Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

Revelation Apocalypse






Diana Manesi

Peekaboo games for mature women (not girls)

*peekaboo: hiding game for babies, also known as son of Boogieman with oracles of the worst and best wishes to come

I use the same eyes to weep and see, mother’s weeping eyes, sister’s seeing tears. mother was a spinster. sister was a widow. man- killers of a different sort. Father says they are cunning and use their eyesight in illegitimate ways. Mother laughs over spilled milk, sister pulls out her hair and mixes them with grass to make a shag pile rug for misspelled narratives and rituals in cunning lingo

peekaboo I tricked you

{Tran T Kim Trang turned blindness}

I yank out my eyelashes and seal them in a bottle to be found some windy day on a seashore by a virgin MILF who kills her mother to sleep with her sister. I go on till mother’s eyes and sister’s tears are the same thing, till my eyelids are distorted, till I can be their difference

peekaboo I see you

When I turn six mom takes me to the ophthalmologist. boys don’t like fucking girls with glasses. they find them dreadfully boring and self-righteous. they look like they ate something really hot. I can tell when girls with glasses have been fucked. they think they can’t see past their glasses. it’s supposed to make them more attractive to men. of course I know I can’t be this type. they also think I am unfuckable, afraid I will cut off their erection with my puffy, brown, greedy eyes, all the same Daisy duck, all the same Minnie mouse, eyes swollen and sewn. men see a MILF; boys think they can see past my glasses {into “aletheia”}

peekaboo I fancy you

I am now over thirty |8.7 myopia, left eye, 9.6 hyperopia, right eye| and blepharoplasty is the last resort for girls of my type. Doctor Antony says that excess eyelid skin causes blindness. mature girls with darker skin tones have a white visible scar. post-operative swollen, bruised eyes, I don’t want to kiss them, I think of Frankenstein. wise doctor says a mid-face elevation may be required to rejuvenate the lower eyelid-cheek complex. HOT MILFs need to take care of their hotness, eat hot soup, drink rose petals, shit rose petals, and get new eyelids

“peekaboo, peekaboo, peekaboo” shouts Dr. Antony

Yesterday, I dreamed something with peekaboo. I had big puffy ears, an orange trunk. And I could send my eyes out of my head to the fridge and call them back “peekaboo come to me.” During the day, I was with peekaboo, I was peekaboo, ageless, high-spirited. I ate simple burgers and kept sending my eyelids back and forth. When it was night, the room had the colour of my inner testicles. I was human again, one damn hot MILF with poor eyesight. I open the fridge. bats come out flying. I am faced with a choice. I can either let the bats absorb all the eyesight I have left. which is probably lost anyway. or enter the fridge blindfolded and admit I need blepharoplasty. NOT. {here turned into a playscape for MILFs and their kind)

peekaboo, I need you

Diana Manesi began writing and recording diaries when she was 11. She stopped once she reached adulthood and went into academia. For many years she engaged with feminist theory, social anthropology, and cultural studies. In the last years, she began experimenting with poetic form and playful prose. In 2017 she published her first poetry collection in Greek, entitled “One and whole: One bite” by Queer Ink Publications. Recently she began writing in English. She currently resides in London and whenever she can she travels and attends poetry workshops.

Louise Akers

Louise Akers’ poetic project is an attempt to map the shift of orientation, as well as perspicacity, that accompanies technological advances in war making. If we understand that drone warfare operates on a vertical axis of violence, we can examine its orientation through modes of desire. We look up, we become spotters; we look down, through a monitor–god’s eye view. If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests in her book Queer Phenomenology, a vertical orientation is implicitly heterosexual, what/where are the lines along we can direct horizontal (queer) systems of desire to segment and deflect heteropatriarchal violence? Hijacking the form of the creation myth, Akers draws lines from the antecedents to the operators to the futures of drone warfare as it has become integral to the contemporary US American socio-political/emotional/aesthetic/religious landscape. When territories are surveilled and murder sanctioned from remote distances at great heights, we begin to conceive of space “not as it is, but space as we make it” (Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, p. 26), thus designating an invisible and ubiquitous theatre of perpetual, US American war. The dialogue is sourced from Gregoire Chamayou’s A Theory of Drone (p.1-9)

Louise Akers is a poet and and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and the Rosemary and Keith Waldrop Prize for Innovative Poetry in 2017. Louise currently serves as the Books Editor at Anomalous Press.

