A Quiet Dinner With A Friend
Rhael Laramy
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May 16, 2008
A Journey to the Land with No Tollbooths
Jeff Shockley
Summer Rain
The Abdomen
Drift
Roster McCabe
Black Pride
Timotheus Gordon, Jr.
New Girl
Jonathan Dessi-Olive
Bleach the Black Away
Cindy Koy
You Don't Care
DNT
Little Company
The New Music Machine
Be Connected
Jasmine Omorogbe, Thomas Toley, and Mosun
Bring Me Down
Will Hutchinson
A Cold Silence
Sarah Boden
Osbick Bird
Lucy Michelle & the Velvet Lapelles
Stacks
Little Boxes
Jamison
Marlene Moxness
Won't you come see me
Two Beat Band
Sweet Home Chicago
by Timotheus Pharaoh Gordon, Jr.
Download Sweet Home Chicago (PDF).
May 13, 2008
La Mer
By Marisa Tam
I follow him against my better judgment, knowing that I should go home, forget him and this city I could never love, the sailors and the fish blood on the street. Yet I follow. We walk along a pier of rocks, a strip of rough land laid into the sea, for what purpose I do not know. We walk for hours, it seems, the rocks prodding my feet through my shoes, before he stops and tells me to look up. I do.
“What do you think?� he asks.
“C’est... c’est...� The language fails me, and I simply breathe: “It’s beautiful.�
Azure blue waves stretch from our feet to the horizon, white caps tumbling in the distance, the clear water lapping at the rocks on which I stand. His fingers brush mine, moving to settle between them, linking us together in this moment.
The word epiphany forms in my mind, and I wonder what the French would call it. Here, we are two tiny, insignificant breaths in the great gale of wind. We are fleeting heartbeats and violent opposites connected by the tenuous union of hands, the small caress of simple human contact in the face of the unrelenting sea. This moment is the closest I have ever come to God. I am Eve, holding on to Adam, wondering what the brave new world has in store for us.
I feel his heartbeat in his fingers. It races, trips over itself in its haste to meet my own, which is quickening in response. How is it that we can fight and tear each other to shreds, and yet our unspilled blood still burns, passion confused between hatred and love?
This must be the temptation. Perhaps I stand not with Adam, but with the serpent at my side. He has led me here, shown me what it is to know the world, and now am I to taste the apple? I consult the ancient, impassive sea, and beg her for answers. I miss the response in the wind, so I look at him instead. I hate him. I love him. I want him, beyond all reason or counsel. In his eyes I see the earth of France, deep, rich brown in which to settle my roots, to find my place in this strange land. A corona of blue surrounds him, dark hair and dark eyes against the sea and sky, the earthly against the heavenly. I brush his lips—a kiss, but not a consent. I cannot stay in Marseille. I cannot go to Paris. I hate him, I love him, I want him.
The wind that whips my hair carries in its breath the sounds of the port. The ships, the sailors, fishmongers and seafarers, the cries of a city drowning in the sea, reveling in the shade. I cannot stay where the ground seems to move underfoot with the swells of the sea, where humanity stands against the power of the water.
“Viens,� he is saying. “Viens.�
The rocks prod my feet through my shoes. The clear water laps at the rocks on which I stand. There is no serpent, no apple, no sin.
There is only the sea.
May 2, 2008
What's Inside You
by Peter Laughlin
Urban Renewal
by Erin Raffensperger
Untitled 2
by Justin Edstrom
Pacific
by Pal Fosaaen
Northern Pacific Lights
by Davidson Ward
Little Beating Hearts
by Nic Buron
Lights and Motion
by Marisa Tam
Kowalski Girl
by Brittany du'Monceaux
Jacques
by Aaron Ridgeway
Iron City
by Allison Kirby
I Was Born Into This
by Sylvia de Sonia
Farming
by Aaron Ridgeway
Dorothy Becoming A Woman
by Sarah Reuter
Conquest
by Christopher Ziolkowski
Comics Rule 3
by Michelle Silva
Comics Rule 2
by Michelle Silva
Comics Rule 1
by Michelle Silva
Cold Love
by Sarah Reuter
