Salt.

EMMA

2012-01-29T12:34:00.002-08:00

She’s always losing something,

never knows where she put it,

doesn’t even know what it is

most of the time.

Everything in the house

has been mislaid at some time or other.

Even when she comes across something

that’s been missing for years

she can’t remember losing it

so it’s not really found.

Her motto is,

“Everything in its place.

That way, nothing is.”

John Grey

THE SPRING IN MY STEP

2012-01-29T12:34:00.000-08:00

The world returns.

Oak partners with elm,

with willow,

to bring it to me,

leaf by leaf,

songbird by songbird.

The warm of my heart

is shared by the grass,

the wildflowers.

Yesterday’s melt

is today’s bloom.

The world would not

be back here otherwise.

John Grey

LIAR

2012-01-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

I’m not the criminal liar,

the one who says this check is covered.

Nor am I the gossipy liar

with mouth awash in fabricated rumors.

There’s a little of the ad-man liar in me,

especially when I put pen to paper.

Poetic license, after all, is written in hyperbole.

I don’t think I’m the evil liar,

none of this, no problem,

the driving’s fine

when sheets of black ice

coat the roadways.

And I try not to be the guilty liar,

red-faced, who says,

“I did not break the vase.”

I do my best not to break vases

in the first place.

I admit I am the lover liar,

though not of the cheating kind.

Not having seen them all,

I can still proclaim you

the most beautiful of women.

With nothing to compare it to,

my love is clearly the deepest,

the strongest, the longest-lived.

You prefer that kind of lie.

Or, at least, you say you do.

John Grey

John Grey has been published recently in the Echolocation, Santa Fe Poetry Review and Caveat Lector with work upcoming in Clark Street Review, Poem and the Evansville Review

i3b

2012-01-29T12:21:00.000-08:00

busy busy butterfly

bathe brilliant beautify

just a sparkle of bling

bass breaks beats

breezers boy bed

moved my being

backbone blood bite

breaths beyond bliss

but here’s the thing … my body’s besotted

i’m drawn to my

bastard belovéd

iDrew

iSpin – (or things i can’t do in iTunes)

2012-01-29T12:14:00.001-08:00

flirt in amungst the r&b

have attitude and hip hop moves

look mad for it and in the groove

enigmatically dark and moody in indie

be a cool couldn’t give a toss rock chic

sweet as a pink pop princess

sad and lonesome country style (dog just died)

in a spin with twelve inch remixes

old skool looking so techno cute

get a phone number with my till receipt

iDrew

iGarage

2012-01-29T12:13:00.000-08:00

you can’t say sorry

with wilted chrysanthemums

it’s not that i want roses

and a candlelit meal

at a posh restaurant

or champagne at a trendy

nightclub not breezers

in a high street disco

i just don’t want

to be an after thought

when you’re paying for your petrol

and rizlas

iDrew

Writing under the name of iDrew to co-ordinate with her titles, Drew is the Tiddlywinks champion of the Clueless Collective

VEXATION

2012-01-24T14:46:00.000-08:00

I have a small confession to make:

your abstracted face

bathed in ennui

my insistence on ruin and havoc

the unscheduled arrival of love

there was never a question—

letting it grow wilder

Laura LeHew

A TRANSCENDENT EVOLUTION WITH A PSYCHIC FLASH

2012-01-24T14:44:00.001-08:00

How

did it feel?

Innocent?

There is no

forgiveness.

His heart a fist

swaddled in blood.

You are a trick question

a larvae browsing through time

watching glass images come

out of the womb how

could one woman be so

disappointing?

The shorter story—

he would have loved you in perpetuity

The lie was a window.

Even if you are guilty.

Laura LeHew

FLETCHING ARROWS

2012-01-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

crow feathers

frigid days

all of my disappearances

hunger appeased—the deliberate duality

what anyone would have done

jay feathers

requiem

as close as possible

to the only path back

with a wall between us

parrot feathers

a hint of hemlock

you are the reason I come home

a rough draft

asking too many questions

Laura LeHew

I’m a Sagittarius with a Scorpio Rising and I quite liked William Doreski’s poem “The Night’s Criminal Intentions Made Clear.”

Looking for Elvis

2012-01-21T13:54:00.000-08:00

Big Marv was bent over looking for his other sock when he caught a glimpse of himself in the locker room mirror. “My ass looks like Elvis,” he told his buddies.

“Your ass is a big white blob with a hairy “V” on top.” Nagi synched his shoulder pads.

“I didn’t say it was the young Elvis. It’s the old guy -- the Las Vegas Elvis.”

Emilio stuck his butt against the locker, let one rip and added, “ My ass sings like Elvis.”

“Definitely the old Elvis,” Big Marv choked into his jersey.”

“The dead Elvis,” Nagi added.

After practice the three boys hung out at Big Marv’s. He had a Lazy-boy, a king sized bed and a wide screen TV in his bedroom. There was an old-school, Led Zeplin poster on one wall. College football pennants were tacked up; Marvin’s mom was constantly reminding him of the goal. Big Marv was six foot and close to three hundred pounds. He was morbidly obese. The Lazy-boy groaned.

“Hey look at this.” Emilio interrupted the rerun of Beverly Hillbillies. Emilio was the bright one, the good looking one, the guy with all the luck. He was holding up Big Marv’s laptop so that his buddies could see it.

“Wow! that’s Marv’s butt,” Nagi said, “Check it out man, the Las Vegas Elvis is on U-Tube.” They gathered around the full-screen view.

“Here comes the other Elvis.” Nagi said as Emilio entered the screen. Then the breath they had built up didn’t tumble out as laughter.

Emilio blurted, “Bullshit,” The other’s watched.

The camera looked over the top of Big Marv’s naked butt; it was a telephoto shot, close up with incredible detail. Black hair at the top of his ass and the white globular folds of skin rippling the crack. He was bent over and Emilio was wiggling against the locker in front of him. The camera caught it in a way that put the back of Marv’s head in front of Emilio’s crotch.

Later that week, the routine was broken and Nagi didn’t hang out with his buddies at lunch; he hooked up with Silvia and the two of them talked and touched each other constantly.

Emilio pretended to read a book. There was a spot of grass next to the flagpole where he could sit by himself. Nobody ever came this way at lunch and it felt good to feel that low October sun heating his skin. Most of the year, he stayed out of the sun; he didn’t want a black neck like his father’s; he didn’t want the black mexican tan of outdoor labor.

He had been hoping football would be his way out; he was almost to a thousand yards rushing: one hundred and forty more yards, and he would have the school record. One regular season game, then the conference championship. Who knows? It all seemed so possible a couple weeks ago, but now he felt like puking every time he forced himself into that locker room.

He dressed out late, and when the locker door clanked the locker room echoed like a jail cell. His cleats clicked over concrete as he passed Big Marv’s locker. The door had been closed for over a week now. Emilio could smell the wet jersey and socks starting to rot as he passed. Jersey number 52 drooped limp from the hook, grass stained, mud; it reeked of nostalgia and loneliness. Emilio gritted his teeth and tried to focus on the record.

After practice he saw Nagi at the 7-11 store across the street from school. “How’s the new girl friend?” he asked him.

Nagi said the girl was sweet which meant he was probably getting some.

Emilio dropped half a pack of peanut M&Ms into a twenty ounce Coke. Shook it up and watched the brown fizz spray past his thumb.

"A little chocolate geyser to celebrate our friendship.” he said. Then he guzzled the flat liquid.

“Who shot that video? Who would do something like that? Man. That’s fucked up.” Nagi said, and it was the first time they’d talked about it since the U-Tube went viral.

