WROUGHT is an e-zine concentrating on American plays, screenplays, short fiction, and humor. Graphic arts and cartoons welcomed!

 

CONTENTS BY AUTHOR

	Bridget Hayes	Gary Braunbeck

SEND US  YOUR WORK!    WE'RE WAITING AND WAITING...
playwrought... playwright... overwrought?  Yeah!  
Email your submissions through send email (put  WROUGHT on the subject line).   Include your materials as PLAIN TEXT attachments or include in the body of the letter.

If you'd be interested in HELPING on WROUGHT (editing, publicity, layout, graphics, etc) contact us through send email (put 'HELP' on subject line).

And check out WOUND our interactive SERIALized novel.

*'WROUGHT' is a registered trademark.

******************************************

BHK

I am a lone gull braced against the wind,
        balanced on the pier;
and the days push on like my car on the freeway...
        mindlessly slow,
               follow the flow.

I am the groundskeeper, fighting nature;
        frantically pulling weeds,
                pruning bushes,
                         planting seeds.
Tend to the crop.
         Feed them.
                 Love them.
Quench their thirst.
        Watch them blossom.
                Let them die.

I am fire; bright hot energy,
        selfish and consuming.
My blaze lights up the sky,
        dazzling the cold and
         burning the dry.

But, sometimes, just sometimes
        I am a robin's egg:
        blue, dear and brittle;
and, your hand, oh, your hand I need to hatch.
I shall sleep in your strong weathered warmth,
        so big and so careful,
                until our time has come.

         Bridget Hayes

        Oct. '96

        click HERE to email the author

******************************************

The Projectionist by Gary Braunbeck

I

It was an old movie theater full of winos and thugs and snoring bums and it stank horribly and was overcrowded and overheated and usually showed lousy movies but the projectionist didn't mind; it was better than the two-room shit-hole he called his "place" and gave him something to look forward to, especially on those days when the movies changed because then he got to splice the reels together and that made him feel like he was creating something, like he was part of the movie: It gave him the only taste of real power he'd ever known. These celluloid lives could be thrown into chaos if he didn't splice everything together just right, just so; he could change fate with a piece of tape, a pair of editing scissors. That made him God, for a little while, in a small way, and an old man needed to feel like God every once in a while, even if it was God of Slasher, God of Tear jerker, God of Musical Comedy, God of Fuck-Me Flicks; it was a taste of the Divine, the only one he'd ever know.

II

do you really like this movie?

do you watch it in your dreams?

can you tell its story dissected

without its meaning in

the magazines?

can you sit in the dark

again and again with

the veins of light

bleeding down onto the

suicide screen?

do you really like

this movie or is it

just something to talk

about years

afterward when your children

come across it on

late-night television?

are you a part of

this movie? are you walking

through the big crowd

scene, the one where you

are Third

Man on the Right?

are you in the

ordinary background

of the hero's tragic

life?

or could you rise up

like a phoenix

from the cutting room

floor and say

not this time

not again

I will not be ignored

?

©1979/98 all content on this site copyright of Tom Noonan  / Genre Pictures / Paradise Theater Co.