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In This Matter it is the settlers who are the experts
By Hilary Plum

We were known by our calipers. What whites of eyes gleamed our way. There was a lack of cartilage. Stalwart we were even as the walls had ears and the bullets were greased in beef tallow. How little they knew of us and how our children spent their days in the baobabs. Our hearts were more ancient and their bullets pierced no fruit in the fall.

The Master Of Tel Aviv
by Inbar Kaminsky

I almost saw The Master in Tel Aviv, after cinemas in my city ignored it for some obscure reason; I almost went to Tel Aviv to see it. It’s interesting to think of it in ideological terms, even though there is clearly nothing ideological about movie distribution, but what if this is some subtle conspiracy to deny us, non-Tel Avivians, with this particular viewing experience. After all, The Master deals with the making of a new religion, or so the trailer leads us to believe.

Procedure For Certification Of Death
Shibo Todoke Kisai Jiko Shomeisho
By Éireann Lorsung

The first requirement is to acquire a death certificate issued by a doctor. But where are the doctors, where are the hospitals now? Where are the ballpoint pens (black only)? Where are those certificates, in which filing cabinets? Piles of paper dumped out of drawers have burnt and blown away. In the sterile white hall of a ward you turn a corner and the far wall’s completely gone. There’s water on the floor. Within seven days, that’s the requirement for the certificate, stamped with your own seal, you who apply for the doctor’s certificate, you who have come on foot or by moped or by bicycle, carefully lifting the wheels over places where the road buckles up completely.

items

Short interview with Pauline Oliveros: " I was always interested in the most new kind of thing I could hear. When I was 16 or 17, I heard some Bartók for the first time, and anytime I heard anything remotely new, I was interested. I actually knew I wanted to be a composer by the time I was 16. So as I got into composition and then improvisation, I wrote some pieces for the accordion and finally began using it to improvise."

Marina Abramovic working with Paris Opera Ballet: “In my own work I am completely in control, but the interesting thing with collaboration is to give up part of yourself, the ‘I.’”

The brilliant Anya Yurchyshyn's "My Dead Parents" project has gone thrillingly viral. We published an early entry in Two Serious Ladies here.

Money & Fame

1.) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Awards deadline May 31st. Two prizes of $1,000 each and publication by University of Georgia Press are given annually for collections of short fiction. Submit a manuscript of 40,000 to 75,000 words with a $25 entry fee.

2.) Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction deadline June 1. A prize of $2,000 and publication in Philadelphia Stories is given annually for a short story.

from the Archive

From “XEMS” By J/J HASTAIN
Months later, during the summer, when I had been out of xems house for quite a while, not yet having been able to write about my experiences with xems in any critical way, having lost my contract with my editor but not having lost my mind, I caught a flight to a city at the verge of the sea. My intent while at the beach was to do some sort of honoring ritual for xems, as a way to thank xems for all that was revealed to me while in xems house.

"My father predicted everything when he said I would procrastinate until I died." - Jane Bowles