15. Bohemia -- August 2013

August 2013• bohemia • 1

BOHEMIAAugust 2013

Bikinis Bermuda Shorts

Ten Million

Fireflies

Mike Bartoszekhitchhiker across the universe

Extraterrestrial Dance Party www.bohemia-journal.com

Poetry & Fiction Fashion & Photography

Art & Lifestyle

August 2013

Bohemia has landed

and

Dancing Planets

2 • bohemia • August 2013

Portraits by

Gena [email protected]

facebook.com/GenaDeedsPageciva-artists.ning.com/profile/GenaDeedsPage

Portraits by

Gena [email protected]

facebook.com/GenaDeedsPageciva-artists.ning.com/profile/GenaDeedsPage


712 Austin Ave.Waco, TX 76701M-F 8:30am-8pm

[email protected][254] 714-1710

An art show featuring the work of H. Jennings Sheffieldvisit jenningssheffield.com for more info on the artist.

Opening ReceptionSeptember 6th, 2013 from 6-9p.m.Show Duration: September 2nd-27th


August 2013 Volume 3, Number 7 ISSN No. 2162-8653

Editor: Amanda HixsonAssistant: Stephanie Rystrom

Fashion: Brittany Amara LilljedahlBeauty: Missy Von Parlo

Writers: Pete Able, Katie Croft, Su-san Duty, Caleb Farmer, Jim McKe-

own, Meg Miller, Jessica Purser, Whitney Van Laningham, Gary Lee

Webb

Photographers: Cecy Ayala, CJ Hudgins, Pat Jones, Bonnie Neagle,

Belladonna Treason, Genna Ware, Cynthia Wheeler

Thank you to the Boho Model Crew located in Waco, TX!

Yes, these girls are Waco, TX.

Also, Bohemia wouldn’t exist without the regular contributors and friends

who lend their talents frequently.

Cover credits:Model Amara Love

Photographer Cynthia Wheeler

Bohemia is produced in Waco, TX. We take submissions from around

the world. Bohemia is a thematic submissions-based journal and

staff-produced magazine. Contribu-tors, please follow our submission

guidelines.

More information is available at www.bohemia-journal.com

Bohemia


Photo by Cynthia Wheeler featuring Amora LoveWe’re the aliens. We’re the savages.

81621264052

Extraterrestrial Dance Party by Cynthia Wheelerwith August poetry selections

These Planets Dance -- Some Homes For Aliens by Gary Lee Webb

Bring Me My Spaceship.I Want To Go home. by Ravenblakh Photography

Fictional short story selections for our theme. Art by James McCarthy

Ten Million Firefliesby Pat Jones Photographyand Genna Ware

A Starry Night Bohemianby Mike Bartoszek


Greetings Earthlings. This issue of Bohemia is brought to you by space cadets. Our mission is

as always:

to keep making Bohemia.

I come in Peace.

58607274889598


Let’s Dance!Is Bohemia a literary journal or a magazine? We’re both, bitch-

es. Is Bohemia local or international? We’re both, bitches. Is Bohemia traditional or modern? You guessed it. We’re both.

Follow our themes. Send us poetry and short stories, art and pho-tography. Or aliens from outer space are going to come and eat you. This month Amara Love takes the cover in a photograph by Cynthia Wheeler created at an intergalatic-inspired session with the very talented lady. We got creative with fish tank tubing. In addition, we have photo shoots by our official photobugs in-volving ten million fireflies, swimsuit clad pedestrians, and boho lovelies wading in a murky summer creek. Incidently, the official name of our theme is Extraterrestrial Dance Party, and there-fore our submissions are littered with stars and planets, UFOs, neon braided alien soccer goalies, and landscape paintings from an alternate universe. Bohemia can be serious, beautiful, hip, or sometimes we just get crazy-with-the-cheese-whiz. Special thanks to staff: as-sistant editor Stephanie, fashion planner Brittany, our scrappy/happy team-o-writers, our photo mavens, and the Team Bohemia model squad. Beauty editor Missy Von Parlo is amazing and our HMU team makes us beautiful. Is it really almost the end of sum-mer and time for us to start planning creepy Halloween photo shoots? Why yes, yes it is. Write, write, write, write, write, write, write & don’t for-get to live long and prosper.

Peace, love, Corona, & kitty cats.

Amanda PS: Next month we’re going back in time... bitches.

Greetings Earthlings. This issue of Bohemia is brought to you by space cadets. Our mission is

as always:

to keep making Bohemia.

I come in Peace.

58607274889598

Martin Museum by Jim McKeown

Summer in the Cityby Cynthia Wheeler

Coco Me Beautifulby Missy Von Parlo

Water Lilliesby Design Cortex

My Bohemian Homeby Linda Carter Hill

Walking With Jasonby John Hunt

Contributor’s Credits


Photography & post-processing by Cynthia Wheeler PhotographyLighting by Pat Jones featuring Amara Love

extraterrestrial dance partyIllustrations by Fabio Sassi

Because Marsby AJ Huffman is electric, red, and resistant to changes imposed by the time-space continuum, it was the perfect place to build the alien discothèque. Planetary minions flocked to its garish lightshow. 12-eyed Saturians decked out in full John-Travolta-Saturday-Night- Fever regalia glow like ghosts under the strobing black-lit mirror ball. The Uranian revival of Donna Summer’s greatest hits streamed through the Milky Way like a midnight meteor shower. There was a hesitant fear of cross- contamination caused by so many sequins, but precaution was thrown to the vacuum, when the local black hole closed out of respect for the blue-man group’s light-year tribute to Abba.


Comet Thoughts

by Donal Keohane

use the force. use the force. use the force.

Comet Thoughtsby Donal Keohane

One hundred million miles awayIt hurls across the sky.“Hale Bop” they say“is just a trailing flow of ice”Through time it wandersWhere space and time are fused;It’s birthday finite minds can only guess;It’s lifespan no one dares conjecture;It’s purpose, role and destiny we do not knowNo more than seers of EgyptFour thousand years ago.For all it’s height and depth and breadthIt’s just a speck propelled byForces greater than itself.It’s presence calls for cause and reason why.For some it is a chariot to eternity;Convinced they left this world in prime of lifeTo catch a ride to levels beyond their dreams.To earthlings it will appear againTwo thousand years from now.From what existence will we see it then?Honest minds cry out“How mighty are your works o God”

Being Sent Angels or a Detached Retina by Chanterelle Atkins On Saturday, was I sent an angel in the shower: God’s messenger? Tiny headlights in my periphery drifting like bioluminescent amoebas or is this a detached retina? Do I fight what is real, seeing a mirage in the possibility that it must be something better than than the blunders of biology, wishing upon the flashes and drifters as the Perseids of my mind. Or is it simply neural firing?

42

“you smolder in the crater of ice”

August 2013• bohemia • 11use the force. use the force.

Comet Thoughtsby Donal Keohane

One hundred million miles awayIt hurls across the sky.“Hale Bop” they say“is just a trailing flow of ice”Through time it wandersWhere space and time are fused;It’s birthday finite minds can only guess;It’s lifespan no one dares conjecture;It’s purpose, role and destiny we do not knowNo more than seers of EgyptFour thousand years ago.For all it’s height and depth and breadthIt’s just a speck propelled byForces greater than itself.It’s presence calls for cause and reason why.For some it is a chariot to eternity;Convinced they left this world in prime of lifeTo catch a ride to levels beyond their dreams.To earthlings it will appear againTwo thousand years from now.From what existence will we see it then?Honest minds cry out“How mighty are your works o God”

Meteor by Trier Ward Oh my fallen star how long will you hold the heat of the night in your hardening heart as you smolder in the crater of ice, bound all around by the mocking eyes of snow in this crystal paradise? How long will you smolder? How long will you shiver? How long will you burn bright?

Astronomy For Idiotsby Bradley Lastname

Procure a copy of GASTONOMY FOR IDIOTS.White out the letter ‘G’ from the title of the book.You now have a copy of ASTRONOMY FOR IDIOTS.“But isn’t it still a book on Gastronomy?” you ask.Well, that’s a pretty intelligent question, coming from an idiot !!Take the paperback outside.Turn to page 62.Use a powerful magnifying glass to focus a sunbeam over every letter ‘O’ on the page, and burn a hole in every ‘O’.With a writing implement, connect all the burned “O’s.”The burned “O’s” have now formed a constellation.Name the constellation anything but ‘Late4$upper.’Now call the constellation, and it will come.What, you want the constellation to fetch your slippers, too?Constellations only do that for Carl Sagan.

Being Sent Angels or a Detached Retina by Chanterelle Atkins On Saturday, was I sent an angel in the shower: God’s messenger? Tiny headlights in my periphery drifting like bioluminescent amoebas or is this a detached retina? Do I fight what is real, seeing a mirage in the possibility that it must be something better than than the blunders of biology, wishing upon the flashes and drifters as the Perseids of my mind. Or is it simply neural firing?

42

“you smolder in the crater of ice”


42

The Truth is OUT There.The Truth is OUT There.

shindig by Andrew Lamont smashed Red Rock bottles litter the landscape; pilots too drunk to operate bottle rockets twist their skinny legs in the two-moonlight, twist another lid off & swear a sip of water - what little there is - in bitter anticipation of the proportionally large headache poised like Curiosity to pick & drill & grind & crawl

Where the Music Is by Jennifer Johnson I want to go where the Music is - Where the Singers sing And the Players play And the Dancers sway And Life is afraid to knock. The Clock is afraid to tock And I draw the curtain on the Day To let in the Night, Where everything Right is Wrong And everything Wrong is… Not what I am Afraid of Because the Lyrics are loud And the Notes are clear And I can’t hear… And I can’t hear… The Good people And it hurts so Bad and Feels so Good that That I don’t have to feel… Anything at all - Where the music is.

Jor-El of Kryptonby Richard King Perkins I

An unasked burden has been lashed across our backs.When perilous stalactites threaten to shower,some may believe the sky is falling,though the stars will not descend.Looking to the outer rim, we notice our lone satelliteand send a handful of others to comfort;that she does not breathe,and send still others to resuscitate.Together, out of the hollow sphere we fly,wearing our flag like a dragging cape—believing in the rightness of our invulnerability,and still we cannot cross to those spawnless strangerswe imagine to be our fathers.

“some may believethe sky is falling”

August 2013• bohemia • 13The Truth is OUT There.The Truth is OUT There.

shindig by Andrew Lamont smashed Red Rock bottles litter the landscape; pilots too drunk to operate bottle rockets twist their skinny legs in the two-moonlight, twist another lid off & swear a sip of water - what little there is - in bitter anticipation of the proportionally large headache poised like Curiosity to pick & drill & grind & crawl

Jor-El of Kryptonby Richard King Perkins I

An unasked burden has been lashed across our backs.When perilous stalactites threaten to shower,some may believe the sky is falling,though the stars will not descend.Looking to the outer rim, we notice our lone satelliteand send a handful of others to comfort;that she does not breathe,and send still others to resuscitate.Together, out of the hollow sphere we fly,wearing our flag like a dragging cape—believing in the rightness of our invulnerability,and still we cannot cross to those spawnless strangerswe imagine to be our fathers.

“some may believethe sky is falling”

14 • bohemia • August 2013beam me up. beam me up. beam me up.

Deadman Lakeby J.S. MacLean A rush of August starsspilled into bottomless wateralong the cusp of night. Three young men dive in.One gazes up and floats with them in space.One retrieves a voice, relinquished long agoby some ancient waterfall. One creates a memoryof a rumbling chant down the bankonto the obsidian surface,pooling in the hollow of life.

beam me up.

Human Beingby Joel Cifer

I find myself with the urge to go and do. When I am going and doing I am a force of will divorced of emotion. Task oriented. I can see things in terms of systems and processes. Roles that need to be assumed and responsibilities that need to be shouldered. In this going and doing, the force of momentum elicits fear in most.

When I can just be, my existence is enough. There is nothing to be proven. Nature flexes and pulses with every breath I take. Insecurities take on a sweet sadness like the memory of an aunt’s cobbler. It is the longing I connect to. Just wanting to be okay. It can’t be for anything you did or it isn’t really love. A peace in knowing we matter. Our bodies as intricate and complex as a universe. God is everywhere. I want to be.

Judy Jetsonby Devin Stroud

shocking grasping lips of juice and softlyblue flame of your mysterycandy scented glistening mouth of disasterbaptize me in thy utterance come with stabbing thoughtscome with the attack of springcome with gentle wratherupt with your suicide inside me.

42

“one gazes up and floats with them in space”

August 2013• bohemia • 15beam me up. beam me up. beam me up. beam me up.

