Fowl Feathered Review 206
And to our long-suffering and bafflingly loyal readers, a welcome once more to the latest installment of what is, by all reasonable metrics, a mistake, a mistake and a half-remembered fever dream stitched together from frayed scraps of a half-century's bad faith and a century's good will curdled. This, you must understand, is the 206th issue of the Fowl Feathered Review, a literary quarterly that has not so much defied death as it has simply out-waited it, a strange and maligned beast that persists with a stubborn, clucking obliviousness. We have survived, not through merit, but through a kind of sheer, bloody-minded refusal to cease existing—a ghost on the literary landscape that pairs best with the existential dread of a car accident or the rich, unspooled narrative of a domestic dispute in a Walmart parking lot. We are, for better or worse, the literature of last resort, a voice from the back of the throat.
For this particular issue, we must offer a word of caution, a premonition of the mind's impending collapse. The entirety of our meticulously curated content was, and this is not an exaggeration but a confession from the abyss, seized by a crew of Renaissance pirates. They were not your typical buccaneers, you see, but a philosophical phalanx, their cutlasses honed not on the mainmast but on the works of Montaigne, their pistols firing not shot but pointed critiques on post-structuralism. Their captain, a man with a surprisingly well-preserved ruff, had designs on marrying the Fibonacci sequence to postmodern multigenre literature, a coupling as doomed as it was audacious.
The results, as you can probably guess and perhaps even feel in your marrow, are an absolute disaster. The poetry reads like a mathematical equation with an identity crisis, its stanzas a series of digits in search of a soul. The prose spirals into a recursive nonsense, a labyrinthine construction of a world within a word within a world. And the artwork? Just a series of gold-leafed spirals that smell vaguely of turpentine and the sort of profound regret you only find in the aftermath of a broken promise. We have done our best to put it all in a sensible order, but it’s a bit like trying to reorganize a tornado—a fool's errand of cosmic proportions. In the words of the late and great Peanut, one of the oldest chickens to ever live, a survivor of some twenty-odd years, who was a kind of feathered monument to persistence, “Bok bok bok.” A testament to a life lived as a series of unrelenting, unanswerable moments, each one a peck at the grain of eternity.
And as for the pirates, their captain, a man with the weary eyes of a prophet who has seen too much, offered a motive as oblique as his intentions. We asked him why he chose such a bizarre project, a conceptual hijacking of our humble enterprise. He said, with a straight face and the weight of all recorded history in his voice, that he was simply tired of the same old narratives and felt he could bring new life to the literary world. We told him his efforts would likely just result in something that looks like an Encacahuatado. He looked confused and asked if that was a new type of modern art, a genre of chaotic creation. We shook our heads, the very motion of it an acknowledgment of all the tragic farce we've ever witnessed, and said no, it’s just chicken in a peanut sauce. A predictable outcome, you see, for a predictably doomed undertaking.
The Orono, Maine, fire department is currently working to contain the metaphorical blaze of this issue's conceptual chaos, while the local 4-H club junior members are attempting to chart the Fibonacci spirals with colored yarn. A forensics team has been brought in to analyze the peculiar smudges on the margins of the manuscript, and even the Minister of Health has issued a public advisory, warning against prolonged exposure to the text without a full-face respirator.
So, mind your step. This issue is a perilous journey, a testament to what happens when classic swashbuckling meets experimental literary theory, when the quest for a new world results only in the familiar flavor of what was already lost.
Sincerely,
Virgil Kay
Editor, Rooster China Wok Habitué
