
September 2002
cover photography by Jordyn Thomas
Preface
Harold Kanning
Sitting here,
in the night,
in the basement,
below my sleeping love,
after all of which
you are about to read
has already happened,
alone again and looking back,
feeling outside of time,
feeling like
the answer
and
the mystery
are simply
the same
thing.
So much has happened in the past week that it is
with some kind of hilarious sadness that I
proffer up its simplicity, yet, it must be said that we
glimpsed a flash of our goals in the pans of our phone-
calls, and we held them, carried them along, brought
them through to manifest fruition by injecting and
inflating the ideas with our lives, bringing death to
ourselves as we had been living, and giving birth to our
new forms of selves. Simply,
we knew we could find
better lives, and
we saw that it
required
death.
All we had
to do
was
act.
jungle jack
Sixto Mercedes
she often tells him where to go
she often hits him hard as Hell
she often invests his money
in lipstick, clothing, and
phone calls
and he often won’t come home
there’s no reason to, when
the city’s so full of cheap
young women to
hustle, with
new cars,
money, and
muscle
they’re staying together for kicks
they’re paying the price, it’s shit
could it all be worth it one day?
you bet, that always seems to be the way
he’s kind of a jungle jack
she’s kind of a bitch
he doesn’t make good decisions
someday he’ll be rich
she is kind of a bitch