The very first wish I ever granted for someone was my mother’s. My mother’s only wish in the entire world was to become a planet. One that could not sustain life or anything or anyone. She wanted nothing more than to become a planet that had nothing on it and spun out forever into cold, dark space.
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR / November 2022 / Kolleen Carney-Hoepfner
Hello Friends,
It's the last issue of the year! Let's keep this short and sweet.
This year we published eleven amazing issues. We overcame our long wait for publication— thank you for your patience. We started a chapbook press and published our first book. We watched other journals implode; we stood up for ourselves and for others. We nominated people for Pushcarts. We celebrated pop culture. We survived.
We're off now until January. While we're away we'll be revamping the site, choosing our second book to publish, and spending time with our loved ones. When we reopen we'll be accepting all submissions, including our favorite: the pop culture issue.
Be safe, loves, be merry. Thank you for a great year.
Always,
KCH
FILM / Captain Canada's Movie Rodeo / November 2022 / Gabriel Ricard
Gabe keeps celebrating Halloween in this month’s Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo.
FILM / Games People Play / Helena Verbivska
Marco Ferreri’s masterpiece Dillinger is Dead, certainly subversive and unique in its style, picked up what was in the air, in the antimainstream air permeated with social unease and shifting perspectives of ’68, to be more precise.
FILM / Blind Chance and Transnational Cinema / Öykü Cengiz
In Blind Chance, Kieslowksi alters the national identity of the national cinema, one sided storytelling, and uplifting messages that creates passion to work for one’s country, making the movie an example of transnational cinema.
Behind the Florida man, other
elderly residents of North Bay Retirement Center
repaint sun-baked housing pastel blue
and orange and green and red. They clean
sand from hapless porches. Where have you
been? the villagers ask.
The color orange
picks you up, blows off the dust,
spins you into a molten wind,
stop being a big sucky baby,
one boot in front of the other.
People talk about how badly “Washington’s NFL Team” is doing and your husband uses the words “unwatchable.”
Finding the old hockey skates in his trunk
and leaving brown-leaved trees behind him
he walks down the frozen rocky path
across tamped-down snow—frozen and refrozen for days—
and onto a shoveled square of ice.
The long-hair grey with jaundiced eyes and matching teeth closes in on me. I think it’s in poor health. Old-timers always say, ‘It is a good idea to maintain a stare. They’ll chicken out.’ It’s a bad idea to have one in your face, too.
Arthritis creeps into my weary collection
while it sits alone in a corner, withdrawing
from society until I nudge it into the circle
of light cast by lit mags and anthologies.
I remember from my old days. I am better now. There are two kinds of people who hike Runyon Canyon. Those who hike Runyon Canyon and those who are hoping to find a private enclave in the woods to score or shoot up or meet a stranger. There was also once a severed head found not too far from where I am right this moment. So to murder could be added to that list. Although I am not sure the murder occurred exactly here.
Down a rabbit hole, I spiraled, pairing Antoine’s name with multiple keywords: writer, photographer, book, blog, UCLA, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. In my quest to prove an association, I scoured articles, interviews, and book summaries. And with each virtual page, I peeled away another degree of separation.
“Thanks, hon,” Ruth said. She retrieved two dollars from the register and stuck it in the long pocket at the base of her apron. “Sweet girl,” Ruth said to one of the men at the counter, leaning over in his direction. The man adjusted his ballcap with his thumb and forefinger and resumed the tale he’d been telling when Isabel had interrupted to order.
i pledged time to idiocy; wasted hours on bad TV;
await the stutters and stops in conversations as
i dredge up some semblance of reason and push
myself down a path as a way to void the previous poison
when the cat next door was dying
mine would walk over
and sit beside all day.
conformity sits in your body like a curse you learned
in school—wait for the light to change at the crosswalk
yearn for someone to call you a rebel even as you
raise your hand and wait
to be asked
So I have come here to ask you a question, one to decide your fate. Back there, and Rosario pointed behind him again, they want to toss you in jail. And if I’m honest, Ivanchenko, if you disappoint me, I will let them. I don’t have a problem with letting the dogs eat you from the guts on out if that’s what it means. You defaced my brother’s life, you know?
you did not see them
in silver crowns
looking
for the crowns
on their head