La Petite Zine, edited by Melissa Broder and D.W. Lichtenberg, has officially launched issue thirty, and today just happens to be National Sponge Cake Day. This issue features words from Theresa Sotto, Gregory Sherl, Kari Larsen, Mike Young, Amanda Calderon, A.T. Grant, Jay Deshpande, Caroline Hagood, Molly Soda, Jenny Drai, Joe Fletcher, Jesse Nissim, Mike Lala, Sarah Fox, Katherine West, Liz Scheid, and Paul Legault, so get your mouse over to lapetitezine.com.
Our favorite work from the issue? That is “Coastal Healing,” by Joe Fletcher:
if they are going
to burn? I said
to the failed suicide.His jaw was shattered
so he couldn’t answer.
He just looked toward where
I was through the gray cloud
that draped his face. His one
working nostril wheezing.I cleated the jib line.
The sun warmed my back.
A cormorant flung itself
with a healthy violence
into a brown roller.Out here you could believe
that each thing nursed
a seed of purpose swelling
on the vine of correspondences.
I ate a plum as plum-colored
clouds fused above a piney isle.
Out here I could follow
this fat, mute captain to any
destruction. Destination.
His scarred hand trembled
gently on the tiller.
He knew this about me.
In such a wind he for once
did not want to be
forgotten. Some tobacco
juice dribbled down his ruined
chin. He tacked us
into the thunder.
