Big Quality in Small Packages: La Petite Zine Delivers Concentrated Literary Goodness

I know you're all dying to learn more about me--Who is that mysterious man with the attractive, uh, typing?--so here's a breakdown of my typical week:

• Edit article about the link between snack foods and death, while eating an apple.
• Write this blog, dazzle literary world.
• Edit book about blind, slimy cave organisms that have only been seen by a few nearsighted, clammy grad students.
  
• Write my personal blog, dazzle no one.
• Write screenplay that is vying to break world record for Taking Longest to Finish (record currently held by the novel Tristram Shandy, unfinished since the 18th century).
• Exercise (this one gets skipped now and then).
• Have fulfilling relationship with spouse (this one never gets skipped on purpose, but you know how it is).
• Have friendships with people whose weeks are at least as full as mine.
  

You know what's missing from this picture? Reading! Who has time to read for pleasure anymore? If it's not a menu or a court summons, I may not have the time to read it. And that, my friends, is why La Petite Zine is such a wonderful thing. Imagine a good literary journal that only publishes poetry and prose pieces of 1,000 words or fewer. Doesn't that make your stress monkey relax? And the reader in you, that underfed starveling, begins to salivate in anticipation of the nuggets of literature headed its way.

The latest issue of La Petite Zine has some real good little gobbets for you. "In Search of Mariachis," a prose piece by erstwhile poet David Shumate, begins with a grabber of a sentence:

When our lives grow unbearably dull, we load up the car and go in search of mariachis. Sometimes we drive a thousand miles before we come across a group dressed in those fancy black and silver suits strumming their guitars out in some parking lot or beneath a wedding tent. We listen to their ballads and laments and are restored.

Heather Christle's "Parallelograph" is poetry, but this is not your father's iambic pentameter or blank verse. No line breaks, no punctuation, no capitalization; just phrases separated by white space. Poems like this are too often experimental to the point of unreadability, but this one, while challenging, rewards the effort (slashes represent white space):

that is not a bird / that is a large dark area / it is the same thing / as your head / when I do your head in silhouette / there could be a nation / that outlawed the profile / or only thought of outlines / from the front / it is the same as your imaginary life / you have just given your concession speech / bravely to a small crowd of supporters / they could be thinking anything and aren't / you can’t tell a large dark area to give up

Jason Koo gives us a refreshing draught of the life-saving elixir called Humor in his poem "What We Talk About When We Talk About." The conversational tone rubs against precise word choices and skillful line breaks, creating a thread of tension that runs through the whole poem:

I thought I should write this down, since your ear
is a vagina and you might not hear it if I said it out loud,
she wrote, and I couldn't tell if she was being sweet
or funny or was just angry with me, mostly I was confused
by the vagina metaphor and thought it was a little extreme,
I mean, was a vagina the first thing that came to mind
when she thought of my ear? Which ear was she talking about?
By then I was fingering my right ear thinking it wasn't
all that different from a vagina, I guess I wouldn't be so shocked
if I took off her pants and saw an ear where her vagina
should be and took off her hat and saw two vaginas
where her ears should be, ears and vaginas were closer
in family than, say, vaginas and toes, and she often caressed
my ear with her tongue the way one might caress
a vagina, I'm not saying I climaxed but the possibility
was there.

There were more pieces I wanted to write about, but I'm edging close to my own thousand-word limit here. And besides, you're busy! Got places to go! Things to do! Short pieces of literature to read! Go to La Petite Zine! Hurry!