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Cover image by G.W. Duncanson

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!!•••••••• Peter Milne Greiner !

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My time machine is silver and bristling with cool blue lights I climb in Intricate holographic displays surround me on all sides Jogging dials, conducting an orchestra of beeps and alerts, I program the machine to take me back Far back I climb out into the past and access the internet I hack your MySpace account I find out what I need to know What I came when to know And I return I delete time machine I feel triumph and the pangs of conscience like someone who has done a new kind of right, like someone who can imagine the possibilities It doesn’t occur to me to wonder what you’re still doing here It’s like the best thing ever to not occur to me because if it did, here I would be, thinking about it nonstop, agonizing silently, powerlessly, totally unable to let it go at all, not even gradually over a ridiculous amount of time, that’s why I have no qualms with messing around with the course of events in the way that I do/have There are twenty-six letters in my alphabet of pain I enter the eight of them that make up your password one at a time, without hesitation, eager to change what has happened in any way I can

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The Place Where Something Goes Before It Goes Away Thomas Mira y Lopez!!To put it one way, all this reminds me of “The Lion King.” The dead father. The elephant graveyard. Simba looks into the water, looks to the stars. Mufasa looks back. The ripples still. Rafiki rattles his stick.!I saw the movie three times when it came out. Twice at METRO, the theater with the art deco marquee four blocks from my home. With who? My parents, then a friend. The third time it had been out a while and was only showing at the Ziegfeld, where the premieres and also-rans played. My father didn’t want to go, he had already seen it, but I insisted. He and I took the bus down to 54th and walked Sixth Avenue over. We waited in line. He bought me a ticket. We went inside. I had never been to a movie theater of this size. There was an acreage of seats—you could plant a crop and watch it grow. I was seven years old. Was I scared then? Knowing that scale enlivens dread, that in the dark I would be on my own. That Scar throws Mufasa off the cliff, that Simba discovers his father’s body below, that the wildebeests trample and I would watch. That this was the only context I had to understand such a situation. That I would look over at my father in the moment between previews and feature and see, in the dimming lights, a face I would eventually forget.!We watched and we left, caught the bus back uptown. I am glad I went with my father, glad I saw inside the Ziegfeld. Then again, that’s what fathers are for. They take you to places you’ve never been. They go to a place you’ve never been.

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Untitled Marcia Arrieta !!She thinks the words will help her movement away from the desk.He thinks the sculpture will assist his understanding of the stars.“They are so close,” remarks the flower.

Molly Matalon

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Fistfight on the Old Cemetery Adam Moorad!Kim scored a contract with the Pentagon and wound up in Canada, penniless. He jimmied a vending machine and lived on ice cream sandwiches for thirty days. Christmas came and his wife was in town. She had recently acquired her venomous snake license and annunciated Latin classifications with a vague magnanimity. Kim thought she thought she was something special. And good for her, but he wanted to slug something. They ate dinner with a bunch of old Jews, sassy and smart, then retired to their sheets. She tasted of marzipan. He touched like a priest. Outside the tundra cracked and fluted gas. My upper body burned and knifed and my bones creaked. Summer walked about a hundred feet away. Rang the rain from her ponytail. I followed her shivering across the steppes until she turned around, looking at me like I was a crab who could not cognize the dialectic. You look like my love, but you got gray eyes. What’s wrong? You have to take a leak? Nothing was wrong with me. I was just an ex-Dave Matthews fan who once drove from Texas to Florida to see him. I puked into my hands. Woke up the next morning on a Greyhound in Miami, or wherever it was.

Lauren Britton

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Untitled Kevlin Henney !!He surrounded himself with quotes and clichés, words of advice that led him down a path of ever-decreasing word count, urging him to reduce, reconsider, reduce some more.!Antoine de Saint-Exupéry told him of reduction and perfection: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."!Reduce, reconsider, reduce some more. Impressions of sentences were left as he untethered their words from the pages of his notebook, removing first the punctuation then releasing the remaindered meaning, clause by clause.!Robert Pirsig had supplied him the instruments of perfection: "The pencil is mightier than the pen."!Reduce, reconsider, reduce some more. He brushed and blew the pages, graphite bound into rubber, word slivers scattered across his desk.!He worked into the night, Blaise Pascal granting him license and time: "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter."!Reduced, reconsidered, reducible no more. There was no question of word count.!Different readers would read into it as they wished, draw from it what they felt. The situation, the drama, the characters would all unfold in flow through the imagination of each, like a mirror, like a river, never twice the same, a perfection unspoilt by the clumsy commitment of word choice.!Done, he scrawled "Untitled" across the front cover, paused a moment, then erased it. In his moment of hesitation, Strunk and White had reminded him of necessity: "Omit needless words."Done, he placed the newly blank notebook into an envelope with his agent's address on the front.