Deadman Lakeby J.S. MacLean A rush of August starsspilled into bottomless wateralong the cusp of night. Three young men dive in.One gazes up and floats with them in space.One retrieves a voice, relinquished long agoby some ancient waterfall. One creates a memoryof a rumbling chant down the bankonto the obsidian surface,pooling in the hollow of life.

Human Beingby Joel Cifer

I find myself with the urge to go and do. When I am going and doing I am a force of will divorced of emotion. Task oriented. I can see things in terms of systems and processes. Roles that need to be assumed and responsibilities that need to be shouldered. In this going and doing, the force of momentum elicits fear in most.

When I can just be, my existence is enough. There is nothing to be proven. Nature flexes and pulses with every breath I take. Insecurities take on a sweet sadness like the memory of an aunt’s cobbler. It is the longing I connect to. Just wanting to be okay. It can’t be for anything you did or it isn’t really love. A peace in knowing we matter. Our bodies as intricate and complex as a universe. God is everywhere. I want to be.

Judy Jetsonby Devin Stroud

shocking grasping lips of juice and softlyblue flame of your mysterycandy scented glistening mouth of disasterbaptize me in thy utterance come with stabbing thoughtscome with the attack of springcome with gentle wratherupt with your suicide inside me.

42

“one gazes up and floats with them in space”


(Inset) Will we be visited? The worlds of Gliese 581 are only 20 lightyears away. (At right) The ocean world around Kepler-22.


These Planets Dance – Some Homes for Aliens by Gary Lee Webb


Mankind has been interested in visiting the heavens since antiquity. In his play, The Birds, Aristophanes had his adventurers travel into the heavens to reach Cloudcookool-and, four centuries prior to Christ. Around the same time, Hindu liter-ature chronicled spaceflight (within the Ramayama). But it was the sec-ond century AD Roman author, Lu-cian, who first had his heroes reach the Moon carried aloft by a tornado (in his True History). That adven-ture not only tells of their travels, but the geography, inhabitants, and strange creatures of three planets and an interplanetary war. Over the centuries, we have learned much more about alien worlds really look like, and our au-thors have taken us much farther afield. We no longer expect to be able to travel using the rising va-pours of dew, drawn by birds, as in Bishop Francis Godwin’s 17th Century novel, The Man in the Moone. We first learned of our own solar system, and then of planets around other stars. Currently that count stands over 900 confirmed exo-planets and over 4000 pos-sibles, but the number of detected planets should increase greatly as the Keplar Space Observatory con-tinues to monitor 145,000 Milky Way stars. And there are some in-teresting planets out there: planets orbiting binary stars, gas giants frenetically orbiting their star, and only 42 light years away is a roiling hot water world (GJ 1214 b), with gravity 9% less than Earth’s. But are any of these habitable? And how do they compare with the alien planets of fantasy and science fiction. Will we find a Dune, a Bar-

soom, a Darkover or Krypton, a Cachelot, or Athshe? Will we find any earth-like worlds ? For me, the name Arrakis (“ar-raqis” is “the dancer” in Arabic), evokes memories of a sand-filled world, populated by giant sand worms, and millions of Fremen warriors ready to conquer the gal-axy. This is the planet, Dune, an earthlike world other than being dryer than our own Atacama Des-ert. Its biggest mammal, other than man, is the Kangaroo Rat, Muad’Dib, which the natives ad-mire, and whose name the protago-nist assumes. But could there be such a place? At this point, we know of 3800 stars within 25 parsecs (82 light-years) of Earth. We expect 6000 planets around those stars, but cur-rently only 474 of them are known to have systems, with 574 planets confirmed. 80 of those are not gi-ants, but remember that the easiest to detect are the big giants, or the planets in tight orbit, so we expect lots of earth-size planets. A dozen have been direct-imaged (e.g., For-malhaut b), but that requires a big planet far from any star. Wikipedia lists 21 terrestrial exoplanets with-in 50 light years, with 6 possibly habitable. Extrapolating that tally, I expect a few hundred habitable planets within 25 parsecs. And we know that the amount of water var-ies from system to system … a hab-itable warm desert world is quite possible. We come close to having one in our own system. I grew up reading

about Barsoom, a world covered in red grass, canals, thin air and low gravity, and both red and green martians. Edgar Rice Burroughs based his stories of noble, war-like Barsoom, on the actual planet Mars, which turned out to have less air and water (and red rocks, not red sward). But had Mars been a little larger, with more greenhouse gasses, it could easily have been the world of Percival Lowell and Giovanni Schiaparelli. Vulcan (of Star Trek) is another dry, Mars-like world. Marian Zimmer Bradley based her 29 Darkover novels on a much more earth-like world, metal-poor and cold, Cottman IV also known as Darkover, which like the planet Krypton (of the Superman com-ics) circles a red-giant. Could there be such a world? Certainly! The star Formalhaut is metal-poor, much larger than our sun, and has a planet which has actually been im-aged. Formalhaut b is a giant, but where there is one planet there are usually several. In fact, there are three close-by K-giant stars known to have at least one planet (stars Pollux, γ Cephei, and ι Draconis), and we know of two dozen more. Whether any of them will have a cold, earth-like world with psionic aliens is question for the future, of course. At the other extreme are the water worlds. Alan Dean Foster wrote about Cachalot, a world of almost no surface land, populated by dolphins and whales brought from Earth in AD 2300. He also wrote about Tran-ky-ky, a heavily iced world. Our own Solar Sys-tem has Europa, a small, icebound

Have you ever wanted to travel into space?


waterworld. It is thought to have a 20 kilometer thick skin of ice cov-ering an ocean that could be hun-dreds of kilometers deep, heated by tidal flexing. Technically it is not a “dwarf planet” like Pluto or Ceres since it orbits Jupiter and not the Sun, but it is the same size as one. Outside our solar system, water and ice worlds come bigger: I al-ready mentioned a hot water world (GJ 1214 b), comparable to Earth in size. There are several water-worlds larger than Earth, ranging up to Neptune size: e.g., Kepler 62 f, an Earth-temperature world, 40% larger, thought to have a very deep ocean on the surface and Ke-pler-22 b, also Earth-temperature with a very deep ocean, but Nep-tune-sized. The best world for humans would not be one of these extremes. These too should exist, and fantasy literature is full of them. Many of them are forest worlds, for exam-ple, Ursula LeGuin’s 1976 novel about the planet Athshe, The Word for World Is Forest, and Alan Dean Foster’s 1975 novel, Midworld. Such worlds should have a mixture of land and ocean, and various ter-rain types. But if the world appears normal, it may be different in other ways. The movie Avatar is centered on a large, forested moon (Pandora) of a fictional Alpha Centauri A gas giant, Polyphemus (to date, we have not yet detected any of the Alpha Centauri A planets and only a single earth-sized planet around the Alpha Centauri B). Polyphe-mus is slightly smaller than Jupi-ter, located in the habitable zone of its star, and has many moons. The moon Pandora appears normal, but it has a world-wide neural network of communicating flora and fauna,

and some large deposits of super-conductive mineral, unobtainium. For all intents and purposes, the planet is aware. And the mineral allows mountains to float in the moon’s strong magnetic fields. Another sentient world appears in the Stanislaw Lem’s eponymous 1961 novel, Solaris. The world is actually covered with a single planetwide organism, an enormous mind capable of telepathic commu-nication, but too alien to really be understood by the human charac-ters. The book has been turned into a movie three times, but the movies have not focused on the main char-acter, missing the point of the book. As the author says: “I only wanted to create a vision of a hu-man encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas, or images. This is why the title of the book was Solaris and not ‘Love in Outer Space.’” The idea of a habitable moon (as in Pandora) has been seen else-where, of course. The Star Wars saga has “The Forest Moon of En-dor,” home of the Ewoks. While we cannot actually see any such moons yet, habitable satellites of a jovian planet at just the right dis-tance from its star turns out to be quite likely. Thirty such jovians are

known to be in the middle of their star’s habitable belt. One other strangeness from Star Wars also turns out to be possible. Fans of those movies may recall that Tatooine orbits a double star. So do the planets (currently two known) of the binary Kepler-47, and Kepler-47 c is in the middle of the habitable zone. Fiction and re-ality can mirror each other. In fact, the Keplar Space Observatory has detected several such systems. Another science fictional theme is the rogue planet, ejected from its system and wandering by itself through space. It turns out that those are not uncommon, and the bigger ones are in fact viewable. Unlike most planets, there is no nearby star to wash them out. So one of the dozen extra-solar plan-ets we have actually imaged is the lonely CFBDSIR J2149. Like Jupi-ter, it glows ruddily in its own heat, and does not need reflected light. But for the most part, we should look at normal systems, for ex-ample, the Gliese 581 system of 6 planets, three in the habitable belt, only 21 light years away. The Ukrainians apparently agree: on 9 October 2008, they used a radio telescope to send a message to the Gliese 581 system. So we may be visited by the Gliese 581 equivalent of Star Fleet in 2030.

Have you ever wanted to travel into space?

A real-life Tatooine ? The two Kepler-47 planets orbit a double star, orange and white.


On Arrakis (the planet Dune), Muad’Dib is the Kangaroo Rat, admired for its wisdom, painted here by Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert.


Bring Me My Spaceship, I Want to Go Home.Photography & post-processing: RavenBlakh Photography


Model: Samanfah Wilson

Designer & Stylist: Jackalopeland


Charlotte is a fashion, portrait, and conceptual based photography student,

currently living in London. Heavily inspired by film, and the work of director

David Lynch, she has an infatuation with colour and strange characters.

'Bring Me My Spaceship, I Want to Go Home' is a collaboration between Charlotte

and Jackalopeland; it reflects a disconnection from ones surroundings, and selfexpression through fashion.


-The Last Words of Mark II, First and Final King of Pluto- by Ty Hall

Plutonians, as everybody knows, listened exclusively to music pro-

duced in western civilizations on Earth between the years 1977 and 1987. A knee-jerk assumption would be to at-tribute this particularity to their impec-cably poor taste in the finer arts. But in reality, it is due mostly to the binary properties of synthesized sounds. For example, C4 (middle C) is 261.63 Hz (with A4 equaling 440 Hz), which translates to 10010100 00111100 01111111. This code is eventual-ly translated into sound, which in turn is retranslated when passed through

Plutonian ear holes back to binary. Middle C, on Pluto, roughly translat-ed to “Howdy everybody I know that I love from the top of my head to the toes on my feet” (which may or may not be saying very much, as the aver-age Plutonian is only about the size of the tip of a dull pencil. Then again, love is relative). This binary quality of synthesized music speaks to them on a deeply rudimentary level. Taco’s “Put-tin’ on the Ritz” (adopted as Pluto’s trans-national anthem) instils great patriotism and nostalgia in their little Plutonian hearts. This music was discovered acciden-tally in April of 1977 (Earth time) by Mark the Second who, upon sharing his discovery with the planet, was

promptly made Pluto’s first king. He took office that same year on August 15th, and every radio on the planet played Cat Stevens’ “(Remember the Days of) The Old Schoolyard,” the re-coils of which were actually picked up on Earth that same day (it only takes about four hours for radio waves to travel from Pluto to Earth). Believing themselves to be the sole beings in all of the universe to have ever heard this music, Plutonians eventually decided they wanted to share this gift with all of creation. So they constructed a meeting place called Plutio 54, and in 2007 (Earth years) they began sending out invi-tations. This highly coordinated ef-fort involved interrupting what they

“The Place Where Forgotten Dreams Dwell” by James McCarthy


Smile Capitol of the World The actual nickname of Pocatello, Idaho by Philip Kobylarz

