The Swan's Rag

Just in time for the holidays(!), Evan Kennedy's very spicy NsoSFW-style xeroxed mag features all kinds of top-shelf material, putting the D=E=S=I=R=E back in language (or vice versa). Issue two features Dr. Halpern's oft-discussed "Love Song (To My Fallen Soldier)" (originally published in P-Queue? Soon to arrive in Music for Porn...) coupled with some excerpts from "Trolley's Kind" which I featured here using Rob's reading copy. 

There's also Cedar Sigo's stirring reflections on straight boys, Ted Rees's "Bahd Nay Foo Yah," and lots of pictures featuring what looks like Ben Affleck (but is really Rimbaud?) running around West Oakland half-naked.

I read The Swan's Rag at a weird Starbucks while waiting for Katja to finish a work meeting, and I realized pretty quickly that this is maybe not the best magazine to casually whip out on the unsuspecting public! Lots of dirty looks, and lots of dirty poems! And lots of boys in this number for sure; that said, the ladies bring the heat, represented here by Jackqueline Frost's "Ex/Sex is a High School History Class and You Remember" and Sara Larsen's "this is my EKKLESIA..."

Here's S-LRSN in full, and do get yr. Swan's Rag here:

this is my EKKLESIA, stiffening at my fly:

like what tender tales of the pelican bathe me in mortal pubis, and aid this fat be
fatter in slighted cunt of sand-sweeping, spare dreams. this kairos is ENORMOUS,
with corinthian tongue flattening new holy stones.

o pelican of heaven deign from the bones to make just bone of your body. all
ejaculate runs down the nape. transhypnotic rivelets. i watch him and give him the
name jonah (false of course), the sky and earth constitute that big whale belly, this
crude digests his body, i watch him

Pie Pellicane, Iesu Domine,
Me immundum munda tuo sanguine.
Cuius una stilla salvum facere
Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.

slight brown cock flops in his hazmat-suit. in a time of famine, there is a gulf
between us. i just want my life back. this kairos is enormous, ever-darkening opal
maw. an inversion of stained glass, wine-dark water. would you, my pelican, bind
yourself to it? my pelican,
my inversion, vulgar to god - would you, then,          wipe it up?