December 2023 - Inauguration
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Dog Throat Journal.
Many thanks to all the folks who responded to our call for submissions and for the work that appears in this issue. This issue includes work from: Adrian S. Potter, Barry Basden, Brad Rose, Ken Poyner, Mercedes Lawry, Nick Young, Pamelyn Casto, Patrick Cahill, Sarah Rohrs, Trilety Wade, and Will Cordeiro. This issue also includes the seminal essay Theory and Play Of The Duende by Federico García Lorca.
From The Editor
by Victor D Sandiego
Greetings all. Some of you know me from Subprimal Poetry Art, a project I founded ten years ago that published (as the name suggests) both poetry and art work. As that project evolved, it included more of what we generally call prose poetry, which leads to fiction, which leads to discovery, which eventually leads to the which which has no which, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Alan Watts.
With Dog Throat Journal, my intention...
Losing Enough
by Pamelyn Casto
We dwelled in the sufficiencies of our days; the times when enough was ample and abundant—the times when the weather worked tolerable degrees and fullness fell as easy as autumn-gilded leaves. It was enough, really, middling and surely adequate--enough to satisfy. At least...
Excursus
by Will Cordeiro
Early summer, languor of an afternoon. Light’s varied seep through willow branches. A few white clouds levitate, drifting leisurely—baroque fragments, architecture crawling from one version of the past into another. Wind tips the extra rocking chair on the porch. The sun construes each leaf....
Just Go for It
by Brad Rose
I’m a wild man. I was raised by guinea pigs. Somehow, in college, I got snake energy. After those rattlers bit me in my dancing foot, I could really throw down a wild Wha Watutsi. Dancing makes me happy, although this place looks like it could use a few more square feet. Naturally, it takes a while to get the hang of it, so I sleep with one eye open. Between breaks in my circadian rhythm, I like to sleepwalk through...
My Strange Rocker
by Trilety Wade
The Young misconceive the Aged, that is, until they too, become old. Harboring misbeliefs that we all become more measured in our final adulthood, a tad boring and a ton childlike. As if the wells of our passions have run as dry as they believe our tear ducts and Bartholin glands to be. We too can cry, and anyone can buy Vaseline.
I was young and blind...
The Fastidious Housepainter
by Mercedes Lawry
The fastidious housepainter tried to hear the birds, to listen and translate, to understand and separate the wide movements from the details. He saw the grid and moved accordingly. The sky was another world only to be considered when thumped with grey clouds. If a harsh wind began, he would...
The Blues Notes
by Adrian S. Potter
Dear Blues —
Welcome to the album release listening party of your bite-marked soul. Play deep cuts so I can dance to them before society’s indifference makes a ghost out of you. Nobody smiles anymore, so here’s my mouth, sketched as a straight line. A closed-lipped border between confession and confusion. Thumbing through...
A Ride
by Sarah Rohrs
Just some lips sounding in there. Flattened bottoms sinking into warm leather creak and ooze. Bodies and butts with no names. Some kind of recovery. I saw the room at the corner. No body knew what I held in my right arm, inside a black coat, the same one I wore when I wrecked the car....
The Magician
by Patrick Cahill
We’re gathered on a green. He stands before us, gestures, and a playing card appears in his hand. He turns it over and on its face an official license to kill, yet he can picture exemptions coded among the stars on a clear and moonless night. He turns the card again and finds...
Dance
by Nick Young
When Ruth Tremayne died, she was sitting in a recliner in the living room of her cramped apartment over a used furniture store in Chillicothe, Illinois. It had been her home for twenty of her seventy-two years. She appeared to be napping, her head canted slightly to the right and bent forward. Her gray hair, yellowed and thinning, hung lankly. Her face, careworn as it was, bore an expression of wistfullness. In her wrinkled hands she clutched a record album to her breast.
And when she died, as she had done countless times,...
An Educated Audience
by Ken Poyner
He returns from the stolen recital agog. He knew the rogue violinists could play, but he was amazed at how many deigned to gather in the open glade, unhurriedly submit to orchestration. Each seemed pleased with his or her part, no matter the size or...
Elly & Jack
by Barry Basden
May 3rd, 1943
Dearest all,
How is everyone by now? I’m still doing all the good. We are in San Antonio for about two weeks. We are planning on going to New Orleans but of course you can’t ever tell. We spent 3 days in Mexico fishing. Saw the bullfight and rode in the Streamline Taxi, a horse drawn sirey. Jack sure has been...
Theory and Play Of The Duende
by Federico García Lorca
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Between 1918 when I entered the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, and 1928 when I left, having completed my study of Philosophy and Letters, I listened to around a thousand lectures, in that elegant salon where the old Spanish aristocracy went to do penance for its frivolity on French beaches.
Longing for air and sunlight, I was so bored I used to feel as though I was covered in fine ash, on the point of changing into peppery sneezes.
So, no, I don’t want that terrible blowfly of boredom to enter...