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5/15/2018

Game Of Narratives: Infinity Wars... maybe

SW: LEVI we have to talk about INFINITY WARS.

LR: [Silence]

SW: What did you think of all the deaths? Of Mr. Purple Grape almost killing Robert Down—I mean Tony Stark! What about Benedict Cumberbatch’s slightly off American Accent?

LR: [Silence]

SW: Levi? Levi? We have to talk about how Captain America is still alive. How is that possible???? He’s like the most obvious choice of killing a major hero off in this movie.  

(Through the intercom) Sam, Levi is taking a leave of absence in order to welcome a baby into his family. He can’t do any Game of Narratives until he comes back.  
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SW:… but...but

​My head rests in the palm of my hand as I fight back tears. Then, through a crack beneath the door an envelope slides through. I turn and pick it up, fighting off one of my two cats.


It reads:
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December 32nd, 2028

Dear former self,  

It’s been 10 years since I last heard from my brother. Darling Levi, where can he be? Raising his son/daughter somewhere in Northern Montana, no doubt. Swinging on Tesla swings, eating Tesla Rice, probably playing catch in a Tesla Holodeck.  

Ten years. It’s amazing that still the most notable thing over the last ten years is that the Trump administration added an additional day to December, leading his base to revolt and call for impeachment, citing that the President abused his power when he messed with a childhood nursery rhyme. The big Donald is now in jail. Ivanka turned on him too because he misspelled her name on the newest Ivanka fragrance. The final straw, I guess. She couldn’t have run faster to Mueller.  

George Lucas is President now. After the 30th Star Wars film was released in 2022, he released a statement saying, “I’m running for President to put an end to this nonsense. Help me protect my legacy.” He won every single state except for South Dakota, whose single citizen wrote in “Rick Sanchez.”

I currently sit in a five-foot by five-foot cell. Thank goodness the ceiling is six-foot high or I’d have to stoop. Thunder rumbles above me, and rain falls into the cell. I can see a full moon lighting up the world.

I landed here in 2021 after a hard gambling streak. I bet half a million dollars on Leonardo DiCaprio to win Best Actor for a movie in which his character, a poor musician, plays the Mandola in refugee camps for children, eventually becomes leader of the refugees and fights successfully for all those dreaming children to become citizens. Instead, Rupert Grint won for his portrayal of Young Luke Skywalker in Star Wars XXIX: A Quest for More Hope. I couldn’t believe it.  

Of course, I don’t have to be here. Lucas actually did some good things as President, ending mass incarnation and establishing recovery programs called the “Jedi Mind-Trick.” But since Earth ran out of oil way faster than anticipated and global temperatures skyrocketed over the last three years—leading to increased storms (there’s a category eight hurricane now), a lack of livable land (who knew all of England would dry up overnight—good thing they had sixty years' worth of tea available), and a lack of natural resources (California, remarkably, did not dry up, but is now gushing with water—thank you hidden reservoir inside Half-Dome, now called No-Dome), I now actually choose to live in my jail cell along with wife and our sixteen happy cats who live off rats and Spaghetti O’s.

But enough about me. I want to talk about you.

I know what you have to do in order to have a fulfilling life. You see where it went all wrong with me, that is to say, future you—you never did another Game of Narratives. Unknown to you, was that fact that your Editor-in-Chief, Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, is actually Bill Gates, who uses this high-tech Jane avatar as a way to research and take notes on what he calls the "female experience." Game of Narratives was something of intrigue.  

But then Levi took his leave of absence, and you, that is to say past me, spiraled into a dithering despair, falling flatly on your face, never able to write another sentence. You, that is to say past me, got into an awful funk and just clunked around in life. Gates, as Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, who we'll just refer to as The JRC Unit, witnessed this and eventually parted ways with your non-writing services.

Gates later revealed to Meow Meow Pow Pow who he was and gave everyone a lifelong stipend in order to keep the mag going and to work on their own artistic projects.  

Do you, my dearest past self, see the issue? If you had but only strived on, even with the leave of absence Levi took, you would be a multi-millionaire right now (though everyone is sense Lucas appointed Bernie Sanders as Secretary of Treasury and he made everything free), instead of in a cell, living with 16 cats.  

I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter. We were all so late in responding to global warming that the planet is complete doggie-doo-doo (Lucas's opposing political party "Trekkies" outlawed the use of shit in 2026) and even those who had money are on hard times.  

But it's not about the money. It's about the drive, the quality of life. Your writing gives you strength! Levi would have wanted you to go on, to write! Don't worry, he'll be back. And together you'll debate the world of narratives. It will be a spectacle.  

