March 2012
6 posts
Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [J.I. Kleinberg]
Element 109 A manila folder in my father’s bottom drawer is crammed with notes and letters, copies of articles and chapters, pages ripped from magazines – Nature, Science, Chemistry in Britain. Mishpokhe, he calls her, claiming her as kin, his mother’s second cousin, Lise Meitner. Physicist, he calls her, the word complicated and foreign in our family of lawyers and housewives. Judgment fogged by...
Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Melina Papadopoulos]
The Incomplete Karyotype 1. The First Mendelian Letdown One by one, we unload our Punnett Squares. There are traits we could cradle like nostalgia. Some of us spent entire childhoods scrubbing away our freckles, hoping either to extinguish them or to capsize them like floating candlelight. Some of us cried when we drew blood, not because it hurt, but because that’s when we realized that we...
Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Michele Harris]
Moon Jellyfish “The chicken has an inside and an outside. Remove the outside and you find the inside. Remove the inside and you find the soul.” -Vivre sa vie Lit like firing neurons, they drift in the bubbling current, closing and opening. Translucent wombs, bellying water behind glass. Each tentacle finer than an eyelash. Rip back their skin with your eyes. If they had hearts,...
Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Florence Major]
Specimen I A specimen is a part that will pass for a whole: To be viewed from a distance upon a slide, through a lens to make sense of it, to find what lies upon the glass that then will be viewed as genus or class, as stain or section, the final essence of a thing. What will be its alliance― What kingdom will claim its critical mass? And then, from an objective distant eye peering from a sight...
Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Emily Cousins]
Birds swallow small stones to better crush seeds for nutrients. The pebbles wear down, shiny and polished like ink. Eaten away by acid, leaving only the hardest parts. I am the stomach stone of a stellar jay. I will remain unbreakable, hurling my body at my desires until I fall away into dust.
Vol. 1 - Issue 7 [Jake Sheff]
The Cure for the Hiccups
Darling, if you want to cure your hiccups just do a headstand and hold your breath. There ain’t no pill for it yet, so for now this is all we got. Okay, okay, very good, doll. Now, while you hold that position and your breath, let me tell you a little something my daddy taught me when I was a kid – he was a surgeon and ordained minister. He said an upside down man was a...
February 2012
1 post
The new issue is coming. Stay tuned.
January 2012
7 posts
7 tags
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [Corrina Bain]
Pluto we began to search for Pluto because of disturbances in an observable body, Neptune had thrown off Uranus and the next thing you know scientists imagined Uranus being disturbed every which way. They theorized some big mass pulling its gravity across our heavens, surprised we couldn’t see it, they called it planet X. Sex addiction is invisible except for the disturbance it...
13 tags
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [Lauren Banka]
The Particle and the Wave at Home My mother the biologist doesn’t believe in photons. She says it like that: I don’t believe in photons. If I learned anything from science it’s never trust science. My brother and father, engineers both, say: It’s not an article of faith, it’s data. My mother rather not know too much about light. Rather call it rays. Rather not know...
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [Tyler Atwood]
IED We’re not talking about some little homemade firecracker here.
Magnesium sulfate gives bottle rockets small dose whistle sparkle but accumulated, death cocktail mixed with gunpowder, poured into contained metal space and here, is an improvised explosive device in the hands of a thirteen-year-old fist in chest arsonist. The field was abandoned small town isolation. My best effort...
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [Cole Sarar]
Sing Bones We sing the beauty of skin sing the beauty of flesh, we leave talk of bones for graveyards and October nights, old bedsheets with eyeholes, or a hoodie with dayglow radius and ulna luminous under streetlight. We primp skin with lotion and blush, get sunkissed or avoid it to stay porcelain unfreckled, unflecked. We speak the hiphop of gym clothes- fifteen reps, benchpressed...
7 tags
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [Valentina Cano]
Renaissance
A year has passed since I’ve rerouted sound. Like a stray wire, I’ve tied bare cables, shucked, cracked open, to each other, sparking new life. Or life that had grown sick of darkness. A year of light and singing and filling notebooks with pressed voices in sepia. A year of refilling my veins with the carbohydrates of consonants. A year of music.
