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We’re working on making the issue available in more stores, so check for updates on that on our ISSUE 1 page. We are now accepting submissions for our upcoming ISSUE 2. See our submissions page for updated guidelines.

Tori’s voice cuts out all of a sudden. It takes Nick a second to notice and look at his phone and realize that the phone’s battery has died. This is especially annoying because Nick is driving his father’s car, a 1990 BMW 318i, a fun car but it’s a manual transmission, which is kind of a hassle when you have to look for something and drive at the same time. Nick’s phone charger is somewhere in a pile of his stuff (books and clothes, mainly) in the passenger seat. The car behind him beeps again and Nick revs the engine, shifts to fourth, glances at the dashboard, turns down the radio, shifts back down to third, and begins searching (one handed) through the stuff in the passenger seat while he keeps his eyes on the road.

Nick’s car (a real piece of shit, Nick’s car is) is in the shop for the millionth time and his dad had to loan him the beamer again for the millionth time. Nick and Tori are fighting on the phone because Tori’s cat died. Tori’s cat died because Tori’s cat was old (Nick is pretty sure). He finally digs the phone charger out from under the pile of shit in the passenger seat and plugs it into the car’s internal power source and jiggles the connection so that the red light flickers on. The red light indicates a solid connection. The internal power source in the BMW is somewhat unreliable. He’s plugging the phone into the charger when he notices a red light and slams the brake. The car (still in third gear) stalls out and throws Nick forward. He feels a sharp pain in his neck and his phone drops to the floor. Rubbing his neck, Nick begins searching for the phone.

Tori was saying something like He was my best friend, Freddy (Freddy is her dead cat’s name) knew me better than anyone else. Nick was saying Freddy was a cat, Tori, Freddy couldn’t know you or love you the way that a person could, so Tori started crying because Tori’s drunk at four in the afternoon because her cat died, even though she has, like, four other cats, and she started calling Nick an asshole and all sorts of other names right when his phone cut out. So Tori thinks that Nick hung up on her, basically.

The phone rings the second Nick plugs it in (while he restarts the car and starts driving again, he’s on his way to class) and when Nick answers he hears his father on the other end, “Nicky? Yeah, I just wanted to remind you not to turn the windshield wipers up all the way, ‘cause you’ll blow the fuse. Is it raining there yet?” and Nick says, “No Dad it’s not raining yet,” and when Nick looks up at the sky he can see dark clouds and he realizes that it’s going to rain. The phone beeps because it’s charging and Nick says Thanks, Dad, Love you, Dad, Bye, Dad, and hangs up the phone. He looks at the phone for a second and turns up the radio.

On the radio is an ad for some sort of weight loss program and Nick shuts the radio off immediately. He’s trying to think of what Tori was saying before the phone cut out, what he should say when he calls her back, whether there’s really anything to listen to on the radio.

Tori will say Why are you so mean to me? I mean, if I’m someone you’re supposed to love, Nick, if I’m someone like that, then why do you say something like that to me? And Nick can hear himself saying something callous and cruel and he can hear himself making her cry and drink until he drives down to see her (she lives like two hours away) so that they can both drink themselves silly and at some point the yelling and storming around argument will become the other argument where they sort of clutch desperately at eachother and nobody says much at all, where Nick doesn’t say anything and Tori pretty much says “Nick nick nick nick…” over and over again. One time (after they were done with both kinds of arguing) he told her that she sounded like a broken clock in bed. When Tori asked what he meant, Nick said that she sounded like a clock that went tick tick tick without ever tocking. She laughed at that

Nick turns the radio back on and now it’s a song by The Doors, it’s Love Her Madly, and right as the main part breaks into the bridge or whatever, when the rhythm lets up and the chords kind of open up and Morrison says I could’ve loved you, right when the song changes there, the sky opens up and it starts pouring and Nick can’t see anything. He drops into second gear and slows down and turns on the headlights. He mutters, “Holy shit, lookit that.”

