Imitation Fruit – November 2012

Imitation Fruit welcomes you to the site with a number of googley-eyed fruit. Without a real aesthetic declared, it is hard to tell what the magazine is looking for without doing some reading first. And what I found is that it appears to be more about story, more about the message, than the style or bravado of the writing.

Imitation Fruit welcomes you to the site with a number of googley-eyed fruit. Without a real aesthetic declared, it is hard to tell what the magazine is looking for without doing some reading first. And what I found is that it appears to be more about story, more about the message, than the style or bravado of the writing.

In Louis Reyna’s “A Trip to the Grocery Store,” Manny is embarrassed when the girl he has a crush on is going to see him pay for groceries with food stamps. So what does he do? Bails, of course. He leaves all the groceries on the counter and runs out and down the street to the more expensive grocery store (which he later learns is a big mistake).

Nancy Chen Long’s “Jump with Joy” is a poem that uses a pogo-stick as a metaphor for “a certain kind of joy”:

the kind we expect to get

from pogo-sticks and other things:
A few brief surges into the air,

yet we don’t go anywhere. Our bodies,
hopeful, soar straight up

only to return so very close
to the exact same spot where we started.

In Kelly Winters’s poem “Tuxedo” (accompanied with Diana Blackwell’s artwork “Cat in the Window”) a cat prowls the streets, “the golden / glitter of his gaze are pierced, slow bleeding / black into the night.” But,

By dawn, he’s crept beneath the portico
to brush dust from his sleek tuxedo
tail, and dirt from his fine face in time
to slip inside the door and purr a denial
that he was out all night.

This issue also includes fiction by Stanley E. Ely, Susan Lynn Solomon, Dick Reynolds, Ania Payne, Hollis Whitlock, and Jenny Tressler and poetry by John McKernan and Bruce McRae.
[www.imitationfruit.com]