What is our responsibility as artists to reinvent or reimagine our world, our selves, our work in order to dismantle current systems and conventions and tastes that are at best, dated and stifling, and at worst a threat to real, lived lives? What role does re-imagination play in freedom?
Sometimes the name and the body stop serving one another. It has been ineffective to always have to explain what this journal wasn’t (about JF, for instance) before we could say what we were. It is far too easy to distract oneself with the symptom instead of the problems rooted in the system at play.
Dear James, I wrote this all in cat memes cuz I didn’t want anything to get missed.
Fred Durst: A Ghost Story Dude at the bar looks just like Fred Durst. Backward baseball cap, Red Sox now instead of Yankees. Tattoo-covered forearms. Frat-boy face with a thin sliver of goatee. Sunday afternoon: he’s the only one in the Boise, Idaho, Spearmint Rhino. Right in the middle of the bar, across from the … Continue reading
In the acute care area, gurneys line the walls, small curtains opening up to people triaged out of their street clothes into cotton gowns and tiny beds. A man yells about razor blades in his veins, begs for medication for withdrawals. Another sits upright, the right side of his skull caved in and drooping into his shoulder like a chocolate bunny left to melt in the sun. Continue reading
Two poems by Alexa Doran: “Pretty Young Thing By Michael Jackson, a Translation” and “Untvanna” Continue reading
Name It Mommy told me to name it so I decided to call it Cinco because my best friend Augasantas taught me to count to five in Spanish and it was fun. But when Mommy told me to name it Daddy gave her a funny look and later that night I heard them screaming at … Continue reading
Awake Next to the Snoring 1:54 a.m. Remember: the great thing about this situation is that now you’ve got all this time to think. And so far, this is what you know: The snore has many dialects. There are plugged snorts, floppy exhales, whistling librettos, and sounds akin to a toilet-paper-stuffed trumpet struggling to be … Continue reading
Love Song To wear a black corduroy jumper with red roses that your mom picked out from Lord & Taylor for ballroom lessons in the seventh grade and which you wore more happily when you cleared plates at dinners for the Junior League when her friends praised you as you soaped the bowls is to … Continue reading
Issue 2 is voice driven and from the gut with first time publications and first publications in a long time; a teenage poet beside a poet published in The New Yorker; triggering fiction and essays that beat your heart and I can’t wait for you to start reading on March 30. Continue reading
Our fiction editor for March/April is Eric Boyd who is working on his first short story collection, “Brownfields”. His writing has been published by Guernica, the Missouri Review, Cheap Pop, Brooklyn Vol 1, and Luna Luna magazine. He appeared in Akashic Books’ “Prison Noir” anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, as well as Trinity University … Continue reading
The James Franco Review 