by Lisa Martinovic
Despite a generation of sensitivity trainings and multicultural studies, an astonishing number of people still feel emboldened to express their misbegotten bigotry in very public arenas. Cops and vigilantes alike are caught on tape throwing down racial slurs before they kill, Rush Limbaugh has no compunction about “slut-shaming” for a national audience, and classroom bullies drive a steady stream of gay youth to suicide. In the face of such madness we may be tempted to question the wisdom of the old nursery rhyme:
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.
That’s what we were taught as children, but as adults we’ve learned a more nuanced understanding of the power of words. We recognize that to call an African-American a nigger, a woman a cunt, or a gay man a faggot is not only insulting and bigoted, it wounds the psyche of the person who’s been verbally accosted.
Need this be so?
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by Lisa Martinovic
Having suffered a series of calamities
so long and varied as to comprise a statistical impossibility
I cling the tenuous hope that
surely
my life cannot get worse
then my computer crashes
and I am plunged headlong into a canyon of despair
deep and unfathomable as string theory
landing with an inelegant splat, I am an upended bug
flailing fruitlessly and beset
by larger insects who gnaw greedily on my exposed viscera
there is no point trying to resurrect this heap
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by Lisa Martinovic
Fashion Apocalypse
Exene pioneered the wearing of Saran wrap snug around one’s wrists and elbows. She had always been fashion forward, but this was a trend that wouldn’t really take off until the first year after Apocalypse. By then Exene had moved on to cardboard hats on which she drew daisies using nubs of coal.
The end of the world is no reason to stop honoring one’s creative impulses. That was Exene’s motto.
Wexler was a gleaner. These days, who wasn’t? He first spied Exene warming her tiny hands over a propane flame in the crumbling entrance to a one-time BART station. So captivated was he by her green eyes and the fact of her missing incisors that he pulled his hands out of the rubble, stood up, and stared.
Exene, ever the coquette, dipped her head towards him, revealing that indulgent daisy hat.
And he just
couldn’t.
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