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Table of Contents

Meghan Adams Photographed By Rachel Easterling 1

November Poem By Tori Cole 2

Absinthe Robette 3

For When I am Weak By Erin Skinner 4

Disco Doxy By Avis Elizabeth 5

“Marked markers mulling…” By George Awwad 6

Photograph By Isabell McGill Lower 6

The Death of the Landscape By Topher Nguyen 7

“Contort before spent horizons…” By Andrew Margalit 7

To Go To Nassau Street By Jamie Carr 8-9

Weetzie Bat Tribute By Wildfox 10

“Here, I am no tourist…” By Jamie Carr 11

To Whoever Is Reading This By Maddy Thieringer 12-13

How You Stole a Girl by Avis Elizabeth 14

“Good ol’ Fort Mill…”& Self Portrait By Lauren Segarra 15

A Letter ThatI Will Not Send, But Wrote Anyway By Jen Green 16

State Fair Photograph by Justin Zimmerman 17

Self Help for the Drunk by Jen Green 17

Ryan Patrick Zimmerman By Adam Eddy 18

Self Portrait By Topher Nguyen 19

Ashlynn 20

Goddess By Chris Creaturo 21

Billy’s Younger Brother By Samuell Kendall 22-23

“I have become a culmination of all things broken…” by J Green 24-25

Ckunky Calliope By Jonathan Williams 26

Some Thoughts By Kristen Milford 27

Mickey At The Whig Photographed By Aaron Graves...28 28

Exquisite Corpse By Avis Elizabeth 29

Hello, I’m Cat-rista By Krista De La Rosa 30

Excerpt From The Upper Middle Class Suburban White

Boy Enlightened Guru Blues By Justin Blackburn

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Back Cover Design by Krista De La Rosa

Front Cover Photographed by Justin Zimmerman

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How You Stole a Girl

In the month of memory, you came to me. When flowers were sprouting from the mouths of the dead you came to push mygerminating bones into dirt, root my fingers and harvest the fourth, flavor your broth with my plundered collarbone. I was breached by way of Irish Whiskey, the tool of thieves filling my crystal throat,flooding the heirloom of abuse that you snatched for your fresh stem.I was Egyptian cotton, Panamanian hash. I was Portuguese porcelain, Russian furs, Brazilian sugarcane. Absinthe, ivory, indigo.You were a street urchin, coveting the wealth of the world. Untapped, deep beneath the feet of humanity, I was liquid grime until you told me I could ignite capitals, burn your city of tyranny.You slicked your fingers with the oil of my arteries. While I remained unmoved, I was everything. Once attached to your appraisal I was a commodity, owned. “Light my shadows, light my cancer. “Yes.” Take to my tanks, mobilize me.” Yes. “Burn, and burn, and always burn.” Yes, and yes, and always, yes. I spoke the only word that exists within the language of the inanimate culture.

I was the heiress of a fallen city, made to be monarch, baptized by ash,

born again as your slave girl. I was Cassandra, aware your gift was false,

foreseeing your raid, your ravaging, the aftermath that only whips women in the land of the dead. Painted with prophecy,

you hushed me into a madwoman, your lunatic. You tracked me down, made me a luxury good, gauged me, then devalued what you had inflated. As the grand Corpse

Queen, without you I was royal rot, sterile seeds, unprocessed,

uncultivated,undesirable. You were a capitalist vulture. With your talons, that is how you stole a girl.

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Some mornings I wake with swollen fingers, and a list of imperfections in my mouth. There is a rumbling, an ache, that coffee or stretching cannot subside, that sunlit pavement and castles wallpapered in novels cannot disenchant. I can write pages of letters, sow the rips in jeans, fall sweaters and burlesque bras, skin potatoes and dig out the entrails of butternut squash. I can ride a bike across the bridge, I can recite the steps that led to the Bolshevik revolution, or to my mother’s demise. I can even pretend to fall in love with red headed strangers or old men fishing around a concrete lake, the girls in braids and ribbons skipping to Ashley Hall or a boy crying in the science fiction section of the library. I can tell the truth to a street vendor making omelets in the park. I can tell a lie. I can make birdhouses, hang christmas lights, cuss like a sailor or pay for lunch. I can forget his death. I can spell ubiquitous. I can teach fifth graders how to write poetry. Some mornings I wake without sheets, clothing or future plans. I am o.k. at a lot of things, but sometimes there seems to be only one thing I was made to do, for there isn’t a day that I wake and I can’t love you.

A

Letter

That I

Won’t

Send,

But

Wrote

Anyway

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Saturday I hid my wallet somewhere in my car, your

couch or the streets of DC. I thought, in between

hiccups and stumbles, that if I couldn’t find it I

wouldn’t be able to buy alcohol and I wouldn’t be

able to drink anymore. I was trying help myself, I

suppose. So when I crawled in through the laundry

room and stripped off my salmon party dress and

someone brought me the last glass of a bottle of

white wine, I drank it. Then I started to sob. At

first it was because my dress was stained, then

because I thought you loved someone else. Finally I

think it was because I was so tired, and you wouldn’t

share the couch. When we woke in the morning, you

kissed my forehead and asked me if I was still upset.

I was confused. I remembered crying, but not why, so

I figured it must be because I lost my wallet.

Because I hid my ID and credit cards and my college

photo and my name. But I woke up still drunk, still

damaged and still me.

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I have become a culmination of all things broken,

All things sharp, green and vital.

I fade into boxed polaroids and birth songs —

While you speak to me in slobbering tongues.

In the dark you can still hear the current’s buzz,

And you ask whether it was the moon’s fault

Or mine.

I have become the scar along your stomach,

The color of the sky between sunset and twilight,

framed in the rear windshield of a van.

Pluck the broken strings to carve my smile,

And there we are again, under an oak tree.

Put your hand over your heart,

Has it stopped beating?

I have become a postmarked carton

Of doves God forgot to set in the sky.

I fold in between the used copies of Neruda and Twain.

And you count silhouettes and drip along curves,

curse too much and each one you love, you lose.

Oh lord, it just doesn’t seem fair,

I have become a part of you.

walking proud or at least, walking.

another sundress, handful of spring

same white bricks in sinking steps

and a taste of dirt and earth

that can no longer be placed.

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Exquisite Corpse

All my behavior is in my mouth. Little flecks stuck in gums. You like my blue thoughts. Lust shouts over confession, submissive as smut. Parliament cherry holes scabbing my legs. Green bruises on my breast. Be bluntness on tap. Be a gutter slut. Be anything but somebody’s boyfriend. The poster boy joins you in Dylanesque duets . He calls my fetishes filthy, like, “Wouldn’t you like one? Don’t you know freaks come cheap?” I’d like to be right with my shirt still on, while you are thinking of other women. “Okays” kept on like bloomers. On the porch, the junkie tells me I’m better than my behavior. In the bedroom, he watches me have menstrual sex. I’m daunting lust simple. I’m a trashy complaint poem.

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