Emilio shrugged. “You seen fat ass?” he asked him.

“No. Big Marv hasn’t been in class all week. I heard he was going to change schools.” Nagi moved close. “Guess he could do that,” he said, then sat next to Emilio on the curb. There weren’t any cars on this side of the store, just the Liquor Mart and a dumpster.

“They all have cell phone cameras. It could have been anyone.” Emilio answered him, “ I’m just glad we don’t have a computer at our house.” Emilio let his head droop and worked up a spit. “If my little brother’s and sister’s saw something like that,” he didn’t finish.

“My old man just watches Aljazerra.” Nagi said, “ I don’t think they’re looking for Elvis on that channel.”

“Same with the spanish stations man. It’s like before all this happened, I never wanted to go home; I could just hang with you guys at Marvin’s, and groove, and eat vienna sausages and candy bars. Man I’ll be missin’ those little cans of sausage if Big Marv cuts out.”

Then Nagi said, “I’m worried about him; we should check in on him, find out what that new school’s like”

There was a short cut to Marvin’s: a green-space that civic groups maintained. The park threaded between the golf course and the little creek that meandered through this side of town. Emilio used to wander through here when he was a kid, before the golf course, before the Oakmoor Subdivision was built. Back then, the woods were thick with brush and garbage. Nobody came down here except a few of the bravest teenagers who had fuck-holes cleared out in the thickets. He would wander here hoping to catch a fish in the little creek, or hunt some deer, or tigers or big game, but all that was in his imagination, because the closest he ever got to a fishing rod was the sporting goods aisle at K-mart.

Now, that the trail was clear Nagi and Emilio moved easily along the creek. Most of the leaves had fallen. Red and yellow hands rusted into the hard clay, and a low, clear light played through the empty branches. The little creek trickled brightly. Brisk cool air filled them and it felt good to be walking away from school, from home, from everything.

“I wish we could just keep goin,” Emilio said, “ Just walk the fuck outa this shitty town.”

Nagi asked him if he remembered grade school and the golf course, and how they used to wait in here and watch them play golf.

“That was great.” Emilio remembered it, “ We’d sneak out there and swipe the golf balls right off the green.” He grinned. “The look on their faces, Man, Like -- Where the fuck did my ball go?”

Then there was somebody or something ahead of them in the darkening woods. A cold chill heightened Emilio’s awareness like the way he felt out here when he was a kid and he wandered into some strange open place. There had been a chain bolted to the tree, dirty magazines with pictures of naked women, whisky bottles, beer cans, an old mattress dragged somehow deep into the woods. That place had spooked him, and now he felt like somebody was watching him, so he hushed his friend and motioned him to stop. They stooped low to see up through the silhouettes.

Something big, a broken tree, or a ghost, something dangled and they slowly approached until Emilio recognized those wide hips, the size triple X sweat pants sagging down from the white, sweet white face of Elvis.

Bob Putnam

Run of Jacks

2012-01-21T13:49:00.000-08:00

It isn’t fair, Eddie thought. His associates milled nearby. Eddie said, "I don’t see why it has to be like this.”

They huddled together nose to nose, shook and shimmered and seemed to agree.

“I mean -- It doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try, how many push ups, sit ups, laps -- Whatever -- How do you get rid of this god damn visceral fat?”

They nodded.

“This shit is killing me.” he told them.

They seemed sympathetic. They moved and shined and it was like the water had a bad case of tourettes. One guy peeled off toward the rocks, then moved calmly back. Another one broke the surface. Then everyone formed a huddle and moseyed.

“Hey guys,” he approached the group with casual locker room banter.

"Were all about the same age -- right?” There seemed to be some disagreement.

“Give or take a couple days.” he added and agreement deepened, the current seemed to let up a bit.

“Have you taken a good look at yourselves lately?” he asked them, “That snout you used to be so proud of isn’t so streamline these days, is it? And your skin? What’s with that bright neon red? Has everybody gone punk on me. I mean -- what’s next. Tattoos?”

That last bit must have gotten to them. It’s ironic that the possibility of something unique always appeals to group mentality, It’s like we’re hardwired for advertising. They gathered around him like an audience, so he had to step it up. He appealed to the their sense of nostalgia, their longing, their self image or at least the images they wanted to have of themselves. They were great hunters and the sea was deep and endless, food always there: shimmering curtains of herring, menhaden. Currents that would take them where ever they wanted to go. It was an effortless life.

“Endless bliss, perpetual vacation.” These were the words Eddie used. They seemed to have the right effect for the group had relaxed and the current was now slowly moving them back toward the sea.

“Think about it guys. We could turn around right now, head back out, forget about this thing called love.”

You could see the oxygen build with each frenzied wash of gill, the strong flex of the side body, spring steel coil and flash. There must have been something in the water: some pheromone adrift on the current. A word tattooed to every molecule screamed directly to muscle and they shot like arrows upstream.

Eddie now realized how lonely he had been out there. He could now feel a sun, late and dry searing into his flaking skin

He looked at his buddies basking in that same autumn ray and said, “Damn, this gravel feels good.”

Bob Putnam

Bob Putnam is a stay home dad and writer in Scottsville, Virginia. His writing has appeared in: Rivers to Mountaintops, Pine Knots, A Blackberry Sun, and Emerge.

The Visit

2012-01-20T17:34:00.000-08:00

I coaxed Pat into driving at dawn from New York City to Baltimore. I just met her in a

bar. I told her about Doris, how she was strictly off limits sexually though rape crossed

my mind. When I moved to Baltimore she was the first person I met just when I needed a

place to get my bearings and put a roof over my head. I hated her big lipstick mouth, her

fat, slovenly legs, her depression, her droopy hair, her big old-fashioned skirts, her

lackadaisical southern drawl, her tripe about her ailing mother. I wanted her to meet a

real woman, one who put lead in my pencil.

At Doris’s place, I told her we both were on uppers I found in Pat’s glove compart-

ment. I didn’t explain why we made the impromptu visit. Dangling, not having things

clearly spelled out, I knew that upset Doris. I chatted fast, telling Doris I was pleased Pat

went home with me rather than the asshole with a nose-ring and wearing an ascot. I told

her Pat had ripped her pantyhose so she bought another in a Big Top near Doris’s place.

Doris was a social worker and I an interior decorator. Doris never shaved her legs,

black hair looked like oddly shaped parasites under a scientist’s microscope. Doris’s tiny,

humid apartment’s atmosphere had always been thick with cat dander moving through

the air like death-dealing asbestos. I coughed, wheezed and sneezed, my nose running.

The allergy shielded me against a counter-intuitive, booze-induced pass at her.

Doris’s attraction towards me was strong though I was completely unavailable. Often I

saw lust sneak out from behind her sluggish eyes. Doris’s walls had haphazardly hung

paintings of red cats floating through rural streets. She made a collage, my photograph

ripped from a New York magazine, my face surrounded by cats, their red fur jabbing

my photogenic skin, thin streams of crayon-blood dripped from a kindergartener-like

drawing of a sprinkler: God awful.

I could have taken Pat to others I’d known in Baltimore but chose Doris. The

upper was enough to arm my mind with a full-frontal verbal assault of trivia. Doris

squirmed in her chair, that wide fanny of hers trying to negotiate her way through the

spur of the moment visitation. Pat fondled me, suggesting a ménage a trois was in order.

Doris’s face reddened, frozen in fear.

She asked me why I was in Baltimore. Just so Pat could buy new pantyhose, I said.

That satisfied her, she numbly drinking eggnog. Pat said that was a fat person’s drink, get

real, Doris. Doris’s eye twitched and began pulling at her skirt as Pat and I stared at her

legs. Pat chatted about how smooth her own legs looked beneath the beige pantyhose.

