Category: Featured

Susan Evans’s poem “Lucy” appeared on Metapsychosis website in Autumn 2020. During the following winter, we exchanged emails in which Susan told me about her creative process, her sources of inspiration, and what her hopes for the coming year.

Projecting human capability and knowledge into the far future, provided we learn to manage our own planet, it seems possible that humans might learn how to modify stars in ways suited to their future needs. Why might one modify stars? I can think of a …

An artist is actually creating a world rather than just a stationary object. The artist is sailing through universal winds and transmitting truth. It really depends on the artist as to how this truth manifests and is revealed.

Reminiscent of the work William Blake, Max Beckmann, and Hieronymus Bosch—to say nothing of the latter’s medieval predecessors, Antoniou’s images find their singularity in the exploration of the imaginal encounter, the sacred drama.

It starts like this, the intercom buzzes. Nick, the reluctant pet cat, is faking obliviousness, turning around, padding over to the kitchen for a snack. His tail, way up in the air, offers me a clear view of his hypoallergenic pink behind—shorthand for open scorn. “Guess I’m getting it then,” I say, pushing back with my own attitude.

Seconds — those appointed to negotiate and if necessary fill in for the principal fighters in duels conducted by pilots of the Polarin Aerial Fleet — were allowed only one kind of interference: to try and talk combatants out of their folly, or to watch as time ran out and they went to their deaths. This was thought to be a way of reducing the number of frivolous challenges. It had had virtually no effect.

Going inward / I see my grey sleek wolf’s belly / moving forward on long legs striding / free, clear, unassuming / my natural strength carrying me / into the clear space ahead.

The game gives us a satisfaction that life denies us.—Emanuel Lasker ∞ “Tea or coffee, Sir?” “Coffee. Black. No sugar.” I’m on the phone with a market researcher. I try to picture a pretty girl at the other end of the line, but it isn’t working. All I …

I looked at him through the camera. “You have a secret.” His eyes widened. I continued. “It’s not something…bad…but you think it is…. Something about a confrontation with your father. And it has to do with…a female.”

Medb is a novel that draws the reader incrementally toward the mysteries of the human psyche, on its way touching on gender roles, the power of the occult, and the pathologization of difference. It’s a winding, inward journey that begins, fittingly, at …

but i often underestimate my husband / for he pointed out that i actually said schizophrigid / i had a kitchen dresser which contained crockery i never used / over- solicitude is display mothering /

Now is when you are alone, when you have nowhere to be, when promises to the world no longer apply. Nobody knows what happens now except you. This is your own personal history.

I walk casually through the kitchen, preparing a cup of tea, as my gaze is drawn to two photographs placed side by side. I am struck by the resemblance between my young son and deceased father…

What happened, Miss Hooker asked–she meant my shock–so I said, Well, please turn around and take a look at Jesus there and tell me what you see.

Forms point upward or sideways from a centrifugal base, hunting and seeking. Tides of observation and transmission approach and recede, leaving visual patterns in their wake. Ancient symbols make their way across pathways of energy, co-existing with forms of nature; earth, sky and all types of elemental forms are born of essential vibration.

The shrunken fighters, cheeks sunken and eyes Gibbous as praying mantis, like a god kept captive By some sick forest cult That provides sacrifice seasonally…

The Spiritual Barber had opened his salon a year earlier and it had been an instant success. Open Mondays to Saturdays, it attracted an ever-growing number of customers, who thought nothing of waiting several hours until it was their turn to be served. …

“Lucy the nun with the green socks / saw me hugging the oak tree / that summer I / hibernated in Spartanburg.”

“St Barbara, a poor white gloved icy ingénue, / Has long been a dusty piece of Black Forest wood // That grew out of the ashes of Sibylline books”

“Sex and God or sex and death.” I repeated his phrase, feeling a slight slur in my speech brought on by the beer on an empty stomach. “Is that all there is?”

​I was jealous of Pedro’s imaginary lovers and of his vaster sexual experience. Short poems, long poems, quirky poems, I read them in secret when he was out. I didn’t understand them. Poem after poem, sounding much alike, revealed the charms of some new image of his desire, even as he prayed for some kind of deliverance from his too, too solid flesh…

I felt that many kinds of patterns, of ancient origins, had been stamped onto our writhing, wrestling, male flesh, and that we had entered this forbidden zone many times before…

they call it soul retrieval | when your essence | core | beingness | the skeletal|hole|body|brain that lives in your gut|liver|kidney|body| self|shatters | breaks its own skull|heart|body in its crumpled raisin|brain as the result of small t | BIG T | sOmE TyPe of tRaUmA

Whether I chose to feel my emotions fully, or experience the depth of them — that wasn’t up to me. That was up to God, or Satan, or whatever it was that controlled me.

Has the Shadow become more user-friendly? No. Whether now or 2,000 or 10,000 years ago, the shared identity of the Shadow and the Guide has always presented itself in the form of an ultimatum, which we must torture our minds and bodies to interpret.

That our world has already ended, of this we may be certain. But is it the end of “a world” or of “the world”? It is reassuring that the prophets of world destruction have proven almost 100% wrong—and yet…

So, what does it mean for the Apocalypse to take place in the present moment, and, somewhat paradoxically, to be always just about to occur?

“I’ve found a techno relationship cuts right into the core, the soul, brings out an almost more real version of yourself, makes you see yourself differently, your own potential to be better. It can achieve a level of emotional perfection. That’s also the problem…”