!Nia Pellone

A Monologue from the Point of View of a Corgi in a Painting by the 43rd POTUS

Daniel Moore !!This disaster in oils was my idea. What I had in mind was a carefully realized subject inthe foreground, not unlike a Gerrit Dou or David de Coninck, juxtaposed against a simple background with some of Barney’s old toys, perhaps. Maybe a dead pigeon to suggest a return from a hunt.!But the execution here is all wrong, and the subject on my left. I assume that darksmudge is some kind of bear deliberately missing credible proportions.!Any artist can become trapped regurgitating the same theme. Especially when first starting out. These things only become a problem when the viewer feels little sense of artistic development. Louis Wain, for example, never got past cats with really big eyes. Coolidge could have done so, so much more if he only grew out of a childish delight in anthropomorphism.!An ex-Head of State is no different. I was trying to gently nudge him in a new direction. I can see now that a fully realized bodegón feast scene was asking a lot.!I *think* that’s supposed to be a Lab. !Putin had a Lab. One time at Buckingham Palace I gave her, Kori, the bacon and cream cheese crescent roll Karl Rove saved for Barney. Barney had a good sense of humor. I couldn’t see him carrying a grudge, or mentioning it to anyone as if it was a big deal…!

What I didn’t count on was such a slap-dash effort after a simple change in subject. It was a change for the better after all. Everyone knows a Terrier’s face cannot convey emotion. Have you ever seen one deliberately strike an expression worth capturing in oils? The kind of Coninck-inspired pose that begs (unintended) for a painter’s hand to draw attention to the ironic distance between artistic medium and reality? Of course not. Their heads are too big. And the matted fur destroys the illusion of movement.!Now I’m sure that object next to me mocking all Platonic ideals of canine is Kori. But the relationship between us, the picture’s hounding, to use the correct term, is still unclear.!What makes this piece so frustrating is how the Corgi normally inspires a sense of proportions. The muscular physique and broad chest can allow a novice to achieve far more than he deserves to. But first he must surrender to the forces he wishes to master one day—the canvas, the oil, the noble lineage of the Cardigan.!Then again, I suppose there are some interesting things happening here if you look at itas a playful interrogation of perspective. If you tilt your head to the right: I’m asking for a biscuit. Or maybe I want to go outside to do my business. It’s anyone’s guess. I might even be greeting a diplomat with a firm shake.!Still, none of it makes any sense if it’s a baroque still life we’re talking about. I should be the focal point, the champion returning after a gloriously successful chase to lord over his kills at his leisure. Perhaps by a fireplace.!Instead I look like clip art. I’m as stiff as an unused fire stoker. An untrained eye could mistake me for a piece of game presented for some meaner beast. The kind of ill-prepared entree a lab like Kori could not help feel enormously flattered by. !What strange vengeance did Barney seek in his final moments?

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Aubrey Stallard

!A Note to an EditorNels Hanson!Dear Editor,!You asked for a different kind of bio. My poem about the hungry shark that will appear in your magazine is from an unpublished collection of children’s poems, “What the Lizard Said,” which contains the candid statements of 30 different animals who have things on their minds. !A friend, the kind and talented wife of our kind doctor, has begun to beautifully illustrate the poems. The night before my wife and I first went to meet the artist at her home, I remembered a distant incident from childhood and discovered a buried scar masked by the faded mark across my ear lobe: !When we were boys, my cousin accidentally dropped my green wagon’s heavy tongue on my ear and I had to get stitches and later my cousin was very apologetic and gave me a green thin bamboo cane from the Fresno Fair and a tap dancer’s straw hat with a green band.!I realized I’d been happy, but that I’d never felt the same about the wagon.!Our friend’s community was near the sea, condominiums arranged around a pool and gym and restaurant. The shaded garden entrance displayed a bronze boy pulling a real green wagon, identical with mine, but aged, rusted through, like something recovered from a tomb, the way my wagon would surely look now if somewhere it still existed. !On the outer white walls of the recreation complex hung many two-foot-long wrought-iron sculptures of lizards. A small real lizard ran across my wife’s path as we started toward the patio. We had lunch outdoors and talked a little with our friend about the illustrations for the lizard book—she had to closely watch her small energetic daughter by the wading pool. !The next morning at home I went downstairs to make breakfast and an eight-inch spotted lizard with a long tail waited against the wall at the entrance to the kitchen, without moving, black eyes watching me without fear or apology, almost brashly, as if the house were his now and I was the uninvited guest. !Quietly I went back upstairs to get my wife but when we came down the lizard was gone and only a fresh dark dropping marked that it had ever been there.!A day later our artist friend took a picture of a vividly colored lizard outside her home. Then she saw another lizard cross in front of her on the sidewalk, as she arrived to pick up her daughter at a yoga class. The cross-legged teacher was holding up a glass jar to show the children a very tiny lizard she’d just captured. 11