The phone rings and Nick answers without looking and it’s Tori and she’s already yelling at him, before he even answers the phone she’s yelling, and her yelling goes, -it’s not that I want you to lie, it’s that you say the things you say when you do, like you’re deliberately trying to hurt me, like, I don’t deserve a fucking asshole like you- and Nick isn’t apologizing, isn’t saying much, he’s thinking and he thinks about saying something like Sometimes it’s too much, Tori, Sometimes I don’t know what to say even though everyone expects me to and I don’t want to be afraid anymore I don’t want to look at you and wait for you to reach out and claw me in the face the way your cats do when I stare at them while they’re sprawled on their backs in sunlight and purring with this lazy, self satisfied aggression and I’m sick of guessing how to act. Something like that.

Instead Nick doesn’t say very much at all and Tori hangs up on him and Nick shifts to third, fourth, and now he’s going fifty down this winding road in the pouring rain and he blows a red light and the phone is ringing again and he doesn’t even look down and he turns up the radio (an advertisement for vodka) and goes real fast all the way to his class while he mutters I don’t know what to say, I never did. He keeps muttering this over and over again and (touching sixty miles an hour on a residential thoroughfare) laughs at the same time. He doesn’t cry. He feels like crying.

When he reaches his class the rain has lightened up and he looks at his phone and sees a missed call from his father. One new voicemail. Nick listens to the voicemail.

“Hey, Nicky. It’s me again. Listen, when it starts raining, don’t forget to turn on your headlights. It doesn’t matter if it’s still light out, it’s so other people can see you. All right. Love you. Bye.”

more of thom crowley’s work here

How our hair floats in lake water

Watch the cypress while underwater, he spits lake water, cypress-
green, lake water in our noses and eyes
convinced of crabs and giant catfish lifting brown lake plants below
our feet, spinning, the cypress a tall sponge or leg and in the wind
our hair hits ripples, the green cypress whipping the house

How our rooms glow in orange shapes

In the months of night, he cracks open
windows to dull orange night, orange lake,
lights and sky, now in the room, glowing ceiling
and blankets. Our windows frame triangles of orange
light on the walls. Still, we practice running in place
in our rooms, in floating orange rectangles, all tangled
and breathing. In the wind the orange lake laps at dull rocks.

more by kelsa trom in print volume one

learn about her Oakland-based writer’s collective here

and see some of her writing here

He drove them to a dead end street and turned off the headlights. It was mostly dark with a faint yellow glow from the high moon. It was an old car. The front seat long and fake leather, like a couch.

They weren’t supposed to be here. They weren’t even supposed to be together. She was 17. He was 20. He was leaving town soon, moving to Spokane for school. She didn’t know what she was doing with her future. She could barely think about high school. He hadn’t seen a hall in a school in two years and she liked that. Liked that he was so far removed from it. He was a survivor and now he had the freedom to do what he wanted. He could watch TV all day and then pick her up at school. Then they’d drive around and sometimes visit his mom at the fabric store. Sometimes she’d give him a five dollar bill for gas or a bagel.

They didn’t visit her parents. She wasn’t fond of their questions, their rules, and attempted affections. They lingered when she was on the phone, listening in, sometimes picking up the other phone. A faint click alerting her to other ears. She wanted to prove something to them, but what?

“This might be the last time,” he said. She couldn’t see his face right then. The dead end shadows eating him. She felt her stomach growl.

He pulled his pants down and she lifted her skirt. Neither of them had underwear on. They reached their hands across each other and touched where they were naked. Their fingers shook in their effort of being soft. “Touch yourself,” she said. He brought his hand back to his own lap and grazed her fingers resting there. “You too,” he said. Then they watched each other, first with their eyes locked and then their eyes looking down. He watched her fingers going into herself and coming out, slick and shiny in the moon’s glare. She watched his hand, squeezed into a fist, his muscles tensed from his forearm to his neck like a thick cable. There was no radio, no birds or crickets. Nothing making sound except the sound of distant traffic and their boy/girl breathing. A new, soft duet.

When he dropped her off that night, ten minutes past when she was expected, he pulled the car up short. Two houses down from hers. She’d walk the extra steps if it meant a pause before the end of the evening; a kiss, and a touch on the neck. He liked to touch her neck. She usually had to reach up and pull his hand away. But this time he pulled away quick. She acted like she didn’t mind but inside she felt like screaming.

