How To Feed A Pet Stone

The rock only has a mouth and eyes in the desert. Crush up shards of glass for the rock’s drink; bite down until the rock turns to liquid sapphires, blue as royal sea slums, blue as diving sticks. The enamel chips and gums are left gnawing. Feel something other than the violet noise and wash […]

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Hummers
You can’t spell swan without dick. These birds have been acting out since ancient times. The Greek gods took their form to rape girls and did this because the swan lifestyle inspired them. It’s a form of divine thug life. Recently, in Chicago, a gang of swans flipped a man’s kayak and aquatically jumped him. [...]
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3 poems
How Sad Young Douchebags Took Over Modern Britain The closer the train inches toward the city, its passengers become more morose, not to mention whiter and beardier. They begin speaking to each other in nose-pick, chin-scratch code. I’M SAD, one mewls, tugging on his coarse goatee. THIS WORLD IS BENEATH ME, another bemoans, right pinky [...]
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Shock, War Game

“The wound….occurred suddenly, invisibly; it came out of nowhere.”        Rooms in the woods help you prepare to hold it together for whatever comes from off center. Mewling of goats, villagers crying in their language for water.  The chest opening call to pray de- leafs, snapping you when missiles follow.  If your body is an animal, […]

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Thunder Boy
Daoud can clap and rub his hands to make thunder. He can make the sky grumble, he can make it roar. His hands themselves make no sound—their speakers are the sky. Daoud’s applause can be a frightening, overwhelming thing. He is not an easily impressed man. You can hardly be more impressive than thunder. Having [...]
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Prison Bird Songs

Image: Hannah Sneddon The following is an excerpt from an oral history interview with Agustín Luna Valencia, the former mayor of San Agustín Loxicha, a Zapotec community in Oaxaca’s Sierra Sur, and one of the seven remaining Loxicha Prisoners who remain incarcerated since 1996. The interview was conducted in the Central Penitentiary of Oaxaca in […]

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Necrology: the Dogs
Our dogs don’t die; like dissidents, they disappear. Lobo was returned while I was at school, to a log-and-shingle house in the woods. He howled too much for the city, I was told, later. Pepper was stolen—by dog fighters, Tom mutters as though he knows it to be true. Her jaw was wide and she [...]
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The Arrival of Metal Changes Everything
The stranger with his flat axe of copper comes to trade in the village where his axe-shine trumps flint, stone, bone, antler. Now, what fool wants to be buried with ivory beads and clay pots? No more communal burials with women crying over barrows. Each man to his own grave, and as many grave goods [...]
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