I asked Doris to make us a meal. She plodded to the kitchen, breaking eggs, making

pancakes. I adored your feast, Doris, make some more, I said. She did, this time coming

back with many pieces of toast, plus jam. I requested peanut butter, so she thumped back

and put down a jar of Skippy’s. Pat told her only eat one pancake, save the rest for us.

Doris said she’d be fired because her supervisor said she was too slow with evaluation

write-ups. Pat told her she was a conceptual artist and couldn’t understand why Doris

painted. So de trop, Pat said.

Doris turned on the TV, immobilized, eating salty pretzels from a bowl. Pat and I made

love in Doris’s bedroom, we going at it on her stinky sheets. Afterwards, we slept. It was

dark when we woke. I turned some lights on and we walked naked past the TV to the

kitchen, eating Doris’s chicken, pasta, veggies and ice cream. She watched a TV

newscast, paying little attention to us, though she did cast a quick glance at us through

her large black-framed glasses.

I looked in Doris’s pocketbook and liberated four Jackson’s. Pat said, Look, Doris,

then pulled down her pantyhose and mooned her. Doris stared, and stared some more

when I gave her the fascist salute and said, Sieg heil. We laughed, then walked out her

door before I slammed it shut.

George Sparling

He Died With a Thumb Drive in His Hand

2012-01-15T13:45:00.000-08:00

He died with a thumb drive in his hand. In the dull light of the streetlamp the bright green of the device contrasted sharply with the pink and red of his frostbitten fingers and the white of the still undefiled snow on the sidewalk. I quickly pried the drive from his stiff fingers, hid it in a mitten, and trudged away from that deserted predawn side street.

I cut my hand on my keys as I hurriedly unlocked the door to my building. I relocked the door, stomped my jogging shoes on the dirty linoleum of the foyer, and gazed out at the snow which was still falling on the street, a street only slightly less seedy than the one in which he died. No one saw me.

As soon as I closed the door to my apartment, I placed my mittens and keys on a bookcase near the door and, flash drive in hand, hurried to my computer. The machine did not respond; I had to reboot it. As the computer started, I wiped the blood from my fingers and slowly took my shoes off. I saw the mess I’d made a mess of my apartment’s carpet. Cleaning it later would calm me, clear my head before I began to reflect on the contents of the device.

We called him John but I don’t believe anyone knew his real name. It seemed that he had been an integral part of our loose knit group from its inception but he only moved to our city less than three years ago. No one knows where he came from. He spoke his baroque English with an unplaceable accent. With his tall thin frame, pallid complexion, long wispy beard, matted brown hair, and receding hairline he looked like a Russian saint or prophet or a nobody.

The most distinctive thing about him, however, was his thumb drive. He never went anywhere, and having no fixed abode was always somewhere, without it. He kept it in a plastic bag the way a drug addict keeps his stash. His most characteristic nervous gesture was to feel for it, in his pants or jacket pocket, in the computer he happened to be working on, wherever it might be. Who could blame him? Though he never spoke of it, we had determined that the thumb drive contained his complete works.

He never revealed the contents of the drive to anyone. He wrote on the drive in libraries, so-called Internet cafes, at friend’s houses, wherever he could find an available computer with a port for it. It was said that he slept with it, even when he was with a woman, clenched tightly in his good right hand.

He seduced most of the women in our group, even some of the married ones, easily. Though the women seemed to regard them fondly the affairs rarely lasted more than a night or two. Once at a party I, an inveterate eavesdropper, overheard a small group of women talking about him. I approached them, brown alcohol in hand, wanting to find out what he had that someone like me, an ineffective womanizer, did not. I wasn’t coming on to them. They knew that. Still they would not tell me anything. The telling word I overheard, the consensus of their coterie, was pungent. They may have said piquant: it was hard to hear in that apartment.

None of those sirens ever saw what was on John’s thumb drive. Rumors about its contents ran rampant through our group. Some maintained that the drive contained a novel in progress, others that it contained stories, poems, fairy tales. A few in our group claimed that they could see traces of what he wrote in the computer’s memory. They claimed that he wrote in English in a simple evocative style that in no way resembled his rococo speech patterns. None of these cyber-sleuths could quote a single phrase.

A few months ago some members of our group started a webzine. John was asked to contribute a piece or, if he felt it was premature, to write a short introduction. I believe he was even offered space on the site to maintain a blog. He refused all these offers. As far as I know he never saw the webzine.

My contributions were rejected. I understood; I’ve always been a peripheral member of our artistic circle. I don’t have any benefactors. I have my ill-paying white-collar job to maintain. I can’t spend much time schmoozing, flaneur-ing, thinking deep artistic or revolutionary thoughts. Some of my work has been published, perhaps in forums as good and lasting as our webzine, but most of it lay dormant on my hard drive which was just coming to life.

I put the thumb drive in the port. While I waited for the computer to recognize it, I wondered what I would do with the work. I could become John’s editor, his Max Brod, or, if I felt daring and the style was similar enough to mine, I could pass the work off as my own.

I looked at the contents of the drive through the computer’s explorer, my personal Darien. Unlike John, the drive appeared to be neatly organized. There was a document called Introduction.txt and numbered folders that appeared to correspond to chapters. I opened the Introduction and began reading what our prophet wrote:

He died with a thumb drive in his hand. The slow-acting poison entered his bloodstream through a small cut in his finger…

Joseph Carfagno

Joseph Carfagno was born in Brooklyn but lives in Connecticut.

Sakura’s Violin

2012-01-12T08:38:00.000-08:00

One can feel the river as a ghost on the very winds that sweep through the streets carrying with them the pungent perfumes of people, jasmine, horses, burning oil, spilt beer and seafood. It was musk greatly to her liking. As always the dusky deep streets thronged with thousands of tourists around Bourbon but tended to thin out as she moved further away into the back streets of the Vieux Carre. Winter was passing into spring and with it a curtain of sensuality and new growth spread over the early evenings and she made a point of walking them at this time.

Pollen like honey dust, clung to her skin with her sweat and the early evening dew. It was romantic and thrilled her. It gave her images to write her music to. In her mind the notes would smell as sweet as the thoughts of deep green vine and new spring flowers. The secret at the center of the magnolia bloom envenomed with ancient wine.

She turned off of Toulouse and onto Decatur crossing in front of Jackson Square. Here the artists and street musicians would already be imbibing on the night’s blood, drinking from the vein of profits to be taken.

She thought of them as modern pirates or gypsies in their colorful ratty clothes and glittering amulets and beads. The smell of the river grew thicker as she approached. She thought to enter the Cathedral to light candles and smell the incense but the night was too sweet. The river smell mingled with coffee as she passed busy Café DuMonde and up to the river walk. She turned left and half walked, half danced through the poorly lit walkway. Towards the French Market, the more interesting occupants of this beautiful and villainous city thrived. It was here that she was going.

The Market was closing and the many vendors were shutting down, closing carts, and packing away the many wondrous foods and exotic foreign spices that could be found here beneath the veneer of cheap hot sauces and cheaper paper umbrellas.

Onto Barracks and into the darkness she went until she came to the tiny quiet shop she was looking for. Musique Pour les âmes érotiques Pécheuses was written in scrawling gold flourish across an old driftwood plank that served as the shops title. She entered and was immediately assaulted by the essence of very old books and stacks upon stacks of vinyl records. Numerous saint candles and one very old looking chandelier lighted the store.

