Author: Editor Person

Issue launch on Sun., Oct. 12th at Gallery 198, 5 – 8 p.m. — Join us?

Big Score No. 1 cometh…

Our launch party is set for next Sunday, October 12th, at Gallery 198 in Sunset Park, from 5 – 8 pm. Readings by Cleo Qian, K.P. Taylor, Justin Kamp, and Andres Cordoba. With music from Will Chang. There is a bar, and the current Gallery 198 exhibition features work by AJ Springer. It will be a good time.

You can subscribe to or make a single issue purchase of Big Score here, which naturally is the best way to support what we’re doing.

A preview of what No. 1 contains:

• Dilettantes, a short story by Adora Svitak 
  
  When we met in college, he was a poet who studied politics. It had been a long time since he had written a poem. While he worked at a public-interest law firm, I pulled novels from my backpack in cafes where disdainful baristas whisked $9 matcha lattes. Reading novels was not my job; I was supposed to be turning my dissertation into a book about modern heterosexuality. I made little progress most days, sitting in noisy cafes and texting friends who had day jobs to ask if they had evening plans.
  
• Calf, a poem by Loisa Fenichell
  
• Dumpster Fries v. the Monster, a short story by Douglas W. Milliken
  
  It was one of those late summer mornings where the air itself was gray and lifeless as old burger meat yet nevertheless steamy with oppression (think of the moist breath of a dog who won’t get its panting stink-mouth out of your face) even while the dirt-colored birds were still in the process of waking up to announce their useless wakefulness. You know the kind of day I’m talking about. It sucked before it’d even begun. We were in that old wreck of a house we’d found standing all alone in the brownfields out by the airport, just Jaylee and me packed into a corner of one downstairs room in a matted pile of sleeping bags and grungy clothes and girl. It somehow was and wasn’t exactly as bad as it sounds. Jaylee’d gotten her cast off a few days before but still had some nasty Frankenstein shit stitched up and down her thigh from knee to hip, and she was supposed to be doing physical therapy, too, but that obviously was not going to happen as long as she had to get through each miserable day as a wounded member of the world outside (as opposed to inside) the hospital: since it’d been her asshole stepdad who’d spelled her leg’s ruin with the front end of his Crown Vic, going home was not an option, and since I lost the gamble of revealing to my god-fearing folks that Jaylee was my girl and she needed a place to stay, we were the both of us now unhoused and too focused on surviving one day to the next to worry much about PT sessions or exercises or the dosage and frequency of Jaylee’s cache of fentanyl patches. We were teenagers without homes is all I’m trying to say. Would you be keeping appointments if you’d been us and we’d been you?
  
• Barbarians at the Gates?, a poem by Brad Rose
  
• An Anatomical Dissection of Depression in a Bo[d]y Offering Itself As Curriculum, a poem by Ismail Yusuf Olumoh
  
• Shells, a short story by Wilhemina Austin
  
  Ralston turned the wheelchair to the right, reached for a cockle shell, pink-streaked. Then he grabbed another with bands of yellow. He was full of the setting sun’s fire. He halted to swoop up one shell after another. He sorted and dismissed, the same as he sorted through the people walking over the sand past us, his voice never low enough. He took the strain of the wheelchair with ease, broad-shouldered as he was, not all that tall, his back well-muscled.
  
• The Swimmer in the City: Civics and Semiotics at the Public Pool, a critical essay by Justin Kamp
  
  Some of my most treasured hours in New York have been spent on the concrete deck of a public pool. My favorite time is just after 5 pm, in the part of midsummer when the afternoon seems impossibly extended, when the daylight idles and eddies before night even begins to take shape. My routine is as follows: I come to the pool directly from work, towel and trunk in bag, sweat usually still sheened over my forehead from the crush of the commute. I shower, stroll out, spread my towel in an opportune stretch of sunlight and sprawl, letting the city’s sub-tropics warm me until I’m kiln-brick hot. Then I don my cap and goggles and ease into the water for a half hour of freestyle. After that, it’s an hour of uninterrupted reading as I dry off in the full late sun before the pool closes at 7.
  
• Chicago Sonnet #42, a poem by D. A. Hosek
  
• Dead Week, a short story by K.P. Taylor
  
  NIGHT ONE
  
  Even Rusty, who usually took no small pleasure in barking orders, had grown almost silent.
  
  “Lenny,” he huffed, “you work all the live freight?”
  
  “Weren’t nothin’ to work,” Lenny replied.“How ’bout the backstock?”
  
  “None of that neither.”
  
  It was the beginning of Dead Week, that seemingly endless stretch of dull nights between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with nothing to do and too many hours to fill doing it. Rusty scanned the backroom, searching desperately for something, anything, for Lenny to do. Every last bag of stuffing had already found its way to the discount rack, and all the bottles of cheap champagne had claimed their places on the endcaps.
  
  “Ya know what?” Lenny offered, preferring to jump rather than be pushed. “I could head over to Aisle 7. There’s some cans of Friskies and Fancy Feast I could front.”
  
  “Why don’t you go on over to Aisle 7, Lenny,” Rusty said, as if it had been his idea.
  
  Lenny made a big show of wheeling an empty U-boat out with him.
  
• Oh the Passion, a poem by T.A.R. Wallace
  
• When You Become a Witch in a Nigerian Home, a poem by CP Nwankwo
  
• When Love Speaks Yoruba and English, a short story by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi
  
  I.
  
  I remember the first time I fell in love. It was with a boy who didn’t know how to say I love you in Yoruba. That should have been my first clue that things would break.
  
  His name was Tobi. We met at a poetry open mic at Terra Kulture in Lagos. I was twenty-two, fresh out of university, clutching my brown leather notebook like it contained my entire worth. I hadn’t written anything good in months, but I needed to be surrounded by people who still believed words could save us.
  
• The Things We Hang Onto, a poem by Oladosu Michael Emerald
  
• Waiting, a poem by Cleo Xian