the pain of a piñata
    blindness without relief.

    In the lockup sweating rhinestones
    gold teeth go swell with silver groin
    and nearly sprained a tongue
    calling me superman, truant centipede
    a charm against the slop pail
    & the friable spine.
    Calling me friend, offering sanctuary
    this knave emeritus

    has a name at last.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


    The Chiromancer by Pat Tompkins

    I tell you what
    you want to hear.
    Most palms say little,
    callused or cold.

    I explore your face
    before I study what
    lies in the lines:
    head, heart, life, fate.

    I read your maps:
    eyes, skin, hair, clothes,
    indiscreet as cell phones.
    What is absent talks, too.

    I polish the rough,
    a manicurist.
    My task: deciphering
    the digital code.

    I speak with planets
    and translate ambitions.
    Most want the usual:
    wealth, reassurance, hope.

    What matters is not what
    I think but what you do:
    Pay for answers and clues
    I am here to provide.

    Let me see that scar.
    A radical wound,
    pierced through, crudely healed.
    Show me your other hand.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


    October by Nina Alvarez

    The brandied thin shell of October,
    Blintzes and crepes, menus, biased windows
    Showers staining tea and bright drops
    Silhouette of sun, snapping heels
    Over the steel-studded roofs of this street
    In some absent search for an aperitif
    and olive branch
    Baying like a wolf at the city moon
    inside a similar body, closed systems
    and wild sturdy semblance of suffering
    and all the Spanish drag queens, abysmal love,
    terse, argumentative, numb, belligerent,
    born to unfold their blankets for sleep.

    I had resistance, the painful bride,
    Hunched under a soulless canopy
    Forging intelligence in turbid bed conversations
    Treating myself to a coup d'état
    What is this bored familiar trimming-
    Pointing, leaning over, or idling
    C’est moi, I say more, flying
    On heels, and toes, pointed and contracted,
    These feet, canons, functions, and geosystems
    Blinking to the system’s love, the heart breath fondue
    Flung from the vain homo-chicks of the slums
    Arcane and scalded sluts and sisters of windows
    The bound bandana slung and smelling of liquor.

    Thin to the touch, bar players, melting girls
    The talk of the terrible game of rent-to-pay
    Of ample bosom, pretty not pussy, miscellaneous touching
    The body’s thoughtless style
    Think of the sturm-und-drang, German Requiem
    howled from a bass, and college debts
    over the bath mats, by door jams, hiding eyes
    apparent in dreams, what is owed to the hard fathers,
    who inherit our births and our deaths, and collect
    the fullness of our lives in a stained box
    and cannot bear to creep, though they must keep it hidden.
    In the delicate lace their wives chose for their daughter’s wedding
    I am walking, shifting, freezing, forgetting.

    They appear too thin for night, too fat for day.
    In the Kissinger and the Klossoski and the Klempt
    The bitten tight leaves, and the unbuttoned young
    Starting to turn in on themselves, to curl and crisp.
    They go to the outsides of themselves again, at the end
    Heavy, flying up to their little edges, solidly sad
    And yet fecund, yearning for something.

    Heaviness is not inability to travel.
    It is an exaltation, a self-conscious yet
    Slow turn against the turning inward,
    And in the dark of South Street,
    Bodies abridged and bundled by this uncertainty.
    Here is a blood stain, a blond hair
    And here the wind is a way home.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


    Bathing the White Stone by Elizabeth Barrette

    Miska longed for a child
    but had none of her own.
    So she took a white stone
    to the creek and bathed it,
    singing a sweet lullaby.
    Then she took the stone
    back home, wrapped it
    in swaddling cloths, and
    laid it in the cradle.
    When the moon turned,
    Miska grew great with child.
    That winter, she bore a boy
    with smooth white skin
    and hair black as onyx.
    Piotr grew tall and strong,
    but rarely spoke or laughed.
    The village girls tried to get
    his attention, but to no avail.
    Piotr preferred the forest,
    and solitude, and the quiet
    little stream under the trees.
    In time, he moved away
    to University where
    he became a great sculptor.
    It was said that he saw
    things in the stone that
    no one else had seen –
    but that was not true.
    His mother Miska had
    seen the same –
    forms and faces –
    and so it was no surprise to her
    when Piotr brought home
    a solemn model who confided
    to her mother-in-law that she
    could not bear a child.
    Miska simply smiled, and
    told her not to worry –
    and after the wedding,
    took her daughter-in-law
    down to the stream
    to bathe a white stone.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


    Isles of Dream by Marly Youmans

    THE SKY DOOR

    And it has been so long since I lowered this pen
    In ink the shade of sky... The rain is splattering
    On mallow and sea oats and on the vanishing trick
    Of mist and ocean waves. A thousand dragonflies
    Jag past, hurrying on to some great sheltering tree
    That shines in the storm-light, all gems and isinglass.
    In clouds that are also ink—not a peaceful white
    But blood expressed from lapis lazuli—one door
    Of sky remains beside a few white steppingstones
    And looks as sweet as spring forget-me-nots in grass.
    I wonder, if I knock, will someone let me in?

    THE GHOST CRAB’S WOMAN

    The paper lantern of moon is lit,
    And the clouds are in attendance.
    They are reflected shimmerings
    On the wet sand beside the sea.