“Bonjour mon cher doux peu Sakura,” said a voice she knew very well from behind a glass case of fossils and animal skulls. It was Donnez and from his thick gruff tone, it sounded as though he had added an extra pack of Lucky Strikes to his usual three-pack day.

“Bonjour Donnez! Dites-svp moi qu'avez obtenu vous ce que j'avais tellement désespérément demandé ?”

“I have it, I have it Ma Cher as though I could refuse you anything.”

Donnez rose and his ancient chair creaked audibly. He turned and set the needle down on his record player. The shop filled with the sound of scratching record needle. And then the sounds of Vera Lynn singing that they would meet again.

“Don’t know where… don’t know when,” Sakura mouthed.

Donnez coughed harshly, turning away from her direction. Sakura walked over to him and set her hand on top of his. He patted it and shook his head.

“Aucun non aucun mon bonbon, just uh the heavy breathing of a man regarder en bas d'un pistolet de tabagisme.” He turned to face her. “And you Cher do you really desire it?” She saw candles within the low light, reflect in his eyes. “There were a number of people swore…”

“I know I know, but I fear that my curiosity is…” she looked up at him, nearly kissing for a brief moment, “irrevocable.”

Donnez nodded and lit another Lucky Strike with an old sailor’s brass lighter. He sat back down, briefly drank from a wine glass upon his small desk and swiveled his chair around to the lock box. It was an old thing. More like a pirate chest then a safe, but Donnez had proclaimed it stronger than any bank.

Protected by a blessing from Marie Laveau herself, he once told her. From under his shirt he pulled the key and Sakura heard the heavy latch slide. And something else; chimes perhaps?

Donnez opened the chest and hesitated. He reached in and lifted the treasure from it. He turned and held it before her. Sakura felt herself respond as if the Prince Charming of the darkest fairytale had just kissed her hand. A thing of intense beauty, shaped like the unclothed back of an exotic goddess. Its finely grained wood was deep red like pooled blood and glowed in the shops dim light. Somehow it seemed to blur and capture any light that touched it. She reached... tentatively.

“Svp l'amour, comprennent que le paiement est cher.” Donnez spoke deeply. He seemed himself enthralled with pleasure and grief though she knew he had never drawn a bow across a stringed instrument in his life. She stopped, hand poised just over its surface. They regarded each other as lovers, guilty in their many acts of sin. Then she closed her hand over the Violin. Immediately she felt warmth and carefully cradling the instrument in her arm, she looked at her palm. There was no cut there, but her palm was moist with fresh blood. She looked at the violin. Clean it was and no trace of her life upon it.

“Now, please…play it for me. I have sought long to hear it,” he said. Sakura hesitated briefly. Looking at the old shopkeeper.

“Your skill with music is unquestionable,” Donnez spoke, with the sadness of a funeral march and the joy of newfound love quavering in his voice. Sakura felt it in her hand. So light and somehow terribly heavy. Yet she had no trouble positioning it and delicately placing the bow.

She began to play.

Sakura had expected beauty from such a treasure, but nothing like what she heard. The music produced by the violin and her well-trained fingers seemed to fill the very room. The candles dimmed slightly and a feeling of something very old and timeless entombed her. Yet as she played, an overwhelming sensation of passion and ecstasy filled her body and her mind.

It was like true love and heroin woven from the air by music. Donnez was weeping openly and gesturing as though the Madonna had appeared before him. Her hands dripped her life’s blood onto his floor and she was unaware that tears of that same blood were coursing down her cheeks.

Sakura played as though adrift in a sea of warmth. The notes almost played themselves. She did not think of what to play, nor did she know the music. It seemed to be in no key she had ever heard.

It just came... otherworldly and ethereal. And as she listened, the feelings that grew were rapture… bliss greater than any imaginable. Behind her closed lids, a universe of lights danced and played to the song. She felt herself separated from the world she knew, lost and adrift in a warmth and powerful eroticism.

When she finally stopped, Sakura nearly fell. She lowered the violin and looked at Donnez. His passing had been one of utter happiness for he was still smiling. His tears had become small rivers of blood staining his collar. The record was skipping and the candles had burnt to stubs. Her breath heaved and she felt her own cheeks were wet, but now they were only tears. Yet, seeing him did not make her sad.

She leaned over him and kissed his tobacco tasting lips. Before leaving she dialed 911 and left the phone off of the hook. She took the violin with her, feeling no act of thievery in doing so. She knew very well that it had claimed her. The night awaited and there was music to be made in the river-scented air of the quarter.

XXX ZOMBIEBOY XXX

4 am Heartbreak

2012-01-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

“Sometimes ghosts walk in on the voices of the frogs…” Sakura said wistfully…

She sat on a mountain of pillows pulled from all the couches in the big living room. She had lit the fire and the saint candles and was listening to one of her favorite bands. The tape was white and ancient. One of the first albums she had ever owned.

The singers voice was haunting and deep and full of pain and beauty. Sakura was one of those souls that reached out to sad music when she felt sad. It was like weaving a tapestry with her emotions and music to create a larger piece of art. A fantastic landscape of pain, fear, and beauty.

Sakura was awake because the night felt like heartbreak. In a house full of roommates she still felt alone… and 4am was always the tearful hour. She was not sure why, but her heart hurt at that time. And her soul felt like a crackling old tearful song on a vinyl record or a broken tea cup.

Uncomforted by arms that would hold her, she came out here alone… wrapped in one of her favorite blankets. Not that she needed it, or the fire for warmth. The spring nights had begun and the air only held the cold with desperation. It was more to feel hugged by something. And warmed by the light.

Something in the night made her fearful. The dark was a physical presence. She chased it away with candlelight, music, and warm thoughts about people that touched her and loved her.

“A warm thought about loves both lost and found can scare away the deepest chilling wraith from ones heart,” said a soft voice.

Sakura was not startled by this voice however. She knew it. After all, she wasn’t even sure if she hadn’t created it altogether.

“My heart is heavy this night. And there is soul hurt in the air like incense without a smell. I don’t know why I am hurting this much Coyote…” she turned on her mountain of pillows. “But I know that my soul feels as though it swims in a vortex. I feel like a little girl deprived of stuffed animals and locked into coldness.”

Coyote was sitting up and eyeing her intently. He was a canine but his every expression was human and he spoke perfectly. Certainly he was not real. Yet, she did not care. He nodded in response to her.

“Little girls must sometimes face the darkness unguarded to emerge as women… yet a woman you already are my dear. And one of strength as of yet undiscovered. I am here now though… and always will be.”

He walked over and laid his muzzle on her leg, looking up at her with canine eyes that held every human emotion. The music continued to play low in the background. The singer sung of pornography and sleep.

“I’m here my Little Ronin. And these ghosts coming into your chambers are no more dangerous to you than nightmares or smoke. And I will chase them from your mind if you need me to.”

Coyote licked her hand and she smiled down at him. “Why are you so kind to me Coyote? What made you come to me? Why am I so special? I do not think I am.”

“I think you are. And I came to you because I Love You… I need no other reason.”

“Did I create you?”

“You are asking me if I am real Sakura?”

“Yes.”

Coyote sat up and was not eye-to-eye with her. “I am as real as you want or need me to be my dear… whether you created me in your mind or not is not important. Reality is perception, and if you believe me to be real, then I am. Nothing is impossible until you decide it is, or stop believing. And I know your heart. You believe.”

Sakura leaned forward and wrapped her arms around him. He certainly felt solid enough. His fur was soft and warm. He smelled of fields and forests and living in the open winds.

The embrace was long and although he did not hug back with human arms, he rested his head on her shoulder. She could feel his breathing. His strong heartbeat. He had to be real.

“Stop worrying whether I am real or not,” he said and pulled back from her.

