by Corey Mesler

“We Sugar the Obstacle Dark”

            –Matthea Harvey

And worm into each other

like common infections. Continue Reading »

Reviewed by Angela Meyer

At the beginning of the 20th Century, nuclear weapons were the stuff of science fiction. Writers like H.G. Wells imagined a future where the incredible power of the atom could be unleashed to great destruction, and thus create no need for warfare. He, and other writers, artists and visionary scientists, imagined a utopia powered by this endless energy. There would be no point starting wars if it were known what havoc the atomic weapons could wreak. Continue Reading »

by Mariana Sabino

Clouds

Orange swallowed the green tufts.  One here, one there, down flat - defeated.  She made the grass do that, to lie still, smooth and soft in the lump.  Play-doh of earth dough, copper like the coin.  The coin was in her dress pocket, she pulled it out and stuck it there in the middle, in the stomach of the bugman.  His stomach sank, growing on its edges to twice as big.  She laughed, more in knowing it was her fault.

It was then she saw the cloud.   Alone,  down low from the blue-on-blue sky above.  Slipping past the left antennae of the bugman, fizzed to fit between her two fingers – if only she had thought of squeezing it -  it went behind her. 

She turned around to see it sneaking inside the window, the tiny-eyed window of the huge, beautiful house,  where it was not supposed to go.  A cloud was not supposed to go inside a house, was it? Surely not. No!  She needed to pick it up, to tsk-tsk it, to lead it back outside. Continue Reading »

by Rachel Watts

The man sitting on the kerb watched the world through drooping eyelids. The tattered signs outside offered beers, wines, spirits. Whatever’s your poison. The metal bars were folded back off the dark doorway. They were doing a roaring trade. Everyone’s got a poison. The buzzer rang as someone walked through the open door.

Behind the counter she was tired. She was sick of people walking in. Sick of that damn buzzer. All her years of standing behind one counter or another were etched on her face in vertical lines. It encoded how many boxes she’d flattened, how many bags she’d offered, how many times someone had threatened her for the cash. Continue Reading »

by Mathew Barker

When I was young
I was driven to a birthday party,
the birthday party of a young boy
my own age.

This encourages social interaction, Continue Reading »

by Mathew Barker

Simon murdered a guy,
lifetimes ago,
in black and white,
over some heroin
somewhere in Sydney
sometime in the seventies.

He did five years for it
before he was acquitted. Continue Reading »

by Mariana Sabino

Dreams lay in folds of my mother’s dress.
She wore it day and night that summer.
Stitched into her fabric, her fiber, I thought,
confusing the two. Flowers bloomed on it
while those dreams rested. Continue Reading »

by Saskia Sansom

My lover stands,

on golden sands

and watches the ships

that go

sailing.

The sky is clear, cold and lovely. The trees are richly green. When the afternoon sun drops by to say hello, the streets turn a warm golden-brown and the sun light drips through the leaves like lukewarm honey.

It is Kaleidoscopic. Continue Reading »

Assessed by Ray F. Roberts

Instead of a story I decided on a rant. That’s what the Internet is for, right? Destiny, fate, and much, much worse, the Deutsche Bundespost has played a cruel joke on me. I ordered a book, and through no fault of the sender, the book that arrived was a completely different one.

Imagine how perplexed I was to find, instead of the literary title I had ordered, a work in Portuguese, by Professor Marcelo Lopes de Souza, entitled “O Desafio Metropolitano – Um Estudo sobre a Problematica Socio-espacial nas Metropoles Brasileiras.” Continue Reading »

Reviewed by Rachel Watts

In Salvador Plascencia’s first novel, an omniscient narrator disguised as Saturn wages war on his characters. Saturn wins the four years’ struggle, initiated and fought over the loss of love, “the omniscient narrator (aka the war against the commodification of sadness).” This novel, heavily influenced by authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, reads as part memoir, part salve to heal a broken heart and part diatribe on control by religion, politics and culture. Continue Reading »