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The Grub Street Grackle is a literary review of poetry, fiction, art, satire, and sundry miscellaneous delights, printed approximately 6 times a year.

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Read some poems

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Volume III, no. 1 (Spring 2008)

in which are contained

a piecemeal poem and a fragmentary foray into fiction by the editor, an unvarnished vignette by Monika Cooper, an eclectic essay by Ben LaVergne, a quotation cut out of context by an anonymous researcher, and some lines lopped from the unpublished work of the mysterious Rictor Jomes.

Marginal Findings of an Anonymous Researcher

This evening as the sun was going down I came across this "quote" (for it is perhaps too lengthy to be a quote) in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Exercises in Futility," and I was interested in what you thought of it... I myself am unsure what to make of it:

He stooped there, his ribs perched on the pealing [sic] window sill, his shoulders and head jutting out into the summer evening air that moved slowly above the enclosed courtyard. It had been another beautiful day. Another "beautiful day"--and only now did he sense any consolation for that fact; only now, with the enlightening concession that he did not have to partake of this day any longer. That strange unrest that enters the nostrils right from the beginning of such a day, that tantalizing promise of something to come which starts in the excitement of a morning wind's whispering, and crescendos so loudly that its mystical echoes can be traced on the moonlight of a new face, can also be, as it had for so long been for him, an inarticulate burden which drives one first to envy and finally to lonely despair.

But as he exhaled that morning breath in the smoke of his evening's first cigarette he was unexpectedly delivered. All the excitement which had swelled and stirred so vainly in his breast was, as if by some strange grace, forfeited, and in that instant he was released from his infatuation with the summer evening in all her infidelity. The resignation could not have been called satisfying or even relieving; its consolation lay only in the manner in which it promised nothing. Perhaps not simply nothing, but also a dawning of maturity so long overdue, though this could hardly be hoped for or even perceived in such a moment. It seemed at last, that he was dying, without acceptance or resistance, but only with that inevitability that he once so fiercely dreaded. And it occurred to him that he, like that sickly young man who he had often sworn he must never become, also lived in a yellow apartment.

 

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