Issue No. 13 | Spring 2011
MMR ANTHOLOGY 2011 — Fiction, Poetry, Art
CONVERSATIONS & CONNECTIONS — Johns Hopkins University, D.C. | April 16th | 18 Journals/6 Presses REGISTER NOW!
GALLERY | Ogun Afariogun
COMEDY SPOTLIGHT | Christian Pole Dancing Fox News
SPRING 2011 ECLECTIC GROOVE MIX | Marvin Gaye, Beirut, Infected Mushroom, The Bird and the Bee, U2, 30 Seconds to Mars MMR Editors
BOOK GALLERY | Kara Candito, Jared Randall, Angele Ellis, Meg Pokrass
FICTION |
The Office They Gave Me Randall Brown
The Anger of Others (Excerpt from MMR Anthology 2011) Roxanne Gay
A Diverse Flora of Native and Introduced Species, Beautifully Adapted to Their Microenvironment Don Hucks
Thieves Len Kuntz
The Weeping Fig T. J. McIntyre
Bomb Squad Jason Olsen
The Makers Natanya Pulley
Smoke Chad Simpson
POETRY |
Common Nicholas YB Wong
This is for Our Mistakes Roheeni Saxena
PROSETRY |
WINTER 2011 FIRST PLACE WINNER | Come to Me Anne Earney
WINTER 2011 SECOND PLACE WINNER | You Must Hold the Baby Like This Mel Bosworth
SPRING 2011 CONTEST | GETUPSTANDUP (Contest Guest-edited by Laura Ellen Scott)
Common
Chinese Translation
_
Think of no as a syllable. Think of yes
as a denial. Think of logic and what logic
rejects to labor. Think of hormones
that surface as moustache, the act
of shaving as dissolving discharge. A day,
a becoming, a becoming however.
Think of solitude as a lingua franca,
dawn as a tabula rasa, each of which
a new start. Start anew, abloom,
agony as actual extraordinary, not extra.
Think of hierarchies, hairs. Think
of your fibula, femur, fixated
to your spine, so we, as a flock, look alike.
Who steals whose face? Who still waits
for fate to differentiate? The nudibranch,
riparian invertebrates, aspergillus, us —
a proper pronoun, a common noun.
Nicholas YB Wong is winner of the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition (Oct 2010) and a nominee for Best of the Net 2010 and Best of Web 2011 anthologies. His poetry is forthcoming in Assaracus: Journal of Gay Poetry, Prime Number Magazine, San Pedro River Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Third Wednesday, Lambda Literary, Mascara Literary Review, and the Sentinel Champion Series. He is currently a poetry editor at THIS Literary Magazine and a poetry reader at Drunken Boat. His first full-length poetry collection, Cities of Sameness, will be published by Desperanto.