The day I saw a UFO I knew I had to quit my job. It was that simple. As

simple as a bright light hovering over a 6,700 foot dun colored mountain at 4:38 a.m. Most of the really important things that happen in this life happen when it’s dark out. Pitch black. The mountain stood at the end of my street on the outskirts of a long forgotten college town in southeastern Idaho. This geographic location meant that the name of the peak– Chink’s– could be a blatant racial slur and there wasn’t anyone for deserts in the dis-tance in any direction who would ever care or feel an inkling of shame about it. As long as they kept cranking out mediocre Mu Shu Beef at Wang Lin’s

grease pit on 4th Street all was good. It is a damn tall mountain, too, as big as the mythical South’s Smokies, but this one is burnt by the sun to look like a multi-layered potato. Its pars-ley sprigs are juniper trees and it has some crazy stubble of antennae on its head. It also, in the right light, can look like a deflated beehive. Or failed pizza dough. But it wasn’t any aerial lights that were shining that fateful day in June when I took the dog out for her morn-ing crap. There was a glowing orb, a halo with no hole, and it hung there shimmering, but not like a star. It pul-sated as if it were beckoning to me in some sort of Morse code language of blink– glowing and spurting out tongues of energy. An otherworldly form of gesturing. Like it desperately wanted to tell me something. And that something was that I was ruining my life. A so-called rational person might be inclined to say I was seeing things due to my tenuous existence on this ball of life known as the Earth. Sure, I am neither astrophysicist nor an M.D. but I am, or was, a teacher of fellow hu-mans. I knew things. Important things. My gig was that of an instructor at an English teaching school associ-ated with a real life university. I taught the mechanics of grammar and the art of speech to twenty-somethings from Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. They loved and revered me and I was the kind of person who would never do them wrong or sell them untrue information. I was an ed-ucator and self-proclaimed skeptic of false prophecies. I was a sort of secu-lar Mormon prophet. Only without the harem. What can anyone or I really tell anyone about foreigners? They are the true aliens. The weirdest thing about them is their food and the way it smells. Of course, they think the same about hot dogs and chalupas. They’re only foreign because they so want to be like us, empty headed and Ameri-can, addicted to sugar and unrealizable dreams. And the sad thing is that some-times they think and see themselves as lizard-skinned, cat-eyed, creatures from a distant nebula just because they aren’t us and will never be admitted

deemed to be the most important me-dia of every planet with Rick Astley’s masterpiece “Never Gonna Give You Up” (01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111… translates roughly in Plutonian as “Hi things that live and think with ears, please come to our totally neat shindig on Pluto”). Unfortunately on Earth (as with the other planets) these invitations were interpreted as funny, annoying pranks to show your buddies, and thus was disregarded. For nearly a decade they waited for a response. Just sitting there in Plutio 54—tiny little heads sullenly buried in their tiny little hands—listening to an endless cycle of Falco, Europe, Men Without Hats, etc. ad nauseam. And with the constant barrage of musical angst invading their tiny little minds, the Plutonians started to become in-secure about themselves. They would say things like “Nobody likes us be-cause we got demoted to a dwarf planet,” or “Do I smell funny? Maybe I smell funny. Hey, you, come over here and smell me. Do I smell funny to you?” Eventually, this angst turned to anger and eventually aggression. They decided to invade every planet that did not attend their party, and show them what for. So all the little lice-sized Plutonians piled into the planet’s only spacecraft (a white orb weighing 2.7 grams with all inhabitants on board, with a surface area of 5027 mm2) and took off toward the nearest invited planet—Earth—angrily chanting “At-tack! Decay! Sustain! Release! Attack! Decay! Sustain! Release!” over and over again. But a glimmer of hope filled their itty bitty hearts when the miraculous tones of Rick Astley were picked up by the ship’s frequency receiver. “Maybe,” Mark the Second said airily, “they thought they were hosting the party. Or more likely, they heard this wonder-ful truth and couldn’t stop listening. This is delightful! Full speed ahead! Ride those waves!” So they followed the sound waves to a house. “What

are these strange characters?” they pondered, seeing the “ΔΖ 80’s Party” printed on a banner above the thresh-old. “It must say ‘Welcome folks from Pluto’” someone suggested. Probably. They came in through the bathroom window. “These beings are giants! Though they look kind of like us, they’re hu-mongous,” Mark the Second mused. Distracted by the flashing lights and bright neon tube tops, the captain crash landed underneath a couch. The spacecraft was instantly pursued by an enormous hand and captured. “Got it!” the captor shouted to his buddies with the orb between his fingers as he re-turned to the table. “My shot, right?” The gargantua dunked the spacecraft into water and shook it twice, jos-tling the Plutonians from one end of the sphere to the other, killing at least seven-dozen. The craft was then sent hurling through the air into a red re-ceptacle full of yellow liquid. It came down with a thunderous crash, filling almost instantly with Keystone Light. With that, Mark the Second—gasping for his last sweet breaths of nitrogen—spake his last words: “I’m afraid this has all been a terrible waste of time.”

“The Place Where Forgotten Dreams Dwell” by James McCarthy


commander of the ultimate exchange program once dreamed up and fabu-lized as Soylent Green. As I write this, the sky above the high desert lacks even one cloud. They know I’m at work on a heretical tract. They will only strike when and if I can get this published in a small printed collation read mostly by the loving mothers of the writers it features: a small press literary magazine. Those are even dying. It’s part of the mega-plan. The last samizdat forum of indi-viduality first slowly, now rapidly, be-ing phased out. They will be in charge of the dreaming when it is time. The one collective dream. Don’t think I haven’t been prepar-ing for such a moment. The truck is gassed up. The guns are hidden, taped up under the seat. If these are my final last words, it can be assured that I’m not giving up without a fight. The reason for this is that I’m not one of them. Somehow, I slipped through the cracks. I know they can feel me sweat when I see the orbs re-ceding, bobbing over the tops of the asparagus-topped juniper trees, fleck-ing into the horizon on badly moonlit nights. And I’ll stand my ground being the proud Neanderthal that I am– the last one who believes in animal fanta-sies of love, friendship, and freethink-ing. Venues full of truth that no one reads about or thinks of anymore. Not when the wi-fi is on. They cannot eradicate the ape in me. And this is the reason why I can-not any longer hold a real job. Jobs are known to them as “perceptive ser-vitude”. This will be made clear by a tangential story. At the front of the English teaching school was Randall’s henchman, a guy anonymously named Bill and he had the ability to see right through me. He had the training. He was bred as a seer. With paper-thin spectacles, he tried to hide his own pupil-less eyes. When he spoke, his voice trembled in fear be-cause he knew he was hiring a teacher with writerly pretensions, and as most know, writers equal danger. One curious thing is that our friends from above don’t even have an alpha-bet. All communication is telepathic or carried out through subtle hand ges-tures, barely perceptible to the human

great grandparents were, we don’t ac-tually see these things darting about like steel cigars in the sky, behind clouds of mountains. I maintain I saw what I saw and it was the only valid form of epiphany that’s worth discuss-ing. Really the discs that float above for-ests in Switzerland, or in the distance between telephone lines in a cornfield of Nebraska, or the balls of light that flew in the skies of a warm Phoenix evening, or the glowing donuts that ap-pear in infrared films shot by the space shuttle crew are all just memories of the great exodus that hasn’t ever been written down in the various arrays of bibles wild-eyed preachers are ready to quote from on Sunday morning low-budget t.v. shows. The true indication that they exist is in the here and now. The evidence is in the way we cannot communicate with one another because we can’t ever document the origins, the virgin birth of the big bang, if one will, of our collective, for lack of a better word, spawning. It is that long awkward si-lence. We cannot celebrate the begin-ning. We are not allowed to. Take for instance my recent boss, of a long line of bosses bred specifi-cally to be of the boss race. Randall, as he called himself, was the kind of guy who could simply never find a suit coat that fitted him properly. He was the type whose consciousness was for-ever itself hovering between what was real and the clever forces that paint the skies interesting. Sure, he could seem like he cared about the stresses and angst of students caught in between cultures in his center for “higher” learning, but he only had two tempera-ments: mellow and mellower. No one remarked how obvious his iris-less eyes were because everyone became instantly lost in his toothy grin and well-meaning demeanor. For him, every crisis about grading or stu-dent housing or the teachers’ inability to make classes more fun than a New York Times crossword was met with the assumption that everything would turn out, somehow, “okay”. Of course, it had to be o.k. Everything would be copasetic until the day giant discs ap-peared over the world’s biggest cit-ies and he could assume his true role:

into the club. The funny thing is how they think we’re the standard of nor-mality. We, the people who put cheese on everything to make it, finally, good. The English language school sat in a semi-decrepit former office or even bank building at the end of the two mountain ranges that hemmed in the town, at the open arms of a naturally formed Y of habitation and occasional moose-wandered wilderness. Within its prison-like shell, in a yellow brick perfunctory box renovated to look like a modern office, there is a room that contains hundreds upon hundreds of taxidermied birds. Owls spreading their wings stacked on red tail hawks stealthily searching for prey. This room was the first clue. What we actually taught under the guise of language acquisition was this: how to smile constantly, how to pre-tend to be happy, how to don’t worry in the artful deceit of please, at all times, be fake and have a nice day. Since the syllabi (or alibis) and the objectives all came from a series of anonymous, apocryphal corporate writers, this was quite an easy task. Coincidentally there are as many theories about our friends from above as there are proofs of crashed vehicles and wheat fields that have been pat-tered. Here’s a bit of advice: when referring to them, always write or say “our friends from above”. It’s not even funny to do otherwise. One hundred and one rules for how to behave in the corporate workplace and one hundred and one hypotheses on how to teach a language. 10 rules on how to refer to Them. Do the math. Simplicity is al-ways the answer we are looking for. Sightings, governmental conspiracy theorem, cover-ups, visitations, etcet-era. No one really talks of how a long time ago they had been with us, cohab-iting our reality. Except late night ra-dio shows on AM. There are mentions of craft in the Bible. Woodcuts, in Renaissance paintings. They could be our beginning and ancestry. One day we’ll figure out what planet we come from (the true mission of NASA). The previous parenthetical will be black markered out. That’s where the unidentified aspect of everything comes in. Just as we can really never know who are great great


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animal who relies on the much more vulgar form of body language. Further proof: Bill’s desk was chaos personified. He, perhaps, didn’t want to signal that he was one of them by possessing an organized, sleek work-space. As he could see through anyone, anyone could see through him. Charts, tables, grade percentages, spreadsheets were all his obsessions. The trembling of his voice revealed his uneasiness with being the one appointed with the duty of controlling the façade of a lan-guage school. He left his office only to enforce his rigid, rule following will on instruc-tors. This he did through an endless array of nitpicking questions. He con-stantly quoted the objectives of learn-ing and the need for grammar, and in doing this, in playing it real uncool, he blew his cover. He also smelled like dollar store lotion. From the handbook: “Teach stu-dents the vocabulary of the body by singing the Hokey-Poky song”. Where in the world could they have gotten this from? Come on, only an alien would let this slip. “Epiphanization” is my term for the moment a human sees through all the crap, the falseness, and the plastic guises they have put up and under-stands what is going on, what has been going on for ages. It doesn’t happen to many. It’ll happen to you, but when it does, you’d better run. These days, I don’t even bother to look up anymore. The sky is full of little silver twinkling things. It’s more and more obvious and if you really spend an afternoon watching, you can tell they’re getting bolder. Just switch on the evening news. It’s all right there, broadcast on such a low band that people are getting immune to the subtexts. The news is now a com-mercial for them and what they want us to be. There’s even a ring tone for it! It’s pure B movie stuff. How stupid do they think we are? How stupid do they think some of us are? Desolate, jagged, harsh, knife-blade-like mountains shaped and torn like an old cloth writhe to the end of percep-tible distance. Like fences in all direc-tions that don’t hold anything back, the mountains surround and change colors from a greenish, gray tint to a low burn-

ing orange in the day’s heat. A Martian resort whose background turns deep purple when it’s about to rain. Tucked in the high altitude crevices and folds are pine and spruce trees, scared as-pens, and a lot of juniper that covers hills and stretches into sage benches of abandoned fields, all a-tilt. This is the maniacal landscape that reminds them most of home. Some crazies have put up a silhou-ette of Bigfoot because there is some-thing about the grand nothingness that beckons primal thoughts. It’s why they came here. It’s the perfect place to es-tablish a colony. No one would think to look here. Idaho. This state with a made up name is the personification of a weirdness they just adore. Most peo-ple can’t even distinguish Idaho from Iowa anyway. It’s what paradise turns into when it’s made out of pure hell. The phone is currently ringing. I will not answer it. Fuck, I just quit my job so that means I’m not taking any calls. I did it via e-mail. I am not giving them a chance to touch me. I know who it is anyway. It’s prob-ably my students wondering where I am. How I could disappear like that. I’ll have to just let them wonder. It’s really too late for them. Or, it’s the guys from the language school. They’ll want to have a meet-ing I will never grant them. They’ll want to talk about “what went wrong”. They’ll try to get me to see things from their point of view. They’ll have objec-tive sheets and brochures and sugges-tions. They will talk to me smiling. Their eyes will never blink. It has been eighteen rings until it the phone finally mutes itself. No normal human lets a phone ring for eighteen rings. Unless they’re just about to murder. Finally, the high desert brings rain. Behind the storm scuds ripped to shreds by the rounded pyramid of Pinpoint Mountain, I can hear a subtle hummm. I know the saucers are taking the opportunity of weather to deploy more of their kind. Horses whinny and that means they know too. I’m not as stupid as they think I am. And horses are never wrong. The truck is gassed up. I’ll get some ammo at Buck’s. I’ll get a case of cheap white wine. I’ve got my mu-

Night of the Comet by Jane Hertenstein

It will not come again . . .

