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TRAVELOGUE
by Richard Luftig USA Today: January,1: Alaska was the No. 1 magnet in state migration—the percentage of moves into a state as opposed to outbound moves—with 70% inbound. North Dakota had the most outbound moves (73.1%) for the third year in a row. There is no room here, only spacewith wind that backs up to the north, clouds that look like snow capped mountains pressed on winter wheat. These towns so sparse they’re named for folks: Ray, Hanks, Russell and Ross. Where the young return just to bury their dead or auction the family farm. And nothing much to catch the tourist crowd except perhaps the largest buffalo or biggest turtle made out of tractor tires near Bottineau, hard down the road from Rugby (whose claim to fame is the exact geographical middle of the country). But tonight and the next and the months that wither like ironweed in a drought, when the Ryder trucks that have hummed and sun-flashed on the interstate come to full stop in front of their down- chain motels, the emigrants will lie in the dark in Minot, Grand Forks, Seattle, LA, staring up at a plaster moon trying to recall just when it was in Rugby that their centers slipped away. |
Shoot the Freak by Elahzar Rao |
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RETROSPECTICOPE
by Sasha Geffen I am giving you a nostalgia factory, a tunnel into the miasma of 1994, a cracked camera lens on the dumpsters of the East Village. I am giving you the acid wildfire of 1977, I am sticking my fingers into your spinal fluid and injecting extract of Mike Kelley. I am serving up fake plastic eyes. They say I am peeling back the brainskins of the iPod generation. The kids are always troubled. They are burning their edges.They are building new worlds. They are smashing their idols on the curb. I have distilled your daughter's uncleaned floor; I am putting spray paint into pills that explode in your stomach. I am cutting your ecstasy with apple juice. I am burning your childhoods with liquor and Zippos. They call me the urban herald. Come into my private theater and hold your eyes open. Look down my neon tubes. I have prepared retrospecticopes just for you. |
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A COMPLEX MECHANISM
by Sasha Geffen Your teenage-days were not by any means your best. It’s just that remembering them that way makes your now-days sweeter. Such is memory’s engine. Still, you sit with clogged fingertips listening to songs loved too many times, like an arm caressed too long. You spin in your chair until your headphone cord mummifies you. Ennui is the mind’s malaise. Like homosexuality, it’s a bourgeois affliction. No one knows if you’ve become smarter or more pretentious since attending that college your mother talks so much about. Vomiting while brushing your teeth in the morning turns out to be a zero-sum game. At least you are recycling the empty bottles of Tanqueray you generate. You aren’t your father’s son, nor do I think you could be. When the light turns green you go. |
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