ISSUE 46 | NOV 2014
LOVERS AND FRIENDS
Canadian nurses in their sleeping quarters, courtesy of the Provincial Archive of Alberta. Selection by Ellis Calvin.
Kristen McConnell
Halloween Dance Party on the Farm
nobody congratulated Joseph or said anything at all to him about the baby - I couldn't waste the earliness on the farm to snuggle with a sleeping bear - he said that having the baby is abnormal and that abnormal things are really humiliating - he was not going to form a domestic partnership with me - not wishing I was married and not even wishing he were my boyfriend
Avi Garelick
Oneida
the domain of sex was excluded from utopian consideration - seeds of a new society - everyone can have virtue - just by trying to live that way with a group - but no one got pregnant - infantile fascination with the power of land - who-shall-be-the-greatest mania - strong pathos of the bourgeois family - gross self-delusion and uninhibited decay - the posthumous condition of a Christian life - this was NOT a kind of serial monogamy - it is a termination - long after a wave of weddings
Misha Bitoslivkin
The Wrong Kind of Family
« What if one of your friends wanted to be your best friend? » - « Fucking is when my feelings go on vacation » - something with less biological substance than blood but more psychological reality than mere sympathy - a distressing crux in the logic of your love life - I know these things to be true - it is a different kind of work, and variety tends to revive me
Raphael Magarik
Romance and Rational Choice
« What is a love that depends on something? » - if a love doesn't depend on something, is it uncaused? - the Hebrew adjective meaning « frivolous » is spelled just like the verb meaning « ceases » - whether Kaufman's concision precedes Maimonides's antimetabole or the reverse - pre-modern homosexual relationships are distinct in being able to continue at length without producing offspring
Piper Wheeler
Three Poems
as though your book would sell a million - I've boswelled your johnson - Exile is not the most alone! - Fix me, hon. My skin's on wrong. - Square teeth, bright as shovels. - the golden egg so shining and so wanted - all our dads, alone, enraged - I can't promise I won't burn down this town
Ray Osborn
Carnation: An Elegy for Alice Alsup
I was talking to a flower or a girl or a flower - a broken bottle's neck / made into a wedding ring to marry myself - Thank you sea! - pitch-night cradling the sickly memory of day - I have eyes like an oil spill - but the muse of amorous invitations tore through me, Psyche, without me
Rachel Berkowitz
Dear Hypocrite: An Advice Column
it doesn't matter whether monogamy is backwards and oppressive - O.P.P. (other people's pussy) - I should try to be better or improve myself or look better or have abs etc - suppose I fail to seduce my therapist - I went to grad school in the humanities because of general malaise - I have no firsthand experience with your situation because I am a born capitalist