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Cover image by G.W. Duncanson

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Peter Milne Greiner

My time machine is silver and bristling with cool blue lights I climb in Intricate holographic displays
surround me on all sides Jogging dials, conducting an orchestra of beeps and alerts, I program the
machine to take me back
Far back I climb out into the past and access the internet I hack your
MySpace account I find out what I need to know What I came when to know And I return I
delete time machine I feel triumph and the pangs of conscience like someone who has done a new
kind of right, like someone who can imagine the possibilities It doesnt occur to me to wonder what
youre still doing here Its like the best thing ever to not occur to me because if it did, here I would be,
thinking about it nonstop, agonizing silently, powerlessly, totally unable to let it go at all, not even
gradually over a ridiculous amount of time, thats why I have no qualms with messing around with the
course of events in the way that I do/have
There are twenty-six letters in my alphabet of pain I enter the eight of them that make up your
password one at a time, without hesitation, eager to change what has happened in any way I can

!!

The Place Where Something

Goes Before It Goes Away
Thomas Mira y Lopez

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To put it one way, all this reminds me of The Lion King. The dead
father. The elephant graveyard. Simba looks into the water, looks
to the stars. Mufasa looks back. The ripples still. Rafiki rattles his
stick.

I saw the movie three times when it came out. Twice at METRO,
the theater with the art deco marquee four blocks from my home.
With who? My parents, then a friend. The third time it had been
out a while and was only showing at the Ziegfeld, where the
premieres and also-rans played. My father didnt want to go, he
had already seen it, but I insisted. He and I took the bus down to
54th and walked Sixth Avenue over. We waited in line. He bought
me a ticket. We went inside. I had never been to a movie theater
of this size. There was an acreage of seatsyou could plant a
crop and watch it grow. I was seven years old. Was I scared then?
Knowing that scale enlivens dread, that in the dark I would be on
my own. That Scar throws Mufasa off the cliff, that Simba
discovers his fathers body below, that the wildebeests trample
and I would watch. That this was the only context I had to
understand such a situation. That I would look over at my father in
the moment between previews and feature and see, in the
dimming lights, a face I would eventually forget.

We watched and we left, caught the bus back uptown. I am glad I

went with my father, glad I saw inside the Ziegfeld. Then again,
thats what fathers are for. They take you to places youve never
been. They go to a place youve never been.

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Untitled
Marcia Arrieta

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She thinks the words will help her movement away from the
desk.
He thinks the sculpture will assist his understanding of the
stars.
They are so close, remarks the flower.

3
Molly Matalon

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Fistfight on the Old Cemetery
Adam Moorad

Kim scored a contract with the Pentagon and wound up in Canada, penniless. He jimmied a vending
machine and lived on ice cream sandwiches for thirty days. Christmas came and his wife was in
town. She had recently acquired her venomous snake license and annunciated Latin classifications
with a vague magnanimity. Kim thought she thought she was something special. And good for her,
but he wanted to slug something. They ate dinner with a bunch of old Jews, sassy and smart, then
retired to their sheets. She tasted of marzipan. He touched like a priest. Outside the tundra cracked
and fluted gas. My upper body burned and knifed and my bones creaked. Summer walked about a
hundred feet away. Rang the rain from her ponytail. I followed her shivering across the steppes until
she turned around, looking at me like I was a crab who could not cognize the dialectic. You look like
my love, but you got gray eyes. Whats wrong? You have to take a leak? Nothing was wrong with me.
I was just an ex-Dave Matthews fan who once drove from Texas to Florida to see him. I puked into
my hands. Woke up the next morning on a Greyhound in Miami, or wherever it was.

Lauren Britton

Untitled
Kevlin Henney

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He surrounded himself with quotes and clichs, words of advice that led him down a
path of ever-decreasing word count, urging him to reduce, reconsider, reduce some
more.

Antoine de Saint-Exupry told him of reduction and perfection: "A designer knows he
has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing
left to take away."

Reduce, reconsider, reduce some more. Impressions of sentences were left as he

untethered their words from the pages of his notebook, removing first the punctuation
then releasing the remaindered meaning, clause by clause.
Robert Pirsig had supplied him the instruments of perfection: "The pencil is mightier
than the pen."
Reduce, reconsider, reduce some more. He brushed and blew the pages, graphite
bound into rubber, word slivers scattered across his desk.
He worked into the night, Blaise Pascal granting him license and time: "I have made
this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

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Reduced, reconsidered, reducible no more. There was no question of word count.
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Different readers would read into it as they wished, draw from it what they felt. The
situation, the drama, the characters would all unfold in flow through the imagination of
each, like a mirror, like a river, never twice the same, a perfection unspoilt by the
clumsy commitment of word choice.

Done, he scrawled "Untitled" across the front cover, paused a moment, then erased it.
In his moment of hesitation, Strunk and White had reminded him of necessity: "Omit
needless words."

Done, he placed the newly blank notebook into an envelope with his agent's address
on the front.

