Issue 1.3, Summer 2016
Featured Content
Fiction: “The Everyday Schoolbook” by Timothy DeLizza
Essay 1: The Lap Swimmer
The Lap Swimmer swam in the same pool his whole life. Every day he swam for so much time as his schedule afforded him. He was known as ‘The Lap Swimmer’ because no one knew him as anything else, or if they knew of his real name, no one used it.
That was supposed to be her.
Flash: “A Lamentation of Swans” by Emmalie Dropkin
A lamentation of swans.
‘What is lamentation?’ they ask her, and then, ‘What are swans?’
‘Lamentation means crying,’ she tells them. ‘Swans—swans were white and had long necks and orange beaks. No, they didn’t cry, they didn’t sing much except supposedly right when they—please just copy down the letters. Remember with cursive to go back and cross the ts.’
Poetry: “what i mean by green” by Flint
—with heartfelt thanks to Marg Yeo,
who thought of it first.
Nature has spilled spools of thread
to give me these spindly fur teeth.
There she is, waving her silk ribbons
—and at the unlikeliest moments—
against the voice of the wind.
It is a small game
seriously played.
This watching
and waiting for the other to slip into song.
Fine Art and Cover: Nataša Ilinčić
Featured fine art by Nataša Ilinčić
Debut publication: “The Sunstick” by Barbara Gruska
It was still early enough that the hot sand wouldn’t blister his tender feet. Henry
knelt down on the edge of the cement bike path, pulled off his yellow Velcro sandals,
held one in each hand, and set out across the overcast beach to the rocks. The coarse
sand compacted and crunched in sections under his feet like his father’s stress
ball; as a child, he had bitten into it, popped the balloon casing, and spewed a
mouthful of sand onto the Persian rug in his father’s study. Henry plowed the hundred
foot stretch of sand, leaving a swath of already windswept footprints behind him. Half
way to the base of the black volcanic rocks, he passed the beige lifeguard bungalow
fifty feet to his left. He scraped away a crust of sand from the face of his waterproof
watch with his thumbnail. It was 9:32 am. Only twenty-eight more minutes, Henry thought.
He had committed the lifeguard’s shift schedule to memory by the second week of
vacation.