Maria Damon, Alan Sondheim

adnoun from left field / the field left behind

Thad nun Tapestries at the far end of the monastery wall
The brutal murk sat, portend against the statuary’s fall
I think of Stalin shattered, Hitler’s fall
You should’ve caught his legless sprawl
Please save us like from the slime, Stephen Hawking,
remember there’s no time sublime, let’s all keep talking!
firewise with redundant undulations, mark my wild surmise!
reflecting only monstrous, bulbous, watery bloat
while I and billions like me missed the boat,
She left the house in pink stilettos and a fuschia clutch.
A date with Stephen Hawking, going dutch.
Nightshaded night’s sweet realms murk now left aubergine yam”
tusk! Suck’d down the intertext’s gory hole, madame!
Both coddles seethed; she, left in the warren
husk-clothed bodies breathed were bereft of the barren
results of the Warren Commission, history’s repeating by and by,
and bees pervading, invading a starry indoor dome-sky!
And here again, the bloated body floats…
Among the plasticined debris, endangered stoats –
Was Speer really good or evil damned, a murderous churl?
East or west, the world is burning, friends,
              swearing and swimming today; they pray for prey empyrian, sink
And Please defer the lyric as you would defend the harp!
im/mortal’d > “th’Alpinic “th’eastern th’ology juices itself out
exhausted, the ad-noun falls
into itself
into itself
into itself

the dark tower hums
the dark tower comes
the text ends here, we’re dead, nothing comes to mind



Tiana Lavrova


Zanga quarkingly hemorrhagizes integral cosmology memonic octaviously agentically disquieting lightning-riffic genealogists and their hot seashells hungarcious xenomorphic intelligentsia where the geometric profiles of all intelligences Galenize ecocentrizing your pungentations tactically hallucinogeneizing imaginophobia where caviaric paint space-antelopes thoughtless unthinkable images Obituating skeletoned to Fraser highwaying Perfect evil Dimensionless protening Eternal Consciousness To hypno-neurones, Astra Athenia of griga, lumbrous self-preservation, spiritual biologists: each tooth is an acromantic heart somingly manateeing thru acramanta corn puffs Affrodils pasteurized scapes of platelets tall-grassed by Luxembourgian sea petals Zoltan hot springs matroyoshka Delphi’s of xhumatic belongingness! zamboni laciniated kittens amnesiate while country sides are plagiarizingly hair-brushed by the tepid sewage of endophilia! Psychocentric chlamydia salamander encumberable probo-possibly I pray fervently to hypochondriac economies before bed staring at the ceiling some hrs later, drenched in the fantasy-prone personality of a yearless girl bridesmaid, who kicks the Bride of Christ’s pew in front of her a domination iatrogenizing the ageing of beings did I mention? humorously humidifying the retrogradation of spirit spores! Sonically-hydrated cloud dunes tossed between the salad thighs of Monetian islets “my armpits breathe out sea foaming sea cedars — sympostically sea cucumbers Air droplets are ingested by every pediatric non-being!” Penniless moguls who wrote the screenwriting for an intellectually talented, underachieving ménage a trois based on real events shackle the hot tub growth in my medullum to thinly combed pond scalps The Hiawathan woman, robed in a sari bought from a hot dog stand, at the laborers union, petitioning public-property for the mass production of the non-existence of suffering a pair of lice for each pre-Socratic element retch sunglasses on the equatorial brain chemistry of fortepianos skeletoned out of decaying wildlife dead spirits Sea lions sangranated from seven-allergic sap morbidly humorize the multitudinous miled monolith laundry basket laying on its craterous side Horses microwaved on moonscapic ceiling fans scraping off petechiae and the mind’s digital bacteria meter is Latinistically delayed and the infinite beings of sexuality pantasize in volleyball courts over flooded with menarche fluid ear lobe tree houses fundicate scaly wrists Crackling the door knob atrophied with ostracized moose mucosae, drug withdrawing home décor universes Teddies bubblingly dished in nanometric plagenic hives lose all control of their bodily functions! free-falling off an emaciated canyon of labels: a natural body without an element shared with humanness, a natural body without being informatically contaminated by humanness Evil demon ravens gutturally howl carcai chemically intertangled on miscarried judgement less social prisms

Tiana Lavrova is an eighteen year old avant-garde writer based in BC, Canada, with upcoming chapbooks via with dancing girl press and Grey Borders books in 2018.

