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News

Mad Year

published by Retort Magazine, on December 21st, 2011

Ok, I apologise for the lack of updates to Retort Magazine this year. Seems life got in the way. I spent the year studying full-time, working full-time and full-time exhausted. I am not entirely sure whether it will be possible to continue publishing in 2012. Retort has been online for over 10 years now and opportunities to develop and grow Retort have not eventuated. I will keep you posted as to whether Retort will be back for another year or whether it is destined for the literary scrap heap. In the mean-time, thank you to all the regular readers and contributors for a decade of fantastic art and literature.

Merry new year

Brentley
editor@retortmagazine.com

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Poetry

Three poems by Luke Skoza

published by Retort Magazine, on July 19th, 2011
Rust

Dear Evee, my love for you, was fake and invented
just like this poem masquerading as a letter.
You do not do any more, We were
a white tennis shoe in which I lived
like a toe, able to move but trapped
to your foot, afraid to speak or breathe.
Today, my neighbor tossed a nail ridden
tire on his greasy green lawn, and then I knew it was
your beauty that kept me inside the tennis shoe.
I think beauty binds as well as a deflated
tire secures a wheel, and love strains to inflate
and fill this gap between rim and rubber.
Nothing not even love is permanent.
Nails and rust prove this so, as well as
the uselessness of beauty, without love
to support it. Beauty is a rim coated in speckled rust
like blotches of dull red paint on a gray wall
kept complete by a leaking tire once full of love’s air.
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Poetry

Three poems by A.J. Huffman

published by Retort Magazine, on April 5th, 2011

White Shadows

Desire is the first step
to destruction.
Its light is unreality.
All shining and golden.
But a touch reveals
the perpetual blackness underneath.
And it sticks to your mind
like glue.
Eating the corners
of your memories.
Until they become hard enough
for your eyes to recognize.
They are your pain.
And they will keep you.
Sane.
And shaded.
From the path
you don’t belong on.

——————–

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Poetry

Fat Venus: Three Poems by Danny Pelletier

published by Retort Magazine, on April 5th, 2011

I. Venus of Willendorf at Her Toilet

the ugliest cook in the college café
wears whiter through the white of a chef
coat, like snow on an un- and shoveled walk, (a shift
of color subtle as an areola,) a white brassier
to contain breasts mottled with a soiree
of molefrecklezits, these
oddly decorated Faberge tits she’s
hidden to hide a spill of wine, a cabernet
birthmark.
to clip
her bush she sits on the can, hedges
how much to loose into the flush, loose labia
unsuckled, unsucked, her cunt unhow-a-snake-dredges
-a-toilet-by-her-husband’s-snoring-tongued.
if this were Arabia
no more snake charmer’d she be, no Scheherazade her clit.

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Short Stories

A short story by Greg Bogaerts

published by Retort Magazine, on December 8th, 2010

TAXI STORY

BY

GREG BOGAERTS

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Poetry

Four poems by Jacob Russell

published by Retort Magazine, on December 8th, 2010

Dog With His Keen Ears
Passyunk Between Morris and Tasker

Puddle after three days rain
bark split and peeling base of tree

Botanical
Disease
hidden
under the street
under the skin
Grins in reflected light
there’ll be no green buds this year he says
the way death does on bright spring days
so quietly
you think no more
than passing clouds

not even that dog
who stops to drink

with his keen ears will hear him
when he calls

…

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