Then both turned in the direction of the window. They knew something had joined them. She glanced at Coyote who only kept staring intently outside. The thing had no voice. It had no substance. It was only a feeling. Yet it was as real as stone. Coyote spoke to Sakura without moving. “Sometimes ghosts walk in on the voices of the frogs.”

Sakura felt her heart twinge at its approach. The closer it came the more fearful and lonely and sad she felt. Coyote came between them and it stopped. His growl was barely audible. Then it was gone and she thanked him.

When he turned to her, there were tears on his face. All too human.

She went to wipe them but he only licked her face. “No. I endure so that your heart is less troubled. It is the price of such things.” She looked sadly at him and he smiled. “No more fear. It will not return. Not on this night.”

He leaned into her again and let her hug him. The night now felt less oppressive to her. The music, which had seemed to fade was playing again, low and steady. Coyote licked her hand again and then stood and turned.

“No…” she said. He turned back and looked at her. “Don’t go.”

“I have no choice.”

“Will you let me hold you? I want to…”

“I want you to. And you always can in your heart.”

“I don’t want you to leave me.”

Coyote walked back to her and nuzzled her with his face.

“I will never be far. And I will always be with you.”

Coyote licked her face gently once more and when she opened her eyes again, he was gone. She looked around and wondered if it was all just her daydreaming again as she was prone to. Then she saw it. A single hair. The music played. The firelight danced on the ceiling and walls. She held it up. A single long white hair. His fur. She held it to her chest and whispered into the night which now felt warm and comforting…

“Sometimes ghosts walk in on the voices of the frogs…”

XXX ZOMBIEBOY XXX

XXX ZOMBIEBOY XXX is a freelance writer, artist, photographer and model from Tallahassee, FL and a citizen of the world. He attended a college at which he received a piece of paper that said he was a Masters though the plurality of the statement made him question his duality. XXX ZOMBIEBOY XXX has written numerous articles for Carpe Nocturne magazine and has self published a collection known as OCTOPUS. He is currently working on his second collection TENTACLES and sometimes taking off his clothes and smearing blood on himself as a model. He has a thing for Zombies and horror.

Police State

2012-01-06T14:57:00.000-08:00

Villains, the original meaning of the word was treacherous, abusive, evil. An

electronic sign in huge red light emitting diodes flashed in my neocortex: Villains At

Work High Risk Zone. A reign of terror beneath my roof was undeniable. I never lied.

Stepping into the tub, I took my usual pre-dawn shower. I saw headlights from the

window in the bathroom, villains driving vehicles, one after another, out of the parking

lot across the street, sweeping their yellow headlights, turning my white skin tawny. I

heard other vehicles parading down the blacktop as well, showing their contempt for me.

Another curious incident, happening often when pissing into the toilet before bed: a

neighbor’s bright front door light would go dark, light, dark. Showering and peeing,

alpha and omega, I had been locked into their vice grips every night.

I have a peculiar way of washing my hands, more scrupulous than a surgeon before

an operation. I lathered a bar of soap, fiercely rubbing my hands together, then twisting

the bar around my palms, and very muscularly cleansing them, pressing harder and faster

against one another, the procedure exceeding two minutes. I had alerted the villains, so-

called biological entities, aliens is actuality. They assumed I was idiotic, these sentries at

my private gates, stowing the information undoubtedly in subterranean caves, preserving

them until the Sun went supernova.

When I used a battery-driven Oral B toothbrush in the morning and before nighttime

sleep, I imitated the noise of the instrument as I lightly pushed against teeth and gums,

sliding quickly, a process taking more time than the hand washing. My dental hygienist

recommended that I devote at least two minutes to my teeth. Villains always listened,

wrongly concluding that I signaled outside help, hoping to throw off my bondage. The

thorough gargling, then mouth-rinsing sounding like hydropower turbines, villains

downloaded, capturing the noise so it would be analysed, decoded, attempting to find out

whether I had been decrypting rebellious defamations during my daily ablutions.

Often, I read print newspapers the way in which genius John Nash ( “A Beautiful

Mind” ), in both movie and book, had read his paranoiac, splintering, bizarrely digitalized

newsprint, searching for an enshrouded conspiracy as I did mine. He had an immense

breakdown, villains desiring my own crackup, going fetal upon the linoleum bathroom

floor.

Standing before the toilet, I unzipped my penis, releasing urine, staring at a large

poster of the artist Francis Bacon who said, “all that death, I find it very beautiful.” I

pissed many times, drinking teas accounting for that. Staring at Piss-Bacon, hearing

liquid against porcelain, probably made by American Standard, its name rang true, I the

basic AS, nothing out of the ordinary though disengaged, searching interiors of my

carnivore-brain for meaning and consciousness and privacy. I wanted to read on my bed.

Read in peace, that was, without outside villain-static.

Villains watched me piss, in the daytime making sure I heard their parked vehicles

outside my apartment, engines running, doors slamming, power brakes pumping staccato

beats, wanting me to be acutely aware I was incessantly under an almighty and

mysterious process of observation: Jeremiah 33:3: “…great and mighty things, which you

not know.” Periodically stumped, I shuttered at the omnipotence of the villains’ inten-

tions.

I stood in the closet, momentum gathering, villains extending their clutches over my

mind, suspending me over the abyss. I took Bacon’s words to heart, pulling out a

Browning shotgun and box of shells given to me by my father for my 16^th birthday. If

I unzipped it from the soft case, classic filmdom’s retribution ( impossible taking the

villains to court---they were so diffuse and dispersed ), I would blast anonymous

persons, all the city’s citizens complicit in villainy. Their toxic venom spurting from

my 16-gauge carcasses, blood cascading, think Kubrick’s movie, “The Shining,” blood

flooding the hall.

At night, peeing became a light show, vehicles streaming down the street, headlights

flashing on and off, red lights twirling and flashing from law enforcement vehicles,

firecrackers exploding, their rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air, their amassed

throw-weight measured by the increase of sickness, physical, mental and emotional, they

attempting to overload me with the ultimate affliction: death.

Reading at night or day, the ceiling light beaming down ( Picasso’s “Guernica,”

history’s light bulb shone down on atrocities ), mufflers covered my ears. I bought them

at a sporting goods store, mufflers used at indoor shooting ranges, men and women of

violence wanting to eliminate or conceal hidden icons of earsplitting noise. I liked great,

sprawling novels and social histories, their fortissimo overcoming the villains lurking

where I least expected it, in books. Where had the people come from, those traipsing past

my windows as I read, many on cell phones mentioning my name, telling friends about a

“lout,” a “freak of nature,” a “dummy,” a “poor excuse for a human being.” Often, they

would stand against my first floor apartment’s wall, their iPods loud with hip-hop or

death metal. I momentarily stopped concentrating, regaining it after inuring their

undesirable antics. But the villains’ war against me knew no boundaries however I

resisted.

The villains’ goal: discombobulating me until I raised the white flag of surrender.

Remember the Masada fortress, Zealots holding out against the Romans, finally

deciding death and suicide by their own hands preferable to Romans slaughtering

them. I, the new Jew, under siege by villains, yelled to a person playing guitar outdoors

a foot away from me on the bed, “Never again, punk!”

Twice daily, I flossed my teeth, rooting out particles, tiny shards caught vice-like in

between teeth, breaking them loose and free, unlike the villains’ strategy of threading my

mind with corruption and rot. I looked in the mirror, seeing myself in the mirror,

awkwardly angling the floss, transmogrifying my face into the image the villains prefer:

ugly, haggard, wretched.