Ed Garland




Iulia Militaru

A Dance in Four Frames


us two)
How come you don’t get these pieces?
Laid together by words
Of your girl running in the shadow
On the whale’s edge, now here

The woman takes a bite of spring.
My father loves our silence,
Thought crushed in voices. Listen.

(Who shall say I’m not, prin tot dansul ei,
the happy genius of my household?)

(a step
in dance
folio. You)


Speech is a way of slipping in                        (subliminal)          information
Of helping those that don’t understand (subliminal)

Understand                    [what you want them (subliminal)
To understand].

 Speech is a way of levelling things.


Against any personal communication.
Against any illusionary I.
Only the cold analysis of the images between us.

The existent is a sexuate body.
Frame 1


Frame 2


Frame 3


Frame 4


Imaginary soliloquy attached to the frames:


translated from the Romanian by MARGENTO



Matt Schumacher


Amidst amethyst mists silvered with slivers of moon, our astute wanderer of districts of dubious repute parades us down alleyways where we’ll be waylaid. To back rooms whose labyrinthine hookahs billow so copiously with smoke you can hear chambered within them chimneysweeps’ echoing shouts for help. De Quinceyeans under the influence, pleasantly or torturously indisposed, breathe smoke, thick as clothes, smoke both market and theatre. Swipe an opiumpipe. Suckle the world of its inhalations like irresistible tentacles. Play and be played by the night, its night-blooming bassoon improvising the derangements of the mind. Please proceed past the province of complete pipe dream, whose abandoned buildings house the machinery of dreaming. Chase after fledgling hallucinations in the hatcheries of far-fetched reveries. Brave avenues where the multitudes of evil spirits who follow De Quincey flee his disfigured guardian angel.


I guess you’re here for the opium, blurts the suspect. A farmhouse spills delicate, paper-thin crimson from a dead end road in the foothills. Yet come and see De Quincey, small and shimmering man/hologram, shoo away authorities with a small spectral hand, arresting the scene, bruising dusk blue like Psilocybe Cubensis in lieu of his innumerable absences. See the police extinguished like last rays of vanishing daylight. Eavesdrop on the most notorious opium-eater in literary history left there to supervise 500 million dollars worth of opium poppies growing hidden behind honeylocusts. What can he do, what will he do, with the vast span of all of this contraban? O, the expression on his face—what a wild coalsecence, a concession stand of delight, wonder, and fright—it is priceless! There’s no sphinx speaking here of the burden of the incommunicable. As if a homeless drifter inherited a shapeshifting estate from a complete stranger. For the first time, the English Opium-eater glides the palatial stairs, trods their hidden grandeur, and rising on their spiral, fingers careful not to disturb the zebra swallowtail butterflies resting on their handrails, lets these banisters lead him through vast rooms the hue of cumulus adrift in cerulean heights, meadowsized antechambers which are truly scarlet blooms…


De Quincey must play many roles in opium’s postmodern one-man show. Unlike a politician, he speaks firsthand to addicts on the street. Everyone I know is on heroin–he quotes an Ohioan, an addicted mother of three. A third of the U.S.—someone you know—gets destroyed daily on opiods, states his resulting article. And you really must see the English opium-eater as shakyhanded teen, codeine fiend with slurred speech beseeching drug dealers on the streets because he resembles your own child, at least what he’d look like were he homeless and missing. De Quincey as a paramedic injecting narcan into an 11-year-old girl who overdosed. De Quincey as a mule for an Ashtabula county pill mill. As an activist carrying a sign which says: NO MORE DRUG WAR! 36 billion a year and a pandemic! As a policeman paid off by the Taliban, protecting an Afghani opium field with an AK-47. De Quincey as a marketer for a drug campaign, making bank, coyly downplaying addiction in favor of relief from chronic pain. As a judge with no training at all in pharmaceuticals or recovery, prescribing Vivitrol. As an Insys executive who forsakes last stage cancer patients to rake in billions, laughing with another executive in a restroom, while the punchline echoes: fentanyl sells! De Quincey driving a hearse carrying away the bodies of the young from what once were their homes. As a bystander wondering what the fuck is wrong with this country this makes absolutely no sense. Thinking someone sure kicked the living shit out of that white picket fence.