Nia Pellone

A Monologue from the Point of

View of a Corgi in a Painting by
the 43rd POTUS
Daniel Moore

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This disaster in oils was my idea. What I had in mind was a carefully
realized subject in
the foreground, not unlike a Gerrit Dou or David de Coninck,
juxtaposed against a simple background with some of Barneys old
toys, perhaps. Maybe a dead pigeon to suggest a return from a
hunt.

But the execution here is all wrong, and the subject on my left. I
assume that dark
smudge is some kind of bear deliberately missing credible
proportions.

Any artist can become trapped regurgitating the same theme.

Especially when first starting out. These things only become a
problem when the viewer feels little sense of artistic development.
Louis Wain, for example, never got past cats with really big eyes.
Coolidge could have done so, so much more if he only grew out of a
childish delight in anthropomorphism.

An ex-Head of State is no different. I was trying to gently nudge him

in a new direction. I can see now that a fully realized bodegn feast
scene was asking a lot.

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I *think* thats supposed to be a Lab.
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Putin had a Lab. One time at Buckingham Palace I gave her, Kori,
the bacon and cream cheese crescent roll Karl Rove saved for
Barney. Barney had a good sense of humor. I couldnt see him
carrying a grudge, or mentioning it to anyone as if it was a big
deal

What I didnt count on was such a slap-dash effort after a

simple change in subject. It was a change for the better
after all. Everyone knows a Terriers face cannot convey
emotion. Have you ever seen one deliberately strike an
expression worth capturing in oils? The kind of Coninckinspired pose that begs (unintended) for a painters hand
to draw attention to the ironic distance between artistic
medium and reality? Of course not. Their heads are too
big. And the matted fur destroys the illusion of movement.

Now Im sure that object next to me mocking all Platonic

ideals of canine is Kori. But the relationship between us,
the pictures hounding, to use the correct term, is still
unclear.

What makes this piece so frustrating is how the Corgi

normally inspires a sense of proportions. The muscular
physique and broad chest can allow a novice to achieve
far more than he deserves to. But first he must surrender
to the forces he wishes to master one daythe canvas,
the oil, the noble lineage of the Cardigan.

Then again, I suppose there are some interesting things

happening here if you look at it
as a playful interrogation of perspective. If you tilt your
head to the right: Im asking for a biscuit. Or maybe I want
to go outside to do my business. Its anyones guess. I
might even be greeting a diplomat with a firm shake.

Still, none of it makes any sense if its a baroque still life

were talking about. I should be the focal point, the
champion returning after a gloriously successful chase to
lord over his kills at his leisure. Perhaps by a fireplace.

Instead I look like clip art. Im as stiff as an unused fire

stoker. An untrained eye could mistake me for a piece of
game presented for some meaner beast. The kind of illprepared entree a lab like Kori could not help feel
enormously flattered by.

What strange vengeance did Barney seek in his final

moments?

Aubrey Stallard

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A Note to an Editor

Nels Hanson

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Dear Editor,
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You asked for a different kind of bio. My poem about the hungry shark that will appear in your magazine is from an
unpublished collection of childrens poems, What the Lizard Said, which contains the candid statements of 30 different
animals who have things on their minds.

A friend, the kind and talented wife of our kind doctor, has begun to beautifully illustrate the poems. The night before my
wife and I first went to meet the artist at her home, I remembered a distant incident from childhood and discovered a
buried scar masked by the faded mark across my ear lobe:

When we were boys, my cousin accidentally dropped my green wagons heavy tongue on my ear and I had to get stitches
and later my cousin was very apologetic and gave me a green thin bamboo cane from the Fresno Fair and a tap dancers
straw hat with a green band.

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I realized Id been happy, but that Id never felt the same about the wagon.
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Our friends community was near the sea, condominiums arranged around a pool and gym and restaurant. The shaded
garden entrance displayed a bronze boy pulling a real green wagon, identical with mine, but aged, rusted through, like
something recovered from a tomb, the way my wagon would surely look now if somewhere it still existed.

On the outer white walls of the recreation complex hung many two-foot-long wrought-iron sculptures of lizards. A small real
lizard ran across my wifes path as we started toward the patio. We had lunch outdoors and talked a little with our friend
about the illustrations for the lizard bookshe had to closely watch her small energetic daughter by the wading pool.

The next morning at home I went downstairs to make breakfast and an eight-inch spotted lizard with a long tail waited
against the wall at the entrance to the kitchen, without moving, black eyes watching me without fear or apology, almost
brashly, as if the house were his now and I was the uninvited guest.

Quietly I went back upstairs to get my wife but when we came down the lizard was gone and only a fresh dark dropping
marked that it had ever been there.

A day later our artist friend took a picture of a vividly colored lizard outside her home. Then she saw another lizard cross in
front of her on the sidewalk, as she arrived to pick up her daughter at a yoga class. The cross-legged teacher was holding
up a glass jar to show the children a very tiny lizard shed just captured.

