The Cenacle | 117 | October 2021 | *Just Released*

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The Cenacle | 117 | October 2021 | *Just Released*

Post by Cenacle » November 22nd, 2021, 11:02 am

The Cenacle | 117 | October 2021
Reading link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/117
Download link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/11 ... r_2021.pdf
Hello everyone,

Here comes the just-released Cenacle | 117 | October 2021! This issue contains the many wonderful regular contributors, plus newcomer poet and graphic artist Jo Monea, and photographer Michael Couvaras. Great to welcome them on board!

This issue is also about 20 pages longer then previous ones, topping out at nearly 200 pages! In addition to the great writing excerpted below, there is cool graphic artwork by Kassandra Soulard, Sam Knot, Tamara Miles, Frederick Albert Horowitz, AbandonView, and Maurice Sendak.

Contents of this new issue include:

From Soulard’s Notebooks:
[Excerpt]
We care about this world. Not just you or me, but us. We breathe its air, drink its water, eat its food, live our every day and night there. Not by politics, or religion, or loyalty to a local ball team. Us. All of us. Now. Today. Tomorrow.

Feedback on Cenacle 116
[Excerpt]
Jimmy Heffernan’s “Notes on Human Evolution” throw up a lot of questions around evolution, leading us to an interesting conclusion where human cultural evolution “goes back to nature,” humans becoming a mere step on the path towards a cybernetic (or artificial) intelligence which may or may not decide to keep around us as pets . . . (Sam Knot)

From the ElectroLounge Forums: Travel in 2021
[Excerpt]
Two weeks after we got both our vaccinations, we began to go out to our usual haunts—masked and careful. We took walks again and felt fairly safe. Then the Delta variant virus appeared and we hunkered down again. With death rates and nasty, dangerous “pranks” from anti-vaxxers, we don’t feel safe and spend most of our time at home. (Martina Newberry)

Poetry by Jo Monea
[Excerpt]
creation is sound and wave
it is color and texture
all because of the instant
in which the wave blooms

Letter by Gregory Kelly
[Excerpt]
My friend. The air is stale. I wish I could hoover the air. Remove the dust. The bits. That all makes it cloudy. And foul. And strange. It’s not the same air I breathed when I was younger. When life was different from now. It’s rich with rank cancerous fear-mongering. Those stories that keep you up at night. It’s like those stories that you used to read in newspapers that happened in far away places, where life was less glittery, came to our front door, knocked.

Dad Dreams by Nathan D. Horowitz
[Excerpt]
I’m in a building in Vienna. Outside, rain is beginning to fall. Through the open window to the courtyard I can hear my father’s voice. He’s rhapsodizing about how good the rain feels falling on his head. I lean out the window to say, “You put a hat on right now, young man,” but the courtyard is empty.

Many Musics (Poetry) by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
“My habit of forgetting began then, losing
time, names and faces. They were not cruel to me,
but indifferent. They suffered this grey world,
but not with me. Whichever camp I stayed,
I was a stray from somewhere else, not a name
to learn, a face to know better; just a mouth
to feed, a corner to sleep. My shapeless hat
tossed outside on the morning I was to go.

Poetry by Martina Newberry
[Excerpt]
 After her arm and shoulder and neck had healed from burns she suffered when Michael McKeel threw a bubbling stewpot at her, for disagreeing with him in regards to Mr. Thomas Jefferson’s chances of winning the election, she fled his house, carrying only a sewing kit with three colors of thread, and her Bible. She took up with the Shakers. 

Mabon Calling [Fiction] by Sam Knot
[Excerpt]
On either side of me are two giant slate tips, and between them the grey sky has just cracked open. Fingers of light trace the contours of distant mounts, while just across the way the heath becomes golden. With quite some delight I notice the slate tips have been shaped by human hands—and it must have been many hands, or else a few pairs over many years, for they are in the form of vast twin dragons, mythical creatures lain upon the earth. And I see they are awake: their eyes are opened by thorn trees, one in leaf and one in blossom, emerging from eye-socket gardens. They seem ready to spring into action, for fires have been left to smoulder in their nostrils. The smoke threads out and—in this place well-sheltered from the winds—goes at a pace of its own to join the clouds in the sky . . .

Poetry by Tamara Miles
[Excerpt]
The lemon
weeps to know
that you are near.

