November 2023
In this issue
Contents
Autumn Blossoms
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri speaks to Gajra Kottary, the author of Autumn Blossoms.
Spiritual symbols in The Left Hand of Darkness
The author traces the influence of Taoism on Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction, analysing the use of spiritual symbols in her book, ‘The left hand of darkness’ which directly relates to her belief in Taoism.
Imaginal Cells
The prescience itself is attacked: the caterpillars’ own being hates that it knows it will change, won’t let the secret be. Life can’t all be eating.
Heraclitean Primacy
We are entitled, much the same as the perception of time dying To look away in the direction where we notice a crow flying Because the crow, whether you know it or not, is a song bird
Turning A Corner
My daughter backs into the neighbor’s car– confesses over a coffee table of water stains and smoke thick like a 90s beer pub. She gets off easy. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.
New Order of our Lady of Bethlehem, 1247
An asylum in a mad city, Bedlam begins in a town ditch with eleven chain, six locks, four manacles, and two stocks, to guard (or guard against) the menti capti, whose minds lay tangled in a landscaped brain. Mary’s blue robe the only sky for inmates;
fractals
creatures caught in the heat of mating/ body parts of personal history/ memory’s tenuous grip/ sudden dip
NightDream
Your mom thinks you should be recording emotions, not just what happens. You don’t really want to, but what the hell. You can try it once. All you can feel at this part of the dream is … fear.
People Like Us
That evening, while Mr. Klein and I were halfway across the river, another boat came downstream so he lowered the line and waited for it to pass. It was a big fiberglass boat, and it didn’t slow down. Instead, it steered towards us and then arced away, sending its wake in our direction.
Siren
Rebecca sank further, dropped down to the first floor, her own office. A room empty of the watery substance and so her body crashed to the floor, dripping with a thickening blue. The screaming of the alarm was still strong in her ears.
White Guilt
I don’t know how this happened; I woke up and found myself like this. I have only just now begun to devote thought to why I am in this state really. My initial waking thoughts were prostrate and bowed to the immense pain of cracking open my oophorm eyes.
Minha
She drew their faces in greater detail on the opposite page, as if she had severed and separated their heads.