Mark Twain once wrote, “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is com-ing again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disap-pointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley’s comet.” Twain died on 21 April 1910, the day after the com-et’s closest sweep. The last time we had a visit from Halley’s was in 1986. I will not live to see it again. Technically, I didn’t exactly see it in 1986 either. I believe it was the springtime when we went out to view the comet. This was before Internet and live blogging. For amateurs such as ourselves we had to read the to figure out the optimum time to catch a glimpse. The best time was before dawn. So sometime in the middle of the night my friends and I decided to go comet hunting. We had to borrow a car and what we came up with was an old shortie school bus. Next we had to pool our change to come up with gas for the bus. Then we had to get out of the city, away from the light pollution. Little did we know how far we’d have to go. We drove I-55 past the Saturn rings of suburbs and warehouses that circled the city. Past the Des Plaines River, a geographic marker, which meant we were out of Cook County and past Joliet—yet the sky was still twilight!

sic. I’ve got a little time before the take over is complete. Just read the news-papers people. Study the newscasters’ faces and watch them on the verge of flinching. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening day by day. Watch the vapid t.v. shows and the clues are there. No one talks about anything these days. It’s all smiles and whatev-er, whatever, until they own you. Until you can’t think anymore. There’s only two places our kind has a chance. Death. Or Canada.


We were running out of time—soon it would be getting light. So we took the next exit. Though we were definitely away from subdivisions, we could still see the ethereal green glow of Chicago in the distance. We kept driving look-ing for dark sky, taking narrower and narrower roads, bumping over broken pavement and then down dirt roads. Finally we parked. There was not a single house or person around. It was now or never to see the comet. We tramped over open ground and in the near-dark sighted a mound, more like a heap of dirt or slag, so we climbed up for what we supposed

would be a better view. I lay down on the rough hillside next to a guy I had a crush on. I could smell the dew around us—and something else, nose tingling and acrid, like plastic burning. Any-way, I imagined it being romantic, ly-ing together, waiting; he reached over for my hand. We didn’t spy a comet, but I felt a cosmic flash and heat radi-ating from inside of me. Slowly the sky lightened, and we came to realize we were sitting on a toxic waste dump outside the Joliet Ar-senal Plant. My friends and I hurried to get back into the city before rush-hour traffic stopped us in our tracks. We were on

Lake Shore Drive when we ran out of gas. Had we been paying attention to the gauge we might have noticed we were running low, but back then we were ALWAYS running on empty. Who was to say we wouldn’t make it back on fumes? I remember sitting in the right lane with traffic building and cars honking, afraid of getting rear-ended any minute while my boyfriend and another guy walked to go get gas-oline for the tank. They returned with a plastic jug just as a city tow truck pulled up to get us off the roadway. We made it home, comet-less and possibly contaminated from rollicking around on an industrial Superfund site.

"Nursery" by James McCarthy


ATTACK ON HOLLYWOOD by Roger Leatherwood

All the latest slingshot formulae and matter-spitting devices aided the

Krn’ith to appear above the outskirts of the dense suburbs , sliding along the crease between their universe and the sore ripples above the Earth, mottled and open by years of television signals and ultraviolet smog. The 77 ships ap-peared as if being dropped from a se-cret fold in a magician’s hat. The Krn’ith were four-legged blue aliens that walked upright and had a highly advanced intelligence although they looked not like big-headed insects so much as resembled great danes, al-beit with more grace than walking dogs might have. With long fingers and a third invisible eye, they commu-nicated in gestures and psychic emana-tions. They were here, invisible and in stealth, to visit upon the cultural navel of the Earth their amoral plans of ex-periments. Upon Hollywood, the maelstrom of corrupt activity, disease and nefari-ous decay that their measurements had identified as the core of the decadent remnants of godless Earthly civiliza-tion. “It’s more inland that I thought,” Skeer thought at his equal (no Krn’ith was superior to any other, only on dif-ferent tiers of equality), Fleer. A landscape seen for the first time in actual atmosphere moved under

them like a sheet: mountains and riv-ers, punctuated by quilt squares of steel and chrome buildings, with rocky grids and spitting car things. Closer they winked to a central loud cross-treet inhabited by humans and blinking in the dark. Loud and attractive, like a star or satellite laden with jewels. Amid the cowboy hats and miniskirts, the Krn’ith cycling accelerometers and tracking lasers twisted the noise distor-tion fields and sslloowweedd matter. Quantum magnets pinched space, and the atomic mousetrap closed the bub-ble onto Hollywood Park, and a switch went on starting: ::TIME STOP:: The sun stopped moving, and the native plants froze in their photosyn-thetic cycles. The Krn’ith observed the inhabitants of the central building, packed in obscene proximity, under flashing lights, pulsing and undulating in a sexual, heathen rhythms. Inside the Grand Agave, the natives were dancing to Donna Summer, to Kashif, and to Cheryl Lynn. Krn’ith scientists had determined that Lynn’s “Got to be Real” was the epitome of mating music in the last 150 years, beating out Ravel’s “Bolero” by a wide margin. But here the natives, these sweaty decadent humans were merely moving back in forth in unison, not touching each other or exchanging bodily fluids - or ingesting chemicals - but simply dancing. A form of physi-cal self expression both sexual and spiritual. And also smiling. The DJ, Longhorn Steve, announced with a Texas twang each subsequent song, full of energy and (the Krn’ith not realizing) half a dozen Shiner beers. Little did he know that the entire club that he had this gig at - three nights a week at $90 per plus an open bar tab - was now in -::TIME STOP::_ and they could continue all night, but that the night would contin-ue well into the next millennium. “Is this really Hollywood?” Fleer gestured, his thin paw scratching the monitor glass. “Let me check the readings,” Skeer

waved back, his brow such that it was furrowing. In ::TIME STOP:: the readings were deep and infinite. The other Krn’ith in the other ships howled and became excited. They scanned no hookers selling sexual favors for acting credits. There were no human vermin padding the accounts or running stop signs. They could not unearth any sin. No broken souls, no dark satanic believers or goat blood sacrifice. Their objec-tive - to suck up human experimentals, to operate and to attempt to mate their purloined cow fetuses with human zygotes they captured without any-one noticing in the oblivious burg of twisted Hollywood - would have to be abandoned. The partiers in the Agave on North Tuscany Stone in Hollywood Park partied on, dancing with the closest, most energetic member of the opposite sex that they could find on the dance floor at a glance, alone on a Saturday night, and under the pulsing globe of mirrored spotlights. They didn’t real-ize, all 95 of them, that they would be dancing all night long, that they would never get tired, that they did not need to get home, to go to work tomorrow, to preserve their energy, even had to stop after a while, that the night was not only young, but ageless. ::TIME STOP:: had released them, froze the arrow of aging, and bestowed the dance of the beat around, the disco inferno, the rapper’s delight, the foxy good times, the hustle and the funk into a bottomless fold of timeslip to last forever. “Our calculations - we skipped over a fold and are not on course.” “This isn’t Hollywood?’’ Mistakes were made. “It’s . . . Hol-lywood Park!” “In California?” “No. In Texas. Near San Antonio.” Needles scratched and panties flashed. The programmed light show changed to a throbbing pink and olive pulse that throbbed to a David Bowie song from the ‘80s. Kweer, in ship 47, thought to Schmeer in ship 12:

A few years later the arsenal closed down and was turned back to prairie and Mike and I got married and had a baby girl with more or less all her limbs in tack and toes and fingers ac-counted for. Since Halley’s other com-ets have come and gone unseen. For my husband and me the memory of a crazy night out comet-watching is like a fuzzy, white streak against a fast and far-receding past. It will not come again.


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being of light and shadow thoroughly sounded the pupil. What would the intruder discover? I wondered. How would he (for yes, this halfway lumi-nous being had sex) use it against me? Now he was blinking his findings—on and off again, as if he in essence were semaphore—in the direction of his light-and-shadow companions. Many more of them than you’d humanly ex-pect had fit themselves into my two-man pup tent. I never thought to won-der whether they’d eaten my absent expedition partner. How might I crack the interloper’s code? I asked myself instead—when suddenly there it was, a scroll unrolling in midair, in need of no key to open it, clear as the daylight streaming into the tent. Had I really left the flap open all night? All that my visitor blinked I now (without any effort) absorbed. “In the flickering eye of the dreamer,” I ‘overheard’ him ‘say’, “observe how an emerging world, many dimensions hotter than terrestrial summer, will now spontaneously sizzle and spit.” Where was this smoke I was smelling coming from? “Still, on the griddle of his bedding, note how his naked frame will now paradoxically shiver.” Regu-lation issue pajamas fed the flames an instant and were gone. All of a sudden I was freezing, even as I (I could not help myself) unloaded into the light. At his core a man is no more vulnerable in sleep than he is upon waking. But try though I might to fun-nel that sensible assertion into the dis-integrating ear of reverie, I failed again and again, doomed like a feathered fish to flap and flap, except I can’t. Help! I tried to cry out, Help! In a flash, like a ring of candles wreathed around the heap of ashes that was once my sleeping bag, my new friends, rough-ly a brotherhood, closed ranks and ‘laughed’ and ‘laughed’ and ‘laughed’. It wasn’t long before I was laughing with them.

(30 Seconds till) Reveilleby Jim Eigo “You humans are so drearily alike,” said the alien into my ear. “No back-bone.” Though I write ‘said’, I want you to understand (as I myself have comprehended only in retrospect): all the invader’s ‘statements’ arrived by way of sentence-long interjections di-rectly into my spinal column. Probing under my left lid, this

“Texas? Is this the navel of the deca-dent remnants of Earth civilization?” “No. It’s the shit-kicking capital of line-dancing and BBQ.” Beer in large mugs and tits shaking under thin polyester tops overtook the monitoring frequencies. The clos-est the Krn’ith got to sensing a dark shadow of dread was a couple snorting cocaine in one of the stalls in the bath-room, but it quickly transformed to a blowup in which love, life, and the en-ergy orgone power of orgasm became imminent. The Krn’ith watched and on many occasions danced along, in invisible and psychic patterns, along with the Texans trapped and released to end-less funk. And they began to under-stand and to empathize with the Earth humans, not so corrupt, not such easy pickings for their amoral experiments, after all. After 996 krell years the Krn’ith turned off the modulators and the quantum magnets and opened the atomic mousetrap, causing time to SPD up. ::TIME START:: blinked off and the inhabitants slipped back into the now, a little dizzy and thirsty and in need of a good massage. Wanting to salvage their mission, the Krn’ith moved to environs east and attempted to possess the polo horses paddocked in the stables in nearby Brackenridge Park but the horses were dumb and had no religion. Also, they couldn’t dance worth a damn and when they tried, with those hooves they kept stomping on the Krn’ith’s paws.

God Play by D.Z. Watt

Once he’d believed not only in God, but in man.

Albert grabbed a plastic bag that bil-lowed into his little yard, compressed it to a ball, and held it tightly. Fluffy white clouds drifted by, but on the horizon dark ones lurked. Their movement across the infinite blue

implied, to him, the earth’s obvious roundness, though he knew it might not if he didn’t already know it was or-bal. And he asked himself: Could an-cient astronomers have realized it was a ball by watching what he saw, if they didn’t already know it was round? Of course not, he muttered. It was a stupid question. They’d have had to know it was round, just like they’d have had to know that the wars they fought weren’t going to end all wars. Or they would’ve stopped fighting wars. Wouldn’t they? He shook his head. No, maybe they’d believed otherwise. Or wanted to. And that was the difference between the good and the evil, too, wasn’t it? The believing? Albert looked up at the blue part of the sky for an answer but it remained mute as another bag rose on a gust and floated into his roses. Across the street the little park was littered with plastic bags and bottles and pizza boxes. And orphaned news-paper pages. But he wasn’t having it here, he imposed order on his little world. Against all odds. When he pulled the bag from the bush it snagged on the thorns, tearing. So now he couldn’t reuse it. And climbing his porch steps, he held a bag in each hand. One to keep, the other to toss. But crumpled up small, he couldn’t remember which was the good and which wasn’t. And he turned suddenly, uncomfort-ably, to look again at the sky.