9 tags
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [R.L. Raymond]
Particularly massive he left a partial print smeared and nebulous almost enough amid the circumstantial evidence but not enough to keep them from asking god for a little assistance
7 tags
Vol. 1 - Issue 6 [William James]
CARCHARODON for Brian Morgante The thing about a shark is the moment it stops moving, it dies. It’s a cruel twist of fate – a practical joke played by an evolutionary whim – the most fearsome, ruthless predator found in all the waters of the earth, having survived unchanged and unharmed as millions of years of biological adaptation passed by, locked in merciless unending combat against...
December 2011
8 posts
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [Syd Arnold]
Ebola River, Congo
I. In 1976 the jungle rose up and rioted against us, and latex and magic couldn’t keep it out. It was in our skin and water, multiplying like some fierce mathematician, some vicious genius.
Oh ugly alphabet, just look at what it did to us— we could only melt and melt and melt.
And then came the men with the needles. The fearless, reckless men, the...
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [Tom Oristaglio]
Something About Silence
someone just said something about silence someone just said something about silence but meanwhile forms abound, separating us from the reptiles with that sighing pop certain bones having migrated from the jaw to the middle ear, from articulus to malleus, where we retain the genetic memory of going for the jugular, of delivering the killing blow, and it resides now in ...
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [Gerard Beirne]
LECTURE NOTES ON PAEDIATRICS I On the journey to the hospital you held your stomach and told me all I needed to know - how the first twenty-four hours presented greater opportunities to save life than any other time between birth and death. Yes, oh yes, I repeated clenching my fist while you stressed how essential it is to recognise at the earliest possible moment ill-health and congenital...
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [T.L. Sherwood]
HER
Exposed.
Flung open, a chest cavity wound.
“Pry the ribs apart”
“Spreader!”
Composed.
Soft and air, woman in a pant suit
“I am not a tart.”
Said her.
Discussed,
Men talk, plot to over take the girl, “To
Save her, we must thinly
Spread her.”
Mouth closed.
Stuck shut, offers love and sex slave, too.
“I want my own heart.”
Said her.
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [Tess Joyce]
Not quite as interesting as an orang-utan
Sorry. I’ve seen eggs with more moves.
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [Peter Taylor]
Theory of Everything I took it while she wasn’t looking. The photograph, I mean. Not her quick eyes cleaving the world’s indifference; not the star-believing beads hanging in the doorway where a cat should be, pawing; but a single page from her notebook laying open on the desk creating reality, creating singularity, the exquisite knowingness of numbers, raw equations where words become...
Vol. 1 - Issue 5 [Molly Sutton Kiefer]
Axis The day they found the lump, I bought a cake, maraschino cherry tucked in white froth at the center of thawing black frosting. I could feel it, a small burning pit measured six inches above, lilting right of the axis. I count this day in footsteps—from bakery to car, to library, to market, and back again, beneath round shapes—hanging flower baskets, the shadowy bluffs in the distance, the...
November 2011
6 posts
Vol. 1 - Issue 4 [Curtis X. Meyer]
The Space Shuttle Atlantis to Casey Anthony Imagine being in the position where everything you knew, everyone you ever met or loved could fit behind the eclipse of your thumb. One blue orb balanced in the cradle of the cosmos like amniotic fluid, a pearl rippling at the top of a tide pool made of ink. As a mother feeds her child in the womb, I felt their emotions in reverse symbiosis surge back...
Vol. 1 - Issue 4 [Florence Major]
Earth, Air, Fire and Water ..And The Chapel of Matisse- The ancient elements were far too few, (As I look upon the work of Matisse) I find Aristotle too limited because it is a matter of the soul that always has been prey to measurement with calipers in search of heaven’s dust. Democritus came closest to this dust, Empedocles debated what they knew but agreed that the soul was a movement without...
Vol. 1 - Issue 4 [Pepper Trail]
Atmosphere Half the world is blue, where we fly Along the horizon, periwinkle shading Up to dome of indigo, everyone’s Favorite color in all its tones, ready To be with the click of a mouse selected And below us all white insubstantiality Vague ripples in a calm sea of cloud Behind us, invisible the mark we make With the very stuff of sky, fog of breath, Persistence of carbon dioxide Mingled in a...