“I’ll write to you,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll send you music,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said.

“I’ll miss you,” he said.

“Me too,” she said.

more from kevin sampsell in print volume one

more from kevin sampsell here

and here

and self-portrait

more from joshua w. cotter here

(a poet’s novel)

an excerpt

When I left Queens College and was just in New York I felt like I was in some tremendous vat and kept falling and falling, but that was life, wasn’t it. I wrote a poem called when you quit and it was about this dive into nothingness, to stop trying to be good not even bothering to go to graduate school and instead to try to do something. Not an outside thing. I couldn’t even explain this to myself. I just kept falling.

You should think about this

when you quit.

It was appalling when Rita asked about the poetry field because I was asking too. I knew jack shit. And yet I believed in it. On Thursdays I went to a basement on the upper west side with a hand-painted sign:  Infinity Space. The sign was purple and the letters were black runes. Dan somebody from Emily’s couch was now purring into a mike almost entirely constructed out of duct tape. Infinity Space was his and he moved the night along with his voice that was so soft and full of feeling. He was extremely nice to women in a way that made me suspect he was an asshole. He wasn’t feminist, he was just needy. Sometimes I’d wait for two hours to get up and read my poem and they just never called on me. Some woman all wrapped up in scarves was hunched over the list. She’d look up, scan the room and look down shaking her head. So much pressure. A woman in a top hat named Alta from California read one night and at the mike she gushed about her wonderful press called Shameless Hussy that made these beautiful books (she said) and they looked home-made and cheap, not even as good as comic books. Dull blues greys and dusty rose. Depressing colors. Extra paper colors. I knew. And she came all the way from San Francisco and she was old, at least in her mid-thirties and she was a lesbian. I think she said something about being bi-sexual too. It was like it was their business — these people talking about such important sex in their heavy voices. It was clear that I could only venture into this world if I was alone — because if I had any friends at all they would just laugh at these weirdos, but in New York I had committed myself to a life in which I had nothing better to do. If this is what poets did and who they were I would be with them. It was a professional choice. I was high time I got on with my career. I was home alone most days except when I sat in a coffee shop to write so at night I needed an adventure, to step up like in the Joanie Mitchell song:  “she tapes her regrets to a microphone stand”– that was me, and one day I knew I would be famous. These scenes were part of it — pushing into the unknown, even if it meant sitting in a room full of creeps, in used leftover looking spaces waiting for my turn.

One time I didn’t get to read the people who did were talking about their real group in Princeton and said I should come some time and I did one night. I arrived very late, having taken the bus from Port Authority. I called somebody’s house and a bald guy came and got me at the bus station and he told me their night was mostly over but maybe would you like to read a poem and I felt like a balloon with the air letting out, and after my poem I looked up at them all completely scared, and they asked me if I had studied poetry in college and I said no. I hadn’t.

I felt like they thought I was some kind of fool coming to Princeton; they taught in college these people, and had jobs so maybe they weren’t even real poets. Pretenders. Someone gave me a ride back to the bus stop and the whole event just made me hang my head a bit—I knew they thought I was a little bit crazy, but they invited me.

What I did get from this entire crowd was that anything goes. About time. I had a whole life of things to discuss. Though I had a relatively normal upbringing in that I lived in a house and went to college, rode around in cars and loved bands, nonetheless many things had already happened to me that I had been unable to discuss with anyone in my world. So I figured with these random poet people I could issue reports from my soul and write poems about getting raped and watching my father die. I still do that.

[...]

to be continued in its entirety in print volume one

more from eileen myles here

more from stephen ratcliffe in print volume one

as well as here

and here

an excerpt

Men in bars like to pick up girls in bars who don’t act like girls in bars.

Lola is acting like girls in bars in movies. She and David sit next to each other on tall stools, her feet dangle in the air and she softly kicks the bar. David listens to the rhythmic thud. The bar is maybe mahogany, or some other kind of dark wood glistening with wax, water perspired from cold drink glasses. The two have their hands above the bar, laying flat, fingers spread. Like honesty or proving they are not carrying weapons.

