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Editorial Hex(by Scherezade Siobhan) is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is it is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is
it it is it it it it it it it it it it it it it it is it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it
surveillance? the state’s pupa? chrysalides? stupor? sniper? vigil? violence? percussion? passive? a machine gun? magnum, massive? redacted? revolution? epithet? epitaph? edited? a torn tourniquet? the appleseed of tesla? a tempered turing’s test? syncopation? sanctimony? schism? a hackfest? a prison? a prism? the cuckoo’s nest? a catchphrase? a cartouche? a cabaret? c.i.a in the anal phase? Übermensch menopause? human? hostile? halved?
is is is is is is is is is it is is is it is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is is
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it it it it it it it it it is it it it is it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it
a metaphor? mortal? moral? causal? cellular? colloquial? digital? visceral? vendetta? larvate? synthetic? sweat-shop prosthetic? applause? apologetic? chemical? cattle? changeling? catalyst? missionary? masochist? balmed broken bastard? bezoar? pain? poem? acronym? acid rain? atrophied? alive? saved? salved?
Trail of Hexes…. Photography
Words
Kuro X (pgs 5, 13)
Zachary Jean Chartkoff (pgs 6-7)
Joshua Wiebe (pg 17)
Pinar Yasar (pgs 11-12)
David Tomaloff (pg 34)
Jordynn Klein (pgs 12, 17)
Jaie Miller (pgs 35, 39)
Ariel Gonzalez (pgs 14-16)
Words & Photography
Killian Czuba (pgs 18-19)
Trinn Paja (pgs 9, 10, 38)
Urshad (pg 27)
Agnieszka Mauch (pgs 8, 10, 33, 38)
James Fidler (pgs 28-29)
Words & Art
Michelle Beyer(pgs 30-31)
King Stimie (pgs 25-26)
Andrew Wells (pg 32) Steffi Lang(pgs 36-37)
Interview
Thira Mohamad (pg 40)
Bob Schofield (pgs 20 – 24)
Jessi Fikan (pgs 41-12)
Acephale
Daniel DC Demarse (pgs 43-44)
Contributor Bios (pgs 45-48) Endgame (pgs 49-50) 3
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Photography: Kuxo X.
We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and selfdestruction. (Denise Levertov on the death of Anne Sexton) Come and Sabotage Vodka within furs. Locked in a garage. Engines purring cloudy and luminous. Lush gas. Breathe in: they'll come and sabotage your words. They'll make fun of you. Your lewdness is still shunned in some circles. Like Mother, Mary and MILF; please hear my confession. I've sucked at the blood of trees, painted fear on my lips. I've asked. I've been refused – shunned – eschewed; ghost, I got something that you need. Your car runs. The road is open. You're drunk and flash. I got flesh. Bright. What are the joys in roots cut away? Depression buried within? Ghost, dig me up. My tongue is punk. My legs are explosions. My arms pure noise.
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The Receiver Be vast beyond the trees. Be transparent. The dusk was good. You cavort. I am shy. Give the sky a backward glance, whose crescent eyes all these road-signs miss but don’t know why. So what? – a phone will start ringing, humming about the rain. Word! you say, the devil will die – but not like this. There’s a graying vapor, nameless, across the water; dull with no words left. For how long will you go without luggage, shoes, road-signs? You can see through me. I love symbols, signs. Rise. Again, press your face to mine under the sky. Glow. Call me Morning Star. In the receiver you can just hear a busy-sound, like rain.
Words: Zachary Jean Chartkoff
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Photography: Agnieszka Mauch
The illuminated bell jar of my body strains to hear the shamisen in my mouth, the language like bunraku performed in the woods. I find this sentence, like the bruised body of a daughter, buried in lavender silence. Ghost-bells echo in the shrine for Tsukuyomi and these words insist on wounding silence.
My native language walks like a lost old man in a fur coat. My words are burdock and I am haunted by a one-legged pigeon seen by the Galata Bridge. The blizzard echoes in the bedroom. Listen to my heart rain against the windows of my skin. Drink the well-water from my neck, hold the lantern of my body against the unlit street of your memory— I close my hands like hibiscus at night. I tell you we will evaporate and become wild honeysuckle but my words are women found dead in the snow in each other’s arms and you look away.
Words: Triin Paja
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Which words? Those that are ablaze in snow-coated paths. Those that produce autumn and knife spring. Those that make you want to photograph with your mouth.
