New Issue Cover, Featured Authors, and Samplers

NEW ISSUE COMING SOON!

We are finalizing ads for the magazine and sending out writer's contracts soon and will have a new issue out hopefully within a month. Featured in this issue will be poetry, fiction, and nonfiction/academic work by:

X. H. Collins
Cody Sanderson
Sal Marici
Aubrey Barnes
Melanie Hanson
Farah Marklevits
Margie Mejia Caraballo 
Thomas McKay
Laura Winton
Misty Urban
Kenneth Darland
Michael Thomas Kelly
Megan Lee




We will also feature photos from our participation in 100,000 Poets for Change from 2014 and 2016, from our Coin-Op semi-monthly open mic, and some Exquisite Corpses written around town.

We want to thank our advertisers so far, The Artery, Theo's Java Club, Spellbound, and the Midwest Writing Center for their contributions. We want to thank Quad City Arts for their ArtsDollars grant, Neighborhood Laundromat for letting us use their space for the Coin-Op Readings, and Western Illinois University for their participation in 100,000 Poets for Change as well as copying and posting our color flyers for Coin-Op.

Manifesto of the Modern Woman

I did not set out to write about 9/11. In fact, I had been studiously avoiding it and all references. But still it comes out, even when trying to write about something else! So here are my thoughts, as usual, interspersed with other things, on the 10th anniversary.

I have been experimenting with using strikethoughs to show choices that I have made in the text, so I am using that technique publicly for the first time.



I am made up feelings, not memories. I do not live in the
past if pressed
I can summon(s)
the memories, remember the moment the men
in suits covered in soot slow as statues in hardening cement
walked up the streets the
disappearance of a building the
long lines to use the anachronistic pay phone in the park
sees and says strung together like tin cans
across states a continent but I prefer to let memories
fade in favor of feelings the tears that come forcefully on hearing
siren after siren after siren song the sun shining in my eyes
the darkness in my lungs the feeling of not taking abreath after breath.

I am made up of feelings that don't face of love anger courage.

I am a woman who is made of feelings once attached to memories that must fade, shed like an extra skin, an old layer, no so much to make me new, but a skin shed, no longer needed, so that can livebreathe.