The Cenacle | 116 | June 2021 | *Just Released*

[Cenacle]

The Cenacle | 116 | June 2021
Reading link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/116
Download link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/116_june_2021.pdf
[Size = 8.2 MB]

Hello everyone,

Here comes the just-released Cenacle | 116 | June 2021! Though running late for release, it is kind of cool to tell that The Cenacle began this month in 1982, in my notebooks, as Scriptor Magazine. On August 1, 1982, I was 18, and I started Scriptor Press International, which was then just me and my notebooks and mechanical pencils and my imagination.

Years later, I returned to that idea and renamed it The Cenacle—that was 1995. And now here it is 2021, and what began in my notebooks so long ago, arrives again today to the World Wide Web!

Also, get your shots! And we hope you will enjoy this issue!

Contents of this new issue include:

From Soulard’s Notebooks:
[Excerpt]
It’s been well over a year since most of us have travelled our local & distant places & spaces like we always had. Be that mundane as the nearest grocery store, pharmacy, or post office, or the wonderful, rarer times at favorite museum, movie theaters, parks, & the like. Been a long time.

Feedback on Cenacle 115
[Excerpt]
I’d like to mention also Martina Newberry’s poem “Yellowstone Erupting,” but after reading it three or four times, I continue to get sucked into a depression each time. It’s that 3 a.m. demon thing, and the phone call, and the inevitable bad news, even though it missed its desired target. So no, I won’t talk about Martina’s so very skillful construction of this vignette. (Judih Haggai)

From the ElectroLounge Forums: In Dreams . . .
[Excerpt]
It’s amazing that we have a subconscious, and/or an unconscious: this other life, in a way. I was thinking the other day: you need two I’zzz to see time. Just like you need binocular vision to see depth in space, you need at least (something like) 2 x awarenesses or even selves. I am thinking that there is one of me that doesn’t know where it is in time, or is in eternity basically, and the other is my more habitual timebound self. I sometimes think of me sending myself message backwards in time. (Sam Knot)

Prose-Poetry by Kenzie Oliver
[Excerpt]
I grew up on a horse ranch in Texas. I should be able to say I know how to ride. I never saw our horses as rideable. They were my friends. As a child, I’d sit on the dusty hay bales, petting their heads as they ate little holes into the hay. I would feed them handfuls of it, and jabber on about my day. The brown and black wolf spiders would navigate the strands of pale golden, cured grass. This was their place as much as mine. With filaments of hay threaded through my hair, its sweet musty smell would follow me everywhere.

Notes from New England: Notes from the American Pandemic October 2020-June 2021
by Raymond Soulard, Jr.
[Excerpt]
So Election Day is tomorrow &, by most estimations, the disastrous Trump presidency will be over—four long years of it. Joe Biden will make a good president—hoping he whomps Trump, & that Democrats get back the Senate. This shit has gone on too long—getting the fuck rid of Trump will be a huge victory.

Poetry by Martina Newberry:
[Excerpt]
Some say we are beautiful. Perhaps we are.
The sun in the garden is perfect,

not only for the embroidering,
but for the gold sheen on our faces.

Rivers of the Mind (A Novel) by Timothy Vilgiate
[Excerpt]
Reckless magic, think the Mushrooms. Only the most reckless and depraved magician would have allowed the Beyond to enter the fourth world in the midst of their ritual. Dark and malignant accusations flutter through the Mushrooms. Over the years, they have accrued enemies who might at times try to challenge them, but none of them would be so reckless as to threaten the existence of the universe in this way. Even though the Arrogant Mint—a shrub with raggedy leaves—often commits heresies against the order of the universe, it is otherwise committed to the defense of the earth. The Nodding Flowers—white flowers that look like five-pointed stars—have no creed nor moral attachment that might sway them one way or another, and such a violent act is far out of the norm for their kind. It must be the Red Destroyers—pictured by the Mushrooms with a ferocious and primal hatred—a race of strange red and white Mushrooms who have been the enemies of the psilocybes since a time they cannot remember. They are a race of Mushrooms who surely would not hesitate to bring certain disaster to the entire earth in order to attack the Lords of the Field.

Poetry by Tamara Miles
[Excerpt]
The first dahlia began to fade.
Snip it now, my friend advised.