Photography: Triin Paja Words: Agnieszka Mauch 10
timpani tongue insect dry in the pluming sun, kermes traces bubbling up, bubbling into the great atmosphere above. peregrine riding with the mountain, bathing with the ships all sunk, immigrating past with the purpose of one. here, here she comes. davullar 癟al覺yor duyars覺n, bak, here she comes in the pluming sun
midnight is a twice upon sun there is a kaleidoscope inside every burden you have etched into your tongue, in the raises of your chest you will see it weep like the woman who could not displace her fate, yet was still secondary to the true tragedy; Antigone on a spit, Claudius in the marsh, Ophelia brushing the weeds with her hair, Cordelia quiet and smart, your place is a whim, your appetite is a war, keep whittling until you cannot whittle anymore
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şehir halkı yine kızgın fresh from the banks of the Nile she comes jingling like a beaded parade, hers is the lioness in a caste, swaying with the mosquitos, Khufu, her only port au coeur of ink and page, let these round bellied children taste, let her spirit, seven thousand beads laid in the linen where she sleeps, protract these cherub gazes until such time her dulcet chimes approach the shore, anchors resplendent in the light of her glow
he plots with the wool in her bengaline dress, hiding himself in her lower back, building with patience a parapet, he injects the soil with brumous mortem, heralding imminence, taxing the clock by disturbing its rhythm, of her piling skin he weaves a bistre oud, he strings her hair between each syllable, his hands cry alone, müziğin tadı dilime geliyor
Words: Pinar Yasar
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TRINITY I doe-eyed boys with thin wrists will tell you they’d never felt so alive as they did whimpering into a toilet just after swallowing the 29th pill, the way in january everything looks especially cold in front of a pair of headlights, the way evergreens stand illuminated likewise in the dead of night, unbreakable and yearning moments before the car crash
Photography : Kuxo X. Words : Jordynn Klein 13
My Country In the country I live (I just made a Freudian slip and typed “love” by mistake) the land is big. If you read about Argentina you’ll notice that the total number of citizens is too small for such a vast expanse of territory; moreover, if you look at a map you’ll notice that the major cities are like little clusters of population surrounded by endless plains. Some people consider this uneven distribution to be the result of poor management, not enough resources for such a large country, or just a failed form of federalism. But the real reason is a little stranger. It’s all about giants. Argentina is the only country in the world that is still inhabited by giants. However, though they are great in size they are small in number and that number is getting smaller each passing day (for reasons I will explain later). No one is sure how many giants are left, but it is estimated that currently there are less giants in the pampas than tigers throughout the world, both captive and in the wild. Although they are technically an endangered species, no one is willing to acknowledge this fact, for everyone has more or less accepted that it is best for the well-being of the population that these giants die out soon. If there is one thing the government and the press can both agree on is the systematic denial of all evidence for the existence of these beings. Giants look more or less like the stereotypical trolls of Scandinavian folklore; in fact, it is not unreasonable to infer that they are one and the same, at least in appearance, for our giants don’t turn to stone during the day nor do they preferably eat human children. They wander the pampas all day long, and during the night they prefer to sleep on the ground. Little more is known about them, for scientists are unwilling to approach them, and those who are interested in doing serious research about giants are usually silenced rather quickly. But there is one more thing we do know about them, and which will explain a few things to the reader. We let the giants walk around the deserts by necessity and by convenience, for there is a psychological trait about them that would turn them into a dangerous presence around a city: giants have a very specific fetish which makes them feel sexually attracted to buildings. No one is quite sure exactly which type of building arouses them, but they can be provoked by buildings of different varieties, such as skyscrapers, train stations, cabins, and even the most precarious huts. They don’t seem to discriminate. A female giant will quickly run towards a building and embrace it, rubbing her 14
sensitive areas against it until the whole structure collapses, and never before that. Male giants are not as impulsive and prefer to approach a building quietly, as if wanting to surprise it. There have been some reports of roving gangs of male giants who will travel through the desert in packs until they run into a house, usually belonging to a modest farmer, and take turns molesting it. A few witness accounts assure us that before attacking, giants will make strange noises to drive the inhabitants away, so the house is always empty before intercourse. Because this fetish has become so prevalent among them, male and female giants are usually unwilling to copulate; this explains the diminishing number of giants, who, for obvious reasons, have no natural predators. The existence of these beings also explains the extreme concentration of cities throughout the country, for any town that settles out there in the pampas is constantly at a risk of being attacked by these beasts, and few people are willing to risk moving out of their city and into the countryside, only to come back from work one night and seeing a giantess humping their house. A sorry sight that would be, indeed. Perhaps when the last giant is nothing more than dirt in the ground, we as a country will be able to branch out and fully occupy the land which rightfully belongs to us humans. And may we all pray that these beasts do not consider the idea of invading. My Mother’s Story When I was a kid I used to visit my mother’s relatives who lived in the countryside of Argentina, a little town called Mercedes, all dirt roads and well water. I didn’t notice it until she mentioned it during one of my first visits: that town had no dogs. She had no idea why, but ever since she was a girl, no one owned a single dog. There weren’t even strays roaming the streets, those old dogs that are so common in Buenos Aires, owned by no one and by everyone in the neighborhood. The closest thing to a dog I saw in Mercedes was a huge goat, just standing there on a street corner one summer afternoon. There were pets, however. It wasn’t that they didn’t need the company of a faithful guardian, a silent friend; so instead of going to a nearby town and purchase some dogs there, they would use the people they had laying around. Those guys who had no job, who didn’t feel like doing anything, vagos, pajeros, would offer their services in exchange for food and shelter. They would walk around on all fours, fetch sticks, jump at their “owners” when they came back from work or school. What’s funny is that no one knew that actual dogs did that— it just came naturally to them. 15
My mother had one, Sergio she called him. I have no idea if that was his actual birth name, my mother never goes into detail in her stories. She told me she loved him. He would sleep by her bed every night and protect her from her father, who once a month come from wherever it is that he lived, always drunk (my mother told me he would drink pure alcohol, ethanol) and arguing with my grandmother. He hated Sergio, apparently, but Sergio wasn’t afraid of him. She owned him for years, until one day he showed up in her room, standing on two legs, and told her that he was quitting. He told her she was a little woman now, 14 years of age, and didn’t need him anymore. He was too old for such a demanding role, he was going to turn 40 next month. My mother started crying and he instinctively whined at her. Then he walked out. My mother was drunk when she told me this story. I think it still hurts her to remember. Especially because a few months after the resignation, she saw Sergio again. He was playing fetch with a little six year old girl in her backyard. At one point the girl threw the ball really far, and Sergio ran to get it, and met my mother’s eyes. She looked at him, and he, with the red ball in his mouth, looked back. They both looked very solemn. Then he turned around slowly and ran back to the little girl.