Go on and write!

Yours, truly,

Jason Samuel Williams, Esquire

PS. I got my law degree for no reason. People said I would make money somehow.
I fold the letter, not understanding how I could possibly write a Game of Narratives again, even given all the warnings.

My phone vibrates. I take it out of my Gryffindor Bathrobe. "Championship Belt Holder" has sent me a text—Brodie! Darling Brodie. What has he to say?  


Brodie: You and me on a game of Narratives?

There's an image with the text. It's a bracket pitting DC characters vs. Marvel characters. It's a sign! A SIGN!
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Levi would want me to go on.  

5/10/2018

Wrecked Chorus Blog

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[wrecked]
Marie Marandola


A man burned his house down
trying to kill a spider. The smudge
on my bathroom ceiling
is a shoeprint, left over from
the cockroach I couldn’t reach.
That was before I saw
the other, perched quietly
on my loofah’s soft pink folds.


It’s hard to be alone, but sometimes
harder not to be.


You light a cigarette,
say you want to quit--
and drinking. You want to cook
for yourself, believe in love,
feel something again. But I’ve watched you
listening to poetry
with your eyes closed.


You take the first drag, and the end of me
goes to ash.
Untitled
Caitlin Spies


Through mist, behemoths rise,
Skeletons strange and rough.
How could you be Sleepless here?

Moisture adheres to every scrap,
To everyone.

This moss grows, drink it in.
Touch a hand to the bark,
Come away cold, but wanting more.

Water turns to Thunder in this hidden cove.
Silken against skin.

The temptation is too much, I am too close.
Eyes closed, breathe the forest in.
Breathe in your air.

Droplets in my hair.

I open my eyes.
I am standing on a bridge.
Two lines, two lives.

The path divulged, and I, coward,
Choose nothing.
And go back the way I came.
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Relationship Haiku
Levi Rogers


A self body bag
I wrapped for you, trekked with ropes
From the sea, perfect: wrecked.



[wrecked]
J. Sam Williams



Never been drunk. Never been wrecked. Never smoked weed or a cigarette. Emotional trauma wrecks me enough. Gluttony wrecks me enough. Lust wrecks me the most. Sin is my wrecker and death my destructor. Try and purge all from my mind. I don’t have time to focus on the rest.


Soak
Cassandra Panek


I float like pots and pans
Left overnight
In the dark I salt the water
But nothing will cleanse your greasy touch.
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My body made of pith
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella  
​

I am drunk on my mistakes and my love is a leather helmet. My body is made of pith and at every beginning and end, I supplicate my plant’s interior at the altar of my errors. Loneliness is a clay that has shaped me—fragile and brittle with a hollow inside. I plug my body with the frames of silt silhouettes that I melt into the void of my insides—I can almost see them for who they are. Mesmerized by their outlines, I devour them. Bodies that beg to live within me, I try to hold them to my figure forever.
​
Ceramics are breakable and every baked part of me is a splinter that once retained the bits of boys that lived in the gulch of my cavities. I am earthenware shards splayed across the kitchen floor. I am vials holding wet, salty, sand made-up of texts that go unanswered. Grind down the remaining parts of my body until it is gritty soil. Till me until I’m loam. And let the loneliness turn into a field where flowers are farmed.
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living wreckless
Alex Simand


It’s funny how once you are whiplashed, it lives in your neck forever: that unshakeable kink, that muscle memory of scraping glass and crunching metal and torn jeans running along the concrete. I see it when I close my eyes, how close I was to departing, how close still, as the blood dripped down my leg and I picked pebbles from an exposed kneecap, hopped right back to a motorcycle that leaked oil, hopped up on adrenaline and the thrill of still being, and rode off. I should have been smarter, but there is no such thing as retrospect, which is an abstract concept best left for men with elbow patches.

I’ve lived so many alternate realities in which the white truck behind me did not stop, but instead ran over my body—thump thump—like a skunk’s slumping carcass on wine country’s winding one-lane highways. In which I was crushed by my own machinery. In which my arms were torn from their sockets, leaving me a chewed-up sock puppet waiting to be tossed in the trash. In which my ribs shattered into a million pieces like a plastic bag full of glass.

I should have expired, I think, that day. Carton of milk. Missing persons. A slumped slab of flesh in an ambulance. A wailing faraway relative. Instead, I have this mark where my knee used to be. I can feel through my scar tissue the part of my ivory I left in the asphalt. I pass the spot where it happened everyday on the way to work, unmaking myself, building a memorial for a moment that only finished partway.
photos supplied by Cassandra Panek with the exception of the last two

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