FROM THIS ISSUE...
Already we know the ships of taut grey canvas
will have gone by then — for plainly the future
parleys with us as it likes,
the steamship smoke smarting our eyes.
—Alan Gould, “A Timeshot, Joseph Conrad In Picture”
...no other contemporary poet has so successfully conveyed the mysterious interconnectedness of all times and places, embodied by those metaphorical ships (ourselves) passing in the night:
— Steven McInerney on Alan Gould
Later, wrapped in that same bearskin,
she showed me waterfalls, cirques, fjords,
the aurora borealis.
When I inquired about flights out, she turned evasive.
“All one’s guilts and losses,” she replied,
“hug one for life
as the villages of Iceland hug their thermal springs.”
— John Drexel, “Iceland”
Old lovers promenade the beach,
bare feet, hands held, they pace the last
of what is theirs. No need for speech,
They walk united by their past.
— Janet Kenny, “Last Dance”
Oh where did it come from, that web of sound
But the glimmer of grass, the red hair shaken down,
Oh where did it go to, that sweep of the strings
But a hand swinging free, as a swallow tests wings?
— Alison Brackenbury, “Album”
Peering at prairie grass, I fail to find
The tracks laid down when history passed this way.
What if those marks are figments (like that line
In Casablanca Bogart doesn’t say),
Ghost imprints on collective memory,
— Chris O’Carroll, “Santa Fe Trail, Kansas”
The rush-hour traffic seemed, as one, to brake,
arrested by their legs and arms entwined,
or by this knowledge: all their deaths would take
was one car passing on the inside, blind.
— Anna Evans, “Dangerous Liaison”
Please look in on The Chimaera’s disreputable parent,
The Shit Creek Review,
and also visit these other zines in which the editors have a hand:
The Flea
14 by 14
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