Words: Ariel Gonzalez
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knock three times on my wooden lungs condense me into liquid or rarefy me into firehand me a compass and i am the demiurge in this tiny world of black bile and phlegm stuck down by the hand of fear let me be boundless in plato’s cosmos i will stand in the air and feel surreal in seven shades of sunlight and retrograde improbabilities
Photography: Joshua Wiebe Words: Jordynn Klein
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Eat Me When I Am Dead The man sat at his kitchen table and held his sides tight and tried not to retch. He sat alone, though not entirely alone, because his wife, Elise, was there with him. But Elise Briar was dead. She had died at home, an aneurism, a tiny explosion in her head that made her fall to the floor, no warning. The man did not call anyone. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. He took the body of the wife he loved and laid it on the kitchen table, the extra leaves slipped in from the sides to make the table long, to accommodate Elise’s legs and her neck and her head and her feet. When they were young, when they were not-so-young, husband and wife joked about what they wanted from death. The man had said “Freeze my body so I might wake up again.” Elise had said “Wouldn’t it be beautiful to eat the person you loved? They’d be a part of you forever.” They laughed, because death was, they thought, seventy, ninety, two hundred years away. The man had little experience with hunting. He had fished now and again, but had always passively deferred to his own father when it came to the scraping and gutting. The man’s father enjoyed that closeness, the intimacy and responsibility of taking another creature’s life. The man, himself, enjoyed the quiet time spent sitting, the exhilaration of that first nibble and tug that jerked his muscles back into wakefulness. He thought about how long it had been since he last went fishing. He went into the kitchen and brought out with him the block of knives so he was sure to have the correct one at hand. He pulled his laptop up on a chair beside him and searched for videos on how one skinned a deer. When a deer is dead, it becomes, through some magic of language and dissociation, venison. He considered three parts to begin with: an area of muscle and fat around Elise’s hips, her left pointer finger, her inner thigh. Places he had previously enjoyed putting his mouth. Places that seemed intimate while not being violations of sacred space. He settled on the stomach. The man sat at the kitchen table with his dead Elise, noticing how naked she was, and how her skin did not look as sallow as he’d expected, and he picked up a paring knife. The knife was small and sharp. The knife made him shudder. The man had to try and try again before he could push through and slice downward from the ribs, before he could come away with a sliver of skin and fat and muscle from that soft place around the navel. He couldn’t help wondering if she could feel it. Her skin was the temperature of the room, now, and slightly warmer inside. 18
“Baby, you wanted this, right?” The man’s hands had blood on them, and the knife was slippery. He could smell the perfume she’d put on that morning, the tangerine oil on both wrists. He wondered if she would taste like oranges. The fat from Elise’s soft stomach erupted into firecrackers on the hot pan. The pops of oil burned small spots on his hands. There was richness in the smell— uncomplicated, unseasoned—that aroused a deep hunger and urgent nausea in the man. He needed a drink. He made a heavy one, Vodka and milk and Kahlua. He drank it fast. He turned Elise over in the pan. He put her onto a plate. With another drink in his hand, he went back to the table. He set the plate down in his lap and the glass beside Elise’s shoulder. The taste mingled with the smell of her perfume. The texture of her flesh was like heaven. He remembered, then, listening to the moon landing as a boy. The family was at Mass. That day, the twentieth of July, was the no-longer feast day of apocryphal Saint Margaret of Antioch. The padding on the kneelers was soft and thick and wine red. There was a radio on the altar. The priest had a thin silver ring on his right hand that caught the same candlelight as his teeth and he pushed the radio round and fiddled with the antennae to avoid the static. The boy’s mother held her hands tightly to a collection envelope, forcing it into sweaty wrinkles that she seemed not to notice. The ceiling of the church was painted in blue and gold. The man wept into his plate. Salt and flesh and oranges, salt and flesh and oranges.
