This Broken Shore is an annual literary journal, featuring poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and theater reviews from writers connected to New Jersey.

JOHN MUIR'S AUGUST HEAD

John Muir's queer and sundry quotations and exclamations shine through pane after pane of Yosemite Valley's buildings. Less a ghost and more of a sacred mascot, his bearded visage seems to hang down from every shaggy tree and to impose itself in the crinkled cliff-shadows on every side of this immense religious fosse into which tourists pour as amply as blood or wine. "How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountain " "I never saw a discontented tree." "The mountains are calling, and I must go."

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"When the Moon Melts"

The dwarf's hideous face retreated from the basement window, an array of grimy grey whiskers and a radish nose.

"When the moon melts And the Gods of Autumn roam Evil and good are equally felt And nothing certain is known,"

Chanted Mr. Plimsoul and the lady together. Wild shadows flickered around them, and they gestured toward the shut box, black and shiny as a beetle's back. They seemed to be trying to compel the box to open or spontaneously erupt in flame...or something.

"Casket of Augersaal, I command you: open " Mr. Plimsoul shouted, making a...

Collected poems of Gregg Glory Gregg G. Brown] Questioning Is Questing Western civilization is in a cul-de-sac. At the end of that cul-de-sac is a guillotine. Beside that guillotine stands the hulking executioner in his greasy black hood. Through that hood peer two red, maddened eyes. Below those eyes, as through a lazy tear, shows a long, slavering wolf-thin grin. Lightning stitches knots in the dead, leaden skies. Thunder interrupts the prayers for the dead. Doom. DOOM. DOOM. Even so, my life is filled with primroses and wishes. I sit here--or lie, rather, languid as an American Oblamov...

A human bean feels different from her fellow human beans, but learns to value her own special loveliness and value.

Prose aesthetic and malefic. Occasional essays and digressions surging up from the source.
I'm tempted to say that this retrospective collection of thoughts and scribbles will veer from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. But that would be a slur on the creator, and so I shall refrain from such malignity. Often, very often, I've been told that I over-introduce my tropical topics with a blizzard of disguising digressions. I'm informed variously that this is helpful, too helpful, not helpful at all, and by Jacko Monahan to "just shut up and read da po-EM."
Inexplicably, I'm...

The old blue storm-sign Gets spray-painted over in red: Get lost Irene Sandy. I have never liked to travel, having a dislike of the confusion of new scenes, but I find myself hamstrung at home as well with a deep sense of offended opprobrium at the repetitiousness of the local rituals of the Jersey Shore-beginning with Bar A and ending with the not-quite-naked strip joints like Untouchables that used to line Highway 35 up toward South Amboy. Too lazy to travel, I wait for the busy weather To come knocking.

A sensitive prose endearing of the lovely poem "The Dream of the Rood (Cross)" by an anonymous English poet.

Flatterers Among the Roses Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven Disfigured by pity, Blindly tearful in an icy lair? To walk in the moonlight, to trod The verdant ambers, and to think of nothing, What sort of matter for a poem is that? Is it a matter of having nothing In the mind, icy sequester Of nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence? Or is it a matter, rather Of nothingness icily conceived, icily meant? It is a matter of sinister consequence. To walk in the violet moonlight Discussing the moon from which it flares Disfiguring the roses Is a kind of nothing, a suave...