Issue 1

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Poetry

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by Matthea Harvey

A child glanced up at her father and they named that Buttercup. The stripes on the road (not the new ones but the ones the wheels had worn away) they named Ghost Morse Code. They named the difference between a photograph of a red barn and a photorealist painting of the same red barn One-Minute-Past-the-Hour. They left no stone unturned, naming the rock's light gray belly, the smears of soil that stuck to it, the indentation left behind in the ground. Even the damp smell of centipedes warranted a word. The Naming Books were stored in warehouses across the country at exactly sixty-four degrees. There wasn't much that wasn't in them, a nation of Adams flinging names across the land had seen to that. Some people rebelled and there was a name for that too. There was one hotel with no name, no sign and no list of guests. If you managed to find it, you might find a crowd huddled around a group of waiters who were flinging water at vents expelling such icy-cold air that the water would freeze in a random and unclassifiable manner, then melt as quickly as it had frozen. Or a row of long tables with bowls of something that was neither sauce nor soup, and outside the window, a bonfire of pink letter paper.


Read more in Issue 1

Fiction The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio
Fiction Origin Story by Kelly Link
Focus Look, Here's America Part 2 : An Interview with Haruki Murakami by Roland Kelts
Poetry [ ] by Matthea Harvey