Issue 07: Commitment

In the introduction to Issue 07, Lisa Howorth ponders the Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt honor thy commitments.

Blake Butler’s deadpan “Bloodworld” pairs a narrator’s private perversities with his dreary day to day agenda. 

David McConnell’s “Huge,” which reads like a story by Schuyler or McCourt, tells of two musicians and how their unusual marriage turns even rockier after breast reduction surgery. 

In “Ella,” Christopher Stoddard’s story about the sudden dissolution of a yuppie Manhattan couple, the protagonist can only accept her commitment to a relationship once she destroys it. 

An astoundingly original modern rendering of folklore, Bruce Benderson’s “Pinnochio in Port Authority” inserts a children’s book character into the adult libidinal world. 

In Steve Anwyll’s “And I’ll Call You a Liar,” a man’s commitment to his wife entails revenge upon a vulnerable victim.

KGB Journal’s first visual art contributor Scott Neary revisits an Amsterdam encounter with James Baldwin in text and illustration. 

“A Seppuku of Centerfolds,” Tom Cardamone’s ficto-memoir of an East Village gay porn collector, is a gothic tale of connoisseurship and entombment. 

In Margaret Barnard’s “The Clam Shell,” the narrator describes the heartbreak and crushing banalities that always accompany the spiraling of a friendship.

“Rough Plans to Go Wrong” by Gary Indiana concludes the issue, speaking candidly about the negativity that follows aging and commitment to a single place.