Press between the pages
of a heavy book.

Add a note with date,
reflections.

Secret Joy Amongst These Times: The History of Scriptor Press, 1995 to the Present
by Raymond Soulard, Jr.
[Excerpt]
What I learned then, or really keep learning, is that the human heart can find ways to live alongside of memory of all manner of tragedies. Even worse, in a larger scale way, than the sudden loss of a dear loved one. Wars that destroy whole cities & even countries; natural disasters that leave countless dead or homeless; 2020’s COVID-19 global pandemic easily comes to mind, too, its millions dead, so many needlessly.

I can’t evaluate one loss versus another. Big, small. Sudden, slow. Loss is loss.

Poetry by Ace Boggess:
[Excerpt]
Dreams that belonged to each of us:
unbroken spirit versus unbreakable walls.
I remember mine as vividly as leg irons:
sniffing pollen from flowers at a highway’s edge,
hiding from marshals under a mound
of brittle leaves in the garden,
eating burgers in a dead café.

Notes on Human Evolution
by Jimmy Heffernan:
[Excerpt]
I would hesitate to say that evolution has made things better. I would say instead that the process of mutation-selection has made organisms and societies of organisms more complex and more proficient at procuring a living in increasingly complex environments. It is only debatable whether there has been real progress, in any sort of objective sense.

Poetry by Colin James:
[Excerpt]
Older toothbrush
spouse in the hallway
incredulity.

First Steps Around San Pablo (Travel Journal)
by Nathan D. Horowitz
[Excerpt]
It makes sense from the point of view of the Secoyas that the kids went through all the things I brought here. If a stranger shows up in your village, you want to know what he has in his bags. I wonder if their parents encouraged them to do this. To sweeten the deal, they threw in the tree grapes. Perfect.

Many Musics (Poetry) by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
“My friend’s crank I turned slowly,
wzzzing sound by my efforts,
yet lessing each time till no more.
Exhaling relief? More turns
produced a quiet hmmming like
I had long followed. Twas music
we shared now, more pleasure together.”

Too Much Asia to Erase (Fiction) by Tom Sheehan
[Excerpt]
Sleep in any alley came piecemeal to Chris Banntry (and never luck, he would add, if anything else.) He called it bonesleep or curbsleep, or a number of other things, just as long as minutes of it were sometimes accompanied by a kind darkness. He liked it best where his bones could settle for moments and his mind go blank and his stomach cease its horrible arguments, and the insects, the ants and other crawling enemies might take a night off from arduous labors. The darkness, inevitably, could bring enemies of all sorts with it, or even the strangest of friends.


A Hood Funeral (Prose) by Charlie Beyer:
[Excerpt]
My life-long friend Steve decided to drop dead. So I brought the remaining rum to his wake in an open container. En route, I neither drank too much on the freeway, nor got arrested. The bottle was drained properly in short order when I arrived, the guests chugging the stuff like it was UNICIF milk in Biafra. I then read in front of all his relatives a few pages of revelations (not Bible-related) that I had written as an excuse for a eulogy.

Poetry by Judih Haggai
[Excerpt]
morning logic
first breathing
then headlines

Bags End Book #18: Sleep-Over in Imagianna! Part 1
by Algernon Beagle
[Excerpt]
Crissy paused 4or a moment. I nodded. “Read the rest,” I said. She did & here it is.

“‘My friend the Castle took us in that day, & has kept us safe & good since. She has many secrets of her own, as she is kind of a Beast of a building. We take good care of each other. She welcomes me to explore her always more!”

The Dead (Classic Fiction) by James Joyce
[Excerpt]
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

Poetry by Sam Knot
[Excerpt]
deep
in the forest of beech
traffic haunted

Labyrinthine [a new fixtion] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
Page after page I read with a kind of wondering dismay. These are not my poems. One after the next. Not. Oh there are lines here & there I recognize. Not that I have them all memorized but they do not feel like my kind of expressions. Or just fragments mixed with foreign matter.

Respond with your feedback here—or by email at editor@scriptorpress.com

Peace, 
Raymond

[judih]

from the first click - that sensational cover (front and back) and superb content that lures one into new zones, this is a really cool edition.
Recommended, people.