Two days later in her backyard our friend found a huge tailless lizard that didn’t run away but let her pet it. She took pictures of it and sent them to us. Its fat tail was gone, just a short thumb where the old tail had started. You couldn’t tell if a new tail was slowly growing or if the stub of the old tail was all that would remain.!The artist wondered if the lizard were sick or injured, or if the effort to sprout another tail was costing too much energy. She made a bed for it and gave it fresh food and water but in the morning she saw that it had died. !The first lines to the lizard poem in our lizard book are:!

One day I found a lizard’s tail.I quickly put it in the mailAnd in a week the lizard spoke:“Don’t need the tail,” the lizard wrote.!“I drop one tail and grow anotherAs lizards use a single rudderTo chase the sun and catch the lightBefore today becomes the night.”

Although our title character is no more, we’ve agreed to continue our work and hope that a lizard that found its tail is watching us.!Sincerely,

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Heather Angier !!Sleepless and hungryI stand barefoot in dark kitchen: eatfrom recycled yogurt containerone organic homegrown baby redleftover wrinkled potato andcongratulate myself—this momentI waste nothing. 2:03 a.m.

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Nels HansonNel Hason’s fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Montreal Review, and other journals, and are in press at Tattoo Highway, The Milo Review, and Emerge Literary Journal.!Marcia Arrieta Marcia Arrieta lives on the canyon in Pasadena, California. She travels between language and art and has a penchant for islands.!Nia PelloneNia Pellone is an aspiring physician from Yonkers. You can find more of her photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/24322241@N02/!Thomas Mira y LopezThomas Mira y Lopez is currently pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in PANK, Green Briar Review, and on Ander Monson’s Essay Daily blog. He also works as the nonfiction editor for Sonora Review and assistant editor for Fairy Tale Review.

Adam Moorad Adam Moorad is a salesman & mountaineer. He is the author of four chapbooks and a novella. He lives in Brooklyn. Visit him here: adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com. !Daniel Moore Daniel Moore is the first to admit his name is way less interesting than Jonathan Safran Foer's. Also unlike Safran Foer, Daniel lives in Canada with his wife and two cats. He is not sure if Jonathan Safran Foer has any cats... It seems doubtful since he mentioned a dog in a bio once. !Lauren Britton Lauren Britton is a painter working in Westchester New York. She is interested in the stickiness of honey, the weight of a body, and tall, tall grasses and what may lurk within them.!Kevlin Henney Kevlin Henney writes shorts and flashes and drabbles of fiction. His work has previously appeared in print and online, in magazines and anthologies. He lives online and in Bristol, UK.

Peter Milne GreinerPeter Milne Greiner's poems and essays have appeared in Fence, OMNI Reboot, Leveler, The Operating System, Sound Literary Magazine, Spiral Orb, Poem Tiger and elsewhere. In July of 2013 he sent a poem into space through the Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel Valley, California.!Aubrey Stallard Aubrey Stallard grew up in New Orleans, where she acquired a predilection for the peculiar and nebulous. She lives in New York, where she learned to document it with a camera. Her portfolio can be found at www.aubreystallard.com!John Graziosa John Graziosa is from the Bronx. You can find some of his drawings here: redgraz.tumblr.com!Molly Matalon Molly Matalon was born in 1991 in sunny South Florida and now lives in Brooklyn NY. She is working towards a BFA in Photography at the School of Visual Arts. She identifies as a lil punk-rocker-tattooed lady who loves puppies, palm trees, ice cream, and making pictures.!

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Heather AngierSince earning an MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, Heather Angier's poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Dirty Napkin, The Sow's Ear, So to Speak, Cider Press Review, Literary Mama, Caduceus, Pirene's Fountain, Enizagam and Switchback. Her chapbook about scoliosis, "Crooked", was recently published by Dancing Girl Press.!Nia Pellone Nia Pellone is an aspiring physician from Yonkers. You can find more of her photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/24322241@N02/!GW Duncanson GW Duncansonmakes sequential art, films and music. He can be found at www.cash-moneycartoons.tumblr.com.!Robert Trevisan Robert Trevisan is currently a student at Hunter College. He spends most of his time chewing sugar free gum and daydreaming about chocolate ice cream.http://www.flickr.com/photos/24322241@N02/!!!Carolyn Keogh, Founding Editor

Miniature Magazine Issue 3, 2014!!