Ames Progressive

(Expanded with the original ending for the web.)
Modern industry thrives on the perception that consumers have a wide variety of choices. As we walk down the aisles of large grocery stores, we experience an apparently unending variety of products to choose from. Yet, as any customer who wants organic and local food will tell you, [...]

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Ask an average group of twenty-somethings about the Ames music scene, and you’ll get a profusion of blank stares, followed by a long silence. Given a little more prompting, they might talk about our dearth of musical venues, the scarcity of all-ages shows, or the well-documented reluctance of promoters to book local bands. But if [...]

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The House of Freaks was quite a letdown, let me tell you. The exterior was a big mural featuring all sorts of fantastical freaks, like a bearded lady who looked to weigh about 400 pounds and a lizard-headed man lifting a giant barbell with his forked tongue. The other three walls were unpainted plywood, held [...]

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The terms for the 2008 presidential election have been set: Barack Obama sets the agenda, determines the themes and introduces the vocabulary and John McCain responds by awkwardly and disingenuously parroting Obama’s agenda, themes and vocabulary. The most obvious and desperate example of this is the McCain campaign’s adoption of the “change” theme in the [...]

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Ryan Gerdes’ essay was originally published in issue 2.6. Read it here.
The Israeli-Palestinian war is a strange conflict: it inspires people to assume positions of impassioned and often radical advocacy, to make strident accusations and judgments, in spite of colossal ignorance. While defying most of the familiar paradigms of conflict and oppression, it is nonetheless [...]

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They always told me that some day I would understand. That seemed to be the only response to any religious inquiry my young mouth could ask, as though that was the only answer my young mind could comprehend. That someday the sun would shine down upon my shadowy doubt and the small buds of curiosity [...]

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“a short play”
There is a man and a woman sitting in a living room. The man is on one couch and the woman is on a separate couch.
The man: (repeatedly pointing and clicking the remote) Fuck—why won’t this thing work?
The woman: (painting her toenails) What won’t work?
The man: (tapping the remote with his hand then [...]

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  bee
love is a honeybee
passing and becoming
all things between us
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
After Los Angeles (April 10, 1964 — for Glenn Gould’s piano)
Under absent hands, keys grow cold and the world’s softest hammers cease inside of a black, wooden coffin as the strings turn pale with dust and silently lose their tune.

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I measured his toes
against the segments
of my fingers
in those first few days
just brushing the bottoms
of his feet made him jerk
away, ticklish
now those toes are open
and wounded
I’ve carried him home
cleaned and calmed
my gut tells me to tear
out every brick in the city
punish the sidewalk

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We were
halfway between Des Moines and St Louis,
low on gas,
out of smokes,
far into the pangs of delirium tremens,
hopped up on powders that give nose bleeds,
cringing at every ray of sunlight and birdsong,
sucking down carbonated, caffeinated beverages
in order to prop open those heavy eyelids
when I noticed that
the FASTER I drove
the FATTER I would become.
Now, I’m no [...]

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