Vol. 1 - Issue 4 [Jennifer Angyal]
Postmodern Some claim that E = mc squared is a “sexed equation” (I am not making this up) because it “privileges the speed of light” over other, equally deserving, speeds— the speed, say, with which the root can deconstruct the sidewalk, or acid rain the gargoyle’s beaked nose. So, what if we pick instead the giant tortoise’s lumbering rate, or the speed of the humble snail, acceptably...
Vol. 1 - Issue 4 [Brittney Corrigan]
15 weeks Your skin is fine enough to see the blood move beneath, your heart beats faster each day. Mine beats faster, too—I move more blood for you. My heart is larger. But I already knew this. How could it not have grown to make room for you? 25 weeks Little cricket, now your bones are beginning to harden. You are less insect, less sea-thing, less star. The rope ladder of your spine settles its...
October 2011
1 post
hi-a-tus
n. pl. hi·a·tus·es or hiatus 1. A gap or interruption in space, time, or continuity; a break: “We are likely to be disconcerted by … hiatuses of thought” (Edmund Wilson).2. Linguistics A slight pause that occurs when two immediately adjacent vowels in consecutive syllables are pronounced, as in reality and naive.3. Anatomy A separation, aperture, fissure, or short passage in...
July 2011
12 posts
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Christopher Michel]
Mirror and Phantom
One of Ramachandran’s patients complained that he was suffering from an excruciating cramping in his phantom arm…. Ramachandran came up with an unusual treatment. He placed a mirror in a cardboard box and instructed the patient to place his existing hand inside the box, next to the mirror. … After two weeks, the patient’s pain vanished, along with his perception of...
Vol 1. - Issue 3 [Carl James Grindley]
AFRAID OF THE DARK
To Lora, it’s all flying Fish and sudden ecstasy. The feeling of air instead of water, The burn of oxygen Instead of the reassurance Of ancient salts. With these Sorts of thoughts, it’s no surprise Her nights never end. It’s no surprise that the moon turns On some invisible pivot And day breaks over James Bay Leaving her to pick at the tiny threads That fantastic, embroider...
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé]
Underground and Adrift
If four puncta equal five lepta equal one hour, the green side just slid out with the tide. Neaten the shoreline. For twelve miles without turning. On the breakwater, an oubliette, trapdoor left open to let out the weeping. Pebble dropped in. Soundless. Lawn of weeds. So this is what eternity feels like. Burnt lime. Sleeping on the equinox like heavy silk. Counting the...
Vol.1 - Issue 3 [Paul David Adkins]
THE ELEMENTS OF SEROQUEL ® (Quetiapine)
Study the mountains.
I level them like flour in a measuring cup. Thunderstorms approach wearing breastplates. Consider summer, the sky licked clean as a bowl. Whitecaps snap seagulls with wet towels. Remember the green-plated pond sprinkled with pollen bright as confectionary sugar. Dream of wildfire. Slouch by a fireplace...
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [R.L. Raymond]
Discussions about the universe over a cup of coffee
Black matter the universe awakening Dark matter unseen presence all explaining Grey matter rejuvenates at the idea
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Jenni Baker]
Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom
Everything must have been much closer in the past before the universe’s first minutes rapidly expanding and cooling.
The fabric of time and space comes into existence at a point and expands forward in time, attracting nearby dark matter. The oscillatory universe is infused with dark energy; gravity gains the upper hand slowly breaking the expansion. Space...
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Yvonne Garcia]
Inhaling Sir Isaac Newton Breathing in Elvis, my hips remember how to move, lip twitches a little release - quick laughter exhale, exchange microscopic pieces of me for Jesus, his desert wanderings find me seeking the first garden grown in a green cabinet turned container on the back porch of the house on crack alley inhale each of his...
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [J.J. Steinfeld]
Contrariness
If and when you become invisible your punishment will be that you cannot comprehend invisibility such is the contrariness of the fantastic in the everyday, the ordinary,the thin surface of consistency.
Miscalculation
In the middle of a terrifying night of calamity and confusiona scientist jumps out from the annals of science history banging his brainy head against a kitchen wall...
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Brittney Corrigan]
Natural Selection at Work in NE Portland I didn’t realize I had a Darwinian car, or that natural selection was taking place on Sumner Street. Our neighborhood in the city, but pretending not to be— tall cedars and fir trees lofting over one-story houses, owls and raccoons eyeing our backyard chickens in the streetlamp-dark. But it has happened twice already. Grey squirrels in the road. Not...