Words: Killian Czuba
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like why would i ever live in this world when ive got this way better one in my head? (from Bob Schofield’s twitter)
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Bob Schofield's writing is like a literary acid trip. It makes no effing sense and it's fantastic. His book, The Inevitable June, which he both wrote and illustrated, is a surreal thirty-one chapter dream. The narrator wakes on the first of June in his mother's belly which “creaks like a door in the lamp post.” Each chapter is a day in June, each beginning with the refrain “this morning.” My favorite, one of them anyway, has to be June 4t: “This morning I crossed a river on a horse made of light bulbs.” That's it. That's June 4. And June 5: “This morning I found something asleep on the other side.” But with all its weirdness, there is a sort of concreteness, a realism to it: when the narrator says he crossed a river on a horse made of light bulbs, he's not speaking symbolically; means that he crossed a river on a horse made of light bulbs. It is what it is and it's wonderful. Schofield's writing surprises and shocks us out of our linguistic and imaginative complacency. Schofield is the author and illustrator of The Inevitable June. He comes from New Orleans. Now he lives in Baltimore. He has an English degree from Tulane that he’s not sure what to do with. But he knows he likes that thing that words and pictures do. If only he could bottle it. Sometimes all these screens make his eyes hurt. It’s possible that by the time you read this bio, he will already be dead. Now the case is in your hands. You will find a red envelope and several keys in the top left drawer of his desk, beneath his cigarette case. Whatever you do, reveal its contents to no one, and keep a pistol close at hand. These are dark times. But don’t get too sad, for he’s bound to come back one day. Probably as a tree, or small pile of bricks. Whatever it is, he will be glad to see you. He wants to be a ghostly presence in your life Cyberhex’s Editor at Large, Michael Julian, interviewed Bob and expects to be commemorated in one of his epic cartoon poems as a gleeful narwhal. Michael Julian: You have recently been called the future of American Surrealism. Is that something you wanted for yourself, or did your parents kind of push you into it? Bob Schofield: Yeah, from a very young age my oppressive stage mom was telling me I was going to grow up and save American surrealism. It's a lot of pressure. MJ: Sounds like it. My mom made me take Karate. Do you consider yourself a Surrealist?
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BS: Mine too! Yeah I consider myself a surrealist, if only because it's the most convenient term for "a person that makes weird shit," which is what I consider myself. But I don't really think of myself as part of some literary school or legacy or anything like that. I'm just me, making my own stuff, and it happens to be pretty "surreal." MJ: Who/what are some of your influences, in terms of writing, visual art, cinema, etc.? BS: Kafka, Borges, and Calvino are my big literary guys. I really love the visual art of Joseph Cornell and Rene Magritte. I started getting real into Paul Klee lately after seeing some of his stuff again on tumblr. I'd never been that into him before, but he's great. I like David Lynch movies. I like Guy Maddin movies. I love video games, and find that design philosophy really interesting. There's a game designer named Jonathan Blow that's been really influential to me in terms of how I frame the reader/writer relationship. There's a game called Kentucky Route Zero out there that is light years ahead of what anyone is doing with experimental literature. There's a webcomic from 2006 called A Lesson Is Learned, But The Damage Is Irreversible, which taught me that I can make whatever weird, personal shit I want and put it on the internet for anyone to see and no one can stop me. I could make my own space there. MJ: Let's talk about the reader/writer relationship. How do you, as you say, frame it? BS: It's a give and take. To continue the comparison with video games, good game design should entice the player to keep playing the game. You're coaxing them forward, and it's a bit of a tight rope act. Make it too easy, and they'll get bored. Too difficult, and they'll just give up in frustration. So translating that to writing, especially weird or surrealist writing, means keeping a tight leash on how aggressively weird the work gets. Challenge them enough so that they're always a little confused, a little off balance, but never make it so that you've slammed a door in their face. And on the other hand, never spoon feed them. In short, be considerate to your reader. Respect their time. MJ: One of the things I noticed and admired about The Inevitable June is how nonchalant the strange/surreal aspect of it is. You're not hitting us over the head with it, and I think you accomplish that through the accessible, everyday language. What was your process for writing and illustrating The Inevitale June? BS: I like coming up with formal 'rules' to follow when I write these bigger projects. Guidelines help me. That way it feels more like I'm submitting to a 23
preordained process, and don't have to deal with the pressure of every poem being dragged out of the ether and onto a completely blank canvas. That would be kind of paralyzing. I can ultimately push myself farther when the scope is more limited, if that makes sense. So I knew I was going to have thirty entries, one for each day in June. I liked the idea of starting each poem with "This morning." It seemed like a nice refrain. I think of it as a little dinner bell telling us its time for the next course. From there I just sort of went along, cherry picking certain images and ideas that I liked, with the intention of dropping them in later. That's why Brazil and the black octopus keep popping up. All these images and refrains form a loose pattern, and the purpose it is to tickle the reader's brain as they go through the book. Give them something familiar, yet estranged. Basically just keep them interested, like I was saying before MJ: You also illustrated The Inevitable June. How did writing and illustrating come together? Which came first, the images or the language? BS: They fed off each other. Sometimes I'd write a line and in it there'd be an image in need of illustrating. Sometimes the illustrations gave me ideas for poems. A lot of the time the words and images weren't even interacting with each other, more like running in parallel, just kind of doing their own thing. But doing both made me feel more invested in the work, like I was doing more than just telling a story, but actually creating a little universe. MJ: Are you currently working on any new projects? Do you have any ideas of what you would like to do next? BS: I'm working on another illustrated book for theNewerYork, and trying to get a kind of weird children's book off the ground for CCM's White Rabbit imprint. I've started getting ideas for a big, sprawling project, like my weird take on a 1001 Nights type thing, but for now that one's just me daydreaming at you
