“The nighttime sky is all about yesterday”
– Robin Schwartz, Night Swimming
Parked there, in the silent fade-out
of a motel’s parking lot, three cars:
a 57’ Fairlaine, its front grill, ridged
with five long metal lines and taillights
that resembled a startled vireo’s eyes;
a 66’ Oldsmobile Cutlass, its face
squinted, and chomping fresh silver,
and a 1973 Buick Electa, its rear end,
slim-finned, and rectangular taillights
swallowed into the long bumper.
Something magical in these cars –
angels creeping past them; summer’s
fertile design – at the outskirts of
everything; these cars, like chapels.…
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Philip Elliott is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Into the Void, an award-winning international literary magazine founded in 2016. He’s featured in dozens of journals in several countries and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Please tell readers about Into the Void, located in Toronto, Canada, and shortlisted for Best Magazine in the 2018 Saboteur Awards.
Into the Void is a literary magazine publishing the very best fiction, flash, poetry, CNF, and visual art it comes across, but it is a lot more than that, too. Our mission at Into the Void is to be a publication where diversity is valued and art is treasured. Our editors read only submissions that have identification information removed to further this mission of fairness and equality.…
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There is a chug in her lungs
put there by robot musicians
who told her she composed
of machinery, but never of girl.
I learn to rebuild instruments
Of more honey and flesh designs.
She is beauty, she is girl, she
is more than a piece of machine —
She is a piece of a red meat
topped in the sweetest cut
of pepper. Fat juices of her
deserve to run down creamy chins —
She rebuilds herself —
converts liquid fuel to blood,
and oil to hemoglobin.
She doesn’t know anatomy
but she knows his roommate,
flesh — the huge metropolis
selling body parts on street markets.
We buy the rest of her from a cart,
glitches of limbs wrapped in
peach and milk until she is skin
tumbling down bone like an avalanche.…
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It would be brie en croute that evening, then—a wheel of brie, sliced in half and stuffed with walnuts and cranberries, rebuilt and wrapped in puff pastry. She removed it from the oven and dipped her finger in the fine trickle of rich, unctuous grease that ran from a corner of the croute and brought it to her mouth, and groaned in simple ecstasy, and wondered if the guests had smelled it yet from the dining room above and if not, how quickly she could eat the entire thing all to herself in gluttonous bliss. She swallowed the rush of saliva that flooded her mouth as she sliced the fuyu persimmons into thick chips and similarly, the flat, crusty bread alongside it, and plated both around the croute on a faux-rustic cutting board the charlatans upstairs grew so frothingly tumescent over, a homey display for a winter home used four weeks out of the year—four weeks during which she had to wear pants as she cooked, since the master and mistress would be in residence and entertaining.…
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Levis Keltner is an author, editor, educator, and musician from Chicago but currently living in Austin, Texas. He is the editor-in-chief at Newfound and teaches writing at Texas State University. His new book, Into That Good Night, was published last month by Skyhorse Publishing and his short work has appeared in Entropy Magazine and Bull: Men’s Fiction.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Keltner about his road to publication, how misleading marketing and expectations can hurt a creative work’s reception, the joys of somber music, and much more!
– Levis Keltner…
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It is January, the month of resolutions. You have resolved to become one of the people that drinks spinach, owns multi-vitamins of the non-gummy variety, and does yoga at six in the morning. You are here because you want to be, or so you keep telling your bleary-eyed self as you walk into your first class at Namastay Awhile, desperately clutching a large coffee with only one sugar, please, thank you very much. You are going to be healthy.
Slipping off your sandals at the door, you wind through the maze of oiled, humming yogis to an empty spot, unrolling your brand new mat with a sticky thwop on the studio’s hardwood. The unforgivingly acrid smell of never-been-used plastic wafts around the small room. You receive sympathetic smiles from experienced yoga students who are secretly cursing the New Year, waiting for the thicket of resolution-makers to be weeded out by laziness so they can again practice comfortably.…
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At the funeral home, sad figures murmur
patting one another on the back, gently
the way we soothe children
gripping each other’s hands, reluctant to let go
then moving on to the next
as if underwater
in no hurry to say good-bye
to our casketed friend
his cooled hands folded, a crucifix on his chest
a still life framed in black and white,
a boxed gift nested in tissue paper.
And why stop there?…
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