Lola doesn’t feel like paying attention to David and it makes him afraid, her callousness.

She orders a whiskey straight, like tough girls in movies and David pretends to feel inadequate in comparison, shoulders hunched, skinny arms swimming in an oversized t-shirt.

Boys in movies are not often inadequate. Not in popular movies. So he stares at her nose and looks for large pores.

You don’t see large pores in silver screen girls.

She asks what he is thinking about.

“Girls in movies.”

She drinks. “Which girls?”

“Just girls.” He drinks too. Just beer. “Tough girls in movies. Girls with ambiguous sexuality— am I making you uncomfortable?”

He isn’t making her uncomfortable. She makes assumptions about men too. “I had a drama teacher in high school who solved the problem of bad teenage actors laughing when they have to stare at each other for a long, emotional moment.”

“Yeah?”

“She told the boys to look at the girls’ noses while the girls were to look at the boys’ eyebrows. That way we looked like we were staring at each other, but we weren’t really.”

“Okay.” He pretends like he understands her.

“You were looking at my nose.”

“I was looking at your pores.”

“That works too. I wasn’t looking in your eyes[1].”

David looks away, decides to look at men playing darts. He has to refocus his eyes to see that far off but his foresight isn’t bad. “How far away is your apartment from here?”

“Ten-ish blocks.”

Do what the animals do.

David doesn’t say anything because he is always afraid of being bad at flirting. So he just tries to look aloof. Disinterested. Like men in old movies. He always wanted to speak to women brusquely like Humphrey Bogart but he was never a dramatist. Just a watcher of plays and films. An art appreciator.

“We can go there later.”

“I’d like that,” he says coolly like life imitating art.

She thinks about saying, ‘I will take off my clothes,’ just to scare him. Instead, she touches his knee, just briefly. He jumps, she removes her hand. “We can leave now if you want.” She does not look at him when she speaks.

The following morning, Lola walks to work instead of taking the bus. David did not spend the night so she gets up very early and walks in the post-dawn cold with a red travel mug full of coffee in her left hand. She thinks about when she first moved to the city, the feeling of always being afraid when she walked alone, being very aware of corners, doorways, dark spaces. She was not afraid this morning and she kind of missed the sharpness fear gave the world. Not being afraid felt too much like apathy and she tries to never appear apathetic. She values being an interested person, a deeply invested person.

Two blocks away from her work in a doorway that smells like cat urine, a homeless man warns her about God and his wrath. He has some stale bits of hamburger bun sitting in his long white beard, like some god of hunger[1] and famine, saving little unsatisfying pieces of food for later because you never know when you will have the chance to save food again. He sits with his knees pulled tight into his chest, a cold animal, cuddling with himself. There is a cardboard sign on his backpack that asks, ‘What have you done for Jesus lately?’

“Little miss,” he says. “Are you a God fearing woman?”

She doesn’t answer him and walks quickly forward. Fight or flight.

For the rest of the walk, she is a little bit afraid that someone is going to try to talk to her and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. She had a friend in college who tried to do something that scared her once every day. Lola was never good at completing projects like that. So, she walks along with a little more fear in her. She imagines her life as an adventure film, but realizes it wouldn’t be very marketable. Her adventure is something very internal. She never liked the running from falling boulders or deceiving enemy spies kind of adventures. Walking down the street afraid is a little adventure. Going to the grocery store, trying to figure out how to have food and good wine without going broke is a little adventure. People wouldn’t be interested in that kind of adventure and, if she tried to exaggerate it, no one would believe the danger of a toppling mountain of large December grapefruits.

People like to fear, but they like to fear the wrong things. She wonders if David has sensible fears. He seems like he would.

She gets to work and spends the day writing grants, fearing for the sake of the company that they won’t get them.

[...]

to be continued in its entirety in print volume one

more from frances dinger here

a portfolio by daniel andersson boe – semiotext

People Inter Acting

A View to A Kill

To Erro Greetings

Prometheus Rising

more from daniel andersson boe – semiotext here

by ben doller

more from ben doller in print volume one

more from ben doller here

and here, and here, and here