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Two days later in her backyard our friend found a huge tailless lizard that didnt run away but let her pet it. She took
pictures of it and sent them to us. Its fat tail was gone, just a short thumb where the old tail had started. You couldnt
tell if a new tail was slowly growing or if the stub of the old tail was all that would remain.

The artist wondered if the lizard were sick or injured, or if the effort to sprout another tail was costing too much
energy. She made a bed for it and gave it fresh food and water but in the morning she saw that it had died.

The first lines to the lizard poem in our lizard book are:

One day I found a lizards tail.

I quickly put it in the mail
And in a week the lizard spoke:
Dont need the tail, the lizard wrote.

I drop one tail and grow another

As lizards use a single rudder
To chase the sun and catch the light
Before today becomes the night.

Although our title character is no more, weve agreed to continue our work and hope that a lizard that found its tail is
watching us.

Sincerely,

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Tuber
Heather Angier

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Sleepless and hungry

I stand barefoot in dark kitchen: eat
from recycled yogurt container
one organic homegrown baby red
leftover wrinkled potato and
congratulate myselfthis moment
I waste nothing. 2:03 a.m.

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C
O
N
T
R
I
B
U
T
O
R
S

Nels Hanson
Nel Hasons fiction received the
San Francisco Foundations James
D. Phelan Award and two Pushcart
Prize nominations. Stories have
appeared in Antioch Review, Texas
Review, Black Warrior Review,
Southeast Review, Montreal
Review, and other journals, and are
in press at Tattoo Highway, The
Milo Review, and Emerge Literary
Journal.

Marcia Arrieta
Marcia Arrieta lives on the canyon
in Pasadena, California. She
travels between language and art
and has a penchant for islands.

Nia Pellone
Nia Pellone is an aspiring physician
from Yonkers. You can find more of
her photos at http://www.flickr.com/
photos/24322241@N02/

Thomas Mira y Lopez

Thomas Mira y Lopez is currently
pursuing an MFA in creative
nonfiction at the University of
Arizona. His work has appeared in
PANK, Green Briar Review, and on
Ander Monsons Essay Daily blog.
He also works as the nonfiction
editor for Sonora Review and
assistant editor for Fairy Tale
Review.

Adam Moorad
Adam Moorad is a salesman &
mountaineer. He is the author of
four chapbooks and a novella.
He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him
here:
adamadamadamadamadam.blog
spot.com.

Daniel Moore
Daniel Moore is the first to admit
his name is way less interesting
than Jonathan Safran Foer's.
Also unlike Safran Foer, Daniel
lives in Canada with his wife and
two cats. He is not sure if
Jonathan Safran Foer has any
cats... It seems doubtful since he
mentioned a dog in a bio once.

Lauren Britton
Lauren Britton is a painter
working in Westchester New
York. She is interested in the
stickiness of honey, the weight of
a body, and tall, tall grasses and
what may lurk within them.

Kevlin Henney
Kevlin Henney writes shorts and
flashes and drabbles of fiction.
His work has previously
appeared in print and online, in
magazines and anthologies. He
lives online and in Bristol, UK.

Peter Milne Greiner

Peter Milne Greiner's poems and
essays have appeared in Fence,
OMNI Reboot, Leveler, The
Operating System, Sound Literary
Magazine, Spiral Orb, Poem Tiger
and elsewhere. In July of 2013 he
sent a poem into space through the
Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel
Valley, California.

Aubrey Stallard
Aubrey Stallard grew up in New
Orleans, where she acquired a
predilection for the peculiar and
nebulous. She lives in New York,
where she learned to document it
with a camera. Her portfolio can be
found at www.aubreystallard.com

John Graziosa
John Graziosa is from the Bronx.
You can find some of his drawings
here: redgraz.tumblr.com

Molly Matalon
Molly Matalon was born in 1991 in
sunny South Florida and now lives
in Brooklyn NY. She is working
towards a BFA in Photography at
the School of Visual Arts. She
identifies as a lil punk-rockertattooed lady who loves puppies,
palm trees, ice cream, and making
pictures.

Heather Angier
Since earning an MFA in English
and Creative Writing from Mills
College, Heather Angier's poetry
has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The
Dirty Napkin, The Sow's Ear, So to
Speak, Cider Press Review,
Literary Mama, Caduceus, Pirene's
Fountain, Enizagam and
Switchback. Her chapbook about
scoliosis, "Crooked", was recently
published by Dancing Girl Press.

Nia Pellone
Nia Pellone is an aspiring
physician from Yonkers. You can
find more of her photos at http://
www.flickr.com/photos/
24322241@N02/

GW Duncanson
GW Duncansonmakes sequential
art, films and music. He can be
found at www.cashmoneycartoons.tumblr.com.

Robert Trevisan
Robert Trevisan is currently a
student at Hunter College. He
spends most of his time chewing
sugar free gum and daydreaming
about chocolate ice cream.http://
www.flickr.com/photos/
24322241@N02/

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Carolyn Keogh, Founding Editor

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! Miniature Magazine
3, 2014!
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