Of course, we all loved sleep, even nightmares holding darkness and doom. But we

continued sleeping for the sake of waking up alive the next morning, another day we

were not dead. Impossible to sleep off hangovers of the dictatorship of villains, creating

another insomniac their plan. Billions had gone before me without much sleep, making

them weak and tractable, turning them into moronic insomniacs.

“They shall not pass,” spoke Delores Ibarruri Gomez, directed at General Franco’s

fascist military machine. Always heroic, I snuggled under sheet and blankets, taunting

them, daring villains to break through my sotto voce or normal verbiage, unafraid,

though through the wall I often heard loud thuds, meaning stop my closed-mouth, tongue

unmoving in throat-speak. I sounded like a Tuvan throat singer, my own overtone

harmonic sounds until sleep. Outside, vehicles ceased, the normally busy street hushed,

silent-nighting me, only without attendant glories accompanying the holiday season.

“That’s terrorism,” I rasped loudly, but below the decibel threshold that would get me

evicted or having to confront the police after my wall neighbor had had enough of my

bedtime harangues.

Villains feasted on the quiet, dead-air street in which I might burn my wings and

crash, interrupting the hush, babbling confessions I neither had nor would ever have. I

placated them though, running through childhood memories, increasing their hostility

towards me. “I love drama, so let the pressure mount. You’ll have to assassinate me, I’ll

never be taken alive,” I barked. “Your hysterical terrorism rages and your opposition

simmers, murmuring me into inner quietude.” Bed-speaking words and phrases I would

not have uttered without villains stalking through my private rooms, erupting in my

dreams, I the Conqueror, you lousy with gutter-born syphilis of the noggin.

For exercise, I rode a stationary bicycle in a long, deep bedroom closet. I pedaled fast

twice daily, 30-minute reps in high gear. Mufflers covered my ears, otherwise the din

bouncing off the walls would deafen me. I pumped robotically fast, villains hoping I

would dizzy myself in the claustrophobic closet, getting disoriented and confused, my

urge for immortality obviating practicality, gaining not deathlessness but cardiac arrest. I

wanted to outlive the pukes, dreaming of a die-off for those who sought an early death for

good old me.

Pedaling, I counted silently, starting with one, two, one, two, then counted to twenty,

then counting one to nine to thirty, one to nine to forty, and so on, repeating that until I

reached one hundred. In between, I might repeat a number say eight, rhyming it with

debilitate, masturbate, exonerate, eliminate, frustrate, defecate, exterminate ( my

favorite ), counting silently, my mouth sealed shut: “Nine, nine, nine, feeling

fine.” Endorphins soon kicked in, an opiate-like substance, cosmic dark matter I

intuited, the analgesia making me euphoric. Nothing could harm me. Villains had no way

to hurt, torture, or slay my being: I was Emma Goldman, Buddha, Simon Bolivar,

Seigfried, Frodo, Don Quixote, plus mythological heroes from around the world.

Paranoia melted away, my true version of myself reaching its zenith. Who could deny

history and fantasy? Only the villains, of course.

After the workout, I drank cups of Morning Thunder, listened to dark ambient on my

iPod, and raised my middle finger at my foes.

The dressers holding hundreds of family photographs, old VHS porn tapes, hundreds

of clipped articles, a drawer full of literary magazines containing my published poetry,

passports renewed in a small drawer, letters from former friends chronologically

arranged, unfinished manuscripts hiding beneath underwear, collectible poetry chap-

books, ‘60s radical pamphlets, my nephew’s pencil drawings: whenever I opened a

drawer trying to find lost memories, villains shared my eyes, I the camera, seeing

what I saw. What was this, a horror movie, who the monster, who the idol?

The sliding windows near my bed, how villains made them quiver, trying uncountable

ways to assail me, straining to shake my fundament. Those windows often had large-watt

lights outside blazing through closed blinds. What was going on, a Nuremberg rally, ala

USA, klieg lights seeking out misfits and undesirables?

The maroon blanket, a gold M stitched in it: villains thought my dad had not earned

his university varsity letter in swimming. And for that matter, the villains dismissed my

own graduation from high school and college, I hauling out the diplomas, villains

cheerleading with iPod drum and bass loops from the curb. They determined the

diplomas counterfeit, forged, bought from a dealer of false papers.

Being unable to reconcile my life and behavior to my dad’s was their fixed idée, their

obsession. The pressure cooker took its toil, though I perfectly addressed my

dichotomous life when I thought about it in a swivel chair near the front windows.

They whispered through my store-bought earplugs used for sleep. “Shut your mouth,

we’re tired of your senseless backtalk, ripostes won’t stop our investigations.” They

rebuked me, three a.m. horns waking me. Had they entered my sleep-filled

unconsciousness? I turned on the light, examining the earplugs closely. In tiny red letters

I read with a large magnifying glass, “Creech.” It was the Nevada Air Force Base. From

there, a Predator or Reaper drone firing a Hellfire missile could obliterate me in my sleep,

annihilating dreams.

If not, I had plenty of dreams in my pockets ready to use. But the villains shelling

me with mortar rounds was not inconceivable. I began energizing my force field,

protecting me from incoming ammo.

I heard cars’ or trucks’ back-up beepers outside. Perpetual war persisted.

I’d take my chances in Tripoli.

George Sparling

Bloody Soil

2012-01-06T14:46:00.001-08:00

I just can’t forget

to remember the red soil

before and after

the cock fights.

I just can’t forget

to remember the red soil

before and after

the bleeding moons.

I just can’t forget

to remember the red soil

before and after

the dripping eyes.

I just can’t forget

to remember the red soil

before and after

the slashed penises.

I just can’t forget

to remember the red soil

before and after

the spilt watercolor.

I just can’t forget

to remember the red soil

before and after

the violent rape.

I just can’t forget

to remember.

Isn’t it just fucking unfair?

Amit Parmessur

Late

2012-01-06T14:44:00.001-08:00

I know, you don’t have to tell me

the dead aren’t dead until we have forgotten them.

Under a most priceless morsel of sky my love

dwells, solemnly, in that howling graveyard.

But this graveyard is not a graveyard.

These tombs are not lifeless, sad repositories.

They are the fashion shop windows

where the mannequins have grimaced for eternity,

showing how to die is an awesome adventure.

There lies my love – so young, so calm.

I now sit there with a spider tattoo, cigarette in mouth,

a cluster of souvenirs round the wrist, guarding it.

And these mannequins do not frighten

me as I do not aspire to be one of them.

People say I’m mad. I can’t care when I deceived

the one who loved me and she killed herself.

As soon as she died I started living for her.

I’ll now see her in the faithful moon.

I’ll now count tears that tell stories of silence.

Amit Parmessur

While craving for her

2012-01-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

I find her in the gossips of holy statues;

I find her in timeless, teeny rivers running

over unknown lands with grazing goats.

I find her on blistered tongues which are

never tired to spell and sing love. I find

her while drawing the curtain over fiery

love rumors. I find her at the edge of my

romantic brain, on every inch of tearful

darkness. I find her in each breath I feign.

I find her on white walls, in the fragrant

frangipanis of my garden. If this vast sky

can see itself in a street puddle’s mirror,

why can’t I find my darling in the moon?

If disloyal souls find good love why can’t

I find her the way I wish? I find her in wine.

I find her in solitude. In pure, red solitude.

Amit Parmessur

Born in 1983, Amit Parmessur is one of the editors of The Rainbow Rose. His poems have appeared in around 100 literary magazines such as: Ann Arbor Review, Calliope Nerve, Black-Listed Magazine, Red Fez, Damazine, Zouch Magazine and many others. His book on blog Lord Shiva & other poems has been recently published by The Camel Saloon. He is nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Award and lives in Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius.

