Old Maid by Ann Dewitt

By Ann DeWitt He’s fifty when he starts with the suspected trapeze dancers, fixtures in the night riding a large red tricycle. Don’t yet know about the World War II jumpsuit or the guy in chains in back sucking the salt off all the peanuts. I didn’t put him in the cage. He jumped right in. Locked the door himself. “Here we are,” he said when we first met. I said, “Let me down.” We were just two small twigs then, riding a red tricycle, getting high on pizza in the back of a pickup, jet-setting in Ohio, bass fishing with his father. “Just look,” he said from where we stood on the pier. “And let me push you.” I first put him in the birdcage when he was fifty, when he started pinning lint balls to the back of his mother’s head and taking a break, telling his Grandmother he’d like to give her a ride on the back of his tricycle before pushing off down the hill, before she’d had her shower. I hung the birdcage in my window. “Give me a shake,” he said, perched in the back of the cage. “Shake it out.” “Give me anything.”...
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Two Poems by Malik Ameer

Little Everywhere and Big Daddy’s Bad Ass Boots “We meet again which life is this some say it’s hell some say it’s bliss some neither know nor care to glimpse what is temporal and what is permanent.” We meet again which time is this much has changed but who still remembers it ages come ages vanish….. ((((((((((((((!!!0!!!!)))))))))))))))) my man drags his eyes from a past where we lived on another planet he almost explains but saw we dug it his wife laughs and asks “yeah but what’s all that got to do with sticking to our budget?!.” We meet again which world is this talking to her belly she asks, “what is your name?” she blinks and in that instant she lives a thousand lives when she opens her eyes her child reminds, “I am what I was unable to finish, I will be that web weaver reminding this world of what is always endless”   Writer’s Rites to write until every rite achieved glows into every infinity as not only something to be said but also as everything to be lived as a means to destroy the ordinary and exemplify the extraordinary defying the natural and being one with...
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Until Now Gives Way to Then: Notes on Fun Home and Fun Home the Musical

By Yardenne Greenspan It was surprisingly hard to rate Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel, on Goodreads. I’d read it last October—quite late to the game, I know—and was touched to my core. How do you define the experience of reading a book that makes you feel simultaneously elated and devastated? How do you recommend a graphic novel that contains about six squares of drawing and fifty words of text per page, and yet can take about a week to read, every sparse square containing multitudes, working on three different levels of content—image, dialogue, narration—that are both hidden and revealing, analytical and bashful, courageous and terrified? I gave it five stars. I’d only recently discovered the world of graphic novels, a late revelation that made me sorry for all that wasted time. This, after all, seems like the perfect genre for me, because if there’s anything I like more than books, it’s films, and if there’s anything I like more than films, it’s books. Fun Home is a graphic memoir, in which author Alison Bechdel recounts her childhood in a funeral home and tries to make sense of her father’s latent homosexual tendencies and of his death under unclear circumstances (interpreted...
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