Waiting For a Signby Robin Chavarria

You ever have that ache that comes with doing things? Or for that mat-

ter ever have to deal with that moron that says, "The beginning is the end?" Well honestly, they're a jackass. It's not a matter of opinion because someone else was doing it before them, chances are they were doing it better and had more of inclination of what was actu-ally going on before I stepped into this pile of cosmic bullshit. And now that I'm knee deep in something we per-ceive as infinite, I must say that I think I would been more content dying in a car crash, getting scrubbed from real-estate with the blast, or heck, dying from natural causes. Now I'm just eternal because I was a dip shit thinking he could fix things and avert a planetary catastrophe. Be-fore that I was amateur mechanic and minimum wage powered-janitor at a super-secret-mega-corporate-think-tank-facility. Now, because of the circumstances that have befallen I am now at the nexus of world's within my line of sight. None of it a place I want to be, but it's the only real choice I have is to keep moving forward. I can back, I can change things but it just messes everything else up more. The possibilities for fuck ups are endless when you're a monkey at the controls. The only thing that remains a constant is that which was and that which will be. Everything else ongoing is suscep-tible to change at the whims at what-ever happens to be at the wheel. Yes, I'm referring to other beings that exist within the frames. People where I came from, called them gods and their agents; being much akin to angels and demons. They had tons of different names, looked differently, acted differ-ently and were all pretty much out of touch with how things were for mortal beings. Being the new kid on the inter-dimensional block, I was susceptible to the passions that drive humans to rise up and do things against the grain. The only problem was the repercus-

sions because people never see the impact they make until after you've seen thousands of years of progress. Especially when a god does something and brings about the genocide of spe-cies that are not their pets. The lack of accountability of these assholes led to deaths and erasure of untold quadril-lions of the span of millions of aeons. It's taken me a very indeterminable amount of time to gain control of my faculties, learn the rules of what's ac-ceptable and what's not. One: Under any circumstances, do not mess with time as it was. Two: Understand that working with other deities is foolish, since they themselves are assholes that need a good reality check; so if you work with them prepare for betrayal. Three: Influencing the affairs of mor-tals is foolish and leads unnecessary death and destruction especially when they establish religions based on your appearance and deeds. So just don't. Four: Don't worry about food, water or sleep. You're infinite now, that means to engage in that sort of routine makes you vain, and I hate vanity. Five: Even if you choose to abstain from the in-sanity, prepare for war. Other power-ful beings will involve you whether you want them to or not. Rarely is it ever the case that you will be left alone because the gods are crazy. Of all the dimensions, time and space are the most volatile. So, tread with caution. Six: Learn to deal with the loneliness that comes with being eternal. Being in love and making children is perhaps the most dumb-assed thing you could do when you're a 'god.' The offspring produced by these unnatural unions are of the most messed up and insane variety. To think, I thought that in-breeding was one of the worst things to be inflicted on the gene pool; Try deities having children, and it'll make a genetic disposition for extra chromo-somes, disposition for violence, edible pork products and pyrotechnics seem like favorable traits to have. Failure to adhere to the first rule above, will bring forth a legion of infi-nitely spawning cosmic police. I heard

from one such deity that they called, 'The Inevitable' since just one viola-tion of cosmic is enough draw them forth like sharks to blood in the water. My personal definition for them is, "PITA" which is short for pain in the ass. Destroying them is easy, running from them is harder and making them stop trying to murder you is nigh im-possibly. I've seen some of the others make armies of their own to fight on endlessly, others have managed to ap-peal and atone for their violations by making contracts to arbitrarily curb their violations of their law. Which I suspect their existence was also willed into being by someone who got sick of seeing and dealing with all the crazy bullshit. One thing I guess you're thinking is, "Do you gods ever kill each other?" Sure. It happens often but they're al-ways resurrecting, some other new comer is stepping into their shoes or they had believers hidden away some-where to keep them constant. It's a load of horse shit but I haven't come to terms with quantum physics or any other sort of higher established sci-ence. I know what I know and I like to keep it as simple as possible. When gods go to war, it's absurd either be-cause the level of violence involved or the stupid games they play with each other. Did you know chess was one of those games? I didn't, I assumed it was invented by some long dead smart-ass bastard that had too much time on their hands. Well I was wrong, it was invented by a being who decided they were going to look like an obsid-ian goose because they grew sick and tired of looking human. I managed to get him to not destroy the humanity I came from by playing him in a game of chess. We stalemated, so an agreement was stricken that he would just create an alternate time line in which man-kind was just evolved from prehistoric anthropomorphic geese. Last I glanced to that side of the cosmos, they were discovering fire. Let's hope they don't ruin their world like so many others have before them.


"Elements of Our Relentless Night" by James McCarthy

About the Artist: Surrealism and Landscapeby James McCarthy

I’m originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan where during the early

1960’s I was part of the first genera-tion of TV kids. Besides cartoons and comedies I also liked science fiction and fantasy. At the same time, nature and the changing of the seasons made a pro-found impact on me, especially the mystery and melancholy of Winter. Even though my family moved to Florida when I was ten and I’ve lived here ever since, I’m still fascinated by Winter imagery. I graduated from Tampa Catholic High School in 1974 and attended the University of South Florida as a paint-ing major from 1977-1981. I had no real direction at the time though so I went to work for my father at his commercial art studio for twenty-five years. Finally, in 1999 I realized my true calling and began seriously paint-ing. I’ve exhibited my work in various galleries in the Tampa Bay area. I like to paint spontaneous organic imagery (in Surrealism this is known as ‘biomorphism’). However, I also

consider myself a landscape painter. I like to depict the seasons and weather. Some of my landscapes are also in-fluenced by places in and around my neighborhood here in Brandon, Flori-da which I then ‘embellish.’ I’m also fascinated by the scenery of the British Isles with their rolling hills, mountains, gardens and especially the ruins. I would like to live there some-day if possible. Often my inspiration comes from music, particularly ‘mindscape’ mu-sic such as prog rock, psychedelic, new age, medieval and certain classi-cal music. Besides the seasons, which

also represent the passing of time and our mortality, recurring themes in my work involve creation and death along with the big question: is the Final Door a door to infinity or oblivion? You will see my artwork on various sites such as DeviantArt, Redbubble, Visionary Art, Tumblr, Utopic Studios, Saatchi Online, Zazzle, etc. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook( ArtUndis-covered James McCarthy). www.surrealseasons.webs.comEmail: [email protected] [email protected]

A little while ago, I decided I'd live amongst the race that gave birth to me. I agreed to not use my powers to shape their existence without first consulting the cosmic robo-police. So here I've lived amongst mutants and savages waiting for a sign, a chance to navigate amongst the stars as a man rather than some semi-omnipotent jerk. The years haven't been nice to my body, mind or soul but I will do what I can with what I got. Next tin can that touches down, I'm going to take a look at and build my own. With a bit of hope, maybe the Almighty might smile on me and give me the chance to do something right. Then again, I'm just an old man mum-bling to no one about nothing other than the forever that comes when you cheat death.


A Keen Summer Memory… by Pete Able

When my dog, Higgins, barks, I do not take notice. I do not sit

upright, alert, muscles taut like a cat bracing for a cold bath, arm-hairs tin-gling and shooting straight from my pale skin like arrows. Higgins barks at everything. He is skittish, old and decrepit. His ears don’t function like they did in his younger days, when my wife could tell I was nearly home by observing Hig-gins’ frantic movements near the back door while my Dodge Stratus hummed down the road the length of a football field away. Today I can park an eight-cylinder truck in the driveway, insert key, turn lock, open the door, plop on the sofa cushion, exhale, and literally step on Higgins’ tail before he acknowledges that yes, I have arrived home, and no, I am not an intruder. This is why I did not hesitate to walk toward the faint sound of static at 1:00 am in Mother Neff State Park. As age 40 approaches like a freight train, it is a sad fact that sleeping through the night proves difficult. There are many rea-sons why a solid seven hours of sleep often escapes me, but on a clear, warm night in August, with nothing between my back and the rocky ground except a one-inch foam protector and a sleep-ing bag, the sudden urge to urinate doesn’t help. Higgins followed me at first. I mo-tioned angrily for him to stay at the campsite and guard Melissa and the

girls, but his eyesight isn’t the best ei-ther. I glanced around and noted with some relief that ours was the only tent in this particular area. Camping in Central Texas in August is not high on most folks’ bucket list, or so I guessed. Back to the barking. Higgins stood rigid, like a bird-dog, only not point-ing, just resolutely not moving for-ward, hair bristled and throat growling, interrupted by his shrill “little dog” shriek-bark that only comes when it is raining outside and he wants in, or when camping and you desperately don’t want to wake your family or any tent-encapsulated neighbors. I walked ahead, ignoring him in the hopes he would regain his courage and face the raccoon/possum/armadillo that had him spooked. Besides, my bladder was becoming more persistent. I found a medium-sized mesquite tree for discretion, fiddled momen-tarily with the button on the fly of my boxers, then relaxed to the sound of my own private waterfall. The static sound intensified. I looked up, and for the first time since waking up and walking out of the tent with Higgins at my heel, my own hairs stood on end. If you’ve seen the movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger you will have a better understanding of the illusion before me. Liquid glass. Circular, like a mirror, only it moved with the slight breeze and appeared to stretch between the lower branches of some live-oak trees nearby. The moon provided enough ambient light to demonstrate the ap-parition’s reflective qualities. It am-

plified the surrounding landscape, but distorted it as well, like thousands of tiny fun-house mirrors glued together. I had long finished peeing, but like Higgins, I stood transfixed. Only I wasn’t shriek-barking. My mouth hung open slightly, and I remember saying “hello?” knowing there was no-one there to answer. There are moments in your life when you come home from a hard days’ work and the thought of investigat-ing some new reality makes you want to curl into a fetal position and pull a blanket over your head. But some-times, and I’ll admit the feeling grows rarer these days, sometimes there are moments where you wish the world held the kind of magic that kindles the spirit-explorer deep within. I stepped forward and cautioned Hig-gins to stay behind, which he was all too willing to oblige. When I stood just a few feet away from the shim-mering window, I found my own indis-tinct, reflected image hovering above ground in tune with the surrounding bushes. Despite the warm, humid air, I could sense heat closer to the lumi-nescent material. I reached my hand forward, intending only to get a sense of how hot the substance might be, but as soon as my fingers neared the stuff they stretched toward it. And by “stretched” I don’t mean my arm and shoulders came with them. I mean my fingers literally extended from my hand until they became one with the mirrors. Pain, then numbness, like an on-slaught of carpal tunnel syndrome. I

"Elements of Our Relentless Night" by James McCarthy

Stock imagery


cas of my daughters, Joanna and Lila, also formed next to her. Even the land-scape changed into the familiar woods and hills of Mother Neff Park. Other Adonites joined my immediate fam-ily, and in every case they looked and sounded like people I knew on earth. Friends from childhood and college. Lanie, the large woman who runs the cafeteria at my office. Millie, our tax accountant. Michael, a bully from el-ementary school. Ex-girlfriends sidled up right next to my wife. Most shock-ing of all - my father and father-in-law, who had both passed away. And yet there they were right in front of me, clamoring to get to know me better. I nearly fainted.

Conversation began crudely, but as my memories contain not just im-

ages but words, the Adonites’ mastery of the English language moved swiftly. Within minutes, toddler-like gibberish transformed into the Socratic method of learning, a strange experience to have with Lanie from the cafeteria or Deanna the ex-girlfriend who ripped my heart out with her long, cruel, tal-on-like fingers. I’m digressing. Back on point… The static energy that surrounded the place seemed to increase my capac-ity to learn as well. I felt like Neo in The Matrix, hooked up to some kind of biological machine transmitting information. Neither slaves nor mas-ters exist on Adon. Working relation-ships are entirely symbiotic, so even the traditional corporate hierarchies we find familiar – managers, direc-tors, vice presidents, CEOs – all these were foreign concepts. There are no spaceships, no alien city skyscrapers clawing toward the heavens. There were no buildings of any kind that I re-member. Their world remained most-ly primitive, something akin to Earth’s pre-historical period, but without the dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers. The lone exception to this aboriginal lifestyle stemmed from a particular group of Adonites who had a well-organized network of communica-

moved forward and grabbed my fore-arm to pull back, but I noticed the win-dow had changed – it was no longer reflective but rather opened up like a vast cavern, a portal into a black void. No stars, no light of any kind. Empti-ness. A strange sort of excitement en-veloped my body, and I knew no more for some time.

