The Cenacle | 97 | October 2016 *Just Released*

[cenacle]

The Cenacle | 97 | October 2016
Reading link: https://issuu.com/scriptorpress/docs/cenacle_97_october_2016
Download link: http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/97_october_2016.pdf
[Size = 6.8 MB]

Hello everyone,

Finally released is Cenacle  | 97 | October 2016. Released overdue, in these strange in-between days before we see how bad Trump's America is going to be. Let us NEVER take elections for granted again in the U.S. This new issue's fine contents include:   

From Soulard's Notebooks:
[Sample]
I will miss you as President. Miss writing to you, like this, even if I were to choose to write to you again. You are a good man, Barack, & I feel very fortunate to have been a witness to your time of leadership. I suspect it will go on in other ways next year & beyond.

Feedback on Cenacle 96:
[Sample]
This issue's photographs are magnificent. The colors are rich and the subject matter is compelling and curious all at once. Well done and delightful. [Charlie Beyer]

Poetry by Judih Haggai:
[Sample]
wordless history
between tractor trails
old coins and seashells

Notes from New England by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Sample] So decided to reach all the way back to 1981, when I was 17, & visit my self every October since. See where I was, how I was, what I was doing. Who I was. Create a kind of composite story. Not a complete one. But more like a representative one.

Poetry by Colin James:
[Sample]
I carried a cute little birdhouse
with a retractable bobbing head
not everywhere but to dubious locals,
roadhouses mostly, and seedy atmospheric dives.

Fiction by Tom Sheehan:
[Sample]
Jehrico knew what he was, and right from his first pick-up, a token-type horseshoe. He was a collector of things tossed aside, and Jehrico assumed that the Indian woman he was looking upon had been thrown aside, like so many of the tossed parts he had retrieved, and made something of in his foraging about the Old West. Which was, indeed, his land of discovery and recovery. In fact, the token-type horseshoe, at his insistence, was made into a Bowie knife by a Mexican blacksmith whose father had fought at the Alamo, and came away with stories of Jim Bowie.

Travel Journal by Nathan D. Horowitz:
[Sample] —and drank the divine language, rich and bitter like the fruit of the tree of knowledge itself. I stood up with a grimace. I observed the linguistic surroundings, the lang-scape. Beneath a tree made of language, I found a twig bearing dried leaves that in their drying had curled up like withered brown hands. I sat down with the twig for further study. I noticed that the leaves were teeming with a miniscule language of black ants. In a little nook, a cave-like fold of leaf, was a hunting spider like a tiny gray monkey with too many legs and eyes. We stared at each other until we lost our fear. When I turned my head to say "Dave, look at this," the spider jumped onto the hair on my chest, explored for a moment, jumped on the ground and was gone.

Poetry by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Sample]
I hmmm, as so often before.
I hmmm, for all they've shown me.
I hmmm, for what I have to do.
I hmmm, for how much I love them.
I hmmm, for how much I love this world.
I hmmm, for how I will find a way to save it.

Prose-Poetry by Victor Vanek:
[Sample]
There is one story that has always stuck in my head, as a half-remembered dream will do sometimes. It's like when a snatch of beautiful song stays with you, but you can never remember the end of it. Like when you can sing the whole of the song but can't remember the words until they come out of your mouth, almost as if by magick.

Prose by Charlie Beyer:
[Sample] My pen has been slathering words designed to politely confute the asinine local municipal bureaucrats, in an attempt to save my ass from digging my grave deeper. I have taken up groveling obsequiously for mercy to these pricks. The "cat incident" fell upon me from the cosmos at a time of intense other complications. Life was cruel and dark. To say the following is a bad whine is rather understated. This is a whole rotten vineyard.

Classic Poetry by Seamus Heaney:
[Sample]
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

Bags End Book #6: The Grand Scheme of Liberation!, Part 1 [fiction] by Algernon Beagle:
[Sample] Some guys live in fantasylands where most are nice & helpfull & all. Not your short but diligent pal Algernon Beagle. In mah homeland of Bags End, friends & enemies are usually found in one scary package after another. Among the scaryest is that real-live talking pillow named Betsy Bunny Pillow. Her story is famous & familiar.

A Brief History of LSD in the Twenty-First Century by Henrik Dahl:
[Sample] According to psychedelic researcher Teri Krebs, people have used "at least half a billion doses over the years." However, despite the fact that huge numbers of people have taken acid, exceptionally few speak openly about their experiences. Even within contemporary psychedelia there are very few outspoken acid advocates. This is not to say that there are no exceptions. For example, in her piece "There is no hiding with LSD" published in The Guardian in 2011, writer and lecturer Dr. Susan Blackmore described LSD as "the ultimate psychedelic." But even if most people still speak in a hushed tone about LSD, its legacy is huge, and as most acidheads can verify, its influence is seen pretty much "everywhere" in our western culture.

Labyrinthine [a new fixtion] by Raymond Soulard, Jr.:
[Sample] "And sometimes I just feel like I'm walking blind through the world, wishing I could make a valley for all my loved ones to live together & maybe, oh you know, open up the valley to others. Random guy walks in & says, I love your writing, man, & I say to him, I love your writing, man, & we hug each other affectionately, & it seems as though I'm left wondering what does it mean to be bound by space & time, by finitudes of memories, by the affections that wax & wane in the human heart, & the miracle of the greener world, & the miracle of music, & the miracle of breathing in, breathing out, & keeping somehow, some way, by years & miles & years & miles, your heart open to all."

Email comments at editor@scriptorpress.com

Peace,
Raymond