Welcome to the August 2011 issue of Defenestration.

An interesting (and true!) story about editing this issue*. After I stitched all the stories, poems, photos, and biographies together into the standard layout, I printed out a copy. Apparently my wife had accidentally loaded up the printer with a bunch of discarded drafts of old Ben & Winslow strips**. So as I’m editing the issue, these light pencil sketches keep showing up behind the content, like the ghosts of cartoon characters. The first page of Lawrence Barker’s “A Stinking Rose by Any Other Name,” for example, contains a half-drawn Apsara Williams in a tank top, which I found fitting because the first paragraph uses the word “attention-whores.” Several other pages have faceless proto-Bens and proto-Winslows cavorting on them. One of the proto-Winslows was fondling his breasts.

I want an X in my name
or a Q with no U, followed by Z
or maybe K

Not a snaggle-toothed-stepsister name, though,
simply smiling, six warts on its nose
a chipped, rusty ax behind its back

We walk down the street
hand in hand
on our mediocre date
when you explain that
not one, not two, but three!
of your friends have recently had appendicitis,
their organ bursting inside of them.

Jan and I went to a masque as each other.
We swapped interiorities, bandied psyches
about. Hell has indeed frozen over: I’m nice
for once, said Jan-as-me. I grinned, Janly.

Huck—Huck Elvis, I’s reck’n you jis tip the raf o’ve wit dat shak’n.
Hang it all, Jim.