Zygote in My Coffee is the hearts and minds of the American people expressing themselves through words. The e-zine has a very liberal philosophy - if Brian Fugett likes it, he publishes it. You don’t have to have an In or be a college professor, or be in a MFA program to publish in it. Brian has been publishing the zine for free for several years over the Internet. Now he is publishing a quarterly version of magazine — which I see as being a best of issue.

Amane Kaneko does a wonderful job with colour on the cover, which features a woman sipping coffee, with the background of the city behind her. While the cover art is beautiful, it’s on the inside pages that things get rather dirty.

It features a nice line-up of small press poets, who have been publishing for a few years, or many years. Many of the small press poets have been considered rip-offs of the great poet Charles Bukowski, which I think is not quite accurate. To write like Bukowski did, one would have live the life that Charles Bukowski did and few if any have lived that sort of life, and had the gift of expression to write about it. One can only write what they know.

The poets, who appear in Zygote can be urban or suburban, rich or struggling to pay their Internet bill. But all of them do the only thing that they can do, and that’s write about their lives and how they live. I can’t help thumbing through the pages of Zygote and thinking of an analogy of ancient Chinese poets featuring Li Po and Tu Fu and others. Words move across the page in the same way, without literary devices or tricks. Zygote features poetry, short fiction, and comic strips. It’s collection of underground work; and Brian Fugett and Karl Koweski did a nice job of editing the magazine.

Some of the magazine’s stand-outs for me include: Jack T. Marlowe’s ‘I Wonder If Einstein Hated Mondays Too,’ Ross T Ruffola’s ‘Down and Out,’ Glen W. Cooper’s ‘Black Hole in High Heels,’ Owen Roberts ‘Stench‘ which is an amusing, yet sad poem about a guy who picks up a young crack whore, and is turned off by her body odour.

From the female perspective; you have brilliant poems from Lisa LaTourette - ‘Another Workday,’ Debbie Kirk, who is featured poet of this issue, and delivers a brutal, and interesting poem called ‘Chalk is Breakable,’ Cynthia Ruth Lewis who drops a huge bomb on egotistical men with ‘Viewing the Cosmos from a One—Sided Telescope.’

I’ve been with some egotistical
Men before, never had I had one
Look at me after sex with an
Expression that said they just
Conquered the world

There’s some pretty good short stories in here too, with Raina Bird’s ‘Perverts In The Redwoods,’ which is a story of a young girl growing up in a hippie commune. David Barker tells a strange story in ‘A Strange Couple’ and Andrew Lander writes a story about prostitution in, ‘Need.’

The print mag also features comic strips. One of particular interest is done by d. richard scannell, named ‘Undertaker Ennui,’ which reminds of some of Robert Crumb’s earlier work. It features an undertaker sitting on a grave stone with his head down brooding. He hears a rumble from the ground, and sees a feminine skeleton who asks him, “lonely? Sad? Suicidal? I can help. Come with me now. Off with your pants.” The undertaker proceeds to copulate with the corpse and of course transforms into a woman, with flesh bones and blood while the undertaker becomes the skeleton.

But I think James Babbs steals the show with his poem titled, ‘Where Babies Come From.’

When the wide—eyed child
Approaches the parents
And asks them nonchalantly
Where babies come from
And the parents smile
Exchanging knowing glances
With one another before
One of them says
Well, when a mommy and
Daddy love each other…
As if love has
Everything to do with it
The countless broken homes
With other stories to tell
And
I realize
It doesn’t really matter
We need to shift our focus
And not worry so much about
Where babies come from
But we should think about
What happens to them
Where they end up
The kind of people
They will become.