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I remember the placement of every finger I have walked in the sun since then have bathed in electric stars have suffered wanting sameness of climax have reached pulled surrendered shuddered Curving asphalt nocturnal French absence buffer smoothed and heated sun rays lionized I drink the slow beautiful striving sinuous in desert contours are we a plague or an improvement does Self look at us as fractures and wipe us clean from Mind
Words: King Stimie
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Art: King Stimie 26
1. I’m ripe for the salt in the sea, the salt in your mouth. 2. Rain comes down like milk; climbs August branch in the size of pins. 3. Am I enjoying myself or the book looking at me looking at you? 4. She doesn’t remember the price of eggs, sits ossified, alone. Greets me with a face subsumed in wrinkles. 5. That’s why I’m still here, seeking the last word of the sun, black kites of shadow. 6. You remind me of the chaotic jumble of Sinhala words graffitied at Platform 5. 7. I don’t have to touch you to check for my pulse. 8. I’m just a story of the birdlife; feathers in my bones, wilting a little hungry. 9. A couple’s fusion is a pollen hum, a dreamed kiss with you. 10. Suddenly he glowed an indecorous blue in the face, Googles everything, his wife, his depression, his wife again. 11. Early morning it’s the dark obedience again. 12. I’d whisper to cool your name as I wipe the sweat off your unibrow. 13. And later, life exists in a beach hut, coughs out Maya. Tickle her with a comic book, she’ll grow again; the streak of a cream field. 14. All the mist like Ondaatje’s graying literature in the shelf. My tongue, an English Patient. 15. I don’t wish to sit between the hands of a pedophile, tall woman, the part unexplored, the Royal College boy. I wish to stand myself against the influence. 16. My mother is beautiful, when I’m not home with the bougainvilleas and recipe for Love Cake. 17. Some parks need more pond, statues of children playing and a banyan tree strung with thick braids. 18. There are echoes of the never told, veering ruthless as it does between intimate and disappointed if such were told. 19. Comfort, independence. We’re always swaying, aren’t we? From there it begins to search. 20. Everything feels better in black and white like an old magazine self-discovered. 21. Save this moon, this consumptive, and this mire, this me.
Words: Urshad
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refuse the amorous opiate fate. person as site. destination. rite. a heart with a half-life. the beloved an adversary. build a pyre in retrograde. immolate failed prophesy. linear diagrams. a lover approaching. the closure of chaos. wonder’s eclipse. extinguish meant. cede to be. embrace pure motion. recast love. thriven not crushed. an approximate resonance. anyone at any time. this. the oldest signal. the farthest reaches. constellations of ancient. stars. nested charts. an SOS. a flare. a glowing cluster. a cairn. do not wait. keep on. a nomad under a North Star. be always somewhere else. not looking. I promise. that will be where I find you.
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Of Singularity: Spirit and Material This firmament: stochastic and compounded, amorous and mathematic. This well of light in immaterial excess sunk just deep enough. This simple ballista birthing all celestial. This trajectory mapped in rainbow. This circuit of earthly heaven. This heartwood grouped under the mixed sign of refuge. This origin story lodged in a horizon of sense. This mainlined coronation for the diamond dawn of a chronicle torqueing intense.
Words: James Fidler
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A Groping I. We had drawn the rope tight, despite the dragging force moving against us. The Hand indicated the direction, outside our line of knowledge. The moral was lost to the slant, Deep down it was cut until it became nothing. Our commission was to board And approach against the after-age. II. The address is nowhere to be found. A mercy we serve history and the future. Without a stitch of clothing we are without a wing. The path seems clear, That is, until it abruptly comes to a close. How do we deliver, now that things aren’t so clear? Try not to abuse privilege, It will only lead to a breach of faith. III. Hopelessness seems inevitable, An accepted part of everyday life, Yet stubbornly forgotten And pushed to the side by a foot. Taste everything sour, Iron melting in your hand. How to keep things interesting? A monopoly over words. Impregnated by rejection. Pulsing convolution. The only obstacle in our path is you. A perfect roar, Scant in honor. 30
Genius without enterprise. Focus for the time being. Low in our mind. We will invariably lose everything. The dictionary becomes our friend, If only we knew how to use it. Do feel as we stand in front, A horn to impose, peppered open By a moonbeam. Narrow in name; Kind in title. To the water! Wind on our backs. Work late but not cross. A division of sorts, sans glue. IV. We fish for paper, hoping to catch a sign before the hole closes forever. Focus on the drive, A pearl won’t last longer than a day. Command moral reactions, Not sharp need. Irregular forms confuse. Focus cuts, lower quality, take variation. Alternating bucks embarrass high marks. Left without matter, premium loses shape. A stem reaches outward, Tags a print A period of order. If an idea moves, Kick off a sheet and rally in a flash.