The alien planet, I later came to un-derstand, is known by astronomy

researchers on Earth as Kepler-62e, named after the Kepler Space Tele-scope launched in 2009. It sits com-fortably in what is known as the “hab-itable zone” of the constellation Lyra, orbiting a star (the aptly named Kepler 62) slightly smaller and older than our own Sun. Researchers have been nar-rowing their focus on this little solar system for a number of years, trying to determine if surface water exists, and more importantly, chlorophyll, the pigment in plants that plays a crucial role in photosynthesis. Uh, affirmative, commander. I grew up in Houston, but the hu-midity there has nothing on “Adon”, as the locals call it. Perpetual clouds and moisture aided the lush landscape, so thick it settled into droplets on my skin and soaked through my boxers. I found that I was on my knees, so I rose and discovered that extra effort was required. Using both hands to brace against my right thigh, I stood and felt the full weight of twice the Earth’s gravity sitting like a sumo wrestler on my shoulders. The faint static sound I had heard back in Mother Neff State Park rever-berated softly, all around me. I could sense the hairs on my head, arms and legs stretching higher, like I had just scooted across a soft carpet in wool socks in anticipation of the shock of my life on the nearest doorknob. With all the moisture, the place smelled like it looked – a damp rainforest. Apparently the liquid glass that sucked me inside was a wormhole of some special significance. A technological marvel on Earth, it represented many

generations of trial and effort among the aliens, and truth be told, it was kin more to biology than technology. Hold on to your hats, folks, because stuff’s about to get real. The alien life forms were actually tiny microbes. Millions of these microbes “glue” themselves together to form a single sentient being, and yet each microbe is its own consciousness, for lack of a better term. I can’t commu-nicate with the microbes directly, but I can see that the creatures in front of me are the sum of many parts. Imag-ine if the cells of our body were barely visible to the naked eye, were made of some kind of radiant material, and could float around and join forces with other cells to form whatever object they wished depending on the need at hand, and you will get a reasonable impression of the creatures on Adon. These creatures, we will call them Adonites, do not eat, sleep, play hop-scotch, or generally do any of the pre-conceived activities we are familiar with on Earth. The best I can explain – they absorb and expel energy, wher-ever and whenever needed, each with distinct functions but always working together toward a common goal. And here’s the really trippy part: they can even absorb memories. Malleable memories. Whatever neurons are firing in our brains to keep memories alive (and therefore our ability to exist as func-tioning sentient beings in rational soci-ety – ever seen the film Memento?) – they hold energy, or rather they “sweat” energy the same way we sweat sweat. Just stick with me, here. Our memo-ries have energy residue, almost like the moon’s halo that sometimes forms when thin cirrus clouds thousands of feet high refract the moon’s light via the tiny ice crystals inside. Faster than you can say “mother-ship,” the Adonites transformed into what I must describe as humans, and not just any humans. “Melissa?” “Hello, Peter.” It even sounded like my wife. Repli-


tion, allowing them to harvest energy sources on Adon and transmit them to the various colonies – not unlike our Middle Eastern counterparts who con-trol vast oil supplies. In seconds the Adonites were asking me about terms like terrorism and oil embargos and “diplomatic sanctions.” I couldn’t an-swer their questions quickly enough. So right - The Colonies. As best I can tell, races and nations in the sense we understand them do not exist on Adon. That isn’t to say there aren’t different types of Adonites. They clas-sify themselves differently than we do. The closest parallel would be the dif-ferent personality traits we commonly identify on our psychological exams. Extraverts, Introverts, Experiential, Conscientious, that sort of thing. This isn’t to say there aren’t problems. One type in particular – I’ll call them Neu-rotics – they seemed generally not well thought of, and in fact they often in-filtrated other groups for no other rea-son than to destabilize so far as I could gather. The Neurotics gradually replace other aliens in the main body, eventually tak-ing over like a virus. They don’t ex-actly kill the microbe Adonites they re-place, but the little guy ends up on his own, often pointlessly wandering the world for long periods of time without any connection to a larger group. I found this thought excruciatingly sad.

Let’s get back to the memory-sucking, for lack of a better term,

because ultimately this is what led to my departure. Voluntary departure, I might add. As more and more Adonites formed human bodies, humans from my past and present life, the phenomenon took a strange and sinister turn. They did not mean me harm, of this I am sure. But the replications in front of me were all based on my memories, my own subconscious thoughts. They did not represent my family, friends, and co-workers as they really are, but rather as my own mind had the abil-ity to create them. Conversations that

started as innocent information gather-ing began to turn into psychological profiling. When you are surrounded by clones of people created from your own subconscious, what you think of yourself matters more than you can possibly imagine. Voices and mannerisms began to re-flect my own subpar qualities. My answers were increasingly met with the sort of underhanded cynicism I greet all improbabilities, no matter how wondrous. Every regret I had with each individual floated to the sur-face, making every private conversa-tion turn painful in the end. Memories where I lacked self-confidence or pro-moted bravado with a sickening mis-placed pride turned into soul-crushing exercises of pity and self-awareness. Understand, these feelings did not all launch at me like word-missiles from the banter of an Adonite inquisition. They cut their way, wordless, into my own heart as skillfully as any surgeon. A deep depression enveloped me, heavier than any gravitational pull. I feared I might never recover. I looked at the three people closest to me in the crowd, my wife and daughters, and for the first time in what felt like an eterni-ty, caught a brief glimpse of hope that my failures as a husband and father were not the end-game. I clung to the thought, found the energy and strength to turn and run toward the wormhole. It felt like I had one of those bungee cords strapped to my torso, willing me back into the angry mob. I reached out, and as before my fin-gers stretched away from my body. Soon the resistance at my back subsid-ed, and I was falling once more, into darkness.

I returned to find Higgins exactly as I left him – shriek-barking and stand-

ing rigid, his lower torso shaking with excitement. The liquid glass of the wormhole faded into nothingness, and I briefly considered I had made the jump in the nick of time. It wasn’t comforting. I found my way back to the tent, kissed my girls, and lay on top

of my sleeping bag. I stared through the mesh windows near the top of the tent at the stars overhead. The night sky was beautiful, full of mystery. I wondered which of the lights might be Adon’s sun, Kepler-62, and whether my new friends with all their intrica-cies could fathom the majesty of a bright, star-lit night the way we can in our frail, human bodies. I wondered whether those moments of reflection on Adon, the most real and heart-wrenching self-awareness I had dared to explore, would change me in ways I couldn’t yet understand. I haven’t been camping since. I’ve at-tended a few movies about the end of the world, alien-invasion, that sort of thing. And I laugh. For all the weap-onry and vitriol on display, it pales in the wake of the Adonites’ piercing en-ergy force. Today I planted flowers in my yard at the eager request of my youngest daughter, Lila. The going was slow and arduous, but soon Melissa and Jo-anna joined us. Neither my wife nor I have green thumb. In time we usually kill what we plant, whether via neglect or overly managed care. This project was no different. One activity, jointly pursued, begun in hope and with an uncertain end. Lila grabbed my hand and prayed for the flower to grow. Then she prompt-ly dumped a bucket of water on top, nearly drowning it. Later I would find that Higgins had dug it up and ate it for an afternoon snack. Life’s imper-fections on full display, haunting me like the over-indulgent fears of others opinions. Images from Adon resurface. They taught me that all failure is memory, and it can be buried or resurrected at will. But this too I learned. Memory safeguards my love and holds it fast. Not mere reflection, but the warm, ra-diant goodness of past realities. It’s the memory that binds. It’s the jour-ney that resonates.


You would not believe your eyesIf ten million firefliesLit up the world as I fell asleep

‘Cause they’d fill the open airAnd leave teardrops everywhereYou’d think me rudeBut I would just stand and stare

I’d like to make myself believeThat planet Earth turns slowlyIt’s hard to say that I’d rather stayAwake when I’m asleep‘Cause everything is never as it seems

‘Cause I’d get a thousand hugsFrom ten thousand lightning bugsAs they tried to teach me how to dance

A foxtrot above my headA sock hop beneath my bedA disco ball is just hanging by a thread

Photography by Pat Jones & Genna Ware

I’d like to make myself believeThat planet Earth turns slowlyIt’s hard to say that I’d rather stayAwake when I’m asleep‘Cause everything is never as it seemsWhen I fall asleep

Leave my door open just a crack(Please take me away from here)‘Cause I feel like such an insomniac(Please take me away from here)

Why do I tire of counting sheep(Please take me away from here)

When I’m far too tired to fall asleep

To ten million firefliesI’m weird ‘cause I hate goodbyes

I got misty eyes as they said farewell

But I’ll know where several areIf my dreams get real bizarre

‘Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

ten million fireflies


Why do I tire of counting sheep(Please take me away from here)

When I’m far too tired to fall asleep

To ten million firefliesI’m weird ‘cause I hate goodbyes

I got misty eyes as they said farewell

But I’ll know where several areIf my dreams get real bizarre

‘Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

I’d like to make myself believeThat planet Earth turns slowly

It’s hard to say that I’d rather stayAwake when I’m asleep

‘Cause everything is never as it seemsWhen I fall asleep



‘Cause everything is never as it seemsWhen I fall asleep



Because my dreams are bursting at the seams

Song lyrics by Owl City

ten million fireflies


featuring (from left): Amara Love, Brenda Flores, Jocelyn Fulbright, Kenyai O’Neal, and Jasmine Ware


I’d-like-to-make-myself-believethat-planet-earth-turns-slowly


a foxtrot above my heada sock hop beneath my beda disco ball is just hanging by a thread


you would not believe your eyesif ten million fireflieslit up the world as I fell asleep


‘cause everything is never as it seemswhen I fall asleep


a starry night bohemian Photography and story by Mike Bartoszek


“Stars have always fascinated me.”Stars have always fascinated me.

There is something about the idea that the universe is beyond what our minds can imagine and how insignificant our lives really

are that resonated with me. You should do what makes you happy. Since 2010, when I bought my VW bus (old hippie van), I frequently camp where you can see more stars

than people that live in the towns nearby. I thought what the hell, lets give it a try, I grabbed my wife’s Nikon D3000 and went out and took some pictures in the dark.

a starry night bohemian

Stars have always fascinated me. There is something about the

idea that the universe is beyond what our minds can imagine and how insignificant our lives really

are that resonated with me. You should do what makes you happy. Since 2010, when I bought my VW bus (old hippie van), I frequently camp where you can see more stars

than people that live in the towns nearby. I thought what the hell, lets give it a try, I grabbed my wife’s Nikon D3000 and went out and took some pictures in the dark.


My first few shots were any-

thing but stunning. There was quite a learning curve. You have to really pay attention to any stray light from any direction. Make sure your friends don’t walk over with flash lights because they have to pee. And pray raccoons don’t knock over the camera in the middle of the night. Trial and error rules my night sessions. I’m not accomplished with Photoshop. I much prefer to make a “photo” than a “painting.” any-way. Composition, light, and color are key for me. I don’t do compos-ites. I don’t edit things out. I take a shot and what the sensor captures is what I save. A little of my history, I was born in Las Vegas in October of ‘83. My dad was military, so we moved from there to Oklahoma then to Germany then to Louisiana then to the great nation of Texas. I am now

currently living in the Killeen area conglomeration. In high school, I lettered in Wrestling, Journalism and The-atre, freelanced as an event stage-hand and rigger for I.A.T.S.E. 331 (eventually becoming president), volunteered at Vive Les Arts ama-teur theatre, and worked for a few local concert production compa-nies. I went to Central Texas Col-lege, where I studied Radio TV Broadcasting. In 2006, I took off across the country to work for Royal Caribbean as a Head Video Technician for their ship Vision of the Seas where we toured around Mexico, California, Washington, Canada, and Alaska. At that time digital cameras were just getting up to 4 megapixels and I had a Kodak Easyshare. That little Kodak was really my first step into photography. Visiting Canada and Alaska and seeing those giant rug-

ged mountains and whales jump-ing out of the sea really locked my heart into landscape photography. Soon after, I moved home to Killeen, married my wife Amber, and took a job as a Producer/Direc-tor for KNCT, while still shooting freelance video, and working as a rigger, stagehand, camera operator for arena events and concerts that come in to town. I was one of the lucky people that knew right out of high school where and what my career path was going to be. I will always be in the entertainment in-dustry some way, some how. In the future, with luck, my VW will keep on galloping along down the hot Texas highways and I’ll be able to show some of my photos at a gallery somewhere and maybe make a few bucks from them! Un-til then, I’ll just enjoy the solace of the unimaginable universe and take pictures to show my friends.

“My first few shots were anything but stunning.””

Mik

e &

Ambe

r


Favorite movie: An old black and white flick called Harvey.

Favorite book: When I travel for any decent length of time, I bring with me a copy of The Hobbit. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Gal-axy is my second grab.

Favorite restaurant: Jason’s Deli, or any deli really. I like sand-wiches.

Favorite band: Blind Guardian.

Fantasy vacation: Scandinavia, or back to British Columbia. Vic-toria, Canada was one of my fa-vorite places to be.

TV show: I don’t support paying cable providers to watch ads, so I don’t watch much TV, but I did watch every Stargate episode ever made (SG1, Atlantis, U) and I am currently loving Doctor Who.

