Rabbit Catastrophe Review #05

We heard a statistic once (unconfirmed, possibly completely made-up) that most new independent literary journals fold after two issues.  RCR05 marks the two-YEAR anniversary of Rabbit Catastrophe Press.  Five issues of the review and a growing catalog of fabulous ScrapChaps.  To brag about all this, we’ve gathered a grandiose collection of writing and art:

Poetry from Paul David Adkins, Tracie Renée Dawson, Charles Decker, Jennifer Gravley, Caitlin L. Heinz, Joni Lee, Bianca Spriggs, and Changming Yuan.

Fiction from Matthew Dube, Dawn Wilson, and J. Edward Vanno.

And art (mysterious and beautiful) from the incredible Dmitry Borshch.

This issue is a brigadier.  It is a blunderbuss.  It is your friend that was loud and inappropriate at your holiday work party but is actually a very lovely fellow to be around.  It is that bad kid from your past who grew up to find glory. Mythical and biblical. Semiotic and diluvian. You might develop a phobia of immolation, bearded deacons, or Mayor Koch after consuming this issue, but you also might finally learn to dance or read a map.

This is also the first issue that features our newly implemented one-word bio restriction.  Our contributors rose to the challenge.  Here are the bios rendered into “poetry” (with function words added for clarity):

SuiGeneris artist

(and) untenured hyracotherium

killn (some) bacon.

(They) change

effervescence

(and) velleity

(way out)

beyond

(a) tiny wave.

 Here is a real poem from inside its pages:

Revival

by Jennifer Gravley

Pacing the short hall between our bedrooms

whose white walls we’ve grubbed up, I pound

the King James I’ve pinched from the TV top,

preaching to my sister who fidgets as if

feeling the hard bench bite, waggling her fist

for her funeral home fan, rocking as He knocks

her convicted heart, until the altar call,

which I haven’t good and finished

before she bounds from the wood floor and runs,

skips really since it’s only two steps, plunges

to her knees, arms up to bury her face

in the cedar-chest moaners’ bench, praying

the garbled-up pitiful pleas we’ve heard

only as music, as sounds torn from their meanings.

Then we know she’s saved because she jumps up screaming.