Caketrain [a journal and press]

Elizabeth Skurnick
“Two Women”
from Check-In

The woman without
graces has a husband.
She has Volvo, sons
of three heights,
a club foot, glasses.
In fact she has several
pairs of glasses she’s
purchased at Sears
of the half-moon variety.
Time, the woman knows,
is her worst enemy.
Dinners bisect Mendelsohn
and Metternich.
The sweater unravels
further each washing.
The hair refuses
to be smoothed.
The daughter holds
damp arms around her neck,
damp cheek to damp cheek,
at the shallow end of the pool.

The woman with graces
is thin stuff, thin stuff.
Thin are the arms emerging
from the cashmere shell.
Thin are the legs beneath
the linen sheath,
hard and knotty as pine.
Thin is the kid wrapping
each teetering anklet.
Thin are the letters from lovers.
Time, the woman knows,
is her worst enemy:
the buzzing cocktail phone
and the showered skull
emerging from its tiled chamber.
A whiff of ambrosial
compact and cleanser
between her and herself:
reams and reams of thin stuff,
an invisible knitting.

Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with a precision and power that feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix:

New and Upcoming

afterpastures, by Claire Hero
(“Where did that feather come from?” asks Jen Tynes; let's find out)

Caketrain Issue 05
(Now bigger and with more gunbirds! New work from Alan DeNiro, Lisa Jarnot, Blake Butler, Angela Woodward, many more)

Loving

5_Trope, AGNI, Barrow Street, Believer, Black Warrior, Born, Bound Off, Caffeine Destiny, Canarium, Conjunctions, Controlled Burn, Diagram, Double Room, Drunken Boat, Elimae, FC2, Finishing Line, Fishouse, Flood, Found, Fringe, Frostproof, Future Tense, Ghoti, Harpur Palate, Hobart, Jubilat, Mad Hatters’, Many Mountains Moving, Mid-American, NewPages, New Yinzer, New York Tyrant, Nidus, Nightboat, Noon, Obscure, Parsifal, Pebble Lake, PENNsound, Pudding House, Quick Fiction, Rattapallax, Redactions, Salt, SleepingFish, Spinning Jenny, Starcherone, Steel City Review, Titular, Ubu, Unicorn Mountain, Unsaid, Web del Sol

Mourning

3rd Bed, Alterran, Deek, Melic, Press 62

Boo. Arf.

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Write to caketrainjournal@hotmail.com

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