Alexis Lopez Paleo – Page 2

The Halfway Witch

Hannah Diry

The first time you see her, she might as well have been a hallucination.

The gas station lights are buzzing faintly, neon bright after the dimness inside your car. You stand there blinking for a second, acclimating, while the doors whoosh shut behind you. What were you doing again? Oh yes, paying for gas. And coffee.

You make your way over to the coffee machine in the corner, passing between packs of crisps and pots of noodles. The machine has seen […]

The Halfway WitchAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:54:51+00:00

Skeletal humour between binaries

Skeletal humour
between binaries:
forfeiting the funny in Svetlana Alexievich’s Boys in Zinc

Emily Upson

Eva van Roekel, an anthropologist working within Latin America, spent several years in post-dictatorship Argentina. She examined how humour revealed “internalised ambiguities”, in “complex everyday moral confusions and moral uncertainties”.¹ This analysis was a steep departure from the often perfunctory assessment that humour entrenched social groups as certainties, rather than sensitively navigating social uncertainties. I want to take this perspective and apply it to Svetlana Alexievich’s text, Boys in Zinc, which is a collection […]

Skeletal humour between binariesAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:55:07+00:00

Mirage

Fiona Haborak

These days, he’s a corpse. An automaton crookedly shambling down the migraine-inducing neon strip, wrinkled suit wet from stale liquor and sweat. He squints while trying to bring her lazy image into focus. An out-of-focus apparition makes him lose track of time. The face of his watch suffers a splinter from his most recent bender.

‘Lo and behold, there she is, amongst the sea of tourists and one-day marriage lovebirds, with that handsome magazine man by her stick-thin side. Mafia, he suspects, by the way he’s packing, […]

MirageAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:55:14+00:00

Love Laws

by Sara Brielle

There is a border, guarded
by greed. Eyes translucent
like a drained heart, flaking
with soul like rapture.

It’s terror sustains on raw
blood, letting lovers pass,
collecting conformity
like rent, toll money.

Care has an oppressive
rhetoric, housed in
buildings with chipped
paint and smells of bleach.

Fenced in residencies with
cutthroat conventions.
There are laws of love and
a penance for trespass.

It is the border, manned by
practiced, dehydrated fear,
which from the crevices
birthed me.

Precarious and reckless,
I run boundaries like
red lights. Heart threaded
to my shirt sleeve.

Trench where friends become
lovers and mentors, mothers,
the ground […]

Love LawsAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:55:21+00:00

A Short Story About Participating in What May Have Been a Kidnapping

A Short Story about Participating in What May Have Been a Kidnapping

Davíd Lockard

The captive is kneeling at my feet, clutching onto the fabric of my pants, begging for my help. Please, please, tell him to let me off, this will be my end.

The bus driver hesitated before announcing his verdict. He looked up through the mirror at his jury of passengers, scanning the faces he could see, before turning back to the captive. “I cannot just let you off in the middle of the highway. I […]

A Short Story About Participating in What May Have Been a KidnappingAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:55:27+00:00

Ida Joun

Colin Bredenberg

“Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.” – God

Their communications systems were the first to fail as the waters rose and fires rained from the skies. The Flood tore through streets and monstrous machines as God spoke in true wrath. Stone titans’ foundations crumbled; the monolithic beasts stumbled and fell. Starvation […]

Ida JounAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:55:36+00:00

Horse Poems

HORSE POEMS

by Nicholas Beren

1.

Hauntings take time
you cannot haunt
somewhere
all at once
and if you ever tried
you wouldn’t understand
what it truly means to haunt
like a horse in the jungle
the cool smell of chlorine
the nearness of your dress

2.

Into the realm of the horses
One descends
Into the realm of the underneath
Coarse brown hair
You all know what it’s like
You’ve felt it in dreams
Or seen it in the movies
Oooh, that looks familiar
Your wife says in a
Milwaukee accent
And you just wish
She’d shut the fuck up
While you’re in the
Realm of the horses
Looking so cocksure
And impressive

[…]

Horse PoemsAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:55:41+00:00

Her Story

Jacqueline Doyle

She needs to tell Robert tonight. If she waits any longer it might seem like she’s hiding something, when really, she isn’t. It just hasn’t come up.

The bathroom is still warm and steamy from her shower, fragrant with the scent of lemon soap. She rubs away condensation on the mirror with the side of her hand and leans forward over the sink to get closer as she applies her mascara. The lighting in the bathroom could be better, a fact that she notes every day […]

Her StoryAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:51:10+00:00

Groundwater

Lucy Shapiro

The road is smooth here, like milk poured over the hills, your hand hot on the back of my neck. By tomorrow we’ll be cut loose from these eastern mountain ranges and will have to suffer through the flatlands. Sweat collects where our skin meets and trickles down my spine, leaving a cool memory behind. I told you this morning this trip feels to me like the Jews’ departure from Egypt, and you rolled your eyes and took the duffel from my shoulder, though I was carrying it just […]

GroundwaterAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:51:15+00:00

Four Views from a Camouflaged Shack

(PRINTED VERSION)

Four Views from a Camouflaged Shack
(in no particular order)

by James Bradley

I.

He hands over his dark Obsession to its dark Object—
Swan-girls high on wings cry, tangled white yarn binds their hair
Orange sapphire & lava rock weighed traverse
Dawn’s golden body from elbow to elbow
Sun awash, disappearing, disappeared like
Anomalies purged by the programmer
Gone are the days of free-roaming viruses
Proud mutants’ majesty upon

[call this the southerly view]

Four Views from a Camouflaged ShackAlexis Lopez Paleo2020-06-08T06:51:22+00:00