Notes from New England: Why Am I Returning to Burning Man?
by Raymond Soulard, Jr.
[Excerpt]
These Notes explore the title question by rooting around among the varieties of my life in the year or so leading up to my first arrival at Burning Man, in August 1999. Excerpts from the poetry, fixtion, and letters I was writing; the Scriptor Press work I was doing; glimpses of the people I knew; the places I traveled and the better and worse days I experienced then. The hopes, fears, dreams, and other weirdnesses filling up my head and heart then. Three dozen snapshots to near, orbit, maybe breach within what answer there might be to the piece’s title question.

Rivers of the Mind (A Novel) by Timothy Vilgiate
[Excerpt]
Marcia, the lady at the front desk, briefly looked up from a copy of People magazine, and waved at us with a smile. I waved back at her, even though Marcia was a catty bitch who seemed to think this was a goddamn high school cafeteria and not a police station. We lost Laura, the normal front desk person, last year when she finished her CNA license and went to work at the nursing home. Now she was a good receptionist. I don’t know who the fuck decided to hire Marcia.

Poetry by Tom Sheehan
[Excerpt]
Next May the mayflies will consecrate
the river all over, the river will turn,
I will wake early.

Notes on Morality by Jimmy Heffernan
[Excerpt]
The problem for humans is not, therefore, in finding a better definition of morality, but rather finding a way for our kind to stop disregarding our consciences in favor of what immediately suits us.

Poetry by Ace Boggess:
[Excerpt]
Two hands reach to choke a neck
or clutch a Raku bowl of tea.
On-ramp merges left
onto the Interstate highway out of town.
Which says more about me?
That earliest insights are violence and escape?
Or that I pause in the middle
to stare at my reflection in glossy broth?

Bags End Book #18: Sleep-Over in Imagianna! Part 2
by Algernon Beagle
[Excerpt]
What began awhile ago as a invitation from Princess Crissy of Imagianna to your old pal Algernon to come to have a fun sleep-over at her Castle turned shapes in story a few times, until it got to be Iggy the Inspector knocking on the Castle’s door and asking where her missing sister was?

Hold on Tight (Travel Journal)
by Nathan D. Horowitz
[Excerpt]
In all fairness, there may have been a buzz of madness in the thin air that night from some weed Mauro and Rumi were smoking, huddled like sailors around the fireplace on the balcony of the Café Labirinto two hundred meters down the hillside from the Hotel Quito. The party guests drank like fish and fucked like rabbits, then drank like rabbits and fucked like fish, and finally frank like fabbits and ducked like rish in a kind of metamorphic sexual apocalypse. In the morning, hotel staff found bras and panties dangling from potted plants.

Poetry by Colin James:
[Excerpt]
The family car’s hood ornament was
a naked warrior chucking a spear.
Someone’s error became our credo.

Secret Joy Amongst These Times: The History of Scriptor Press, 1995 to the Present
by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
The best an Artist can do is to allow it all on the table. Every happy, stupid, fragile, weird, delightful moment. Like an overstuffed palette of colors, of notes, of clays and bones and rusts. Then, like a long distance traveler in mind and dream and yearn, explore it, bravely, fearfully, proudly, shamefully, and so on to the end.

Plumb Bob (Prose) by Charlie Beyer:
[Excerpt]
The hat came off in supplicating humility to my position as boss. The tattered baseball cap was clutched between his two hands over his navel, like he was making an apologetic presentation to the judge. As such, his eyes were downcast and half-lidded. Where the cap had been, there was revealed a vast dome of hairless expanse, glinting dully in the florescent light. Coupled with the lack of a mustache, eyebrows, and even nose hair—the effect was that of staring down the end of a giant uncooked hot dog. I wondered if his thirty-year career in the rock insulation business had caused him to scratch of every offending hair follicle.

Poetry by Judih Haggai
[Excerpt]
peacock at sunrise
the echo of existence
what is becomes was

The Golden Key (Classic Fiction) by George MacDonald
[Excerpt]
There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt’s stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.

Labyrinthine [a] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
Black and white TV covered in colors wash out indigo glow “dreams they complicate my life . . . ” sings that perty radio. Colors all wash out and now black and white again, decorated white and blue bowls of chili up and down the counter tis the lunch special—

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

Peace,
Raymond

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