Issue 8 submissions call, a new Musing, and a piece from Issue 1
What's new from the gaba-'gule?
\ Propagule Membership
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\ Open call for Submissions to Issue 8
The reading period for Issue 8 is in full swing, and we would love to read your work. If you’d like to send something over for our next cycle, you can do so here.
It’s free to submit and we pay up to $30.
\ A new Musing
We have a new piece from returning contributor Gregg Williard, “Watching The Astounding She Monster to Eric Dolphy / Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory”:
We have always tried to understand why we are here, why she is here, what she is, what this moment is. Our cabin, our bodies, our clothes, our postures, the She on the floor that has the bluntness of a Wee Gee forensic photo. She draws you back. She draws you in. Others have written exhaustively (and exhaustedly) about the actors’ badness, the movie’s badness, its bleak tedium. A maddening, nearly unbearable monotony. Robert Clarke said Shirley Kilpatrick’s work was only a big butt and big breasts, but we remember when she clutches her chest in agony and falls to the floor, careful not to expose the tear in her shitty costume. Kilpatrick appeared in two other films and was remembered for her warm personality. She was a beauty pageant queen and a model and a stripper. She wanted to act.
\ A piece from Issue 1
“Last Days of the Bonneville Water Sprite”, by Alyssa Quinn (Propagule 1)
I am a witch witch witch witch. Two and a half million years I’ve lived here. Underwater once—prehistory, a lake. Those days I conjured spells in the deep and the jets from the magic bloomed pockets of air; I sealed my lips to them to breathe. Now, the desert is an obliterating force. It grows difficult to recall that turquoise cool. I dream ammonite and nautilus, bulbed kelp and oolitic sand. Recite these names out loud: brine shrimp, flattish crabs. A list of jawless fish. Extinct genera as the basis for a new occult, its power drawn from memory nearly-not-quite dead. When the tourists come and shoot the pronghorn down; when they pose with antlers gripped; when they drive their Jeeps in mineral billows; when they make the sagebrush burn; then I lurk in this maybe lakebed and curse them something dark. They will die of thirst in hotel rooms far from here.
A punchy, aquatic stream-of-primeval-consciousness. This piece features occult refrains paired with the resolute, naturalistic perception of the bottomfeeder, mourning and magic, tourists, and jawless fish, but most of all an inescapably urgent, thrumming current of prose. And don’t for a moment imagine that it is anything less than true.