Some poetry, as Matt Mullins reveals his favorite work from Issue Eight:
“Gregory Sherl’s ‘The Oregon Trail sold death without caskets’ is that rare type of poem that collapses worlds to make the world again, only to kill that new world and purposely leave it to rot. This poem pixelates like the chunky graphics of its throwback educational video game namesake. By which I mean you better stand back, way back in your mind’s eye, to get the full sense of everything that’s going on here: The process of game-play from which the poem-world unscrolls to imply some form of now and where in our electric age. The language and things of the trail itself, which make us forget that electric age and see a Nineteenth Century wilderness of wagon trains, drowning oxen, cracked axels, ditches filled with rattlesnakes, shot-dead bankers from Boston gone stiff two ways. Then the combination of these two worlds writhing around the poem’s spine, bending meanings into a third timeless place, a place where You and I push sick along the trail trying to make it from Independence to some better beyond, which is only better for its zombies and rotting meat. This poem is still teaching me things about gut-shot love shitting its pants. It’s telling me this is a game/this is no game. This is You and I with everything at stake in the here and now filtered through then and then some. This is that third world a poem can make, the one we know by a feeling and not a name. That place we can’t pin down but know exactly, as the words that prove we’ve been to this feeling before, when, ‘on a night too lonely for color, you find blood in places where blood should not be.’”