HORSEFLY’S LITERARY MAGAZINE
Horsefly’s current issue is a 101 page, journal-sized perfect bound book featuring cover art by the Canadian Artist Alf Crossley. Six authors contributed works of prose while twenty-two poets contributed poetry to the issue. This issue focuses primarily on local Kootenay and regional writers, but also includes work by Canadians from coast to coast and a good smattering of American writers.
To the tune of an old Cat Stevens number:
“Take your time,
think a lot,
think of all the shit you bought:
it will still be here tomorrow
but you will not.”
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
A Nanton Care Package
1. You am standing on the corner of Blanshard & Hillside
and you am writing in a basement apartment
and you is run out of lung for morphine cigarettes.
and you does fail to paint the terror
wrought by feather mattress.
but this will escalate,
we become a type of foam which emits cyanide when burned.
we soon be one of THEM,
we may can feel the comfort in those shoes,
begin to sense the market–how it’s tied to Martinique–
you am guzzling Starbuck froth
a gazillion guns an hour.
BUT.
before we/you/i turn to suet:
do not tumble for ya;
do not should i stay or should i go;
do not go silently back in the U.S.S.R.
(how lucky).
2. “J’accuse the neo-constructionist bus shelter!”
send out some of that fine Alberta vodka,
made from the sickly-sweet fumes
of fermenting styro-foam.
“J’accuse Jaques Cousteau!”
a trace of song,
nostalgia for marathon fences,
wool-filled sky.
“J’accuse situational irony!”
‘…Or that I would see and feel
my penis being devoured by fish.’*
how earthy those old existentialists!
as Druid stumps from the pre-historic,
murmuring like lunch-pails.
“J’accuse the silverfish of late autumn!’
heating vent diaspora,
as bulbous as my wasted youth.
“J’accuse the Malleus Maleficarum!”
and the mother-in-law who cried wolf.
3. “4 Strong Winds”:
dyspepsia advertissement.
4. “3 Men and a Man-baby”.
5. BaBo’s gurneyed into rest homes;
the FIRST baby boomer,
tubed and tied,
welded in,
wintering in a bedpan
(Calypso chorus gives way to Kraftmatik vibra-massage).
adanaC,
and you’ve taken over the department
from a man who was at Woodstock.
he’s shredded all the ledgers,
you’ve purchased quill and blotter
and have hired foundling scribners
to eat the twizzling Twizzlers,
Lo! fetch the goddam bitters!!!
These are slash and burn retreats,
these funny Babo’s,
like Stalin torching the warm steppan night
as Hitler advances (pas de deux),
they’ll withdraw into a series of Russian dolls
and when you open the littlest, middlest, infitessimal centre
you open air.
6. Let’s
awhile
away,
and sip
Sanka
from the grim
cistern
of Lewis Lapham’s skull.
Calloo, ca-fuck-lops-ided-LAY!
7. So send. Send.
Send along ye olde audio cassette
(they yet play in the odd Le Sabre)
for spice and such and so-and-so.
We’ve taken to dining out
with a cow-lick
–blue anathema reflected in the nearby tables,
reflected in the watery, gravol eyes.
they’re conFUSED, is all.
’cause once the ‘Boomers really pull out,
it will mean
(it WILL be mean)
so much scrambling for labour resources
that we’ll have to take away your prescription,
we’ll have to introduce conscription
(”Do ya wanna make tea @ the BBC,
do ya really wanna be a COP?”+).
We’ll be pulling der kinder
from der kinder gaarten
and putting ‘em to work
in the Olive Garden;
a 5yr.-old cashier at Safeway,
a 7yr.-old car salesgirl,
a 13 yr.-old Solicitor General
(boasting his military record,
his ‘Tough-On-Crime’ ethos).
So send, do.
“Tawny are the leaves turned
but still they hold.”
– John Crowe Ransom
____________________________________
* Jean Genet, in conversation with J.P. Sartre
+ The Clash, “The Clash”
gut-shot wisdom clayton mccann
you must first be as Peter Lorre, eyes bulging, trapped in a trench coat.
wander, or better, stagger down your street, but blocks from the house
–a little too far, you’ll never make it, weak, head spinning,
like Slim Pickins in that Peckinpaw flick, Bob Dylan rungling in your ears—
not that you’re dying, not that you’re shot, but the idea of it,
as the sun drops through cherry blossoms on the fortunate ants,
the idea that you took a bullet and all you’ve got left in the world
is this heap of bloody intestines (you’re trying to hold it all in).
‘if only i can make it home…’ or, ‘Oh, God, i’m dying!’
it’s the IDEA– this is the last minute of your life–
that lets the world reveal itself, uncalloused by memory.
you’re about to drop to the asphalt, soon, the chalk
and your own blue rigidity, your complete indifference.
but for now, as you stare up at birds you’ve never known the names of,
you’re alive at
The End.
just lucky, i guess
on the street outside the grocery where i work but
was not working this day
i am talking about people
gathered a large number
of single
people no-one
seemed to be with anyone else they could have been
a choir cleverly
spread along the block looking
up
not singing not
yet
they never did
sing just looked
up
all of them roughly
looking at his hand some
face his face though it was difficult
to make
out some stared at his clothes in order
to decide if he was poor therefore abject some
looked at the way he
clung to the scaffold some
people spoke into their
hands
but
really into
cell
phones but if
you were from
a different
planet where you
don’t have cell
phones to call
some
one and say some
clay mccann / 250.595.2272 / foxpocket@hotmail.com / just lucky, i guess
thing like
‘just unlucky, i guess’ and oh if
you really were from a
nother planet you might think these
people were just talking in
to their hands simply
telling them
selves this is
real this
is real
this
is
Dear Mr. McCann,
Rest assured, 2007 contributers will be contacted as soon as the editorial process is completed. Those contributers who submitted late to the 2005-2006 issue will be automatically considered for our 2007 issue.
Sincerely,
jessica michalofsky
editor,
horsefly literary magazine