What Do You Want To Know About Mike Bartoszek?Article of clothing: : /

Hobby: I have a 1976 VW West-phalia bus. Vehicle restoration isn’t a hobby of mine, camping is. I try to spend as much time as I can spare hiding in it, in the woods.

Dream job: Traveling either as a video professional as part of a con-cert tour, or owning my own shop of some sort in town. Right now, ice cream shop and 1 screen movie theatre are on my mind. I’m get-ting tired of working for people.

Favorite art: Landscape photog-raphy. Living vicariously through where other people have gone helps to keep me from wan-dering, but at the same time drives me to go.

Influential person: George Carlin

Color: Deep, dark purple.

Charity/cause: The Humane Society, and our Food Bank. I’m a local socialist and a na-tional libertarian.

Drink: Soft - TeaHard - Rum & Coke

Food: If faced between dy-ing from diabetes or giving up pastas and breads, I think I’d choose death.

Animal: The gorilla. They’re giant, powerful, solemn veg-etarians, and a manta ray, an-other giant solemn animal.

Mik

e &

Ambe

r


Hitchhikerthrough... the Universe

Photography by Mike Bartoszek


Hitchhikerthrough... the Universe


Ann JohnstonThe Contact: VigilMixed fibers84" x 36"2011photo credit: Bill Bachhuber.

September 12th with a reception and gallery talk to follow. The event is free and the public is cor-dially invited. In October, renowned quilt artist Ann Johnston, will present an exhibition entitled The Contact, which comprises – so far -- a series of 13 quilts, all seven feet tall. She has written numerous books and presents lectures nationally and in-ternationally. The museum will host a re-ception on Thursday, October 24th from 5:30 to 7:30 PM and the pub-lic is cordially invited. But the exhibit which has caused the most buzz on campus will also open on September 10th and run through November 14th. The exhibition, Ansel Adams: Dis-tance and Detail, will feature 29 iconic black and white photographs by the renowned photographer. Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902. His love of nature and the environment start-ed at a very young age. A pivotal event in his life occurred during a family trip to Yosemite national

The Martin Museum of Art is among the shining jewels of

Baylor University. Director Karin Gilliam has unbridled excitement about the events scheduled for this coming academic year. On September 10th, Ga-lactic Journal, a solo exhibition of contemporary paintings, draw-ings, and collages by Yale Profes-sor, Robert Reed will open. Reed was born in Charlottesville, Vir-ginia. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1960, and an MFA in 1962 in painting. In 1969 he land-ed an appointment to the painting and printmaking faculty at his alma mater, Yale. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale Art Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum and several other venues. His work explores “the structural mechanics and behaviors of complex object systems through precisionist pictorial techniques,” according to Baylor’s press release. The exhibit will run until October 10th. Reed will present a public lecture at 4: 30pm on Thursday,

FALL Schedule -------------->

Ann JohnstonThe Contact: VigilMixed fibers84" x 36"2011


FALL Schedule -------------->

Robert ReedWashington ParkAcrylic, oil marker, canvas, wooden frame84 x 144 in (two parts 72 x 84 in)2003-2009

Park in 1916. He had planned a ca-reer in music, but the gift of a Ko-dak Brownie camera changed all his plans. By the time he reached 17 years of age, he spent a summer internship with The Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural wonders of the world. Adams, more than any other photographer, helped estab-lish photography as a legitimate

art form. His photos are so well-known, many of them are easily recognized by even the most casual museum visitor. A reception and gallery talk by Rebecca Senf, curator of photography, Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Ansel Adams Archive will be held in the Martin Museum September 26th from 5:30 to 7:00

PM. The museum will also host a Free Lunch Monday, a complimen-tary lunch and informal chat with Baylor photography professor, Su-san Mullally, on Monday, October 21st from Noon to 1:00 PM. Seat-ing for this event is limited and res-ervations are required by October 11th. For reservations please call 254.710.3503 or email [email protected]. Events are free and open to the public. The Martin Museum of Art is located in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center on the Baylor University Campus the main en-trance off University Parks Drive. Museum hours are from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM Tuesday to Friday, and 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM on Saturday and 1:00– 4:00pm on Sunday. The museum is closed on Mondays and university holidays. Admission is free and all events are open to the public, unless specified other-wise. For more information, call 254.710.1867 or visit the museum website at www.baylor.edu/martin-museum

atthe Martin Museum of Art by Jim McKeown


Model: Ethan Smith

summer in the city Photography & post-processing by Cynthia Wheeler Photography

August 2013• bohemia • 67 Mod

el: A

bby

Eade

s


Model: Mason McLain


Ah, coconut oil — how we love that sweet smell, creamy texture, and buttery taste. Is there anything this superfood can’t do? Not only can you cook with it, but you can wash with it, moisturize with it, and more.

Have you started incorporating it in your daily life? You can use it as a substitute for oil or butter when cook-ing, or simply use it in your daily beauty routines. There are several ways you can substitute coconut oil for the chemical-laden beauty products you see on every drugstore shelf. Sounds fun, right? Here are a few ways I use it.

coco me beautiful

Weekly Hair Mask. Combine co-conut oil and a little bit of honey, warm it up and coat your hair. Leave it in for an hour then wash out (thoroughly). I am slowly bringing my hair back from the dead with this. It is so soft now!

Cleansing Facial Scrub. I keep a little jar of coconut oil and one of baking soda in my bathroom (re-purposed baby food jars work per-fectly). Get a tiny bit of coconut oil and add a pinch of baking soda and scrub away. I do it once a week and my face feels smooth and has a healthy glow!

Eye Makeup Remover. I cleaned out an old hair care product pump bottle and filled it with 1/2 cup of warm water, 2 tsp coconut oil and 1 tsp organic tear-free baby sham-poo. It gets off the most stubborn makeup off easy-peasy. Plain coco-nut oil works too but I prefer my little cocktail.

Hair and Makeup by Missy Von Parlo, Photo by DSR Photography, and Model Jessica Kehrer

coco me beautiful by Missy Von Parlo


coco me beautiful

Hair and Makeup by Missy Von Parlo, Photo by DSR Photography, and Model Jessica Kehrer

coco me beautiful by Missy Von Parlo


water lillies Photography and post-processing by Design Cortex Hair & make-up by Missy Von Parlo


jocelyn fulbright


abby eades


stephaniestephanie


Fashion planning: Stephanie Rystrom

stephanie


ao ife g

o rey


Male models: Ethan Smith & Brent Phillips

88 • bohemia • August 2013 Photos by Amanda Hixson

my bohemian home

featuring Linda Carter Hill

Linda Carter Hill truly loves her dwelling be-cause she decorates it with pieces of herself

and loved ones. Each home object, she carefully acquired, caefully kept, carefully displays and it all makes sense in the tapestry of her memories. Linda doesn’t live lavishly. She lives simply in a beautiful three bedroom/two bath condo in Cen-tral Texas. Her neighborhood is quiet and her home is her oasis. A certified yoga instuctor and “people person” by day, in the evening she values quiet time meditating and the capacity to enter-tain and board visiting friends. “I try to live well, and live with good humor. My home reflects my heart, my taste in art, and my silliness.” Linda lit a multitide of candles about the house, poured Bohemia a glass of Sangria, and shared with us some of her life stories reflected in her decor.

“my home& my heart”


my bohemian home

featuring Linda Carter Hill

fridge magnetmottos

Linda at home with her poodle.

“The Cherub fruit bowl. Everyone in my family thought it was hideous. I think it’s beautiful. I love that they are pointing at you. Like, “Hey you! Eat more fruit!” I’m a refridgerator magnet junkie. I grab one every time I travel. Some I picked up at trinket stores and others were gifts. My spice rack is well stocked. I enjoy cooking, flavor and spice. The puka shell bread basket and the coconut shell sugar bowl were finds from the International Fes-tival in Houston.”

“Instead of the tradi-tional and typical pillar candle on the candle-holders, I chose deco-rative rain sticks by Funkengruven. They are so fun! Where did I get them?? At the Bob Marley Festival. Where else?”

pillarcandle sticks

“Milagros are reli-gious folk charms that are traditionally used for healing pur-poses. In Spanish, the word milagro literally means miracle or sur-prise. Milagros can be offered to a symbol of a saint as a reminder of a petitioner’s par-ticular need, or in gratitude for a prayer answered.”

“Eat Taste and Heal is an Ayurvedic Cookbook. Basically it contains a questionnaire that helps to discern which foods are best for one’s physical constitution or DOSHA (body type). Vata, Pitta and Kapha are the three Doshas. Each Dosha has a unique set of characteristics. The small cabinet in the corner is my tea drawer. I keep all sorts of herbal teas on hand. Herbal teas can be served hot or cold and have a wide variety of holistic medicinal benefits.”


I am right here right now


“That’s the ICE MAN. I purchased this rugged guy from Story Sloane’s Gallery in Houston, Texas from his collection of black and white Houston Historic Pho-tography. He’s HOT and COOL AND he’s a Texan! Makes you wanna unplug that refridgerator and get an ICEBOX.”

“I purchased this piece in Galveston. I love fleur de lis and the fact that it was created on a piece of tin. I added the string of pearls just for fun. More accou-trements were required once I realized, ‘SHE looks like a MAN!’”

“I LOVE this candelabra! It’s seen a lot of wax in it’s day and is a beautiful piece of artfully waxed wrought iron. The ro-sary that adorns this piece is a souvenir from when I took my son to the Basilica in Mexico City. The piece of mixed media to the right is called “Form Vs. Function” and was created by a brilliant artist from Seguin, Texas named Lisa Hohertz.”

gypsy altargyps

y al

tar

right now

92 • bohemia • August 2013bohemia

“a rose is a

rose isa rose

is a rose”

(Above right) Linda collects and frames Rolling Stone magazines and album covers. She also has fashion illustrations (adjacent wall in coral frame matte)

“The Waterford Crystal Millenni-um Edition champagne bucket and coaster is a testament to my love of wine, champagne and the beauty of living an artfully eclectic and exquisite lifestyle. The crystal ball was a gift from someone I used to know. If you have never looked into a crystal ball you wouldn’t know that the reflected images are upside down. The gift should have been my clue to RUN! It’s beau-tiful though and a great conversa-tion piece.”

“The Robert Longo black and white prints are the BOMB!!! My son is waiting for me to die so he can confiscate them. I bought them in an artsy district of Hous-ton from a guy that was selling tye dye dresses. We made a deal and I basically stole them. The pen and inks were in my great aunt’s house when I was a little girl. They are beautiful and detailed. I hang them low and near my big chaise under the light so that I can admire them. I have caught my poodle staring at them on several occasions. My son wants these as well.”

August 2013• bohemia • 93Contact Amanda at [email protected] if you have a Bohemian house to showcase.


keep waco beautifulMaking Waco a Beautiful Place to Live, Work & Play!

kwbWhat does Keep Waco Beautiful do for Waco? Keep Waco Beautiful

is an organization in Waco, TX with over 13,000 volunteers and 400 members. Their mission is to make Waco cleaner, safer, healthier, and more beautiful. KWB

sponsors clean-ups at the lake, river, and in Waco’s neighborhoods. The organization goes to the schools to educate children with hands-on projects that teach litter control and

community pride. KWB raised 200,000 to build Indian Spring Park, lighted the Suspension Bridge, and assisted Waco in developing Miss Nellie’s Pretty Place. KWB raised over 2 million

to build Heritage Square in downtown Waco. In order to make sure these projects continue, join and get involved today. An individual membership is 35 dollars. A family membership is 50. Busi-nesses may partner as well. Your tax deductable membership donation will get you an auto decal, a t-shirt, and more. Find out how to volunteer, donate, or join at www.keepwacobeautiful.com

keep waco beautifulOrganization provides volunteer oppurtunities for

people who want to make a difference!


keep waco beautiful

kwbWalking With Jason shares John

Hunt’s story as he follows in the footsteps of his late son, Jason, and embarks on a cathartic journey of self-discovery, understanding and appreciation for the benefits of nature. While hiking the Appala-chian Trail from Georgia to Massa-chusetts in 2010, Hunt experienced the value of learning through na-ture, the importance of developing a strong sense of self and the power of wilderness therapy. Jason was an outdoor edu-cator, and the book spotlights the individual stories of some of the outdoor leaders that Hunt encoun-tered. These personal stories pro-vide insight into not only the teach-ers and guides of these programs, but also the powerful impact that exploring in the wilderness can have on the development of mind, body and spirit. “I wrote this book to share with others the value and success of therapeutic wilderness,” said Hunt. “Nature truly was nurturing for me as I struggled with the loss of my son and discovered the educational power of the wilderness.” In addition to Hunt’s jour-ney and the stories of the people he met, Walking With Jason addresses the issues relating to the develop-mental and behavioral challenges children face, a parent’s influence

and the rising field of Outdoor Ex-periential Education. Hunt’s experi-ences with grief and self-discovery come together in this inspirational book of loss, learning and healing. For more information, please visit www.jwhf.org.