Blog: http://therainbowroseezine.blogspot.com/

entropy

2012-01-05T14:49:00.000-08:00

“Out there it is bloody, fucking chaos, mate.” he spun on his left leg toward the younger, twirling the spatula in his left hand. The apron settled in front of him and he began again shaking the spatula at the younger gently and then turning back toward the stove. “In here, you think about it, and the whole fucking thing seems simple enough. Yeah?” He pressed down into the skillet and something seemed to shriek, as he resumed too quickly to allow a response, “Simple enough and straight about too. That's how things are too. If you can find that in here you know that is how they are. It is so elegant that you'll know- when you find it, that all it takes is to express it and like the lights mate, you've got it.” He moved his arms around a bit in a restrained motion in front of him and then turned toward the table that the younger male was sitting at. He walked to the table and placed two plates on it. “It's so simple; yet out there, it's bloody, fucking chaos.” He sat down and then looked directly at the younger. “Now, eat up, mate.”

It was especially when the younger male sat on the hard floor of the living room, staring at blocks with sunlight streaks cutting through smokey, dusty air to strike whatever was in its path, that the younger went, in his mind, to something nice and simple. Mostly he sat there quietly with his legs crossed and his hands palms up, one holding the other, and both resting in the center of his legs. The sounds of his neighbors were a varying ambience that was internalized as well as unrecognized.

The younger could smell the older male and hear the older's body any time he was there. The older spoke loudly sometimes, and he liked when the younger looked at him while he talked. According to everything the older imparted, all the things that the older said would be of benefit, but it didn't make sense because the younger had already found the simplest and easiest way. He was polite, and some people gave him what he wanted.

“Get up. We've got to get the trash out of here, now.” The older man was wearing a plain white t-shirt that had a number of holes widening around the neck line. In his pocket rested the soft package of cigarettes that had the visual appearance of a decoration. The younger rose, walked to the kitchen and opened the cabinet beneath the sink. The large green plastic trash can had been with the older man longer than the younger had. The rim was worn, revealing a number of holes that were beginning to widen. The result was that small pieces of the lip would crack off when lifting the can by the lip. The older man would lament and attempt to reinforce in the younger the importance of not breaking off any more of the lip. The younger would listen. “I realize that that can is getting old, but every day that we make it last from now on, is another day that we save the cost of replacing it. It's like overtime. These points are important. Do you understand that?”

The younger would nod his head in the positive. The younger would inform the older when another piece of the lip would break off, because it was important. What was actually real in his mind was the can could be used long after it had no lip and that a broken lip was no reason to stop being polite & getting what he wanted.

A wrapper spun at the base of the hallway's wall. A piece of string swung at the top of the stairwell. He drug the toe of his shoe pointing it at the spinning wrapper, then across a seam with a thump. Another thump against the angled concrete above the stairs. Another fainter down the hall. The light grew brighter and brighter. He reached the bottom step. The last on the left. The door was the end. Light streamed and spread around the darkened concrete wall. Light from above and up the steps on either side of the wall ahead at the end of building. The light came up into the hall and just past the last door on the left where he now stood.

He touched the handle and then knocked. The tiny dent at the upper left was always a comfortable resting spot for the ring finger of his left hand. The knob turned with his hand still on it and the man pulled the door open. The boy stepped inside and rubbed his left eye with the meat of his hand.

“Got the trash out quick didn'tcha?” The man pushed the door closed behind the boy and then walked into the living area and sat on the couch. “You know. When you don't take out the trash, I have to walk out to the left, Down the short steps and all way 'round. The banging stairs you bound up, I can't take anymore.” The man sat there with the television for a moment while the boy sat down on the hard floor. “Chinga. Never get like me. Ya hear. And would'cha look at that on the screen.?” The boy lifted his head in the direction of the screen. The two watched as a news story was read and text scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

“They're screaming overthrow him. I'm wondering where's the bloody dictator supposed to dictate the people that want to be dictated when we give the country to the people that want to be free.” The younger watched as some diminishing flames and embers lit part of the otherwise darkening room in a brief image. “But out there, it'll be a lot of bloody fucking chaos before its over, mate.”

Edward Wells

Edward Wells II is a writer, recently returned to schooling. His work The Rider is appearing in serial publication at The Bicycle Review, while other pieces are available to readers at The Writing Disorder and Bending Spoons. His collection Mexico 2009, originally released electronically by Full of Crow ( HYPERLINK "http://issuu.com/fullofcrow/docs/mexico"http://issuu.com/fullofcrow/docs/mexico), is soon to be available through major e-book distributors in the form of small e-books containing adaptations of the manuscripts original sections. His author page can be found on facebook.

I, Tad

2012-01-04T15:52:00.000-08:00

Dead, I had become transparent eyeball, not Emerson’s, but godlike. Dead, I

knew and perceived more than alive. My father Gustav was dead, mother Hildy too, but

sister Herpy’s alive. My entire life, its repellant bloom had yielded nothing of

importance. A man without biological necessities, lacking essential neurons had no

reason to sit down at dinner to discuss his day, the news, vocations they regretted not

pursuing. Mother wrote for the town’s newspaper, Gustav ran a pharmacy, Herpy taught.

I, dead, and not loquacious, sat and endured.

Some said I died from untreated syphilis, others said the white trash hooch I drank,

glycol from antifreeze giving me cirrhosis of the liver killed me, others saying it

was cancer, too many soft drinks, ignorance dominated the town. I never had sex, seldom

manually released, never drank alcohol, thinking folks would never again doubt my

ignorance, and I drank only herb teas. Soft drinks I associated with white southerners

drinking Coca-Cola, gibbering about how superior they were, unlike dummy blacks.

While putting up storm widows, bracing for the Midwestern cold, Gustav was in the

garage attic where we stored the windows, me up a ladder on the concrete floor, and

instead of carefully handing me the heavy wood-framed window, my weak arms could

not balance on the ladder. I had been born with multiple sclerosis, an undeveloped

twenty-one year old, due to oxygen deprivation at birth, the umbilical cord twisted

around my neck. Gustav bullied me into work, all the time knowing the obstetrician’s

absence, nurses fondling each other, not attending my primal needs. Gustav flung

one wildly at me, thinking I would hold on to it but it smashed my forehead,

knocking me off the ladder. I thudded on my back upon the cold, hard floor,

gazed at the ceiling for two seconds, then oblivion, blood haloing my head.

A Blue Jay cawed. A diesel truck throbbed down a far off highway. A dog barked. A

spider’s legs noisily crawled over my face. Dust hummed through the air. The door,

squeaking, from the house opened, then slowly, creakily shut. I lay dead.

Herpy grabbed my body, wrapped it in a heavy tarp, and then rolled me to the

backyard, hiding me in thick, gray dogwood. It kept me comfortably out of the world,

concealing me from the backsides of neighbors. Herpy told mother I had met a friend from

my high school years, reliving memories at a tavern or restaurant, possibly sharing a

downtown theater’s movie. Mom looked surprised, then her expression changed---

for the first time her eyebrows bent low over her eyes, finding me intolerable.

Who would date me?

Think of nostalgic western films, on sheriff’s walls, Wanted, Dead or Alive posters.

Mom and Herpy liked those old TV westerns, seeing dead outlaws heaped in a

big pile in front of the hoosegow. She still watched them on rerun channels. I pulled

at my suspenders, puffed out my chest, momentarily pride and glory engorged me,

then I snapped the bands, too loud for Hildy. “Don’t interrupt me, please,” she said,

her mean eyes staring hard. Watching “Rawhide” reruns better than speaking to the dead.