Words: Michelle Beyer
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Saltgrass ahead, in three divided, the red brick wall, and, over the rocks towards it, rushing waves. I left the dinghy, hauled up somewhere my salted eyes won’t find on this thin needle of shore sails convulsing – as though a phantom was pounding the fabric, screaming.
Fall to notness Double-take at the two moon lake, I observed the marriage of owl and cat, saw grey vines fall from the moons like pipes, burgundy window frames of the promenade, something says they’ve visited me elsewhere: a cobbled street and water-borne black mares – dim light the rotten ladder rung, the fall to notness and the half wine-stained face above me with white brush strokes for eyes.
Words: Andrew Wells
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That cordate pulsating thing Is a weapon A thimbleful of strength in sorrow When the coquelicot eventide Comes to rest in my bed A kiss of chapped terror Reinvents sleeplessness When the sheets are a psychopath’s dream Enveloping Waiting I think I know what to do So that I don’t thud against a butcher’s slab: So I love the beast By smiling like Luna’s priestess I love the beast In a drawn-out sigh With a gauntlet slipping to cradle its jugular vein I brag that I love the beast In my prestigiator’s resume I love it with my fingernails I love it with the whippy branches of my rhemes I love it with non-refusal With shadow-seeking From my spot in the gemma And my fall is not a fall My fall makes for a perfect unfall
Words: Agnieszka Mauch
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Photography: David Tomaloff 34
Photography: Jaie Miller 35
female with persuasions that tread the filmy skin of underworlds in blue flower dropsy in lungs of amethyst nodes the meat star paradox the rash in your war you made infidel draped in bastard whiteness syncopated, lung strung honey dross womb. in viscera and violet biles, they to quiver-parse sterilized throats but like mandrakes, the language of wounds seeds too quietly in your dark.
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lady of white laelia mass-produced medusa the sulfate of time’s stutter mariposa crown honeydew jewels La Llorona in the undertow the red raw flowers, the lady white laelia fat in the river water. clairvoyant heads, milk stonedwhere la luna glazes the mesa for her hidalgo lovers not sin or succubusthe wife who chokes on darkness the massacre where opium wings and las brujas bare their bluecorn thighs to the rise, the hex that subtle sin that permeates the makers.
Words: Steffi Lang
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I end up bombing myself. Everything soft gets buried.
Photography: Triin Paja Words: Agnieszka Mauch 38
Photography : Jaie Miller 39
Grandmama fusses over the low tables laden with fried fish, rice hot off the pot, humid weather clashing with spices - an alimentary assault. The fans dance in clumsy gaiety chasing off heat trailing breath, to no avail, as we continue to sweat profusely from the combination of chilli residues ringing in our ears and the unforgiving glow of midday sun. We soak our bare hands in the flavour, skin meeting the unification of tastes, our teeth gnashing sticky rice clinging to dental corners like children playing hide and seek. I look out the window, at the small bridge arcing over the now-empty artificial pond where we used to feed the fishes with leftovers our tiny bellies couldn’t stomach. The fortress of our girlhood; the transit stop for gangly boy cousins pronouncing their manhood in makeshift pirate costumes. Each of us had made a crossing, the crossing into the realm of adult uncertainty, the crossing of leaving and returning. These walls have seen much of us, the house of mirth bubbling the laughter of newborns, the lower dais first christened by my parents’ marriage over two decades ago, the slaughter of lambs for qurbān, the less pronounced and bloodless slaughter of daughters muffled through wet pillows at midnight when we thought no one was watching, these walls that had bared witness to Death claiming grandfather when we thought he would live forever. How did we not see the the footsteps of decay entering the front door? How did we not sense Azrael’s perfume heavily stenched with corpse-rot in the antechamber when hibiscus blooms lining the verandah have not borne the weight of virgin petals for nearly a decade? One by one, we begin to perish.
Words: Thira Mohamad
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Slinky woman of east Europe are you a Galilean moon, ice balm surface and black line features? How your mouth pours honey on wax ears and the last syllable you lift from your tongue sticks while we each listen harder to you. Colorless in the day, by night you become the tavern’s wood, your legs silting your torso so you vibrate when you sing. And I want to be you, your surface-milk body; your night eyes. Your caldron hips and deep space hair, there is blue in your pitch black. You spellbind while I stay silent in my fool gold hair. You are the lurking vibe of long verbs men speak slow. Oh to own your midnight hour, oh to be had in your Pagan mouth, your life some kept place. You are the threshold of lost cities and I am the weight of their lithic currency. The labor of man, his hands on a stone, flecked to a point to kill a thing. The harsh heavy movement of a bent wheel made too long to haul crop. The tired tools that are hung in sheds up away from the ground. The collection of capacity. The personification of possibility. It is the subtle declaration of things, their made reason, their conviction. A bucket, the worn handle of a shovel, the thin sheets of metal, the filed edges of an axe head. How they rest without use yet still in their silence they scream their potential. This is my guidance in writing, knowing the connection of man and thing and earth, the need, the wearing out. The erosion story. I have given my hips to the river my hard aching being drawn away from me in wilted forms I am a failing flower too weak for storms. I grew up on agrarian seas meant to tenure as all the oak fence posts, meant to remain in my place. You gave your back to the moonlight and found in winter’s hapless white epithalamion to hum for your greatest love is the night air. Those blooming mists of breath from you. You grew upon bosky waters in a piece of a kingdom that was promised to you, so you promised too - you would never leave. I am partially the shorelines of all great places, dispensed enough in quantities to know I need more. So my ache looks for your wholeness along your country’s shore. And you in your night way, married happily to your freedom, you say my name in cold weather. Let me spin about your mouth, that great continent of you, and dissolve again.
