most colorful litmags

“Ubi Est?” by John Zedolik

NEW POETRY!

(photo by RiddiMRyder)

The town’s pizza joint that once held primacy of place
moved long ago and now rules across the road and down aways,
and if you didn’t grow up here, you wouldn’t sense a trace

of the hearty business that used to flourish in this space,
now a blocky cipher that dreams in its latter days
among the dark hemlocks in this bypassed place,

whose needles weave stark shadows, and the walls enlace,
perhaps a proper end in which the elder can laze,
and the long course of its catastrophe, trace

as eighth-century monks might ponder the disgrace
of men in God’s crimson eye as the Norsemen raze
their chapels, bell towers, and every holy place,

why the clanking ovens no longer grace
its innards with a comforting blaze
and the aroma of dough has vanished without a trace,

but perhaps it’s better not to keep apace
of these migrations, no need to craze
the benign, brooding senior in his place,
hiding on a street, both long faded to just a trace.

(photo by MJ Barnes)

John Zedolik an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and has published poems in many journals– including previously at our main site, here.

“Train Life” by Ben Macnair

NEW POETRY

It is a question of economics
where the price you pay gives you the best seat,
and the best seat gives you the best experience.


Train Life


It is a question of timing
where we will not announce platform changes
until three minutes before a train reaches you,
and the new platform is a full pelt run away


Train Life


It is question of chance as to whether or not
your carriage contains a group of school children in a shouting competition
or your carriage contains a group of babies in a crying competition
or a group of teenagers looking for like, an easy like man, stereotype.


Train Life


The man opposite you is raising his eyebrows,
his flares his nostrils as Lisa from accounts tells everyone
she is on the train.


Train Life


All the people.
So many people,
wanting to get home,
or to work so they can afford a home.


Train Life


reading the newspaper,
hoping for something other than
the same clowns in charge,


Train Life


leaves on the line
cold, insipid tea,
frost on the windows,
and the muffled clap of gloved hands,
the shuffle step of cold feet,
and an announcement saying the next train
is delayed for another ten minutes.


Train Life. . .

Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and play-wright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair.

An Excerpt from “The Meteorologist” by Olaf Kroneman

NEW FICTION

One of the pleasures of being a family physician was watching people grow and develop. I tried to help them along the way from cradle to adulthood and the grave. They have given much back to me. I have learned from them. I got meaning.

I learned that people with autism sometimes are blessed with special gifts. They used uncharted areas of the brain to amaze and fascinate.

Sarah taught me about the weather. She focused on the highs and lows of the day. She could predict it. I was not sure how she did it. I suspect it had something to do with her innate sensitivity to circadian rhythms, bariatric pressure, or the phases of the moon or something, but her predictions were so accurate that the local weatherperson would call her to confirm and compare notes before going on TV with a forecast.

Her reputation spread until all three local networks consulted with Sarah before going on air.

Sarah would put her hands on the window and, through touch, would divine temperature and humidity. She was correct. I tried to do it. I was always wrong. I functioned poorly in her world.

COMING SOON TO NEW POP LIT!

How Ernest Hemingway Almost Got Us Beyond the Obvious

by Michael Maiello

SPECIAL FOR FAST POP LIT’S HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

There’s a joke in the 1980 movie Airplane! as directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker set the scene, where we watch cars dropping off passengers as a man on a public address system directs drivers to color coded zones, some of which are designated for “loading and unloading only.” A woman takes the mic and contradicts him. It’s the other zone that’s for loading and unloading. The two argue. It is quickly revealed that the two are lovers, fighting over whether to have an abortion.

The joke is a riff on Ernest Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants where a man tries to convince his lover to have an abortion while they wait for a train to Madrid. It’s a classic Hemingway set-up, where the story hides beneath the surface of what’s going on. People, Hemingway tells us, can rarely face up to what they are doing or to their own circumstances. The stories we tell each other are the stories we tell ourselves. We have serious arguments with each other while avoiding the topic. We think we are strong when we are weak. We find strength in moments of our greatest vulnerability but seldom even notice it.

When you ask people about Hemingway, they are very likely to tell you that he employed a simple writing style. This is false. Paring down the descriptors and using ten dollar words sparingly is not “simple” at all. It is simple to call a man a bully. It is complicated to show that man using the boxing skills he learned at Princeton to best a young matador in a fight but, even in victory, to look like a coward when the battered bullfighter presents the ear of his prey to the woman the two were fighting over, in a public display of courtship.

We now live in a surface culture where if things aren’t said explicitly, they might as well not be said at all. We live in a culture where companies trying to sell us things say, in plain language, “we care about our customers,” as if stating an intention that you should be demonstrating with action makes it true, rather than undermines its credibility.

The Old Man and the Sea is probably the best story written in English about how you can face the world and nature with honor, strength and courage but still be met with indifference. The fisherman Santiago triumphs for a marlin that could feed him for months, only to have the carcass, which he has strapped to his boat, stripped of its meat by sharks. Santiago returns home, weary and unrewarded, but also undefeated.

Imagine if Santiago were analytic like people today. Imagine he gets home and uses a web-based service to contact a cognitive behavioral therapist and whines that he just cannot get ahead in life and that he sees the whole ordeal with the fish and the ocean and the sharks as a depressing metaphor for death. Of course, a modern therapist would not understand this and might suggest that Santiago should stop repeating patterns that lead to disappointment by finding some other way to get food or, at least, by fishing for smaller catches, closer to shore.

We don’t want Santiago to be so explicit about what he does and why because it undermines him and his dignity (and ours, too). We don’t want him to find an easier, practical solution to his poverty. We want him to rebuild his courage and to try again, even if the ocean will not care whether he wins or loses. But we definitely don’t want Hemingway to say that explicitly.

We want to feel that for ourselves, by reading and learning. Hemingway is not giving us the fleeting thrill of a twist ending, as if we are drunk at a magician’s show. He’s giving us a chance to more deeply understand the world by engaging with a story that is about more than the words on the page. 

Hemingway’s methods are not the only modernist techniques that work, by the way. In T.S. Eliot you’ll find a similar economy but the types of words used are very different. Eliot is fine with you not knowing the words he has chosen. He is okay with making you study. With Hemingway, you can understand every word on the page and still miss the point — it’s the opposite of advertising or contemporary journalism.

So, yes, let’s celebrate Hemingway, literary modernism, and the world beneath the worlds that we seem to have lost sight of.

KEEP UP on what Michael’s up to, here. (His Substack, Middlebrow Musings, is one of the best out there.)