Category: Side A

Side A Poetry: “The Strategy of Tension” by Christopher Blackman

The Strategy of Tension At a bar, lobsters millin the corner claw machine,waiting to be pulledfrom their situation,from brine into boilfilling the room with the smellof displaced sea, pluckedfrom bedrooms to be usedin amusements, consumedby men in cargo shorts.Not to quote Dostoevsky,but this might be our greatest sin:destroying and betraying ourselvesfor nothing. Friends,I don’t need…
Side A Fiction: “Stoneware” by Katie Coleman

Stoneware We were packing boxes in the kitchen after a nice day: chimichangas, supermarket beer, loving talk. I thought I might as well pack the lobster bowls with the bedding, because we’d be inviting teachers for dinner in Thailand. My boyfriend’s certain to make a good teaching assistant. That picture of him in his camp…
Poetry for Side A: “Militia Lands Hunger” by Jonathan Memmert

Militia Lands Hunger they’re out there— they wait for the likes of youliberal likes they so dislikelikes so unlike them they meet train drill exercisein quasi synchronized precisionas onslaught takeover practices fantasize they dress in para uniform camouflage guisesbare tattooed ideology from under their skinstand sentry cocked and locked as white rise political voices sound…
Fiction for Side A: “Dancer” by Joel Henry Little

Dancer Some days when I’m on all fours and the corporate ladder-climbers on retreat are flogging me with their big foam swords, I watch the LEDs halo around the nearest bald head through the honeycomb eyeholes of my wolf costume reeking of weed and piss and I try to make a desert sunset in my…
Side A Poem: “Glow” by Never Angeline North

Glow “Gardening. No hope for the future.” —Franz Kafka, from his diaries In the second part of my life, I am living in a graveyard made of the first part of my life. In the first part of my life, I did things. In the second part of my life I do not. In between…
Side A Poem: “Soup of the Day” by Sarah Peecher

Soup of the Day Suddenly, you find your crisp mid-April self digging through the closet for anything lightweight enough that’s not wrinkled but your summer wardrobe is an old friend you’re just warming up to and nothing seems to match the same way Saturday will be eighty degrees and sunny and Sunday will be thirty-five…
Side A Poem: “Prodigal” by Michael Juliani

Prodigal My phone rings all hoursof the night with my grandmother wanting her mother, her sister,her husband, anyone dead who still walks the housein her mind. I repeat a script my mother taught meto soothe her back to sleep, then try it on myself,ears open to the screech owls and red-crowned parrotscommingled in the blue…
Side A: Two Poems by Wes Civilz

Bullet List of Shame-Based Issues ● The stunning fact of shame’s preeminence In all I say and do and make and think ● Blue gloomy penis: an impediment ● The lazy way I use my blood as ink ● Eating my food so fast I hate myself ● Wolfing down burgers easily, I’m busily Constructing…
Side A Fiction: “The joint is mine, the wine is yours” by Tomasz Lesniara

The joint is mine, the wine is yours London was lonely. Cold. Empty. As soon as the sun went down and all the pint glasses were sprayed with boiling water inside silver, industrial dishwashers—it was time for laptops and noodles. One of the most celebrated cities on the planet turned into an abandoned ship, drifting…