Monthly Dispatch #8 — December 2023

A letter from the editor[s]

Just a little stocking-filler as December was a short month for us. But we’ll be back in the new year with tonnes of new stuff … to say nothing of our plans to hold an event in Paris next October. Follow on Twitter for updates on that …

So merry Christmas, happy holidays, bonnes fêtes de fin d’année, felices fiestas, etc. — and we’ll see you in 2024 …

The Editor[s]

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ANONYMOU[S]

Spleen & Avenue — ANON.

“Zip codes average around eighty-five square miles. Enough to lay our corpses end to end like stolen pearls. [Every pearl: the spoil of theft.] …”

Oxyvos — ANON.

“In 1992, I found oxyvos printed for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary. Hidden between oxyuriasis (n.) infestation with pinworms and oyer (n.) an assize …”

Fiction

Perfumed Night — Haroldo Conti (tr. Jon Lindsay Miles)

“A human life is a miserable rough draft, a meagre handful of sorrows which fit in a handful of lines. Yet now and then, just as there are whole years of a long and heavy darkness, a minute of a man’s life can be of a dazzling light. Señor Pelice had this minute and this light …”

Haroldo Conti (1925-1976) was born in small-town Buenos Aires province and lived most of his adult years in the Argentine capital. His fictions give witness to the nobility of ordinary human lives and the significant force of environment. Conti was detained and murdered by the military junta and appears in the list of the permanently disappeared.

Jon Lindsay Miles lives in rural southern Spain. Publishing as Immigrant Press, he has made translations from two of Haroldo Conti’s four novels and from a personal selection of his stories, from which “Perfumed Night” is taken.

Abeyance [excerpt] — Ian MacClayn

“One midwinter night the warm pitying foehn winds came from over the mountains to collapse upon the shin-deep snows of the institution grounds, wherein his ward Joseph woke to an inscription on his left eye …”

Ian MacClayn‘s fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review.

Essays & Features

Queer Reverie, or, What’s Behind Sebastian’s Loincloth — Francis Keaton

“A brief description of the work: a Dionysiac ((effeminate))
(((queer object of desire))) man clutches a tree,
Sighing as his body presses backwards and forwards against the trunk,
Peeling off a loincloth that’s meant to hide his penis,
As arrows penetrate and fissure his toned abdomen.”

Francis Keaton is a Neo-Victorian transfag, located in London, and can be conacted via Instagram @francis.keaton and on Twitter @venus_as_a_boy3.

by Frank Garrett

Better Shopping Through Living IV: Mise-en-scène for Robert Irwin

“Slowly the evening strips from his finest cloth,
that for him a circle of ancient trees holds up;
you survey: and the realms from you withdraw,
one skywarddarting and one that drops …”

Writer and translator Frank Garrett shops in Dallas, Texas, and is essays editor at Minor Literature[s]. His series Better Shopping Through Living will appear monthly. He was transfigured in Marfa by Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) in January 2020.

From the Vaults

Three Beers — Aaron Fahey [26/05/2021]

“The train station was crowded. Flashes of the floor showed black slush dragged into the scuffle from outside. Everybody was trying to get home. There was a train about to leave for Leeds that I could have taken, but I changed my mind and waved it away. I was drunk from the pub across the road. Work drinks. For hours people who ignored me in the office grabbed my shoulders and said don’t go, don’t go, then finally go on then, go on, Merry Christmas …”

Aaron Fahey was raised on the Isle of Man and lives in North London. His fiction has appeared in Open Pen. He is currently working on a collection of stories about men who make terrible decisions. Twitter: @Aaron_Fahey 

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Coming in 2024 …

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, R.G. Vašíček, Jon Cone, Brigitte de Valk, Isabella Streffen, Jake Romm, Max Blecher, Daniel Adler, Kirsten Mosher, C.D. Rose, Jacqueline Feldman, Seph Murtagh, Frank Garret, and much, much more …