Spring 2017 Season

Work from the Spring 2017 Season of concīs

Chapter Fourteen: Follow Here

Phoebe Reeves

February 14, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

All things are under the wings of doubt—
cattle and the fruits of the earth,
men and women,

the menstrual flux, the flow of milk
and infirmity.
Between her legs,

with her hands, she summons her health
as if it were flowing from the knife,
alone without

the foundation of loss.
Some men came to a stream.
One of them took off his clothes

and went into the stream
and tasted it and declared that it was true.

Without words, action is secret.
Out of the water,
the man’s hand suddenly burned.

Under the threshold of the door,
the bones of a name said
I have my own hands, and a little hole,

unknown to touch or look.
I have seen the fields, the air,
and been within the year to prove this.

February 14, 2017

Why My Life Still Revolves Around an Old Man From South Korea

Spencer Shaak

February 12, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Because he tapped me on my shoulder in the PC Bang and said, Do you want to go to ping pong room tomorrow? Because in the ping pong room we talked over instant coffee, and played Beatles music together. Because he asked, Do you want to go to Amen Church with me? And because I said yes and I sat with him in the chapel pews with his Korean-English bible, reciting Korean. Because he introduced me to his friends, culture, and way of life. Because he gave me hope on Sundays when I was alone. Because one night he said, Duck, let’s eat, and I said yes because I never had duck in another country, or soju to wash it down with. Because he slapped my back when a bone was caught in my throat and we watched it fling in front of us like it a slingshot. Because we couldn’t stop laughing about that. Because he showed me pictures of his son and daughter who are married and have their own families in Seoul. Because he’s a proud father and he inspired me to be like him, except perhaps with a little less of the late-night gambling, soju, and cigarettes at the PC Bang. Because I hugged him before I left South Korea. And, because it’s hard to hug people these days.

February 12, 2017

Make Wings

Monica Rico

February 9, 2017 by admin 1 Comment

They shit too much,
the swallows nest
above the mail box
with black eyeliner
or wings on the eyes
of Elizabeth Taylor
who would be jealous
of their blue brilliant as a
bought jewel from the
mouth of Richard Burton.

They strike in dips
and ignore the beautiful
women who catch them
and use their forked
tails to pencil in eyebrows.

February 9, 2017

The Myth (4)

Jerry McGuire

February 7, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

The Company of Wolves, “The Story of Grandmother”

All the pretty girls in their bright red hoods, against forest green, blizzard white, diamond mine, pure flame. Each her beast of cunning oncoming, filthy blast of desire, lostness of love. The dance behind everything a stumble through the woods, strut down a narrow path, fumble at the door. Behind it, always, grandma in grandma drag, rocking, knitting, humming a pop song, cuddling her Bible, cradling her shotgun. The guts in jugs on shelves, ferocious tease of teenage nipple, the cunt you never see. Everything turns from cartoon to feast of horror and back again, looping forever, origin story to grind of endtimes, sacraments of warning, damnation, redemption, salvation. The woodsman who comes chops everything up and stacks it in neat piles smeared with granny, the wolf, the girl. That he himself escapes is never in doubt. She forever puzzling over path of pins, path of needles, he confirmed and solemnized in path of axe.

February 7, 2017

Good Fellows

Mark Budman

February 5, 2017 by admin 1 Comment

They told me to leave town and take the Russian with me. She had a penchant for
pearl strings and ring tattoos on her fingers and toes.

It was suicidal not to comply. We barricaded the glass door of my house with chairs and mirrors, pulled the blinds down, ate caviar on buttered bread and drank champagne straight from the bottle while wearing nothing but gun holsters: in hers—the Desert Eagle, and in mine—Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum Revolver. I cocked my gun half a dozen times. In the morning, the stars faded, the neighbors ran away, three black limos arrived, and ten guys with AK-47s fanned out.

The Russian came out from the bathroom with a toothbrush in her hand.

“I hope they brought caviar,” she said. “We are running low.”

February 5, 2017

spice

Ferral Willcox

February 3, 2017 by admin 1 Comment

hiked skirt, alert
atoll, coral lace bleached to pieces
blasted to patches of cover, duck
under the fabric of safe damask
hidden features of the past
spiked earth coerced
from circle to interrupted girth,
fetish of flash, of fried fish
spurted to Piscean heights
shattering glass,
ceilings of an active sex
dispersed. She was a pretty young thing,
the earth.

February 3, 2017

Familia Crest

Rose Knapp

January 31, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

One Medieval value
Papal Borges Loyalty
Submit Two Prince Jon
Pre printing press Brut
Of course of coarse
Finally fallacio is free
From bastards &fallacy

January 31, 2017

A Memory of the First Battle

Xujun Eberlein

January 29, 2017 by admin 2 Comments

At first our city’s two Red Guard factions engaged in “civilized struggle”—using brush pens and words, big-character posters and leaflets, high-pitched broadcast and public debates, loud diatribes and, occasionally, fists to attack each other—until one side started to frequently parade the streets, shouting insulting and damaging slogans such as “Blah-blah is doomed,” and that nettled the nerve of the said faction, middle and high school and college students who had successfully forced the city government to stop classes, so they could carry on the Cultural Revolution, and so they charged into the city’s firehouses, where fire-fighters had been told not to resist the Red Guards, filled fire engines with sewage from big cesspools of communal toilets, drove to the streets, and sprayed their parading opponents—who might have been able to stand up against water cannons but ended up fleeing helter-skelter from the overwhelming foul smell—making the streets stink for days, so badly that stores stayed closed. That was how piss and shit and fire engines became the first real weapon in our city’s “armed struggle,” preceding steel rods and spears, which would, in turn, be replaced by rifles, machine guns, tanks, even warships, all supplies from arsenals stocked to aid Vietnam’s resistance of the U.S., and when those weapons drew blood we’d hear stories such as friends of an injured student tying a towel below his leg wounds, a first-aid method they thought they had learned from war movies, until the boy shed all his blood and stopped breathing.

January 29, 2017

Ephesus

M. R. R. Gutierrez

January 27, 2017 by admin 2 Comments

The temple is almost gone. Its remains settle snugly into a niche surrounded by grasses and poppies. The sun is so hot it turns the sky white, burns the chlorophyll out of the tops of the plants, putting all the colors together and makes everything seem bright and otherworldly. It’s like finding an old shin bone in the grass. In many years, the stone will have worn further, time folding it gently back into the earth. All the while—if we have stayed away—the poppies will have claimed everything, falling into cracks, stretching their arms out, running over the hills and bones, spots of blood on a handkerchief.