The Cenacle | 112 | Summer 2020
Reading link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/112.html
Download link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/112_summer_2020.pdf
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Hello everyone,
Here comes the just-released Cenacle | 112 | Summer 2020. It is dated “Summer” instead of “June” because, quite honestly, it’s been slow in finishing. Maybe it’s the pandemic and sheltering at home, maybe it’s me job hunting (again), or maybe I was just slow to do it.
But “Summer” fits this time. It’s been a hard, crazy summer for everyone, in the world really. This issue addresses some of the things on many of our minds, and I think holds its currency for its release today. As always, my thanks to the wonderful writers & artists within its pages. And thank you for taking the time to read it. I hope it spends your time well
Contents of this new issue include:
From Soulard’s Notebooks:
[Excerpt]
Marches in cities are helpful if they lead millions clamoring for justice to the voting booth this November. Ridding the government of the poison that is Trump will help, will maybe be a restart.
Feedback on Cenacle 111:
Tom Sheehan’s short story “The Man Who Hid Music” is wonderfully unpredictable, and seems to hint at some kind of larger world around this village. The ending is perfect. It left me wanting to know more about the world it took place in, and to hear more stories from this setting. And to experiment with woodworking [Timothy Vilgiate]
From the ElectroLounge Forums:
EL Forums Reading Club:
“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
[Excerpt]
To me this is a very Taoist poem. Clearly, it is all about balance. But more than that, it shows us that
we cannot have light without dark, happiness without sorrow, joy without pain, kindness without loss. Once one finds Tao, it goes with you everywhere because the Tao is all things. A Tao waterwheel spins within a Tao stream. And in finding what we were looking for, we realize we were never without it. [Jimmy Heffernan]
Poetry by Timothy Vilgiate:
[Excerpt]
All this after two months in isolation,
we wake up in a revolution,
called rioters while being
slammed into the pavement,
pepper sprayed, tear gassed,
false flagged, infiltrated—
Notes from New England by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
What is Bags End?
A Reader’s Guide - Part 3: 2014-2020
[Excerpt]
Everything dreams, because Dreaming is the original state/sense, from which the others come. There is no bifurcation between waking & sleeping. Things change too, even in this timeless Dreaming time. The hmmm emerges from the Dreaming, music of all singing close together. Something, or someone, cackles playfully, merrily, & the Hmmm becomes a braiding of many musics, still clustered in one Dreaming; until a Blue Suitcase falls from the sky, from an Emandian spaceship, waking all to the senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, & taste. There is now waking & these 5 senses additional to the Dreaming & the Hmmm.
Bags End Book #16: What is the Red Bag? Part 1 by Algernon Beagle
[Excerpt]
I could tell you that we come from the Red Bag, & it would be almost true, but not enough. You see, the Red Bag is how we got here. And through the Red Bag is where we are from. It’s like through the door of the Red Bag, just on the other side, is our original home. If you tried to get there the usual way, it would take you millions of miles, many centuries, & you would arrive so much later than now. But through the door of the Red Bag, you would arrive now, a few steps, a few seconds. Except you would not find our world. Our world is gone. It is a dead, dark place. We left unwillingly, & we could hardly bring everyone, or everything, or our beautiful world itself. We brought a remnant, a sliver.
Poetry by Sam Knot:
[Excerpt]
As entire lifetimes
metamorphose ceaselessly
in every nectarous
effortless death drop of
changingly changeless
butterfly nature.
Church in the Greenhouse [Pandemic Journal] by Tamara Miles
[Excerpt]
I’ve planted at least two hundred bulbs so far during the quarantine, and I already had many lilies and gladioli ready to blossom. Yesterday, I planted black adder hyssop, pearl polianthes, and crocosmia. Soon, this yard will be so full of color and beauty that I will be in a wonder-world. I wonder if the beauty of these flowers reflects something alive in me—something colorful, vivid, playful. I suppose there are many reasons for having a garden, but I can’t help but think that one good reason is to find the beauty and wonder in us again. It seems to be why we go to concerts, too, or listen to music alone in our rooms.
Poetry by John Echem:
[Excerpt]
My grandfather was a mystical man to me.
He would take me as a boy to hunt antelopes
and other wild animals in the dense forest.
