Issue 10

Reader/Writer

By DENISE DUHAMEL

Lady Gaga says she truly cares about all her Little Monsters
and if you don’t believe her that is just because you don’t know her.
They send her fan videos, tell her about the bullying
and the beatings
and she takes it all in. One night a bulimic approached me
at KGB Bar.

Reader/Writer
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Volunteer

By DAVID LEHMAN

The drill instructor was not in a good mood. He had had a mi-
graine all weekend. The weather sucked. He hated sports and there
were going to be no pleasantries about the Yanks, the Mets, the
Knicks, the Nets, or any other team. He knew as I knew that every-
thing depended on one thing: the book. You went by the book. Fol-
low orders and stay out of trouble.

Volunteer
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Three Poems

By MAZEN KERBAJ

TO THE READER

Comic, Eye

 

SPACE-TIME

Abstract Comic, Kerbaj

 

COLD SWEAT

Abstract Figure

 

Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics artist, visual artist, and musician born in Beirut in 1975. Kerbaj has authored more than fifteen books. His work has been published in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines, and translated into more than ten languages. His paintings, drawings, videos, performances, and installations have been shown around the globe.

Purchase your copy of Issue 10 here. 

Three Poems
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He’s-At-Home

By BEN SHATTUCK

On Nantucket, eighty-year-old Connie Congdon and I sat in her dim living room looking at the 120-year-old plaster dildo that a mason had found in her chimney. It now rested in a pink dress box on her lap. At my feet, three sweet-faced Australian shepherd dogs snapped at houseflies. A catbird sang in the street. Her house is an old colonial buried deep in a nest of lanes in the historic downtown.

Connie said she usually kept the box in the pantry, near the urn of her daughter’s cat, Spanky. In the box were the other antiques the mason had found with the dildo: six charred envelopes from the 1890s addressed to Captain James B. Coffin; letters from the same James B. Coffin to Grover Cleveland and Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Dehl; a dirty and frayed shirt collar; a pipe that still smelled of tobacco when I fit my nose in the bowl; and a green glass laudanum bottle. These items must have been hidden in the chimney by James’s wife, Martha “Mattie” Coffin, sometime between when the letters were dated and when she died in 1928. The fireplace was later sealed up, and a closet was built in front of it. With these valuables, Connie kept a CD recording of her late husband, Tom, being interviewed about the dildo for Nantucket Public Radio. “It’s the only recording I have of his voice,” she said.

He’s-At-Home
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