Issue 11: Winter 2017
The Winter 2017 issue of Mangrove Journal is an online-only edition. Print books of select Spring issues are available on the University of Miami Coral Gables campus for a suggested donation of $5-$10 to the Creative Writing Program. Please contact mangrovejournal@gmail.com for more information.
Notice of Breach of Contract
Because you've made the biblical texts comforting, we reject your privilege of
pontification. Say anything, not comfort. If you read them honestly, they're
absolutely disconcerting. (That's comforting.)
Because you've made the biblical texts deathly boring, we won't suffer your
rejection of narrative to save your magisterial dogmas.
Because you loved your share of the spoils of postwar prosperity, you feared risk.
Because you feared risk, your people learned to be long-haul aliens to suffering,
and so suffered pathological ease.
Because you loved your friendships with princes and bosses, you consented to
privatize the Spirit, privatize truth, privatize commodities and privatize love.
Because you forgot to regret the ecclesial fission reaction you started, the body
kept splitting till it got to ones, and kept splitting still.
In your prophetic frenzy, you swallowed whole the lone-ranger heroics you
observed in America's illicit dreams, which in turn exacted their full price: split
and shattered souls living moorless in communities without community.
Having learned your new benefactors' language, you proceeded to capitalize on
your orphan-children's dark desert nights, peddling your Ultimate Solution to
Whatever, and got off blaming Nietzsche for the fallout.
Because you continued smashing icons until you emptied yourself of all
substance, the form that remains is a mere tautology—a tautology you drunkenly
tell the world it can't live without, but because all you have left is opinions, you
always tell them with shame.
Because you exchanged ridiculous rites for ridiculous dogmas, you forgot to live
in the real world, and built a big glass beachfront house on sandy delusions of
epistemic glory.
Because you embraced the Gnostic essence in the name of orthodoxy, we doubt
your powers of discrimination. Because you constantly contradict yourself, your
people forgot how to ask good questions. Because you were entrusted with the
minds of whole generations, and dared to waste them, we don't trust you.
If you refuse to lie, we can work together, because changing the world means
learning to speak truthfully at any cost.
Don't waste our time on the merely nice.
Ricky Machalski
Ricky recently graduated from Florida Atlantic University having studied
chemistry and English.