–De Quincey, Confessions

De Quincey died in 1859. He never had his front door smithereened by a SWAT team. Never was tased or pepper-sprayed. Never was sentenced like a young black male facing an all-white jury, locked up for life in Oklahoma for trafficking three ounces of crack cocaine. Never watched the white judge recite his sentence, or heard the state really say, We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. De Quincey wasn’t sickened by prison’s fetid, stale air, the click of locking metal doors. The silence when a penitentiary replaces nights filled with stars. Despite his Orientalist nightmares, he was no scapegoat in Saydnaya. He never fled edicts to kill every drug addict. He never had to meet Philippine vigilantes. Men dismembering and indiscriminately killing children. The state’s greatest hope would be to execute the Opium-Eater without trial, pin on him an incriminating sign advertising his use or sale of drugs, and leave him for all to see, dying in the street. A bloodstained example of what not to be.


On a hot July day, De Quincey, high on bath salts, breaks in and decorates a random family home for Christmas. The police break in, too, and find fault, arresting the pale, emaciated poet just when he’s placing the star atop the tree. He’s frisked, booked, and charged with B and E. But wait, the police say… Look at these Christmas lights, this tinsel and these snowglobes! Let no one say this Mr. De Quincey lacks style! Somewhere that damned dandy, Lord Byron, somersaults in his grave, wishing he could be this extravagant, this wild. Then the police become wooden mannequins. They’re merely props that drop through a trapdoor. And Santa Claus—I mean the real Santa Claus—replaces them, ambling in, taking De Quincey’s hand. So saileth away De Quincey in the famed sleigh, into a summer night that drinks the reindeer trail, the galaxy of blinking lights that accompany the siren.

Matt Schumacher, managing editor of the New Fabulist journal, Phantom Drift, lives in Portland, Oregon. His recent poetry collections include Ghost Town Odes and a chapbook of fantastical drinking songs, favorite maritime drinking songs of the miraculous alcoholics.



At the suburbs of Thebes, I met my Conceptual Father.
Clandestine practices and other room rituals of an Agoraphobic-in-Revolt.
Try the Proletarian Desire with your clothes on.
As the sun rises over Obediencia…
From a distance, Vila Violence was perfectly visible.
Your Lyrical Laceration, your charms, your air…
Systemic Splendour: a rather melodramatic synonym for success.
Grow your own Ennui Noir.
The contemporary aesthetics of Atelier Abuse.
Capitalist Fairy’s favorite motto: We can pay for the coffee so we have the dawn.
In my Digital Dreams all doors are closed.
The Arrogance Academy is shining under the spring light, freshly painted ego-white.
Someone strongly circles the words Coded Conflict.
Guiltless magic, with the essence of Enforced Normality.
Meet me at the Lower Eden.
Dear reader, we are trained to not confuse art with the Bourgeois Nightmare.
Avoid eye-contact with the Scattered Signified.
Driving to model houses on the hills of Privileged Porn.
Provide a separate place for petting Nervosa Negativa.
Autobody loves to cancel pathos.
From this state of paradox the Punishment Plethora has bloomed.

Welcoming the New Nothing.
Resistance Reverie: a glamorous and especially virtuous activity…
Systole and diastole of Patriarchy Parody.
Advanced Roleplaying is not everyone’s cup of herbal tea.
Banality Bureau’s comforting message: Repeat after me, repeat after me.
Hatewave brings yellow weather and some aura from Hell.
She loved the menu at Decadence Deja-Vu.
Survival Set sample.
In this Identity Parade, where everyone is performing a prayer… “Please tell me, how do I look?”
Did I mention the Throne Room at the Hotel Humiliation?
Exit Text. There is a book with this title, too…
Are weekends becoming too expensive at Safety Simulator?
Rejection Letter: the smart way to move through the world.
The Twilight Trauma and the new theory of colour.
Readymade Revolution. Available in S, M, L and XL.
The Official Forcefeeder promised me more forbidden food.
Dear Dead Muse,
The Nausea Narration has something for every taste.
It’s screen-time again and my Shark-Eyes can’t hide their hunger…
Various Dooms updated.
“In an era of Political Maximalism, politics invades all phenomena.”*
As the sun sets over Ruinette…
Never underestimate the obsession of the Hyper-Rich for funereal flowers.

