Comics by Noah Van Sciver -- Click on each to view!

Noah Van Sciver is an underground cartoonist.
He currently lives in Denver Colorado.
And he is the Walrus.

Sophie by Sam Virzi

Sophie:

I have this pain in my gut whenever something like this happens and it happens pretty regularly that my existence causes this pain in my guts and this pain in my guts is a direct symptom of some kind of angst which sprouts up every time all existence grinds and strains agaisnt itself and my self ends up burning because of that intense and bitter and anguished burn of hands rubbing hands awkwardly of people doing things that people don't normlly do and I call this burn a burn but really it's more of a thing that happens between two people tht don't know each other and want deearly to know eaach other but lack the balls or the courage of self to get to know one another because of things like appointments and dates and demands of meeting people, other people, all the other people as they demand to be met, on red park benches, in orange trenchcoats, what a hateful color that is, don't confuse the two, and in this tension and stress and shuck and jive of bleeding eyeballs, guts cllenched in agony and wonderment and self-condemnation, something always escapes it which defies escaping but escapes because of what it is and what must, as nature demands, escape: something half-there and half-white, some ghost of what I could become, trails out from the roof of my mouth and into the air and the sky swallows it, gulp, says the sky, as it gets drunk off the corpse of my immortal soul.

And it's usually in response to anything, it's never like a desensitivisation to any kind of drug, it's never a direct consequence or a feature of an unavoidable process that really pisses me off about this response about the painful part of existence, which is existence- there's always a trigger, there's something in the world that's too sharp that won't kindly turn its edge away from you just because it knows you can be cut- there's always a cruelty in the way leaves change too quickly, the way wallets empty themselves, circumstantial but undeniably there to fuck you up, it's always just a trip, stutter, hiccupping happenstance which would probably, you know, happen if you weren't there to be put in agony but still it's a bit of a coincidence that you only really notice its symptoms when the causes of such symptoms happen within you & among you like a photonegative of the kingdom of God, Eden in a mirror, place where your mind goes & it can't do anything but ask WHY of everything that leaves a footprint on it- WHY are her eyes blue and WHY are mine brown, WHY do people smile, WHY God, WHY build such an enormous cathedral & paint it brown with bricks, WHY follow & lead & be lead to the same place, & WHY There.

Which is a roundabout way of explaining to you why, exactly, I didn't look into your eyes as we passed each other on the street this morning, because there's also a reaction that happens when something that used to ignite fires refuses to ignite a new fire, or when something sharp no longer cuts, or when somebody can't kiss the way they used to, or when my lips can't whisper the right kinds of poetry, or when they startle your sleeping, quiet, your mind at rest, which is hideous, and our eyes are hideous together, which forces me to believe they're beautiful apart, and this is all just a way of naming something disgusting to make it seem less so, even though the word "disgusting" is, itself, a disguise, in and of itself; it's all because I don't want to see my ghost in your eyes, and because you would see yours in mine, and acknowledging the shell of what we had & made, even for a moment, it would mean we'd have to move back into that shell, and die together like squashed, overgrown, adolescent hermit crabs.

I'll forgive you if you forgive me.

Best,

___ _____

Bio:

Sam Virzi is a senior in high school. He'd like to thank his family and friends for their endless support.

Poetry by Ray Succre

July 1979

Summer afternoon and the paper

wasps druzzing near the porch.

Playing the red truck across sidewalk,

pushing it hauling stones, debris.

Listening to Santana from the lawn,

FM radio alarm, old, given to kids.

Smell of baking yards and mowers.

Grass imprints on knees and legs.

Hovering insects and bombination;

spinning hymenopters aflare past an ear.

The songs and then

the lightning in a wrist.

Materias

Of blackened marble eyes in the strepped,

twitting heads of birds,

of ants in cue-balls, corner-pocketing bits

of debris to store in a hill,

of feeling for engines, smoke blue

and the rotor striking lawn,

of ladyfingers in wasp nests, blastcaps

in down pillows, gasoline in floodlights,

of water pouring clean from the ribs

of a ghost in the Christ of Nazareth,

of pigs tined beneath ears and hind-leg hung

to cause the bacon, ham and else exist,

of hospital myths, and shrubbery ticks,

and woodboar teeth, and of a woman

leashed to another buried in dog hair,

come the details of my kind.

Of each material, they stray by minute.

Of their own volition, they are scale-sized.

The Philipino Woman

One candle-armed woman shelling Ostrea

at the bench, and razor clams after sleepwalking

noon. The oysters turn as they lift,

then the jab, twist, snap, shuck,

from the bench.

She owns a schedule of tides in her own,

knows them low for high,

and all a cause of moon's place,

and even red tide from this place.

The two brown men come and spray

down the bench, and the thin, metal shucks

and bowls, soak the floor with a cloth hose lake.

They drain the flood by a draw at center dock,

for wait of its sitting dry by air,

and the woman sits in the puddle wood,

woman with gashed rough hands spent

long at the pry.

Amphetamania

The aborted notion of authority,

the accurate wetness of violence—

in these introverted men

see frivolity spun into discord,

and an unchecked, edgeless amperage.

The blaring emotion and its stifled check,

short-spoken, tweaked, criminative.

They can find extroversion

tucked into pipes and tipped atop scales,

and hurry the bursting,

offer it registration and field.

It provokes them, moments latched

faster, becoming the most temporary

comprehension of their times.

Bio: Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, Small Spiral Notebook, and Coconut, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. He tries hard.

For inquiry, publication history, and information, visit me online: http://raysuccre.blogspot.com