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Eckleburg No. 21

Eckleburg is a literary and arts journal publishing original works from both emerging and awarded writers, poets, artists and musicians including Roxane Gay, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, Moira Egan and David Wagoner. Eckleburg No. 21 curates a beautiful selection of traditional and genre-bending fiction by Gertrude Stein Award winner, Faerl Marie Torres, Agnes Scott Poetry Award winner, Jessica Melilli-Hand, eleventh century Sanskrit translation by Brishti Guha, artwork by Sandra Shugart and more.

Eckleburg No. 21
$10.00

 

ECKLEBURG NO. 21 CONTRIBUTORS

Faerl Marie Torres, Gertrude Stein Award Winner
Julie Jones
Jennifer Buxton
J. Grace
Lindsay Hatton
Cady Vishniac
Kasey Thornton
Miranda Forman
Rosalia Scalia
Trey Sager
Robert P. Kaye
Andrew Joseph Kane
Cover Art and Portfolio by  Sandra Shugart
Jessica Lanay
Jessica Melilli-Hand
Kuzuha Makino
Translation by Toshiya Kamei
Kshemendra
Translation by Brishti Guha
Fumiki Takahashi
Translation by Toshiya Kamei
Amye Archer
Mary Hastings Fox
Walter Cummins
Paul Rousseau
Phillip Hurst
Filiz Turhan
Alexa Cahill
Marion Deal

What others are saying about Eckleburg…

Being a good lit citizen means supporting lit pubs. Donate. Buy. I’m going to show some #AWP17 mags that you need to support… , , .” Meakin Armstrong (Guernica)
 
The most exciting and adventurous and gutsiest new magazine I’ve seen in years.” Stephen Dixon
 
Refreshing… edgy… classic… compelling.” Flavorwire
 
Progressive….” NewPages
 
Eye-grabbing… fun… bold… inviting… exemplary.” Sabotage
 
 
Eclectic selection of work from both emerging and established writers….” The Washington Post
 
Literary Burroughs D.C…. the journal cleverly takes its name from the The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald….” Ploughshares
 

Proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away. —The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The 25 cent Masseuse

I still remember the skin that stretched
across my mother’s sinuses. Alexa Doran

This tells us something
about the things we hate.

My mother’s nose was knobby and delicate
at once. I stood over her
and massaged the bridge of her
nose for a quarter. I felt naked as I kneaded
her and kneaded her.

Why concern ourselves with my mother’s glands?
Why fixate on the blissless grip of an 8-year-old girl?

I could focus on the eyelet lace across our couch
or the snow that lay its blank body beside the bay
window. I could cast about for my father’s mouth,
mutter my millionth save me.

But the brain is a dirty thing
and it knows what I know

so let her surface, awful and center
as she is — we will always know her
tenderness. We will go away and spend

forever knowing the eggshell arch of her nose
rose high and soft, your newborn’s breath, and everything else

collapsed into valleys,

the station wagon saturated with crumbs,
the hours connected to the cordless, the screen
door and cherry smoke that cling in her wake.

 

The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review was founded in 2010 as an online and print literary and arts journal. We take our title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and include the full archives of our predecessor Moon Milk Review. Our aesthetic is eclectic, literary mainstream to experimental. We appreciate fusion forms including magical realist, surrealist, meta- realist and realist works with an offbeat spin. We value character-focused storytelling and language and welcome both edge and mainstream with punch aesthetics. We like humor that explores the gritty realities of world and human experiences. Our issues include original content from both emerging and established writers, poets, artists and comedians such as authors, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, poets, Moira Egan and David Wagoner and actor/comedian, Zach Galifianakis.

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Alice Sometimes

Sleep-wasted, I shake out dusk. Evening is for solo-exploration, for lying
naked on the fresh made bed. My body is tinsel coat, my body is a blue dress 
punched from sky. Pills make the archetype come easy: cherry Melatonin mixed
with Xanax, bitter blue. Swallow to turn inward. Swallow to skin-shrink like sealed flesh. 
Sometimes I fall between the folds: my cerebellum
labyrinth. Sometimes I disappear entirely.
Down &
                down &
                               down—chemical mouth 
fruit fragrant. Cheek to pillow. Pillow to forest floor.
A peeling occurs. Who I am is the whittling—the collapse into cocoon-stasis.

Elsewhere, passed out
on the lumpy mattress, the cat swats at my visible tuft. My body buried in sheets, my brain
buried under layers of hypnogogia. Life continues:
coffee pot bubbling, televised re-runs, a radio show
piped through distant speakers. Something seeps

in the interstitial: an NPR voice filtering into the dream stream, intoning 
…feeling trapped…maze-like office buildings, fluorescent lit…almost a warren…

There is water here. In it, my reflection is a hundred things collected under one name. 

Words for warren: bedding, burrow, rabbit hole.

 

Kia Alice Groom is founding editor of Quaint Magazine. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets award, the runner-up for the 2014 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and a pushcart nominee, Kia’s work has been published in Cordite, Going Down Swinging, The Australian Book Review, Westerly, Permafrost and others. Her work has been anthologized in the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry and is forthcoming in various other collections. She divides her time between New Orleans, Louisiana and wherever she goes when she falls asleep.