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My caged assertion My empty room My white day My black sleep All the rest is grey
My body, the vacant orphanage. My body, the origin vessel. Prelude to lovers Preface to ghosts Unlimited space Ubiquity place Hips and shape Lemniscate.
Words: Jessi Fikan
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Tractate 1.1 : Looking for Nadja
“Dis-moi qui tu hantes, je te dirai qui tu es.” Show me who you haunt, I will show you who you are. André Breton Flaws are like little presents you can’t open; revealing the persistent hole we insist on filling does nothing - loss is human. great loss is human. Each of us is a soul partly missing and this in fact is what makes it a soul. I doubt anybody has never in their life had a moment when thereon nothing would be the same again. Don’t fill the hole, recognize the missingness. Make friends with the rough edges, or else dwell yourself into bombastic refinery: run to crooks for help: eat spaghetti really sloppy: deny truths left and right: be all the bad stuff there is but just remember not to kill anybody: but never fill that beautiful, tampered-with void. It sucks in all material and grows with each attempt to caulk it over - the present, the gift, cannot be opened: that is the gift: that is the permanence: that is the tragedy, actually a dialectical beauty: we have the blank parts man: the rough parts: the baffling terror, spacetime, roughage gaining across a pebbled stream, wisps of salt hay whispering tide’s change [Pound, sic]: and like Rilke’s man drinking his world, he finds not the world and drinks more, drinking, drinking, and suddenly filled too much with world as the cup spills over. There is no signpost telling us where to get whole, get perfect: next best thing is to remind ourselves of flaws that (un)control, that warmth! The way someone might spend a section of everyday recalling childhood. In needing to adhere to structure, somewhat—at least, in order to be an affecting piece— the written word inherently possesses more value than the spoken word—in conversation—or, even merely stated around others, who in turn will react—if only by hearing it—and therein lies the difference: words written down have the ability to not be read…words spoken by one human wholeness around other wholeness/es will incite a reaction, simply because they are able to be heard…even those words we speak to ourselves, in solitude, we ourselves will hear. The written word has less value at the foundations, because it contains less humanity, less reality, in this way. I go into the moment, as many as I can, with intention. And maybe the finest thoughts I will finalize and call as they maybe are or were once are ideas separate from their experience: notions: that but for a passing unconscious glint of lighted time were no 43
essentia, no selfhood for the prior event, the experience; maybe even the intensity of whatever reflection is entirely baseless, and my life itself a living merely for that chasm within moments, wherein I might think something entirely outstanding for being so apart from the general loci of my individual burdens and guiles and joys, but which nonetheless have and will construe strongly within the ribs of such events, elbowing away whatever source-world with more affinity to the truth of and within and without whatever said moment, experience or apocalypse. My sense and human sense hermetically seals over the radical, dazzling essentia that might elsewhere have been discovered if living in the moment and its notation did not create a lapse. If the path itself towards throwing some irregular light on what an experience was did not necessarily have to well be.— Why stamp a name on life called retrospect? Because we do not want ontological, wordless truth. We cannot grasp essence because we require meaning. Existence may precede essence but existence is unfindable. Essence is exactly what is experienced if seen from the outside, ironically. It is untarnished by the personality whom will always need to signify something or some meaning, carry lessons from wreckage Unlike reality—unlike conversations—the words written down, each after each in a piece, are not fleeting, and can be returned to at one’s whim, however. They want their subtleties to be heard in the silence of the mind. So, then, I instead devote myself to the content of what I say, and make that—in its passage—digressive, as a way to display this fleetingness, so that one may read it over and over again and see something different out of the same words, in the same way one might have the same conversation with another using different words, and so then prove the lack of staying power of communication in general, a power only to be removed thru the situation at hand: that is, whatever situation of an individual’s reality—each to each—that passes on to another, and is forgotten, and this is the communication of life: a power of fleetingness, made the more thru our disdain for remembering the things that others wish us to know, enough, to repeat such things over and over again. Is this a mess of subjects to you? Or-is the subject messy, as it was meant to be?
Words: Daniel DeMarse
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Acephale (Contributor Bios) Triin Paja is a 23 year old Estonian. She lives with her cat and books in a small Estonian village, but has also lived in Argentina and Belgium in the past. She spends most of her time reading, writing, visiting the woods, being a ghost, and traveling.
