i can't really sing, so

GIGANTiC MAGAZINE has opened its submission period for its second issue! submit your poetry, prose, essays etc. to us, now! Submission Guidelines: send work to giganticmagazine@gmail.com as an ms word document. if you don't have access to ms word, please copy and paste your work into the body of the email, but beware that your formatting may not transfer. all genres accepted and please specify what genre you're writing in. if you invented this genre, name it. if you are submitting the same piece to other magazines, we'll consider it but let us know if it gets accepted to the other magazine first. include your contact information: name, address, email address and phone number. 15 page maximum for each piece (double or 1.5 spaced) please only send up to five works per submission period. GIGANTiC will be available only in print. there is not yet a closing date set for this submission period. we will post later if we have one. meanwhile, send us your best writing you want t...

Third & One. To those only vaguely familiar with football terminology, third and one may make a musical sound. The words roll off the tongue like an upbeat waltz, the beat on the last syllable. But to a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, especially after this week’s circus of a game, third and one is a plague. Third and one sounds more like the music played in films when something bad is about to happen as the unsuspecting victim ambles alone down a corridor. Third and one, some might argue, is at least better than fourth and one, especially when your team is down and the coach decides to go for it on fourth down, though the team is already in decent field goal range… When it’s third down, one yard to go, the play to choose most of the time would be to run the ball. Hand the ball to one of your running backs who you trust to gain a yard, maybe some more. The Eagles coach Andy Reid, however, on third and one, chose today more often that not to pass the ball. Though the Eagles play...

There is something to be said for beginnings that feel more like middles, similar to poems that write themselves from the third stanza on, cross out and delete the top two. You wonder, shall I offer some sort of explanation? Have I forgotten something essential? Does this even make any sense to anyone except me? The poet will choose to not worry about these things, and realize that his prologue is better off deleted, was a mere tool to get him started. My over-usage of commas, my immediate awareness of the awkwardness of internet blogging and the fact that I, despite self-knowledge of it, can never help but over-preface and avoid the point, often obscuring the idea that I even have a point—we can look forward to all of these things in more substantial clots of words to come. The murky definition of “point” here overwhelms me, bores others and, all in all, muddles this paragraph further. There is a Frenchman whose jaw is wired shut in my kitchen. I just used my cell phone to return a...