C.L. Nehmer – First Crime Scene Photos, 1888

First Crime Scene Photos, 1888 They’re eerie, these black and whites, camouflaging the cryptic message of a disemboweled corpse. Eyelashes like a lamb, did she enter the pub where he communed at the bar, forge a quick and dirty deal, a pulling out from the pub to survey a cathedral dome sky over London’s East […]

George Franklin – Origami

Origami She takes a sheet of white paper And breaks it in a knife-sharp fold. The edge could draw blood. She takes an edge, cracking The ribs of paper. If paper Could cry out, it would shriek Like a bird, a crane Penetrated by a hunter’s arrow. She takes a crane and breaks Its wing. […]

Emma J. Gibbon – Medical Museum Midnight Raid

Medical Museum Midnight Raid I will smash the glass and liberate the specimens. The suicides, the murderers, the gypsies and the poor, I will stash your skulls in my loot sack. The leathery feet and the hair bezoars and the shrunken heads, the lungs injected with ink, the cysts and bladder stones, the slices of […]

Alan Ira Gordon – From Whence the Songbird Sings

From Whence the Songbird Sings She told me one dark evening, how on her native world she stood waist-deep in a ruby river while lightning chirped across an orange sky. I fought back tears that sprang to life from the look on her face as she longed for home. But in the glare of next […]

F.J. Bergmann – Appropriate Tools

Appropriate Tools … a man opens a wooden crate with the help of a bird … —J.M. Coetzee, “Speaking in Tongues,” The Australian, 23 February 2006 He wanted to see what was inside his head, but his workshop had been rifled by his disaffected spawn, and all that was left him in the way of […]