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issue 2.01   ::   summer 2012
Scary Bush

Our bravest contributors have shared with us some of their more earnest efforts from the misty past. Scary Bush should not be reviewed while in the process of drinking liquids, and the reader assumes all risk.


Smurfette

Jessy Randall


The Thousand Teardrops

Lea Marshall

A thousand teardrops
glisten on the sand.
Broken dreams lie
scattered about
like a raindrop splashed
on a stone. And the thousand
teardrops are scattered
by the wind.


Агония (Agonia)

Jill Khoury (ed. note: someone took Russian in high school)


Why not stay?

Helen Vitoria

so what if you are singing till the end

sooner or later you remember your fear of rabbits
dark hollows   crush of bone

each frozen stare a scurried confusion
zig-zag in a field

pulse of soft fur       some of it purple       blue
clumps of hair falling

one   he places on the small of your back
quivering all the while

He leaves it there
because     because—


Sissy

Juliet Cook

Click here for the whole story at a larger, more readable size


Graveyard Shift

Zac B. Hancock

Edmund White knew the truth, and the truth was this: folks die on the Graveyard Shift.

Edmund strolled down the cluttered pathway of what had once been Main Street, which was now nothing but a shadow of its former greatness. Main Street had, once upon a time, been booming with traffic, held the thick smell of exhaust pipes, and thousands of different colors and lights that radiated from the billboards and various signs that hung over the entrances to big, towering buildings and shops. The street had been paved a pitch blackness of brilliance. The asphalt seemed to shine as rays from the sun beamed down upon it. Edmund had seen it—oh yes, many times—but he saw it no more. There was no longer a shine on the black pavement, which had dulled into a gray, cracked shadow of its former self. Nostalgia crept into his mind, but he pushed it out. He didn't have times for reminiscing and old memories. The shift starts in three hours. Let's just focus on getting a bite to eat, eh? Don't want to work the Graveyard Shift on an empty stomach.

Click here for the rest of Graveyard Shift


Passed & Passing

Gary Anderson


The Thought Map Factory

Adam Moorad

The wind and tide had worn the building's mortar bare, and a final gust ripped the Thought Map factory's roof free, and it floated up and into the clouds, and with the clouds it drifted between the glass skyscrapers of the city, above the horns and shrill sirens with fluid aerial locomotion. The Thought Map factory's roof had once housed many Thought Map makers who had worked tirelessly each day for hours penciling different Thought Maps onto what was once the Thought Map factory's ceiling. On the ceiling, each Thought Map resembled the vascular shape of different dissected human organs with veins and julienned tissues diagramed in such a way as if to provide some indeterminate cardinal direction. These maps could be seen in the sky from the ground where, in turn, the Thought Map factory's walls had fallen into red brick heaps on the sidewalk, crusty and sporadically spotted with gnarled grey pieces of chewing gum growth. Soon after the walls fell, the sidewalk rose too into the clouds that now softly kissed the windows of the city's glass skyscrapers which, in turn, reflected the red brick heaps on the levitating sidewalk as it drifted above the avenues like a mighty cement barge through the heavens. The Thought Map makers watched from the ground, and they could see the way the vine-like routes of the Thought Maps they had plodded had begun to fray in the form of tiny copper wires from the underside of the Thought Map factory's roof. These wires' roots popped with a snowy voltage that sprinkled white-hot energy confetti across the city, inundating it with milky flakes of electricity as the currents sprung from the unraveling Thought Maps that now hung split-ended and entangled with the blinking antennae poking upright from the peaks of the city's glass skyscrapers that throbbed lurid amethyst across an impaling purple horizon where flocking gulls cawed frosty optimisms from the silver linings of their cloudy houses. These houses formed giant mounds of smoggy ice cream floats that hovered above the Thought Map makers below who had left the site of the Thought Map factory's ruins and had walked-off together like a liberated hunting party to etch new Thought Maps tracing wounds on belly of a green pastoral morning.


Black Hole

Jessy Randall


Chained Reactions

Teresa Tulipano

Blew mind
Cried Bean
Echoed basement
Gripped smile
Took him
Greened couch
Ate honey
Smelled period
Plucked brows
Drank wine
Washed feet
Oranged blossoms
Played gatorball
Sang Autumn
Denied blame
Avoided fat
Stole kisses
Bruised hips
Pissed blood
Embraced shame
Loved her
Needed him
Dried thighs
Cherried Coke
Sat silent
Touched dizzy
Plunked rocks
Flew bones
Left each
I am feeling rather chilly as I sit alone in my bed, remembering
how many lives can be changed by a single action