Contributed By: Stephen Gibson
The need to be restrained is a given—
by rope, by ball-gag riding bit, by chain:
the art of knot tying is not for everyone,
but the need to be restrained? A given.
Everyone understands love brings pain—
this is its visible, exaggerated expression.
The need to be restrained is a given—
by rope, by ball-gag riding bit, by chain.
Return to table of contents for Issue 12 Winter 2018.
It’s possible to loathe and desire the same thing. What the heart wants isn’t simple. It’s complex. In graphic novels heroines beg for it to sting. It’s possible to loathe and desire the same thing.…
It’s possible in one’s soul to feel this lonely and, so, to purchase someone to caress, if not in flesh and blood, then in latex. It’s possible in one’s soul to feel this lonely. Girl-Who-Always-Smiles…
She wasn’t sure what happened, hearing the news— she was buying a pack of smokes at the corner (not for herself, she didn’t smoke, for her father). She wasn’t sure what happened, hearing the news:…
Clo needs to believe she’ll help to end the war and, with those others she lives with in the Haight, that she’ll actually find peace and love forever. She’s run away with a girlfriend—this…
By co-opting the style and tropes of the Romantics and applying them to an ironic magical realism story, Süskind created a postmodern text liberated from the delusion of originality.
I want to find ways to connect what maybe seems unrelated, until they are tied inexorably in the world of the poem or the book.
Mountain down to damp emerald moss, wind-bent hemlock, fragrant duff under tent floor, fog the metronomic gusts fail to dissolve, we break out supper—mine lost to memory, Ted’s pickled herring he gulps like a seal, the reek & smacking & cross-eyed, lip-licking contemplation settling me down at the formica table cleared of supper, dishes on […]
