ISSUE ONE
FALL 2020
R&R:
RECOVERY & RESILIENCE
Namasté, Mega Shark
By Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
“Mussels” by Rachel Singel
I
None of us are corpses yet and I throw shade,
Miss Jean Brodie-style shade, at the young women giggling
as the yogi tells us this is our time, the time
we have earned through choosing to work our bodies
in a 130 degree heat index, in 80% humidity.
The minutes tick away as I seethe at their Lululemons,
even though I know this is like importing harlequin
ladybeetles to control aphids, planting Tree of Heavens
to prevent hillside erosion. Correctives cause their own
misalignments and in them we miss our own little deaths.
II
This world is an irritating and irrational one
full of racism, corporate colonialism, and jeggings,
which don’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge
their stirrup pants roots. My favorite punk rocker/
animal lover/suicide said that the world made no sense.
So many days I agree with her. Other days I will choose
to misinterpret my second favorite suicide, Nicolas Chamfort,
and shout, “the heart must either break or turn to lead,”
because homographs are God’s gift to the despondently hopeful.
Then I come out a leader, swinging, like a wild-souled cephalopod
I’ve seen in Christ-like graffiti where a two-armed figure
enjoins, “If you ain’t got no one to hate on, hate on me.
Drunk Octopus wants to fight.”
III
Thank you, savior cephalopod, tip the tables
of the moneychangers in the temple of my hate
so I may no longer store it up, slow loris style,
in a gland on my elbow. My first victim was always
the closest, like a megalodon rousing from a million-year sleep
to destroy the nuclear sub that woke her before hitting
an innocent 747 and the not-so-innocent suicide hotspot,
the Golden Gate Bridge. She is as symbolic as the Navy
using the retired supercarrier USS America as target practice.
IV
Are you ready to stop target practicing on yourself?
Ready to find your inner MegaShark to troll the oceans
of the schoolyards and malls for jerks, scumbags,
and others who psychologist R.D. Laing says do violence
in the name of love? Can you stop fighting the giant octopus
long enough to team up and form the Justice League of Bitches?
Can you take Laing as a mantra and not believe that being
in formation means doing right? You may abbreviate it,
“if everyone jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you,”
if that’s more helpful. If not, can you at least make the shape
of the thing? We will all be corpses soon enough.
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, originally from Columbus, Ohio, lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she edits confidential documents for the government. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and Pleiades. Her chapbook, Fine, Considering, about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, is available from Rinky Dink Press. She serves as a reader for Emrys.
Rachel Singel
Rachel Singel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville. Rachel grew up on a small farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013. Rachel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, and Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia and will continue her research at Proyecto’ace, an Artist-in-Residence Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Summer 2021. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private, public, and museum collections.
