First Resin Canvas • Lauren K. Dougherty
excerpt of Golden Hour Glare  • Euna Bonovich
Lucid • Rough Cut Press

Welcome!

Let’s jump right in. It’s the first day of June; June means pride; pride means squashing secrets. Our very first issue is just about that—secrets.  

You can expect us to pop in your inbox on the first day of every month with a blast of multimedia artwork, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Also, if you are an artist/writer/dancer/musician/photographer/creative ANYTHING please drop us a line. We want to experience your work. We want to create with you. 

Sincerely,

Amanda Lezra
Editor-in-Chief

Figures 1 and 3 • Sara Pacelko
Transcendent • Liam Lezra
Symmetry • Rough Cut Press

An Angry Father

Cass Lintz

Bandages.
Once removed, delicate, by the ridges of my fingertips
threads of scab like scaffolding
spilled like silk spooling at the ankles of tempt,
exposing firm forgotten land
acres you had hidden away.

Planned loneliness, a consequence.
A line of sea with a saw tooth loose bit peninsula poaching brilliant swells of young coral
ripe with plumage, you were too young.
By the time I found you,
you were riddled with crags and chasms that I could not fill
with skin
or song or sentimental spit.

The house we built was built to slide
out of purchase, we dug
into the abyss that eats old moons
and dirty coffee cups… our midnight smoke feigning dawn.

A-symptomatic
of bloodletting.
Angry grew the father, the further you went.
Pale goes the ghost.

Opiate of optimism, slung between our verse.
Two women trying to change the patron tide.
Brackish were we then, there to try.
Foaming from both ends.

It was not my touch
that sent you to the woods.
It was what we saw underneath
between the cloth and coral
that blemish, that blotched scratching sky you had held back—permanent darkness.
Protecting me, from him, you fled.

Your mortal pearl dusted
in the jaw of poorly lit circumstance.
I am still collecting suns in my freckles
should your lips return
needing
light, again.

Asymptotic Futures no. 1 • Cory Fisher

On/Off

excerpt of essay • Amanda Lezra

You turn off the light. You’re seventeen. You’re about to have sex with a woman you just met, somewhere deep in Queens. It’s raining and the city smells like scorched sugar; the woman’s eyes are turquoise and she has a bruise on her chin and she tries to open her front door with four different keys until someone with a greasy beard lets you in. His pupils are planets. The room is covered with half-naked corpses with sloppy grins drying on their cheeks. The woman takes you to her room and tells you about the love of her life, Anna. They were together for five years. Anna was perfect. Anna died two weeks ago. Heroin. You reach out to touch the woman with the turquoise eyes but she swats your hand away and tells you to take off your clothes. “Don’t look at me,” she says, and you say “okay.” You step over corpses and let yourself out at dawn and drink black coffee on the subway. You burn yourself. You try to call the woman a few weeks later. She dies. You stop sleeping.