“The Distinction” by C. Elena

Jan 20, 2021

Sometimes good guys don’t wear white, and sometimes punk chicks don’t wear black. Nashville’s Cybelle Elena can attest to this. A child of Seattle’s 90s grunge community, the artist and writer knows firsthand the cultural mystique attached to growing up in counterculture — her work gives a nod and a smirk.

Artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz featured originally in Winter 2021 Issue of In Parentheses.

The Distinction

She’s staring through me in a sage-filled room
It’s the middle of the afternoon
But it’s dark in here

She flipped the tower card
Snipped some rosemary from the yard
Said she had a premonition
But it wasn’t clear

Maybe it’s wishful thinking
Or maybe she’s Jeane Dixon
After all, I guess we’re living among electric sheep

Stirring up gravel in my driveway
He’s in route to the highway
Says we’ve got to get out of Dodge

The stadium has been converted
And he can’t tell me where he heard it
But he knows someone
Who knows someone
In the CDC

Maybe it’s wishful thinking
Maybe I don’t know the distinction
After all, I guess we’re living among conspiracies

John Franklin Enders, a Nobel laureate
Was he burdened with regret?
My parents never would be

“Vaccines are dangerous!”
“Uncle Sam is just trying to poison us!”
But never mind their habits
with LSD

Maybe it’s wishful thinking
Maybe they never let it sink in
After all, I guess we’re living among the free

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.

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