Jellyfish Magazine – Fall 2012

Jellyfish Magazine’s design is simple and fresh. The top of the page features a sketch of waves—and certainly this issue flows through like waves, ups, downs, and fluid, often touching on the topic of the water, the sea.

Jellyfish Magazine’s design is simple and fresh. The top of the page features a sketch of waves—and certainly this issue flows through like waves, ups, downs, and fluid, often touching on the topic of the water, the sea. 

Rob Macdonald’s “Lifeboat,” about the fear of large cruise ships, is both humorous (“And these people, // eating their / baked ziti and waiting // for cheesecake— / I get scared.”) and insightful (“To be untethered, // to be without walls— / ideas can’t bounce // off salt air alone. / An absence of ideas // can’t turn a propeller).

Noah Falck’s “Landscape with Stuffed Animals” is a collection of brief images: “the nape of her neck,” “a small girl with a / handful of sunflowers, and my favorite, “a giraffe drinking rainwater from the gutter of a / tanning salon.” His recent book (2012, BatCat Press) sounds enticing: Snowmen Losing Weight. 

In Lesley Yalen’s “This Town,” the narrator can’t sleep and takes to wandering around the town, getting a strange feeling and noting new things as the “people who are so nice and the families” are absent. In the end, she ends up going back home to “the crease in / real life where [she] reside[s] in wonder, now.”

A.T. Grant’s prose poem “Dead Brother Speaks” is powerful. It starts, “My throat opens. The tunnel made flesh. I make myself a smoke body and send my smoke body into the tunnel. I sing into the black. I sing Dead Sister back to me.”  In the end, the prayer is a sine wave, a wave that “cuts the bugs in half,” “bends the river,” and the tunnel, and “cuts across the wake.”

Jellyfish offers a nice chance to sit down for a half hour, take a break, and read; get a fresh breath to continue on your day inspired.
[www.jellyfishmagazine.org]