Editors' Notes

Maria Damon and Michelle Greenblatt
Jim Leftwich and Michelle Greenblatt
Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt

A Visual Conversation on Michelle Greenblatt's ASHES AND SEEDS with Stephen Harrison, Monika Mori | MOO, Jonathan Penton and Michelle Greenblatt

Letters for Michelle: with work by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jeffrey Side, Larry Goodell, mark hartenbach, Charles J. Butler, Alexandria Bryan and Brian Kovich

Visual Poetry by Reed Altemus
Poetry by Glen Armstrong
Poetry by Lana Bella
A Eulogic Poem by John M. Bennett
Elegic Poetry by John M. Bennett
Poetry by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
A Eulogy by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Joel Chace
A Spoken Word Poem and Visual Art by K.R. Copeland
A Eulogy by Alan Fyfe
Poetry by Win Harms
Poetry by Carolyn Hembree
Poetry by Cindy Hochman
A Eulogy by Steffen Horstmann
A Eulogic Poem by Dylan Krieger
An Elegic Poem by Dylan Krieger
Visual Art by Donna Kuhn
Poetry by Louise Landes Levi
Poetry by Jim Lineberger
Poetry by Dennis Mahagin
Poetry by Peter Marra
A Eulogy by Frankie Metro
A Song by Alexis Moon and Jonathan Penton
Poetry by Jay Passer
A Eulogy by Jonathan Penton
Visual Poetry by Anne Elezabeth Pluto and Bryson Dean-Gauthier
Visual Art by Marthe Reed
A Eulogy by Gabriel Ricard
Poetry by Alison Ross
A Short Movie by Bernd Sauermann
Poetry by Christopher Shipman
A Spoken Word Poem by Larissa Shmailo
A Eulogic Poem by Jay Sizemore
Elegic Poetry by Jay Sizemore
Poetry by Felino A. Soriano
Visual Art by Jamie Stoneman
Poetry by Ray Succre
Poetry by Yuriy Tarnawsky
A Song by Marc Vincenz


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Exit the Heroes, or, in Praise of Cowardice
Part 2

The terrain leveled out; the land became flatter, and yet the mountains shot up through the earth like frustrated rapists. Weeks passed—a month, two months. In the woodlands of Vinaspera, some of us, regardless of age or musculature or level of slaughter previously enacted on the fields of carnage, could be seen sniffing the blossoms of cherry trees with unconcealed enjoyment at the arrival of those soft, fragrant spring pedals. As the spring advanced, and we could feel summer approaching, new symbolic breezes, surprisingly amenable to the culture of cowardice we had been cultivating, blew in from various twilights. By Autumn, our time of service itself would be butchered, and we might then be able find peace waiting for us in such acts as penetrating our wives' vaginas or enjoying rituals with our loved ones—gathering advice from the older generations, or playing with our children and imparting to them strength and wisdom.

Despite this consolation, which was vague, unformed, and never explicitly shared between one another, our cowardly retreat had nonetheless surprised us, humbled us. Many of us were given to shame and melancholy, and wandered around the plains of Giademia at the mercy of a terrible ennui. The arrival of summer reminded us all, impressed man, mercenary, and professional soldier alike, that the beginning of the autumn—when our requirement to the king was to be fulfilled—though still far away, was nonetheless not too far away, located on the other side of one season's span. Like an endless hailstorm of shields raining down on imperial courtyards, the thought resounded through our spirit: if we survived the duration of our service, there were homes, wives and children we might just see again. Life, however—a beating of the heart, intact internal organs, a healthy, functioning, un-severed spinal cord, and an attached head—would be necessary for this reunion with our families to be accomplished.

Command from home headquarters acted quicker than we might have thought. The sovereign ordered the disruption of our contingent's autonomous homogeneity (we had, after all, acted as an unbroken, independent unit for more than 3 years), and new warriors came to join us, while some of our own left us, ordered away from us by imperial authority. Displaced from their position in a distant contingent and ordered to join ours, these newcomers were, if nothing else, inconvenienced, and regarded us with unconcealed disgust and derision. They were grumpy in general, too. Nobody likes to have their routine interrupted. It was never stated outright among us, but these newcomers had almost certainly been sent to us in order to restore our sense of honor and courage. Or, at least challenge what had started to resemble the borderline smugness of our cowardice. They were disruptive, clamorous, arrogant, but more than anything, disdainful. I felt far more anger toward them than I did the dangerous mercenaries we had quite wisely fled from. It also irritated me to think of the king's advisors talking about us back at home like we were a bunch of women, and my murderous instincts, which I will admit had during the daytime hours been absent for so long, lain dormant like a sleeping rapist, returned to me briefly during moments upon awakening to the insomniac moonlight of the early morning hours. Each day I found myself utterly disgusted and depressed, and I fantasized about slitting my own throat, or falling on my sword in a manly way, and letting my body experience terrible agony before my life ended, my blood ebbing away from me in a prolonged emission of leaky gore. But both forms of suicide seemed far too painful, as well as irreversible and, with respect to the physical health of my body, non-repeatable. Despite my fury, I found myself quaking just at the thought of getting a blister.

