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“Social Distances” by L.B. Browne
There is a manwearing dark glassesand a blue paper surgical maskin the fluorescent sun of the grocery store.Hey buddy, 6 feet!a young woman shoutsas he backs up, nearly touches her,outrageous,she does not seethe white cane he slides in small arcs at his feet,tip tapping the waydown ravaged empty aisles.
There is a womanwith a 3-day-old coughand a nasal drip that runs down the back of her throat, -
“BARREN: The Primary Themes in the Novel that Inspired Blade Runner” by Nicolas D. Sampson
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a delicious sci-fi yarn that focuses on the ontology of intelligence, biological or otherwise, and the limitations of one’s choices.
DADOES is also a cautionary tale that points to a collapsing world where biology no longer thrives.
Above all, it’s an allegory on the merits and dimensions of life and death – a genre-driven exploration of survival’s brittle complexities.
Some may call the story precognitive, a commentary on life that turns all too relevant as time passes.
To deliver his message,
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I never sent you that letter that I told you to look out for, by David Greenspan
Our heads were full of yogurt
during those years
of rain and warm rot–
We didn’t pay much attention
to the mudbleat
hiding in our chests–
We drank grapefruit juice
and watched squirrels
chase each other–
You didn’t look at me
stuffed as I was
with glass–
When milk spoiled
and winter was bright,
we talked about
the body’s coarse leak–
O the beautiful shapes
our mouths made to speak–
Anne,
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Two Poems by Emma Hyche
Precarity
My friend saidthat adjunct teaching makes him wonderwhich character from Apocalypse Nowhe is that day-
Dennis Hopper maybe, orthat Playmate emerging from the helicopterand shimmying. The onewith the cowboy hat and the fakeguns under the swingblade. I’ma palm tree on the beach
most days, keepingthe sand anchoredto the shore.
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“Quarantine” by Rimas Uzgiris
By day we count like clocks the dust motesAnd wait for the hour of maximum sunWhen the forest folds us inLike the first morning, Eve yet to meet a snake.
The passage back is through the cemeteryHaunted by the occasional humanShuffling from grave to grave,Pottering with plants and sloughed pine.
We park ourselves before electric iridescenceTrying to feel our way towards a future:Seeing only fear and desire and no Eightfold Path, -
“Artemis” by Peter Warzel
The old dreams of hunting, the moon. Deep in the blood, memories of poets and kings asking for and receiving stories of the first and the last. The sanctuaries of Artemis are spread throughout the groves of the Mediterranean and she shape-changes by location. She, Artemis Diana, had come here, to my backyard.
On a Friday evening two years ago, the night of Zozobra burning when I refused to attend but could hear the groaning from Fort Marcy Park and the annoyance of the helicopters keeping order on the crowd, I was standing in the yard having a cigar and a beer and called my son Zach to remind him of the annual auto-da-fe,
