Welcome to your favorite chain grocery store! You may notice we’re in a bit of disarray this week. That’s because we’re implementing a fantastic new layout to improve your retail experience. And guess what? We don’t give a fuck what you think about it.                 

I’m not a fan of the national anthem. Sure, it’s beautiful in the way that ancient things are beautiful. Like when you see an old picture of your grandma, and you say, “Wow, grandma, you sure were pretty. I guess, technically, you’re still pretty compared to other old people.”

Given the right conditions, a single cell could mutate and then reproduce itself over and over, forming a new species, or something resembling a former colleague who was run over by a cement truck and survived, though he leaned to the right when walking. It is no wonder that this man—who spoke with a lisp, stuttered, and suffered from incurable hiccups—had trouble communicating, for aside from giving a lecture or a speech now and then, Vladimir Matzkvech’s chosen method of imparting his brilliance was to preserve his thoughts on paper. With his untimely death, (Matzkvech passed away at the age of 97), a collection of his papers are scheduled to be released this week in a book entitled To the Apogee.

We are a nationally distributed literary arts magazine rooted in the upper Midwest, appearing in print and eBook editions. We are a journal of safety and danger, of love and hate, of meaning and meaninglessness. We crave your prose, poems, prose-poems, chimeras, flash fiction, rash fiction, crash fiction and narratives randomly jotted on brochures in Greyhound buses and on whirligigs.

There will be no Revolution, man.  The world has already ended twice, once at the invention of the steam engine then again with the A-Bomb.  All that follows will simply be the unfolding of the inevitable consequences of our shitty behavior.