James Fidler is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz working in Feminist Studies, to develop his passion for critical theory, and Creative Writing, to find weight and grounding for poetry’s intoxicating vapor. He was born and raised in Marin County, California, and is also, in turns, a sometime photographer, musician, and artist seeking new worlds.
Joshua Wiebe is an anxious Canadian filmmaker living in Montreal.
Andrew Wells, born 20th November 1996, is currently a student of English Literature, Philosophy & Ethics, English Language, and Creative Writing at the Howard of Effingham Sixth Form in Surrey, UK. He has been published by, or is forthcoming in, magazines which include Dagda Publishing, The Brasilia Review, Map Points and Hark Magazine. You can find him at poetry-and-insomnia.tumblr.com.
Jordynn Klein has no idea what she's doing with her life and is absolutely terrified of the future. She enjoys butterscotch ice cream, astronomy, and writing about herself in third person.
Ariel Gonzalez was born and currently lives in Buenos Aires. He learned English the hard way by using a used copy of Moby Dick and a dictionary. He then fell in love with American literature and was able to visit Emily Dickinson's grave on 2013 during a trip to the States, where a TSA agent asked him if he wanted to kill himself for having an office job. He is 26 years old.
Agnieszka Mauch hails from Poland. She has obtained a degree in Applied Linguistics and currently teaches at the Kujawy and Pomorze University in Bydgoszcz, as well as a 45
local language school. In her spare time she enjoys reading, giving shape to her thoughts and exploring darkness. She's also an avid gamer.
Kuro X is a mysterious lenswizard from the otherside.
A Sacramento native, Michele Beyer’s poetry frequently converses with California’s diverse landscapes, exploring their physicality and political aspects. Word etymologies and definitions also inform her writing process. For the last five years, she has worked in marketing and communications for several local nonprofits that promote adult literacy, as well as services for immigrants and refugees.
King Stimie is an artist and writer living in Northern California. His applications to move to the Interzone have so far been denied due to lack of space/interest/ignorance in the proper way to prepare hashish.
Zachary Jean Chartkoff is a hospice nurse, poet and translator living in Grand Rapids, MI, across the street from the city's graveyard. He believes that the best colors in the world are, of course, psychedelic greens and yellows mixed with early winter fog -the colors of the gods.
Pınar Yaşar is studying English with a minor in Philosophy at Tufts University. She has been published in several magazines, including Galaxy Literary Magazine and Insert Lit Mag Here. She is also the founder of a student run, Bostonbased literary pamphlet, Block Party. Yaşar is a playwright, with writing credits for The Way I See It, Family Feuds Over Fish, and For I Am Here.
Killian Czuba writes, reads, and draws. Follow her @killianczuba on twitter.
Daniel Toumine is a hack scribbler.
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Steffi Lang has been published in Goblin Fruit and Literary Orphans among just a few others. She lives in a quiet place in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains as an amateur bird-watcher and lepidopterist.
Daniel [DC] Demarse was born and raised in New York City. He is a friend of life and beauty, and hopes to enjoy and relentlessly sketch the darker parts of these as well as the sunnier side of these.
Urshad is a writer and artist from Sri Lanka. She can be found at www.urshad.tumblr.com.
David Tomaloff is an abolitionist vegan, a pixel-herder, sound pusher, and maker of word-things. His work has appeared in several chapbooks, anthologies, and in fine publications such as TheNewer York, Connotation Press, Sundog Lit, Lost in Thought, and A-Minor. He is co-author of the collaborative poetry collection YOU ARE JAGUAR (Artistically Declined Press). His latest chapbook, SLEEP, is available from Plain Wrap Press. Send him threats:http://www.davidtomaloff.com/.
Jaie Miller is an artist living in London. He takes photos using a 1970s Nikon FE camera for an authentic, vintage , grainy feel. He can be found at www.whoeveriswinning.tumblr.com and Instragram : @nolifeinthewest.
Jessi Fikan is native to American Midwest who has moved to the Californian shoreline. Art for a purpose, not for its own sake, is her rubric and she creates in many accents including photography, drawing, writing and painting.
Thira Mohamad is a writer in progress, a sojourner in spirit who is currently based in Toronto. A poet and storyteller of South/East Asian origins, she utilizes art and its boundless dimensions to navigate the nuances of her identity. Thira’s work is grounded in Toronto’s diasporic community, and she regularly participates in poetry readings within the city. Her poems will be featured in From the Roots Zine: Issue #2 – Body, a quarterly literary zine showcasing works by women of colour in Canada, and in Homebound: Muslim Women Poetry Collection Volume Three, an anthology featuring 47
writings by self-identified young Muslim women in Toronto, both set for release in Spring 2015.
Front Cover:Thira Mohamad (Edited by Scherezade Siobhan) Back Cover: Thira Mohamad, Daniel Toumine, Jaie Miller (Edited by Scherezade Siobhan)
Cyberhex Editorial Team Scherezade Siobhan (Editor In Chief) Michael Julian (Editor At Large) Vincent Philip (Editor, Poetry) Jim Bowler (Editor, Visual Arts) Jessamy Klapper (Editor, Content)
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V1.1 Issue II. 2015 Cyberhex Press©
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