But now, after a few weeks, things have changed. The effect of the new arrivals on us men as a whole has been undeniable: right now, as we march through the fields, I observe the recently-arrived Priasphalatius. Savage and grim, Priasphalatius strides among us, violence smoldering in each of his steps: legs as though they have annexed metal and fused it to their own motion; a sword arm so thick it looks custom-made to beat elephants into submission. His fingers clasp around the handle of his battle ax as though they are longing for an auxiliary sphere of existence, one where mass slaughter is a matter of routine.

Though aesthetically attractive, the weapons he wields are not made for decoration, but for the enactment of monstrous atrocity. The injudicious risk of his person on the bloody fields of carnage has left Priasphalatius' flesh a pretext for the formation of scar tissue. His face, too, is scarred from battle—multiple crescents and long, deep cuts are incised also on his half-burnt scalp and throat. His arms are stout appendages that appear unafraid, as if they are daring all of mankind, including the body they are a part of, to mutilate them further. As is so frequently the case, his buttocks are inversely sublime. Firm, muscular, though not without that yielding fleshiness, they are a man's man's buttocks—ready to do their part in exterminating any enemies, but soft in moments of muscular relaxation, where back and calves have no cause for straining.

Priasphalatius was reassuring to me because I felt an association with him fuse the two of us together through our shared bellicosity and longing to bash and pummel our enemies. He was on my side, after all, and I felt empowered by being on the same side as the nefarious one personifying the mercenaries. Now one of these demons was on our side, and that led me to hope that our contingent could reassemble its fighting spirit. For, apart from his buttocks, which were too attractive to be entirely ruthless, Priasphalatius too appeared to have been regurgitated from a pit of infernal machines. He too had seemed spawned from a new race of weaponry that had, in turn, spliced the human genome, grown flesh and become self-aware—if, it should be admitted, only moderately so. I doubt he can count to ten.

His mind was one specifically and exclusively adapted, fine-tuned, and ultimately intent upon the blood-red annihilation that results from hacked limbs and the leaky gore of armed conflict. As our small army continued its march, Priasphalatius would fall back from the vanguard to within the bulk of the army, having grown bored by so much marching without combat. Dispirited, he became pensive and given to melancholy. If at camp the crisp branch of an oak was snapped in two to provide fire for a pyre or to roast a deer, Priasphalatius' ears would prick up hopefully, as if in this breakage he detected the sound of human bones being crushed.

I had seen him in action years before. He had shown himself to be deliberate, haughty, and resolute in his bravery. Grim and fierce, he was always the first to charge into battle. Many times I had seen him launch himself impetuously in front of us, hard-set on amputating his enemies' limbs through the skillful, seasoned application of his battle ax. Holding it aloft, he would roar from our front ranks into the field of combat, his torso arising from our battle formations like a foreign body rejecting its host, hurling itself in front of our charging battalion like a tumor that has sprouted limbs of mobility impatient to try themselves out, or a charging bridegroom anxious to track down and rape his fleeing wife. Priasphalatius seemed resolved in battle on finding the purpose of his existence anew, to meet the enemy and cross steel in vigorous conflict. His greaves, propulsive wings attached to his legs, would flash behind him; majestic and undeniable, he would outdistance us rapidly, as our own forces charged ahead, struggling to keep up with his seven foot frame. This enthusiasm for attack was mimicked in his manner of fighting; those of the enemy who wanted to surrender would be better off retreating—Priasphalatius' ethics were shaky, his lust for slaughter, unshakable.

Priasphalatius, in joining us, was accompanied by his half-cousin, Tranch of the Violated Maiden. Like Bencetheleus of Neomia, Tranch had gods in his genetic material; his father, Grion, was half god, but this half had become altered due to a dependency on opiates. The story went that the drugs had been sneakily administered to Grion by a race of clandestine sirens from the isles of Grantikedes Minor. Grion had spent so many years as a prisoner of love in those spas, and his addiction to those opiate-based aphrodisiacs had become so severe, that when he escaped his captors, it took him years before he was able to shake his dependence on both the drugs and all those acts of sexual passion. As a love slave amid such attractive sirens, even while addicted to those potent sexual stimulants, he didn't know how good he'd had it. His misogyny, not understandably, became unbounded once he left them, perhaps because he so suddenly felt himself incapable of experiencing erotic pleasure. That is the mentality that led him to rape the shepherdess Niandra; an act of desperation committed as an attempt to locate his manhood, it was through this violation that his son Trencaphasius was begotten.

