Cutting my hair with the meat scissors,
being told off for not using a hairdresser,
explaining that if I don’t change something
often I will do something worse
Author: Porridge Magazine
Metaphor, Make-believe and Misleading Information in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – Charley Barnes
‘Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.’ (84) In definition of genre, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) has a wingspan that ranges fiction, nonfiction, and the ambiguous nonfiction novel. In definition of content, it is both a book with ‘dramatic power’ that warrants ‘honorary…
ONE POEM – Amanda Huggins
we revered those rake-limbed lads
on the slot machines
as though they were gods,
not fishermen’s lads.
ONE POEM – Srinjay Chakravarti
It will not miss
a trick—
or treat.
Its bulging eyeballs
on a roll,
it makes an advance
and then stops.
Three from Color Wheel — Salvatore Difalco
Underscoring the onset of nausea on the pier, feelings of self-loathing
also bubble up to the surface. “I get seasick in the bathtub, man,”
declares a ponytailed dude in Plymouth pink.
Radio Music Magic – Paul Sasges
Turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio Turn it up, that’s enough, so you know it’s got soul. ‘Caravan’, Van Morrison, 1970 The transistor radio came out between the vacuum tube in the fifties and the Walkman in the seventies. I spent many hours on our braided area rug prone upon my…
Good and Beautiful — Laura Eppinger
Henri is at least good for catching the scent of socio-political turmoil in the air.
My Mother’s Quilt – Clare Reddaway
This is my mother’s quilt, but many other women have had a hand in it. It was started by my mother in the 1950s, and she made it for most of my life, in admittedly rather a desultory fashion. I remember her sitting on a freezing, pebbly beach in Suffolk, with the grey North Sea…
TWO POEMS – Janet McCann
Something Lives Something lives in the crawl spaceAbove my room. A bird? Maybe a rat?Sometimes it seems to be shaking out its feathers.But then there’s a scrabbling overheadAnd the squares of insulation quiver. I’m not afraid of you, I tell the shaking panels.We all have the right to be.And I will not pursue you with…
Tea for a Pandemic – Terry Kirts
1. My grandmother was a kitchen singer, an apron wearer who trilled the rs and drew out the tra-la-las in all the old songs while she kneaded bread dough or blanched tomatoes. Some days growing up, I spent more time in her windswept farmhouse outside of town than I did in my own home, my…
ONE POEM – Constance von Igel
Brazil has 27 administrative regions, and we found
The strongest evidence of your ancestry,
In the following 10 regions.
ONE POEM – Sofia Lyall
I find the roots of an oak (dead, upturned, twisted)
and am left more disoriented than before.
Porridge 