Full text--James: A Fantasia
James avoided the counterboy’s glare (he was a dark and sultry island, James thought; with piles of compost, and barbed wire) and paid with exact change, for which he had picked through his change cup that morning in preparation, to avoid unnecessary complication. Having acquired his coffee he sat blankly at one of the sleek tables, hand curled around the Styrofoam cup with a slight unconscious tension. His loose gaze hovered somewhere in front of the picture window. His thoughts were occupied with an accustomed set of worries, but today there was something else taking shape behind their swarming: something pointed and waxy and orange.
From the New Issue
An excerpt from the recent marginal findings of an anonymous researcher, reproduced in the current issue in all their inconclusive entirety:
That strange unrest that enters the nostrils right from the beginning of such a day, that tantalizing promise of something to come which starts in the excitement of a morning wind's whistpering, and crescendos so loudly that its mystical echoes can be traced on the moonlight of a new face, can also be, as it had for so long been for him, an inarticulate burden which drives one first to envy and finally to lonely despair.
Poetry
I thought the thing was fully pitched;
its kicked up limbs had gone knee high,
daring themselves to show some more...