Trencaphasius was especially brutal, and of his various exploits all one had to do was inspect his features. His countenance was mutilated almost beyond recognition, leaving the exterior of the man a grim reminder of his past. Trencaphasius, like his father, had fought the effects produced by mysterious powers of enchantment. Like father, like son, if only obliquely. As a child, Trencaphasius had bathed in the waters of a particular spring contaminated with the vaginal contributions of a strange breed of nymph-ogres. For this reason his armor, apparently just by being in contact with his body, would at unpredictable moments glow spontaneously, alternating from one minute to the next between a liquid blue and a transparent green. Equally curious, once every few weeks he would suddenly grimace, and immediately his entire body would turn a curiously bright but subdued mauve. I remembered how startled I had been when I first saw this myself five or six years ago, in the lands of East Ulobram where we had been journeying toward that fateful conflict with the Dalions. The warrior captain Hesperides the Yeoman had mocked Trencaphasius, whose face had just begun its colorful alterations.

"Trencaphasius," Hesperides laughed heartily, "it looks like your feminine instinct has gotten the better of you again! Your normal color, though scarred so savagely by the fire and steel of war's grim butchery, was at least human, and those scars were at least honorable. One can tell by this new color you have assumed that your grandfather was a god. You clearly are no human! Now, indeed, you glow as though you were a woman—indeed, this pinkness is hardly manly. Soon, I fear, you will turn into a butterfly and flit away to join the weavers and seamstresses at the loom!"

The men laughed heartily at sallies like these of Hesperides, who continued on remorselessly in this vein for hours on end, until gradually the mauve hue would leave Trencaphasius' skin and he would reassume his normal color. All the while, suffering these indignities, he had been grinding his teeth with fury, no alternative left him but to endure his commander's cruel taunts. His mauve jaw line stayed clamped shut, and yet he knew he could not counterattack his commander. But considering it now, I think that Hesperides, with his manly derision, had served a cultural function that bound us together as men and as soldiers, reminding us all that we were warriors, not meant to show mercy at another's weakness.

More weeks passed, and due to the time spent after the infusion of the new warriors, we inwardly rebelled against our panicked flight from the mercenaries. We hadn't had a chance to fight again since that craven escape, but it seemed we regarded that act of retreat as an oddity—a benign aberration that would go away if we ignored it. It was the gods who had played that trick on us, we told ourselves—it was the gods that had robbed us of our manly spirit.

However, the opportunity to prove the legitimacy of our fighting instincts recurred on one fatefully depressing day: our battalion was climbing the slope of a large hill. Looking up the hill's crest I saw that our front ranks had ceased progressing, accumulating awkwardly, bunching up and then spreading out to the sides of the crest like a torrent of water, brought about by the spring rain, spreads to the sides as it flows directly and violently into a dike. When I reached the men at the crest, I could see what had given our soldiers pause: there were about 200 men—truly beastly—who were glowering up at us from the bottom of the hill. We recognized them as a tribe of the Priangeles, a nomadic group of insurgents that had been an annoyance to our king; these barbarians he would very much like to see us exterminate—in fact, exterminations like these were one of the reasons for our small army's existence, for the Priangeles were terrible thieves who had stolen many tons of wheat from farmsteads at the furthest perimeter of the imperial territory. We didn't need to think too hard over what needed to be done here—the burglaries committed by the Priangeles made them ripe for easy slaughter.

Yet they looked up at us from their imprudently located camp fearlessly. Some of them were naked. This reminded me that the Priangeles were famous for their mental instability; their eyes looked up at us in that startling, limitless-seeming hatred the mentally ill are sometimes capable of conveying so vividly. Though they were two thirds our number, they looked mean. Some of them—even without having put on the war armor that is taken for granted as a matter of course during the hack and grind of battle, and which would have helped to at least partially shield their scraggly bodies from our arrows—strode boldly up the hill to meet us in combat.

Boldly may not be the right word. This was an act brazen past the point of stupidity. It was suicidal, really: our very vulnerable assailants not only suffered no mean deficit of armor, but terribly inferior weapons. We had an archer for half of their number, none of which were properly protected, as well the tactical advantage of hundreds of yards' elevation. Since we were on top of the hill, and the Priangeles were on the bottom, they were all incredibly exposed to any speeding arrows we might hurl downward at them. However, fifty angry Priangeles had already begun running up the hill toward us. There were more of these brutes walking behind their companions, carrying the rudimentary weapons, all different, hand-made, jutting out like miniature totem poles.

We turned in the other direction, and ran away from them. We ran like hell, back down the hill we had just climbed, down the slopes into the gullies and through the streams and into the plains. We followed the paths into the woods and into the clearings and then we continued running. Our war boots left footprints indicative of terror on the soft soil of streambeds. We let our feet ensure our safety by means of putting distance between the Priangeles and ourselves. Our rapidly beating hearts surged in our chests as our footsteps thundered through the plains. We ran: we crossed the borderland between danger and safety, and headed for the latter. Those nut jobs could have hurt us.


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