Sometimes he would place me in a circle,
and give me a sacred leaf to put in my mouth.
He would instruct me not to leave the circle
until he returned, come what may.
Notes on UFOs by Jimmy Heffernan:
[Excerpt]
Perhaps, if an intelligent species can get past blowing itself up, technological advancement might actually reach the point that they would transcend matter and energy, and go into a higher dimension of reality. Of course several hypotheses in physics including, to an extent, quantum theory, unequivocally posit dimensions beyond the four we are familiar with. So perhaps, at a certain point, putative aliens would not exist in physical bodies transmitting light signals, but would simply vanish from our consensus reality.
Many Musics (Poetry) by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
Long before men, & down below sight,
there is green. Webs upon webs,
before story, before song,
veining down through the living world,
there is green. World by light, a combustion
to glory, now mixed with Sea water, there is music,
there is life, there is green.
Rivers of the Mind (A Novel) by Timothy Vilgiate
[Excerpt]
Well. I guess I have superpowers, I thought to myself, as I started to fall asleep lying there in the bushes, my stomach and head both feeling still strongly overcome by latent LSD. As I tried to relax, an endless vortex of diamonds spun across my eyelids, pulsed into the shapes of birds, of anchors, of chains, of pearls, of ivy, eventually grew steadily darker until it faded into blackness.
Poetry by Tom Sheehan
[Excerpt]
We always separate this way,
as if night is a wedge or wall,
final hard divider of the day,
a bolt thrown home by pale hand,
sounding ultimate punctuation.
River of Voices Or, Why the Jaguar Goddess No Longer Walks the Earth(Travel Journal)
by Nathan D. Horowitz:
[Excerpt]
A man went out hunting with his blowgun and darts. Sitting within the smell of frying time, I see the story Rufino told us taking place before my eyes. There’s a rainbow serpent in it, but it starts on the bank of a river, where this hunter found a baby playing by herself on the sand, all alone. He thought he might need to bring her home and adopt her. Looking far up the river, though, he saw the mother, a powerfully built young woman crouching ankle-deep in the current, perfectly still. Almost too fast to see, she pounced, and a great splash went up from the water. She sprang to her feet with a wriggling fish in her hands. In a moment, the hunter would realize who she was.
Poetry by Martina Newberry:
[Excerpt]
To stay sane, I research and pore
over the small things:
a chipped fingernail,
an odd-colored feather gracing the ground,
an unidentifiable spot on the kitchen floor,
a television show,
a book of crosswords.
Detonator! (Prose) by Charlie Beyer:
[Excerpt]
My name, on the desert playa at the Burning Man Arts festival, is Detonator! Here, on a fossil lakebed at the head of the Basin and Range Province in northwestern Nevada, a vast city, called Black Rock City, emerges for a week a year. Thirty-thousand domes and shanties, peopled with exhibitionist youth, blanketed in alkali dust. The masses worship a 50-foot wooden idol that sham-protests commercial materialism. They collectively spend approximately $11 million on entrance tickets, and another $30 million on supplies, tents, gas, etc. It is the biggest private party known on the planet.
Poetry by Judih Haggai:
[Excerpt]
dust settles
one foot in front of the other
into clarity
Poetry by Ace Boggess:
[Excerpt]
We settle for sedentary lives,
sometimes not noticing space around us,
sometimes wondering what’s out there &
if we could be happy on another world—
The Metamorphosis (Classic Fiction) by Franz Kafka
[Excerpt]
Slowly, awkwardly trying out his feelers, which he now first learned to appreciate, he pushed his way to the door to see what had been happening there. His left side felt like one single long, unpleasantly tense scar, and he had actually to limp on his two rows of legs. One little leg, moreover, had been severely damaged in the course of that morning’s events—it was almost a miracle that only one had been damaged—and trailed uselessly behind him.
Poetry by Colin James:
[Excerpt]
Empathizing with an old girlfriend,
I helped her train
her pet eagle, Caligula.
Labyrinthine [a new fixtion] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Excerpt]
It was a cube of chocolate chip cookie dough, edible? the baking kind? The story varies. It was the end of the world. Others said it was cherry vanilla. Some said both. Some said one cube, some said many. Some said it was the confection of the culture it was travelling. Some said it contained magick. Others called it really trippy.
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Peace,
Raymond
