Words and image

              "And Lo, I Forgot What I Came Up Here For"

by Colleen Burner**

Mind

Tiantong Rujing, amid the tumultuous clacking
of a bamboo forest during a thunderstorm:
“Ten thousand hands, clapping
for this spectacle staged by the gods!”

The diva, Mme Brillant, in the resounding applause
of a standing audience after her solo:
“As fickle as temperamental gods—
and their clapping the only assurance!”

by Stephen E. Childress 


**More of Colleen Burner's hand-made collages can be seen at http://www.frenchforgluing.com or http://www.frenchforgluing.tumblr.com Prints of these babies are available for sale through an online shop: http://society6.com/FrenchForGluing. 

Moon Baby

There were astronauts who went to the moon very slowly, and on
the way one of the astronauts had a baby that she didn’t know
about. They all agreed to leave it on the moon because of jeopardize
the mission. Also, they had no cute little baby spacesuits.
The baby was young, though, and learned to breathe moon. It
slept in a crater and powdered its bottom with moondust. Every
moon day, the baby looked up at Earth multiple times and made
baby wishes. A moon day is almost thirty Earth days! Then the baby
crawled around in reduced gravity until it was naptime. And it had
lots of baby food, because baby food is mined from the moon. Also,
the cheese.
 
Back on Earth, scientists used a giant telescope to see the moon.
Imagine their surprise when they saw a bald baby crawling around
the lunar desert with the American flag as its diaper! The scientists
had a meeting and then became evil, and they put a cat in a rocket
and sent it to the moon so it would sleep on the baby’s face.
But when it got there, the baby and the cat became friends. No
one could talk to the baby except for other babies, because it had
made up its own official moon language: “Baby.” The cat learned to
speak Baby and the baby told it all of the moon secrets. And the cat
introduced the baby to the album “Mothership Connection,” which
the baby loved, by late ’70s funk supergroup Parliament. The scientists
saw all this from far away and scowled.
 
One day the cat and the baby had a fight about who wanted the
funk more. The cat went away to the dark side of the moon in a huff,
and it got turned into a catsicle because cold the universe. The baby
found the cat, though, who was frozen in an ice cube, and cried because
its friend was dead.
 
The baby flew to Earth crying and its babytears made a comet
tail, and the baby was now a meteor. On the way down, it pooped
through its diaper and the evil scientists saw the poop through their
giant telescope and they thought it was a humongous asteroid but
it was poop and the poop landed on the end of their telescope and
the scientists all screamed and fainted, but then the janitor who was
smarter climbed up on a ladder and said it was just poop, dummies.
But the baby also forgot everything because babies have a bad
memory and anyway the atmosphere burned up its memories. The
baby struck an unassuming lesbian couple and sank into one of their
tummies like it was gelatin. She delivered the moon baby nine minutes
later and they did a good job of raising it, because it became the
first mayor of the moon because space travel, and the two mommies
went to the baby’s skeptical grandparents and said, see?
This is why babies everywhere love cheese and the song “Star
Child.”

By Jimmy Grist

paled and susceptive to

paled and susceptive to

the slightest breeze

a slice, a sliver,

of paper is caught

on a clothesline.

the supports are bent

and only

a bleached clothespin

clings to its wire,

the spring rusted tight.

on his own order,

a boy explores,

climbs through

swiss chard and lambsquarter

and notices the parchment

quivering above.

he’s just enough to reach it

and reads well.

the paper is a note,

a message, secret of course,

and the boy realizes

only one other pair of eyes

knows it.

by Tyler Young

Starting today, we will be posting content from Volume 63 (2011) every week, so check back often!