|
contents/no. 4
Back then the
world was full
of possibility,
but not the good kind.
Lilies held malaria
in their stalks.
Down there at my feet
stuck all those silly toes
and slow hairs.
So they locked
me up
but when I got out, the hairs
still stuck there, patient
as this page.
The noon pond
made us
read more
|
 |
|
i quit the
lyceum i took a stoker's job
i was your glaring jungle bird
because of your patriotism i meant nothing
i was south american
i was an undocumented alien
i was looking good and my small fists
were crates of bananas
read more
|
|
Drawing on the
Right Side of the Brain
irene pérez |
oil on paper,
2004 elizabeth insogna |
On the first day of class, I introduce myself:
my name is Irene, I’m from Puerto Rico and
I live in Jersey City.
Spanish is my first language
when I’m among English speakers.
English is my polished language
when I’m among Spanish speakers.
But I don’t say all that.
Why am I here?
I am here because I want to
awaken the right side of my brain.
The left one won’t let me live
read more
|
These are the
objects that link us
because words no longer do
not memory either
not even email.
We need these things (list to come)
because our smart selves know
better. Our dumb parts
are smart though, leaving
read more
|
|
|
I Said Coffee
sharmagne
leland-st. john |
|
I
said coffee,
I didn't say,
"Would you
like to cup
my warm
soft breasts
in your
un-calloused,
long,
tapered,
ring less fingered
hands?"
I said coffee,
I didn't say,
"would you
like to
run your tongue
read
more
|
Self-deception’s in
our nature because it’s useful to mother nature.
He was a beautiful
neuroscientist, Adrian was. That sounds like nothing. It sounds like fiction.
But it’s not; it’s not nothing. It is quite something to be brilliant about
the brain and also to have that brilliance reflected in the arrangement of the
parts where we take information in for it, where we take inspiration; where we
express and nourish it. And though it is a rare thing when a beautiful mind
and face are found together, what was more striking about Adrian was that this
beauty-state didn’t seem to match the half-alive feeling he felt most of the
time. (Beautiful and brilliant and blah
read more
|
My sex-brain
knows from real experience of fucking real women that it can
let me talk, act, gesture, talk more, make shit up, charm
her circuits, work the seduction. And if I do my job for it,
it will give me the keys to the only true heaven on earth: a
woman will use her judgment to betray her judgment. She will
let herself be carried off to the alien planet of Sex with a
New Man.
1.
"So what's with the polar bear
fetish?'' Ellen asks, after reading my first pathetic
attempt at an erotic story. Her laptop screen cast a faint
white glow on her breasts, like milk.
I can't meet her big black eyes, so I look up and to the
left, making up right-brained shit, like I do.
I go: "I don't know. Polar bears. They're soft but
massive. Soft white fur, sharp black claws. I remember the
rearing-up stuffed one in the Natural History
read more
|
|
A General
Theory of Relativity
jannie wolff |
|
"Choose
life,” Karl said, and kissed me on both cheeks in the German
way.
He looked into my eyes to make sure I understood him and said
it again, “Choose life.”
We had
to go see Larry first. I got directions at 11 am when I was
still drunk and starting in on the bourbon I'd left on the table
the night before.
Just over the
Manhattan Bridge, "Thoity-thoid and thoid," Karl said as we
pulled the U-haul out of the rental parking lot. He was trying
to be funny,
but
I hurt too much to
laugh.
We were going to
IKEA. That should tell you something. In this world, people
either like Ikea or don’t. I’m in the don’t group. Nothing
personal, I just don’t like shopping areas in general. Seems
sort of unnatural and yet innate
—
a walled-in version of
read
more
|
|
Pulling Away
(After Sex)
marnia robinson
|
Unlike all
other mammals, we have the potential for on-going,
dopamine-driven sexual desire.
Yet we, too, self-regulate. An "off switch" kicks in after
too much passion.
Dopamine. It's at the core of our sexual drives and survival
needs, and it motivates us to do just about everything. This
mechanism within the reward center of the primitive brain has
been around for millions of years and has not
read more
|
|
Females want the best they
can get; males want the most they can get.
That's about as succinct a statement of what we resent in one another
that I can think of.
When I
was a nature lover I desperately wanted to talk to animals. I wore
my heart on my sleeve. I read poetry by Wordsworth and Rumi. I
hugged trees.
I thought birds sang love songs. I drew moral lessons from the
life cycle of a butterfly. I believed in magic —
read
more
|
 |
The true soul mate often crashes the party that is our life, striking us as quite exotic, and may even complicate things for us.
CNN.com reported on an
article in the July, 2003 issue of The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences claiming scientific evidence for
the proposition that 'opposites do not attract.' I do not know
who's to blame here for the sensational marquee-style conclusion
"Opposites Do Not Attract": CNN.com or the university where the
research was conducted
—
Cornell. I do understand
that CNN likes a good (terse) headline, but I am also familiar
with the crassness with which psychological researchers seek to
dismiss or debunk what they dub
read more
|
melted
crayon on paper, 2004 meganjz
|
|
What Wild
Kingdom Never Told You
george
williamson
|
Evolution's Rainbow
is the first work for a popular audience by the distinguished
Stanford biologist, Joan Roughgarden, and as such, perhaps marks
an auspicious beginning. The book reads well, and does an enviable
job of covering technical material with facility and grace, not to
mention humor. But it has a personal edge as well: it is devoted
to redressing our cultural failure to do justice to the diversity
of sexual and gender expression in both the natural and human
worlds, and Roughgarden happens to be a male-to-female
transsexual. Her personal interest and insight are pervasive, but
polemics are strictly kept to a minimum. Evolution's Rainbow
offers a serious critical perspective on various theories that
tend to minimize, exclude or pathologize sex and gender
read more
|
|
|
art
|
photo:
sophie andrews ink
on paper, 2004
|
|
|
"By focusing on
the minute details of botanical species and extracting and
manipulating these fragments, the work speaks of the common
threads shared between the microscopic world and the universe,
and a fascination for subtle components which are often
overlooked."
see more
|
|
|
color photo
1998
howard bloom
|
|
"Four
thousand years before the rise of the Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk,
and Kish, Stone Age metropolises from Anatolia to the edges of India
were already rich in challenges and opportunities. These urban traps
and niches may well have been selectors forming much of what we are
today. Homo urbanis has not only arrived, he has long since elbowed
Homo tribalis far off to the side."
see
more
|
 |
|