*from “The Neutral” by Roland Barthes

words-links: “patriarchy” from the poster or graffiti “Death to Capitalism/Death to patriarchy.”

Antonis Katsouris is a writer, and the editor of the reading series “The Closet.”


by Yoko Danno


                          affinities between this butterfly
                          and me―an eternity for the insect
                          but a few-second stay on my palm
                          before i clap my hands in worship


                          a swarm of butterflies flutter
                          in an illuminated glass dome,
                          light breaking into winged souls
                          in and out of the rose-wet grotto


                          screaming i struggled to wake ―
                          i was one of a thousand butterflies
                          in an enormous LED light bulb, 
                          my voice silently rising like bubbles


                          the land shook, suddenly as before,
                          nymphs trembled, terracotta soldiers
                          guarding the underground palace
                          shaken in alarm―attention! forward!



by Yoko Danno

               Puffing and panting,

               to the hilltop ascending,

               what do I expect to see

               flat surface of a writhing sea?








by Yoko Danno

I am in my brain,
You are in your brain.
You are in my brain,
I am in your brain.

I feel that time flies faster than ever. Because I digest food more slowly lately? Or am I already traveling around another sun, or another moon? I hope the orbit of my thoughts can be traced more precisely and the geography in my brain explored more in detail. Ethereal fragments of consciousness, along with earthbound urges, should be eventually put together into a meaningful whole. Is there a mastermind behind all of this mysterious integrating process?

I sent a letter to my friend with a wrong address. I didn’t know he had moved. Someone told me he has gone in search of a bird. Where?

In pursuit of the swan, he arrived at the land of Harima by way of Ki, then crossing Inaba he came to Taniha and to Tajima. He followed the bird east-ward to the land of Chika-tsu-Aumi, crossed Mino, chased it through Wohari, past Shinano, and finally in the land of Koshi spread a net at a river mouth…*

The man in the topic was instructed that if he found the bird, the child—an emperor’s son who was unable to speak—would be able to speak. But is it possible, at the present time, to wander over the Japan Island of the 8th century? Let alone to find the bird? I’m told ‘past’ is a mirage, ‘future’ a phantom, and ‘now’ becomes ‘past’ from instant to instant—a flower never stays the same. But then what is the present time exactly? If there’s no ‘now,’ we live only in ‘past’? If so, no wonder he has gone looking for the bird into ‘past’…by the way, I sprained my neck while I was asleep last night.

Ki lies in the Ki Peninsular facing the Pacific Ocean. I once visited there on a school excursion when I was a child. Harima, far down south of Inaba, is the birthplace of my grandmother. Carried in a palanquin, crossing mountains, she married into a sake-brewing family in Taniha, my ancestors’ place. In Aumi is Lake Biwa, home to multiple birds. In Mino cormorants are nurtured to fish for humans. In Wohari I lived with my family for two years. Koshi is present-day Hokuriku, northwesterly coastal area. On my way to Shinano on a sightseeing trip I looked out over the raging Japan Sea through a train window. What has he been doing all the while? Where on earth has he flown to?—the one to whom I sent a letter, I mean.

My letter must be carried around in a postman’s bag in search of his whereabouts. I hope it won’t be abandoned in a box of ‘undelivered mail’ at a post office, since I forgot to write my return address on the envelope. My fatal fault. Once lost, a letter will never be delivered. I may not know whether he has actually caught the bird or not, although I desperately wish to know.

I have recently lost my voice, caused not by a laryngeal cancer, but from hypertension—I need to perform magic in front of old people in a nursing home. Most of the audience is suffering from dementia, but I am warned they are strangely quick-eyed in seeing through tricks. It is rumored they are trained nightly by particular owls to see through the darkness. If only I could regain my voice, I might distract their attention by my mumbo jumbo.

I wonder, however, if we should always expect replies to our letters. Emily Dickinson wisely stored in her small casket the letters to her ‘Master,’ which has kept the world in perpetual suspense and contemplation. Thinking I might perhaps have forgotten to mail my letter, I rummaged all drawers of my desk and cabinet—in vain. There’s no doubt that I posted it—the letter is in my brain.

*Excerpt from “Kojiki” (trans. by Danno), the oldest collection of songs and stories concerning the founding of Japan and the beginnings of Japanese culture, compiled in the 8th century.


by Ed Garland


