Online Issues
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Aim High
photo by Joyce Ellis
by Brian Ellis
No childhood is complete without facing this one question one thousand times at least. It may come from a friendly aunt at Thanksgiving dinner, a well-meaning neighbor from behind the wooden fence or an adult you’ve never seen before and never will see again, but ultimately the person asking you the question is inconsequential. The important part is to have an answer for when the inevitable time comes.
“So…what would you like to be when you grow up?”
Since you are a small child,
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The Guy Who Has 15 Things
image curtesy of The Public Domain Review
by MJ McGinn
1) Don’t look now, but they’re coming. They want your shit. They want it. They want it and nobody cares how you never had a birthday party. They’re hungry and wanting and wanting and hungry and wanting, and most of all, they’re coming.
2) I live on the backs of trains where it’s warm enough. If you can’t count the spokes, it’s moving too fast to get on or off.
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Self-Guided Study
image curtesy of The Public Domain Review
by Meredith Gordon
This quiz is for self-enrichment only. Its content may be triggering.
Any reaction should prompt further self-study. There is one correct
answer for each question, but there are no wrong answers.A classroom, a back row, a dilemma: A 500-page statistics book sits with
its spine uncracked on your desk. Under your desk, thick, glossy issues of
Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Self, are splayed open
in your lap. -
“Out of Sorts” by Muzzafer Kale Translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell
Photo by Giovanni Apruzzese
When you come across someone in one place after only ever seeing him in another place, you’ll likely have trouble remembering how you know him; but that’s not how this was!
He comes in and takes a seat four or five tables away. I doubt he notices me. He looks preoccupied. One can get a little disheveled sometimes, it’s inevitable; somehow you can’t pull yourself together, which then makes it hard to notice whatever is going on around you. Or maybe he hasn’t woken up yet. There’s a fog in his head and it hasn’t even begun to clear.
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The Mountains Comes Down the Mountains
Art by Andy Mister
By Patrick Whitfill
Maybe there’s some great end game
I’m missing out on with this last
century’s revision to the nursery rhymeabout the baby stashed in a tree, but I
always thought, with kids, it’s best to lie
only a little. Point to the window,say outside, because there’s nothing
about transparency they need to know
When my son noticed his shadowthe first time, we had a choice to make:
confess to what we don’t know, -
Ode to Edith Massey (Aunt Ida in John Waters’ Female Trouble)
Art by Bill Wolak
By Michael Montlack
Secretly we all want to strut like you, squeezed
into that laced-up leather catsuit, snaggle-toothed,
bleached hair teased into a cotton candy mess—
how easily you made Mae West pedestrian.Shouldn’t we all have an Aunt Ida to guide us
in that purr simultaneously girlish and granny:
I worry that you’ll work in an office … The world
of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life.Virgin Mary, Egg Lady,