Excerpt

What do you think of when you think of the wilderness? The

word is derived from the Old Eng-lish meaning “wild beast”—a place of wildness. Is it a land of “lions, tigers, and bears”? Do people live there? Is it barren as a desert or an ocean, or is it full of vegetation, trees, rocks, mountains, streams, and rivers? Do you fear what you cannot see as in the woods, where unseen dangers lurk behind each rock and tree and around the bend? Or do you fear what you can see as in the desert and on the ocean, which is nothing for miles and miles? Do we fear both the deso-lation of the empty spaces as well as the enclosing hidden-ness of the woods? The power one gets from being outdoors, from being in na-ture, and from working with nature to help another person takes on its own mystical sense of fulfillment and becomes another acknowledg-ment of higher truths and presence.

I learned that the Greeks have two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos time is measured in sec-onds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. It is the time on the clock that we can lose track of. It is the time that hurries by. Kairos time cannot be measured. It is quality time that can be defined only by what happens in it. It is the most important type of time because it affects us, who we are, our lives, and our futures. It is the time of stretch, of personal growth, and of development. It is the time of the Wilderness. I learned that there is actu-ally a third time—a time to walk away, a time to regroup. …The emotional trauma of not being able to help Jason caused me to leave the National Ski Patrol. It wasn’t something I could just pick up from the previous season without seeing Jason’s face in every injured skier. Jason’s death was a time of its own wilderness, its own sorrow. Time was normal, time was fast, and time was slow all at once. We had time to think and time to carry on but little interest in doing so. Ev-erything seemed to take longer, but time passed before we were aware of how late it was. My only answer, my only justification is that our traumatic journey with Jason in 2001 planted

Walking With Jason: A Father’s Exploration into the Power of the Wilderness Excerpt from: Walking With Jason by John Hunt


the seed for my journey since. The Foundation, the Appalachian Trail venture, the many interviews, the different camps and schools visited, and the seminars attended were all continuations of those nine days, or rather, a chance to be with Jason longer. It was a chance to under-stand the person of Jason as well as what he found in the outdoors and his work with youth that gave him so much pleasure and growth so that maybe we could in some way help others like he had. At the time of Jason’s death, the outpouring of support told us, his family, that others understood the person he was, the man he was becoming, and the contribution he made to their lives. We looked for a way to continue such contributions and decided to create the foundation in his memory. To date, the founda-tion has helped boys and girls alike from across the country to experi-ence wilderness programs in Con-necticut, Maine, and Arizona. The many testimonials excerpted [in this book] speak directly to the pro-found impact that Jason’s founda-tion and wilderness programs have been fortunate to facilitate. Nature and the wilderness have been instruments of personal change, growth, and development throughout history. The Buddha, in his quest for enlightenment, is often

shown meditating under the Bodhi Tree. In writing the Psalms, King David used the deer, thunder, and lighting as analogies drawn from nature to reveal God in his entire splendor. The prophets all lived in the wilderness. Jesus Christ, in preparing to begin his ministry, the work of his Father, fasted for forty days in the wilderness. Then, Jesus and the apostles ministered in the outdoors, slept by lakes, and prayed in gar-dens. Enlightenment, or belief in the Creator, was gained, encoun-tered, and understood by being in the wilderness. Many have written that Aristotle and Socrates taught by walking about with their students in open discussions. Why is it so spe-cial when a teacher offers to take the class outdoors? I never saw a class refuse the offer to go outside from such a “cool” professor. Realize that these writers and world leaders came from a time that, compared to today, would be considered “primitive.” They came from societies that were agrarian with some pre-Industrial Revolu-tion manual labor skills and yet with sophistication that amazes us today. Life existed without the technology of instantaneous com-munications that we have today

and lacked, as well, the scientific discoveries that have “improved” life as we know it today. Cities, ex-cept for a few, were not big then, if they existed at all, so wilderness was close by, around them con-stantly. They didn’t have to go too far to get lost. So the question that begs to be asked is, what was it that they needed to get away from? They didn’t have global warm-ing concerns; they didn’t have the atomic bomb; they didn’t have the electronic jangle of TVs, radios, portable sound machines, tablets, and mobile phones; nor did they have the Internet or texting. What did they need to get away from? What they and each of us needs to get away from are our everyday lives in order to find our inner spirit. In breaking through and leaving behind that which con-sumes our energies, talents and time, we are open to see who we really are. The silence of the wil-derness with its mountains, rivers, forests, and challenges provides us with that grounding, ties us to who we really are, gives us the hope and confidence to move forward, and recreates us. Honey flows from rock.


Where will you be singing Home Sweet Home

Waco, Texas is a beautiful place to live, founded in 1849 by the Huaco Indians that lived on the land in the present-day downtown area. Waco offers some ma-jor attractions, five historic homes, seven recreational venues, and nine arts organizations staging theatrical and musical productions, as well as art exhibitions. Waco is also brimming with Texas history, economic opportunity, and a rich variety of cultural experienc-es. The three college facilities include: Baylor Univer-sity, McLennan Community College, and Texas State Technical Institute. The city boasts one of the biggest and best municipal parks in Texas, Cameron Park. The 416-acre park is located in the heart of Waco, next to downtown, situated on the Brazos and Bosque Rivers. It hosts numerous races, triathlons, boat races and more.

Find a forever home. . . with Natalie MorphewFind a forever home. . . with Natalie Morphew

Natalie MorphewNatalie Morphew, [email protected] c | 254.399.7024 wwww.nataliemorphew.com

Find a forever home. . . with Natalie MorphewFind a forever home. . . with Natalie Morphew


Recent work by Philip Kobylarz appears in Connecticut Review, Basalt, Santa Fe Literary Review, New American Writing, Poetry Salzburg Review and has appeared in Best American Poetry. His book, Rues, was recently published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. His collection of fiction, Now Leaving Nowheresville and book length essay Nearest Istanbul are forthcoming.

Andrew Lamont is a second year MA student in Linguistics at Eastern Michigan University. He’s had work published by Eunoia Review and Third Wednesday. He was the founder and a co-president of his high school’s UFOlogy Club.

Bradley Lastname, or B-Dog Lastizzle as he is known by his peeps in the hood, is the author of Oracle Whip, Your Pret-ty Typeface is Going to Hell, Eraserhead Visits Wittgenstein, Malcomn + Madame X, Bela Tarr Has Feathered His Nest, and Several other books of poetry and fiction.

Roger Leatherwood worked on the lower rungs of Hollywood for almost 20 years before returning to print fiction where at least the stories he could tell were his own. His work has or will appear in Skive Magazine, Oulipo Pornobongo, HorrorS-leazeTrash, Bright Lights Film Journal and others.

J.S. MacLean is an independent poet who has been published in a variety of journals in Canada, USA, UK, India, and Australia. These publications include Ice Flow (Uni-versity of Alaska), Hulltown 360, Literary Review of Canada, “The Chimaera”, “Shit Creek Review”, and “The Literateur”. He has a collection, Molasses Smothered Lemon Slices available on amazon.com. In his spare time he works.

You can find artwork by James McCar-thy on various sites such as DeviantArt, Redbubble, Visionary Art, Tumblr, Utopic Studios, Saatchi Online, Zazzle, etc.

Jim McKeown has an MA in Literature from Baylor University and an MFA in creative writing from National University. He teaches literature, creative writing, and composition at McLennan Community College. He lives in Waco with his wife, son, two cats, and their faithful Lab, Mar-cy.

Peter Able has been writing fiction and poetry since high school. His screenplays have beeen finalists with Scriptapalooza, PAGE International, and the New York Television Festival, among others. He lives in Woodway with his family. He is currently the director of Financial and HR systems for Baylor University.

Chanterelle Atkins is a native Mainer, living in Wiscasset with her husband, Kevin. She graduated magna cum laude from Emerson College with a B.S. in mar-keting communications. She is employed as Director of Administration at the Port-land-based healthcare consulting firm, Compass Health Analytics, and previously worked at Harvard-affiliated Massachu-setts General and McLean Hospitals. In her free time, she enjoys poetry, picnics, skiing and fly-fishing.

Mike Bartoszek is a military kid whose family decided to settle down in Killeen.Working in entertainment the past 12 years he has worked on shows rangingfrom ZZtop to Cats, and after ending his employment as Head Broadcast Techaboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, works full time as a local KNCT PBSProducer/Camera man/Director/Editor.

Hello! I am Robin Chavarria. I am 28 years old. I work retail at Games N Things in Waco, TX selling video games and the like to people. In my spare time, my hob-bies are art, music and writing! Simply put, I enjoy the arts and like to share my thoughts!

Joel Cifer s an author, comic, bartender, philosopher, father and husband. He even-tually and accidentally graduated from the University of North Texas with an under-graduate degree in Psychology. This quali-fied him for…nothing, but prepared him for everything. He enjoys questioning re-ality and physical altercations. He lives in Mclennan County.

Jim Eigo is an architect of two reforms of AIDS drug regulation, expedited ap-proval and expanded access, that have helped bring many treatments to many people. This work is profiled in the Oscar-nominated documentary, How to Survive a Plague. You can read his recent flash fic-tion at cleavermagazine.com.

Ty Hall lives in Texas, makes up stories, and tries to be good.

Jane Hertenstein’s current obsession is flash. She is the author of over 30 published stories, a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre both micro and macro. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. Jane is the recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming

A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has previously published six collections of poetry all available on Amazon.com. She has also published her work in numerous national and international literary journals. She has is the editor for six online poetry journals for Kind of a Hurricane Press ( www.kindofahurricanepress.com ).

John Hunt is the Executive Director of the Jason William Hunt Foundation, an or-ganization set up in 2003 in memory of his son. The foundation helps support outdoor experiential education programs and cre-ates scholarships for children at-risk. John loves spending time outside, and is active in social work through his church. He cur-rently lives with family in Batavia, Ohio.

My name is Jennifer Johnson. Words have always been a huge part of my life. From my earliest memories as a child, there was always a book or pen in my hand. I haven’t always shared my work with others, but I recently decided to give it a go.

Pat Jones became interested in photogra-phy six years ago. Finding very little help when starting out led him to seek out pho-tographers to work with and later to start a forum for local photographers. Pat lives in Robinson, TX. He does wedding, pin-up, boudoir, fine art, and glamour.

Born in Ireland and schooled there and in the USA, Donal Keohane has been a prac-ticing artist all of his life, having his work displayed in galleries, museums, churches, offices, and private homes. The conviction that creation shows forth the glory of God leads him to base his subject matter on na-ture in all its diversity.


Fabio Sassi started making visual art-works after various experiences in music and writing. He makes acrylics with a stencil technique on board, canvas, or oth-er media. In addition, he uses logos, tiny objects, and what is considered to have no worth by the mainstream. He often puts a quirky twist to his subjects to give them an unusual perspective. Nevertheless, he still prefers to shoot with an analog camera. Fabio lives and works in Bologna, Italy. His work can be viewed at www.fabio-sassi.foliohd.com

Devin Stroud was carved from pine on a vacant Mississippi night. He was raised by Dionysian ninja turtles and mentored by gloomy Apollonian grunge bands.

Trier Ward is a mother, scientist, and poet. She lives in Dallas, TX. Her poetry has appeared in Rolling Thunder Quar-terly.

In Texas since 1993, Genna Ware, 43, haa been shooting along side Pat Jones for 1 year. She’s a 911 Operator of 8 yrs. Pho-tography is an incredible passion of Gen-na’s and she enjoys all types.

Gary Lee Webb is a 16-year resident of Waco. He has lived on three continents, visited four, and speaks many languages … badly. His credits include over 210 public speeches, four decades of confer-ences and contests, and both non-fiction and fictional publications. He is 57, mar-ried 36 years, and has 4 daughters.

Cyndi Wheeler is a Waco native and mother of three. She writes, paints, and does graphic design. Her true love is pho-tography. She has been a volunteer for Waco Center For Youth for four years.

Contributors


FEATURES:POETRY SLAM, AUTHORS, POETS,BLOGGERS, SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASYOPEN MICS, AUTHORS’ PANELS

10TH ANNUAL

S E P T 2 8 & 2 9 , 2 0 1 3I N D I A N S P R I N G P A R KW A C O , T X

wacoculturalartsfest.org/wordfest Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce

15. Bohemia -- August 2013

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Transcript of 15. Bohemia -- August 2013