CORVUS REVIEW ISSUE 10 S/S (2018) COVER ART "Building a Home" Fabrice Poussin
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CORVUS REVIEW ISSUE 10 S/S (2018) COVER ART "Building a Home" Fabrice Poussin This photograph used found objects. I was rummaging through an old barn when I stumbled upon some old windows. How hard can it be to create a new home in the wild. Can the building in fact be completed? What accident may happen during construction? In this case the home will not be built as so many obstacles intervened. Those who hoped to live there have in fact abandoned the dream. What remains are the ruins of that dream. EDITORS J. Mercer (Editor in Chief) Janine Mercer is a Canadian ex-pat currently residing in Milwaukee, WI. Her work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, The Quint, and others. Her current passion project, Haunt Heads Podcast, can be found on iTunes. She blogs at hauntheads.wordpress.com. D. Vang (Fiction Intern) Destiny Vang, a self-taught procrastinator, loves reading, writing, and creating music. In her non-existent free time, she enjoys spending time with family, trying out new hobbies, and cooking. You can find her published work in Furrow. 2 Table of Contents 24. L. Potts 104. L. Shiers 2. Art/Editors 25. K. Oakes 109. B. Selesnick 3. TOC 26. J. Zable 111. J. Bonder 4/5. A. Slonaker 27. M. Ellis (N/F) 114. B. Pieper 6. A. Hampshire 31. K. Crowley 121. C. Fuerst 7. A. R. Dugan 39. F. Poussin (ART) 122. A. Yusi 8. M. L. Johnson 40. D. Roennfeldt 124. K. Farleigh 9. C.R. Wood 47. J. W. Freeman 128. A. Rezdan 10. C. Keaveney 49. T. Almy 130. T. B. Grisanti 12. E. F. Stone 55. A. Swyer 132. A. Giles 13. G. Bogart 64. A. Coleman 138. D. Fraser 14. J. McNerney 68. S. Bellamy 141. F. F. Amanti 15. J. Oppenheimer 73. R. L. Penick 142. J. Levy 16/17. J. Milford 74. C. Lubner 147. K. Harris 18. J.W. Burns 82. A. Heil 149. S. Difalco 19. K. A. Dronsfield 85. L. Morgan 153. W. Dass 20. L. Powers 86. M. N. Hart 154. R. Zlotnick 21. M. Johnson 89. A. Haselkorn 162. B. Gillen 22. N. Gill 96. N. Ford (ART) 165. D. T. Mattingly 23. T. L. Winters 97. M. Wild 169. Bio’s 3 Shirley Adrian Slonaker For as long as she'd filled out her census forms, Shirley had been a one-person household, and she wasn't a hugger, concluding that, unless a kid is clutching you to prevent plummeting to a painful death, a hug is superfluous. Yet she posted epistolary embraces to a penfriend named Ahmet, the fiftyish Turkish typing teacher who wrote in dreamy undulating longhand and sent selfies of a mustachioed face with smiling eyes and a solemn mouth. His warmhearted words eagerly gulped down- like cloudy lemonade with clinking shards of ice in a heat wave, sustained her in stoic solitude as her humdrum haze of postmenopausal puttering progressed from tolerable to acceptable. Their correspondence continued until year six, when Ahmet vouchsafed that he'd be visiting her, snaking a romantic route from Izmir to Yonkers by ship and by train. On April 12th she put on her chartreuse shift dress and Chanel No. 5 and waited at the railway station for a passenger who never stepped onto the platform. Shirley shuffled back every morning for nine Ahmetless days before she shrugged her sloping shoulders at the ninth shrinking caboose and silently slaughtered hope. The Hotel Mattress Adrian Slonaker The mattress is long in the tooth, if mattresses could masticate, having dazzled in its debut in the city's haughtiest hotel, bolstering the sweat-blotched backs of visiting VIPs and their lovers. But mattresses, like Hollywood honeys, have a best-before date, so as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were found featured in psycho-biddy melodramas in the sixties, the mattress was next cast in a mid-range motel, braving ravioli smudges, incontinent seniors, sick ankle biters, and cursing couples cross at the requirement to rise at three fucking a.m. for cheap Continental flights. The mattress continued its descent down to a roadside flophouse, suddenly smeared with hookers' rouge and vodka-scented vomit and grossly groped during demoralizing drug busts. The mattress is beyond knackered, yet pleased with its red-letter rips, stains, and sags as a valiant vet is proud of the Victoria Cross or Légion d'Honneur. 5 Weightlessness André Hampshire I can feel the weightlessness of purpose. Where a boulder once stood upon my chest, Compressing my lungs, Stealing my air, Now stands open space, In which my muscles ease and my breath cycles freely. In this open space, I grow, like a lobster casting off its shell, No longer convinced by the illusion of its protection. Men and women in white coats, Degrees hang against their walls, Like beautifully wrapped boxes, vacuous inside. They promise peace, they promise a cure. Blue pills, white pills Crushing my mind against its impulse to grow In that open space Where the air flows freely, Moving to and fro like currents Washing away the filth. 