Conjunctions — The forum for innovative writing

Time 2020-10-25 03:02:26

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Current Issue Conjunctions:74 Grendel s Kin: The Monsters Issue Spring 2020Edited by Bradford Morrow *SHIPPING NOW!**ORDER A PRINT COPY.*Monsters are the ultimate Other. In them, our most heinous traits, our weirdest fantasies, our greatest primordial fears, are mirrored and transmogrified into grotesqueries of every kind. Our ancestors imaginative visions of terror and dread gave rise to a spectacular alternative universe of fiends, daemons, ghosts, griffins, zombies, succubi, dragons, chimeras, sea serpents, vampires, werewolves, and other monstrous progeny. Latter-day generations have been just as creative in adding marvelous creatures to the Nuclear Age pantheon 1954 alone saw the birth of Godzilla, stirred to life by the atomic bomb, not to mention the giant mutant ants of Them! No matter the era, no matter which century, be it a dark age or one of enlightenment, monsters have held a mesmerizing fascination, as well as an existential horror, for everyday mortals.In Grendel s Kin, classic monsters such as the Minotaur and Sasquatch are conjured alongside newly imagined unfriendly beings like the Gricklemare, the Moon Fairy, and the Soul Collector, as well as a poltergeist, a tentacled creature discovered in an uncharted crevasse in Antarctica, a sister who is grossly, inexorably extruded from her host sibling (much to the latter s mortification), and killer fleas from beyond Pluto. Here are monsters who inhabit the churning oceans and ride on killer tsunamis. Monsters born of plague and strife and hatred. Monsters who lurk in spellbound woodlands. Village and city monsters. Monsters who are stubborn, inescapable, greedy, pestilent, some of them cunning, others a bit clumsy and most of them as malignant as a stumble off a very high cliff.Conjunctions:74, Grendel s Kin: The Monsters Issueexplores, through innovative fiction, poetry, and essays, the many ways in which monsters are sublime and horrifying and an important part of the human legacy from one generation to the next.To see announcements of new issue themes or to keep up with our issues as they develop, follow us on Facebook and Twitter and join our newsletter. View Issue Cover art by Hugo von Trimberg: Der Renner, ca. 1230 ca.1313, courtesy of The Morgan Library Museum, MS M.763, fol. 230r. Photography by Janny Chiu, 202. Send more Chuck Berry, went the joke—how the aliens would reply when they got their first spin of the Golden Record on the Voyager. Sweet, friendly aliens with toe-tapping rhythm (whether or not they had feet), an appreciation for sweat and guitar riffs pooling together even if they had no first-hand experience with either. I like the black & white. I likethe mirage they create. I like            planes. I like stray dogswho never forget where I come from. The woman knocking on my door has a dilemma. She only has x-amount of time per day to dedicate to prayer. So, on whom should she focus her prayers? The migrants who are starving, the people with the virus, or those of us stuck here? If us, which one of us? How much should self-interest factor in? Should she pray the most for the woman with the slight heart condition or the woman she most wants to leave the ashram? The birds here Have not changedThey drop salt not seedsInto my open mouthNow—my back bare to the skyBreasts buried in soilThrust into the darkness of thisSearching out each star A poem listensto both rooms from the middleground of its title, the threshold strip  An exhibit was all you wantedand me to lay closemy facelike a film behind a curtain When I thought of their home life, I pictured them hunched beside flame, firelight bringing out grime on their faces.     Between my mother and grandmother, Mrs. Hufferman is always referred to as Lilly. The bones and crosses left out for him an emeraldCicada dying attended by ants the emperor’s pleading faceAll over town I dragged it behind me like a wing Quisa had fallen into the habit of disappointing herself, and then disappointing herself a little more, with the words she let slip from her mouth. She kept talking to people in this hungry, intimate way, as if they too had spent the time of their lives in their heads and read the warning labels too closely and worried irrationally about their lymph nodes. Accidental confessions are what these amounted to. Four cops come. Both parents are arrested, D&D. The children—William, six, and Stephanie, three—are taken by CPS.     The neighborhood will be quiet for almost two weeks. After the bites. After the appearance of what, under one of the wobbly lamps in the employee dressing room/lounge, looked like three welts on T.’s forearm and two little ones on the webbing between S.’s index finger and thumb. After they (zombie fans all of them, horror fans all of them, gore fans all of them) whooped for October 1, whooped for the whole damn month, whooped for another year at the Haunted Farm, which was the only thing they loved in otherwise miserable Olney, Maryland. After a long battle, the Department of Special Needs approved my request for a monster.     It should have been a good thing. There was a long wait list for the monsters, which had only recently been developed. During lunch at the treatment center, when everyone heard I had been approved for a monster, they clapped and congratulated me. I had been waiting for a monster for years, as had many of the other clients, but I still had misgivings. When the Moon Fairy arrived, blown in through an open window one summer night, we were all surprised by how much it resembled Sylvie. Of course, it was much smaller—no longer than Sylvie’s forearm, the perfect size to take its place among her forgotten dolls—but its small, shimmering face was a tiny image of hers, like a portrait cleverly formed from beaten tin. that mineral sacrifice, nacre-pleda knitted therethe commercialpleat, which the body recognizessquintof your courtesy, liege & master Coworkers drop me off at a cutting-edge camp for the talkative so I have people other than them to bore for two weeks such as the doorman with the bad left knee who I tell about my bad right knee as we are exiting applauding vehicles under upstate trees As the light scanned his body, I could not tell if what was projected was what was outside, that which remained of his dynastic rule, the ruins of pillage and scorched-earth tactics from those of the north, or perhaps of his own minions; or was it some landscape of his dreams, an unfolding of what would come, the ruins that lay waiting deep in the tenses of the future, where the springs would be clouded with matter, the earth pocked and scabrous, mucosa and serum streaked. It is contested territory. Right now she has two thick horns atop it. Dying can turn the most flamboyant into their most feared demon.     R who works with her in the daytime puts oil (olive, coconut) on the horns, which G, who works nighttime, complains about. When the coronavirus outbreak caused Bard, along with other schools across the country, to move to remote teaching, my plan to host a campus visit with one of my closest longtime writer friends, Joyce Carol Oates, had to be canceled. Disappointed, we agreed to reschedule for the fall.  But then I had an idea. To salvage some semblance of a class visit, what if I asked my students to read her recent collection, Beautiful Days, and send me an email asking her a question about a favorite story, or about the fictive imagination, and I would forward them to Joyce for her responses? in the pharmacy of the childone used a hopscotch stonea jacket zipper one’s tonguethe sharper tongue of a friendanything to get one’s soft skin back 1.Because he could picture himself curled up on the shelf of the refrigerator between the bread and the light.2.Because he stared up at the sprinkler attachment and thought of it as a metal flower.

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