Vol. 2 Issue 1: March 2009

Our theme this issue is -Pirates vs. Ninjas- or -A New Beginning-. (Next issue’s theme is -Visions- or -The Natural World-. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.) We received so many poems and stories about new beginnings we couldn’t begin to include them all, and one about pirates, ninjas, and beginnings, which of course we couldn’t leave out (see “Blood Vessels” in Flash Fiction). Be sure to check out the spotlights this issue. Kealan Patrick Burke is a very interesting author, and Verb Noire is the new publisher to watch. Scroll on down and take a look, then say hello in the comments and let us know if you like the new design.

Image-left: Ninja Frogs, composite/detail, by Ursula Vernon. Ursula Vernon is the author/illustrator of the Eisner-nominated webcomic Digger and the children’s books “Nurk” and “Dragonbreath” from Harcourt-Brace and Penguin Dial. See more of her work on her website.

In this Issue

Sir Percival spurred the borrowed police horse as far as the corner of York Avenue and 67th, where he swung his armored bulk down from the saddle to land on

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They arrived in seemingly empty vessels. A short distance from the shore, we’d been hiding in the great communal garden. We clung to trees and avoided moonlight. My three sons

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Dust clouded the windows of the teashop, but the silence outside told them that it wouldn’t be a pretty sight, so they stayed inside.

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Now a small cradlefish— his brain rocking in the skull, adeptly learning his earliest youth, this soft havoc of ribbons and spit is the baby...

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But her face carried a haunted look, pale and undernourished, as though she had stopped growing at an early age.

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I am, for a moment, a child again. I feel the same reluctant sleepiness, the same dull-witted obedience to kind but insistent commands to dress...

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But it wasn’t the seamwalking per se that was dangerous or the occasional crashed dirigible. Progress and technology themselves brought double-edged swords aplenty to the fore.

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Verb Noire came about out of the idea that there are untold stories hidden in the dark that deserve to be brought to light.

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Two days ago I watched my transfer pod dissolve, its once solid walls decaying into a foamy lump and then dissipating as the containment field imploded and the pseudo-matter seeped

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There was a time in my life when I thought I couldn't go on any longer, and I almost gave up. I was at the bottom of my personal barrel.

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The trial of Everett Charles Parker was a particularly unpleasant matter, in view of the defendant’s unswerving refusal to manifest any sign of contrition whatsoever.

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When the self undergoes delineation in the matrix of a psychoholo cube, a fluted and opaque blossom with an articulated stem emerges:

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