6 A Rowboat Splintered on the Rocks AR Dugan Resin-coated pine looks like brine-logged honeycomb / bent to contours of shale in the morning fog. Some of the stouter parts, / like the seat bracket / and the ribs every sixteen inches, / resisted the moisture and dis- / memberment. / Jagged with rebellion—they would riot in the streets / if their dependent faculties, / arms and legs if you will, were not soggy and helpless, / not even driftwood. All heart / and no means, no finger to point, / no voice to shout. Soon, / very soon, not even a thought to sink. Lorie Michael Lee Johnson Lorie, you want to see me clearly through this joy of my naked body avoiding the sweat of my emotions, just breathing on my neck rubbing this baseline of my groin- will not find us here again. Go away, leave me thinking louder than your breath- body moves quietly in a lazy sway of indifference. A Field Guide to Ethical Necromancy Celeste Rose Wood A human is a brief gathering of buzzing dust, the way a cloud of insects rises from the ground like one twisting body, husks swept from copses and corners, a decision of wind. Thought is muscle, kept supple by movement. Necromancing is choreography. Think of it like this: revenants must be allowed to dance, and to build, clean, and otherwise toil. Rent out the services of revenants and you provide succor to the living. To yourself, you provide income which is its own sort of life force. Let your mind diffuse into the translucence of childhood, when to sculpt with sand was inviolable. At the heart of any animal is the anatomical but also the anima, the soul, malleable like dough. A body is a human-shaped cake which must remain raw. Whether some thoughts survive death is unknowable. Death is mute. Do not counterfeit a correspondence between yourself and revenants. A semblance of afterlife is often enough for the living. Just as many people sign up for organ donation, many others will covenant their own reanimation. While a certain class of necromancer will have no compunction to murder, that is sloppy, lazy work. Graveyards, too, should be avoided, lest we trip into the ditch that is the old stereotype of ghoulishness. Still, death is a suit of mud which can be washed off, a crust which can be cracked like the softer stone around a geode. The way into a revenant is through the apertures of its eyes pulled wide like circles of overlapping blinds, the hand of your thought walking down its throat on fingers; inside, a house of familiar rooms. Eminently Doable Christopher Keaveney I In Japan, there is a castle that floats on fog like a strafe of starlings, like the shouldered globe seen at the World’s Fair as a child, the Hall of the Future undone by its own hubris and by the vendor hawking battery operated umbrellas out in the plaza who attempted to make believers out of everyone in line. Touché, the intricacies of fish bones mother left for the cat to fiddle with after she went back to work part-time at Gimbels during the Christmas rush, The stigmata of the abandoned son, his forehead and upturned palms gracing the linoleum. II The old man lit out late on the first Saturday after the solstice, Bitches Brew skipping in the familiar spot, dissonance more-or-less eloquent in absentia, an adjudication of the jazz hands on weekend trips to the loft in the city where he sought to reinvent himself, proffering a hot dog on the steps of the Museum of Natural History as alimony. gold lame hid the lacerations while rust called our attention to the problem in the first place, retracing our steps to the slender-necked ingenuity of the cormorant in the park. III I made him wait two summers for forgiveness, barnacles to harbor resentments on the somnambulist’s almost perfect morning, gone fishing on the sound, the bunkers I caught and released habitually just to get in a word edgewise, stymied by the wildflowers whose petals he pressed into my hand along with a five spot and the trilobite which also had its day in the sun, wrangling the absentee father’s standard commitment. The French have a dozen words for practically everything he mumbles while rummaging through the tackle box, but apparently no word yet for doggie bag. When I Die Eric Fisher Stone Go outside. Laugh at airplanes chewing clouds, feed horses planetary apples, lick the air and taste all remaining light.