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Denny Marshall]
Dust Collection
Moving bedroom furniture That has not been moved For years Marks dug deep Into the carpet And dust and dirt collected Mostly piles of dust If anything sits A long time No matter material Or living thing The dust Will gather A reminder To get up and do something
Vol. 1 - Issue 3 [Pamela Murray Winters]
On Hearing of Ceres an asteroid, possibly to be named a planet Ceres…has a very primitive surface, water-bearing minerals, and possibly a very weak atmosphere and frost. (http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/why.asp) It’s made of clay and brims with liquid. Perhaps it’s the vessel that pours its wine to wash the moon red. Perhaps it boils with steam and swathes Venus, or pours its...
The magazine is coming...
…a few days late, thanks to an overwhelming number of submissions (thank you, guys!), but coming nonetheless.
Stay tuned!
June 2011
5 posts
Vol. 1 - Issue 2 [L.S. Bassen]
At the Moment of Anesthesia, the Mathematician At the moment of anesthesia comes a choice, brief and unreal, as through the vein comes cool and wet what breathing through the mask would little slow, but awake it is also no easy task to feel a polygon become a sphere, my sums, zero. I tried to focus on the voice of the anesthesiologist who told me to take deep, easy breaths. Though...
Vol. 1 - Issue 2 [Michael Quilici]
Catenary There you lie, Spanning vast distances White arms stretched A thousand miles In both directions One foot anchored On either shore Those golden scales! Such a precise balance An ounce on either end And you would come Crashing down, like Galloping Gerty And the pieces that Fell would drop Silently into my arms Nobody can stay Like that forever. Patient winds erode Your willpower down ...
Vol. 1 - Issue 2 [Jaime Martin]
Plasmodium I have been with you since before you were even you before you climbed out of the trees and walked upright Incubated in the most perfectly evolved creature this side of the cockroach Mosquitoes, my apostles everywhere there is water complex and mobile have countless substrains there are 50,000 of me in the space the size of a period Call me parasite malarial carrier I killed Alexander...
Vol. 1 - Issue 2 [Emily Kagan Trenchard]
The Two Most Important Things I Learned in College 1. This is where the dead skin of my lip goes when I bite it free: the joined cogs, the origami clusters that make up a protein will splash into the acid lake of my stomach. The links between these molecules, release their promises to one another and chemistry is now biology is now a gift from myself to myself, to make some new...
Better Late than Never
The May 2011 issue is on its way. The flu and editing don’t exactly go together, as I unfortunately learned, but everything is on its way. Thanks for your patience!
(>-) + <3
Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory, Editor-in-Chief
March 2011
6 posts
Vol. 1 - Issue 1 [Jeff Klooger]
Better
without it nothing is achieved I want you to have it need you to want it to make it better with blood everything is better blood makes the body more than its parts it is the tune and the rhythm the meat to fill your belly blood is like a wife in the wilderness fierce as spring deep as last winter’s lake blood seeps through the spaces left by silence blood is the pattern of every...
Vol. 1 - Issue 1 [Jenn Blair]
Variable (Henrietta Leavitt 1868-1921) In her lifetime, Leavitt discovered more than 2,400 variable stars, about half of the known total in her day. Poured into lines into a shape, sure as anything. So how to explain the times at night I feel boundless sitting here back bent over, wasting my eyes measuring? As if I could tell the distance between hand and foot gut and heart and gill, the hill...
Vol. 1 - Issue 1 [Kim Rosenfield]
Chapter 1 Hark! False reports have contaminated our fish and terrestrial vertebrae. We are particularly concerned with problems of the moment when oregano becomes creation, proving that God often does overlook certain species. When I think of gradual consequences I’ve known, my reason tells me that this is going to be a simile of comparative anatomy and a phenomenon of general...
Vol. 1 - Issue 1 [Chris Leja]
5 Very Good Reasons Never to Date a Physicist
1) When you fall in love, They will measure the trajectory and velocity, Take careful note of just how quickly you collapse; They will not be there to catch you. Your heart is just another experiment in gravity, And it would be bad science to intervene. 2) Any physicist will tell you That people never truly touch: This means that when you kiss They...