    So much for setting.
                                   The ghost crabs
    Go skittering along the shore,
    Fall abruptly sideways in holes.
    They are white like the August moon
    And as flimsy, their dead torsos
    And legs tossing in the sea foam.
    One is greater than the others,
    With lustrous claws in the moonshine;
    They might be fine mother-of-pearl,
    Formed in a nacreous shell of dream.
    See there, the ghost crab is dragging
    A little woman by one arm—
    Her eyes are an unblinking black,
    Her hair spun from obsidian
    By dwarves whose names she’d never guess.
    Now she is dragged by those rare strands
    Into the ghost crab’s secret hole,
    Where slowly he undresses her
    And gives her all his twiddling love
    Till what’s left is a bone that gleams
    Like a grinning sickle of moon.

    THE GULLS

    A hundred gulls
    Sit and stand on one leg or two
    Around the old man in the chair—

    A handsome fellow,
    With downy gray hair fluffed by breeze,
    With his hooked and aquiline nose.

    “You’re popular,”
    I say; he nods.  The black eyes shine,
    But he’ll never tell his secrets.

    THE MOON ON THE STRAND

    At dusk a boy and girl took sand and made
    Images of turtle, star, and dragon.
    And when the gibbous moon rose from the sea,
    It was observed to be a surprising pink
    That matched the color of adjacent clouds.
    Sand animals awoke in the moonshine,
    And turtle and dragon ate up the star.
    Its arms hung down like petals from their jaws.
    The sister leaped onto the dragon’s back,
    Her younger brother on the turtle’s shell;
    They flew toward the pink blossom of the moon.

    Their mother had gone for a dawdling walk
    And did not know, for just then she had passed
    The last marker and found the endless sands.
    The older brother slumped inside the house,
    His face blue-lit, playing with his machines.
    Their father lay asleep upon the grass
    And now was dreaming that his darling wife
    Wore nothing but a wreath of moonflowers.
    (In metaphysical ways, this was true.)
    The grandfather was dead and could not help.

    Only the grandmother was left to see
    The children swoop up to the clouds of stars.
    Grandmothers are more clever than you think.
    She clambered to the sky and brought them home,
    Riding dragonback behind the sister,
    And then she went to the infinite sands
    To fetch her absent daughter by the hand,
    Without asking what she had seen or dreamed
    To make her eyes the color of the sea,
    Her ears like twin shells murmuring the sea,
    Her mouth as cold and dumb as depths of sea.

    MEMORY OF YOUTH

    “What are these for?” Z repeats,
    A little angrily. She is
    A girl as hard and sharp and hooked
    As a thing made for catching fish,
    Although she never brims her pail.
    I look at all the years of words
    And see just flotsam and jetsam—
    I burn every page and scrap,
    A holocaust of living dream,
    Every poem of my youth.
    I am a woman, twenty-one.
    The smoke and ash go up for hours.

    Yet I
    Begin
    Again.

    “What are they for?” Z asks with scorn.
    This time I say they’re for the soul
    That longs to hold the earth and sky
    With all its mounting clouds and birds,
    The yaupon foxes and raccoons
    And ghost crabs scuttling into holes,
    Enormous smears of moonshine, bright
    Against the endlessness of sand.
    I say, “The soul’s a seine for fish
    Like running rainbows, ice, and fire—
    On mountains underneath the sea,
    I have caught magic in my net.”

    AFTER STORM

    Everything is washed.
    When sea and sky return from mist,
    The shrimp trawlers have been erased.
    A cock-eyed rainbow

    Blesses the wheeling birds
    As half-wild cats come to the porch
    And children to the sand and waves.
    The dragonflies

    Copter from hidden groves,
    Their million mazy paths of flight
    Inscribing mystery on mild
    Emptied clouds

    And all the floating heaven.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


    Kimono Monochrome at Midnight by Linda Ann Strang

    Her heart is a nightgown fastened loosely.
    The throb of a nightjar slips a hand

    of sound all the way down to her belly,
    where an incubus is the cold ring in her navel—

    the stud piece of the Arctic.
    Night cries want to unpick her seams,

    carry her away to where her moon man 
    parks his chariot—carved from a single pearl—

    too close to the curb of the atmosphere,
    liberate from the chain and stem stitch

    full-blooded nightingales for the Emperor—
    in each larynx the diamond ink of starlight.

    But tighten the belt of her dreams,
    and waive all west of the moon

    and princess possibilities that never were.
    Her ears become caverns of ice candles:

    a thousand sirens shrink to the failed flare
    of a match. There’ll be no third degree burns

    on Cupid’s torso tonight. Midnight slips
    in through the ticking of its own keyhole,

    cyan tongued as a nun in martyrdom,
    needle-eyed as a daily habit.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


    Fabula by Linda Ann Strang

    I enjoy a metaphor mixed lover.
    I swallow marble: god or cake.

    I’m mad about tops and tails
    and speed on the uptake,

    any transmuting silent swan with guns
    that sport a lion’s legs,

    the orgiastic glaze of kisses
    on a pair of gunpowder kegs,

    the pinwheel grip of dark hands
    around cherry tipped pastry breasts,

    a spawning frog’s haunches
    at home in the snowbird’s nest,

    a pricking taste of hedgehog,
    crown prince or gingerbread king,

    some cuddly kitten, purring—
    hardens into scorpion sting—

    the lip licking fox that ends
    in a feather flurry of black cock,

    and—yes—the embryo cuckoo that flaps 
    in my lowly grandmother clock.

      BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS


 

The content of this web-site (graphics, text and other elements) is © Copyright 2001-9 by John Klima and the respective content creators. This material may not be reprinted or retransmitted in whole or in part without the expressed written consent of the publisher or the owners of these respective websites. All rights reserved worldwide.

Electric Velocipede has been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Stories have been reprinted in several year's best anthologies. Subscribe and find out where speculative fiction is going in the 21st Century.