Nothing feels like a fresh pack of cigarettes. Nothing like a woman’s kiss. And nothing like a baseball bat across the occipital lobe. Two hours later, I regained consciousness and staggered my way to the stinking third story apartment in the Bengali quarter where Madame Stolchnya held her Druidic ceremonies. When I got there, four …
Category Archives: Prose
Field Trip
They used to tell stories. First you had to get undressed. They made you lie down on the carpet. Then, while the others you were with tried to calm you, the leader would pry open your eyes with his fingers. There would be an eyedropper that contained a very dilute acid and they’d let a …
Untitled
Now is the time for all retroactive poppies to succumb to the fate of their chromosomes. The neat brown cub scout leaps over the pimple-pocked demagogue as shaken instruments recall the time of every mother’s signpost: pygmy erythrocytes writhe as copper-bellied stroke victims count their dental fleas. Speak now and forever decay with fido’s folded …
Untitled #2
The fiddler and the joker spent too much time in the balcony. Tess up and took the carriage and left them to wander in the wretched mist outside the abbey. A leper crawled from the shadows and pleaded for absolution. The joker rendered it with a vanilla wafer and then knighted him with his battery …
Orbert
Orbert woke up screaming. He knew it was silly; to be araid of living things, but he just couldn’t help it. If only it didn’t crease his style of operating in the New World. There, apart from the splendor and the wonder of his hair and the fine tawny gold of his appendages, he might …
Not Yet Beneath Me, Beluga, Beguine!
Be seen and not heard, jellied caviar. You are only the meager bourgeois babbler-in-darkness and we shall not accommodate your folly. Butchered bathing beauties prance like winsome caterpillars upon your seeded airplane wings while morphine-sodden columnists compose scorching polemics against your use of portent. Fear as thick as eyelashes flutters down your precipices, rolling like …
Masthead
PUBLISHER’S STATEMENT Magic Bullet will be published on a basis, and will present the best (i.e. whatever we can get) of Philadelphia’s Art & Literature. Anyone desiring to submit Art & Literature is encouraged to do so, by sending it to: [postal address no longer in service] Originals will not be returned or paid for …
Commuter Special #1
“Welcome to the new world.” Harlie muttered as he stepped down from the train, its cold steel side sweating in the gloom. Operators, in ubiquitous cubicles marked data on cards in magnetic ink and whole worlds of possibility were shut off; rendered inaccessible to curious eyes. Harlie suffered the pains of a normal man. He …