Herpy slid me from the shrubs, barely able to lug my pear-shaped corpse into the

trunk, driving to deep woods, pulling off the tarp and found maples, locust, hickory,

hemlock, a thicketed undergrowth, used the shovel she snagged from the garage,

digging four feet in a patch of soft mire, mostly mud, near a small pond, rolled me into

the hole, tamped down loose earth making my cadaver impossible to locate. I sunk to the

bottom of a manure pit. That lasted until she left the scene, then I rose from the wretched

earth, seeing the dead more plentiful than before.

Later, Herpy committed mother to a mental hospital. She wanted to protect Hildy from

the fact of my death. Nothing would conceal my deadness, not even motherly affection,

though that was nil in her case. Mother always hated my insufficiencies, and would have

gloated at the news of my death. There, psychiatrists put her on serious medications, the

kind that never let you know that you were better off dead.

My albino sister Herpy taught at the community college in town. Damn Gustav had

driven me out of my gourd, always directing my eyes toward mirrors. Gustav made

sure of that because there seemed to be a hundred scattered about the house, in the attic

and basement as well, but he never mentally hogtied and tortured albino sister. My face

and body were covered with wens, warts, bleeding moles, body smelling like fiery crap,

hag-breath so foul father wore a gas mask bought at an army navy surplus store, hell, was

he a cruddy, mean dad. And what a cruel simpleton donning a gas mask. Photos of me in

earlier days, a handsome Gene Autry, good looking in a cowboy outfit. Our family ate in

a cramped dining room, full-length mirrors on two walls. Dad never flouted traditional

kindness except when it came for me. At heart, my kind of visage people despised

because it reminded them of suffering, sorrow, pain, decline, ruin, and decomposition.

Dead now, Autry looked and sang better that ever. Mother had no appreciation of Gene.

Gustav gabbed about his day at the pharmacy, telling there were rumors of customers’

hospitalized because he scrimped on medications, like watering down penicillin, and

buying them cheap online, he using big Latin words, ticking drugs off as if proud of

what he had done. And he lost membership in a downtown business club. The members

thought him grand at first but funds went missing, so they banned him from their midst,

preferring not to press charges. Ostracized, but shallowly, unlike the grateful density of

my own exile. Deaths brought about by him also. He died in prison, an inmate slashing

his throat with a razorblade, settling the score, avenging his wife’s murder.

Herpy was sensitive about being albino, pigment leached out of her. When we were

in nursery school, could it be that when we played kissy-kissy, touchy-touchy, you know,

stuff going on everywhere on earth, made her whiter and whiter as years progressed?

Herpy collected paintings from the art store, prints the owner said, but I still called

them paintings. I was stuck in my ways, hating change. Herpy, the artist, drew my

portrait, my hair uncut, more balding than I assumed, my Dumbo ears making me goofy

looking, my fat cheeks as if big chaws of Mail Pouch bulged out, my chin long and teeth

crooked, me thinking I was as good looking as Adonis. She drew my tongue protruding

out the side of my mouth, my bug-eyed-monster eyes, one iris greener than the other,

my nose aquiline, my mustache, how skimpy it looked by her steady hand. Herpy

said it was a fine Roman nose, one looking like Emperor Commodus’s. Herpy told me

the assassinated emperor begot the word, commode. Whether that was true had not

mattered, but merely associating with toilets, its receptacle of excrement and urine,

even blood, lent my deadness greater potency. I beamed at the thought of toxic, liquid,

chemical turmoil. My mustache, how skimpy it looked by her steady hand.

Herpy and I inherited the house we lived in since birth, both having a trust fund from

which would last our lifetimes. Mother out of touch with us, her mind overloaded with

pills and tablets, too may westerns, perhaps. Herpy paid her visits, mother’s expression

offering Herpy recognition as her daughter. I visited once with Herpy, mother staring

at me blankly, lifting up her flabby arm, pointing wobbly at me, stammering, “You two,

stay together,” that barren, empty look still there. Herpy gave her an easy going hug. I

tried copying Herpy’s embrace, but Hildy withdrew, staring at the ceiling, a nurse ready

to change the sheets.

One day, during visiting hours, I saw mother alone, she sitting in an upright chair,

watching Fox News. She looked better than last time. What were her days like? She said,

“I watch Fox all day, eat, pray in that cute little chapel, take meds and sleep. Nightmares

of our house and garage, the yard.”

I decided to leave, moving toward her, clasp her floppy body, seizing it in my arms,

squeezing it, showing my exuberant love. No, not love, I only wanted to be Herpy’s

equal. I kissed her and she recoiled, saying, “Cold lips you have. Are you my son?” I

moved away, telling her Gustav killed me. I witnessed her hair turning from gray to

white. Dark outside, a single fluorescent light bulb lit the room, like moonlight. I said

goodbye, “Goodbye” a clichéd response, then recalled a song about a woman lover

not knowing whether she had said "Goodbye" when she and her lover split.

Home, Herpy said the hospital called: Hildy just died. I crushed her dead, though I

never told her that. Unless Herpy had gotten pregnant, there would be no offspring. The

family line stopped. We began quarreling, trivial stuff, like who would rake the leaves,

weed the small garden, vacuum, cook, go shopping, maintain the car, wash the dishes,

sweep the porch. She at her computer, creating digital art, I knowing nothing about

technology except for archetypal toilets.

I sat on a soft chair in the enclosed porch, staring at cars, watching families walk by,

listening to leaves cry in the wind, hearing end-time, funereal noises of birds, snakes,

ladybugs, dogs, hearing historically unrecorded sounds emitted from mouths of folks just

prior to their deaths in our neighborhood---it grew maddening, the events known only by

the transparent eyeball, how its majesty, its grotesque lowliness exalted me.

George Sparling

THE INSANE AMONG US

2012-01-01T21:29:00.001-08:00

The insane among us

drugged and decomposed

fashion a light between themselves

dark, dense and beautiful.

A river swells in them like a beast,

its long tongue whipping brush and briar,

an insatiable hunger. Listen

to its shadow. Pay attention

to the voice of air. Sunlight

is not always the light to health.

Michael H. Brownstein

THE RAIN AND THE FLOOD

2012-01-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

a partition of clouds and an edge to calm,

one array of silence,

one array of sullenness,

one array of something we no longer indent,

every rapid of light a fluid bubble

over leaf and wind

glitter and pause

and still the river flows taking with it

Michael H. Brownstein

DRIFTWOOD

2012-01-01T21:12:00.000-08:00

These are the names of all of my days.

I sit on the tree trunk in front of the vacant store on 43rd,

The elevated terrible and angry, squeals to a stop.

Standing near the fence for a century or more under the mist of rainbows,

I watch the workers in the distant fog harvesting crosses.

Quiet sympathy,

Every tone of skin a variance of depression gray,

Every knitted muscle more convoluted than its companion piece,

All of the ragweed eating into the lining of my nose

The very seed that feeds the song I like most.

Field workers assemble the wood,

Framing one piece to another,

Whitewashed and hammered shut.

Fog thickens and thins, turns and rises.

Every distant shape, every piece of driftwood.

Michael H. Brownstein

Michael H. Brownstein taught elementary school in Chicago’s inner city (he is now retired), but he continues to study authentic African instruments, conducts grant-writing workshops for educators, designs websites and records performance and music pieces with grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Oppenheimer Foundation, BP Leadership Grants, and others.

Listen, Arcata

2012-01-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

My not so paranoid grievances: those tied at-the-laces tennis shoes draped over a

telephone line outside my house coupled with the movie, “The Woodsman,” Kevin

Bacon’s character, a newly released sex offender, an image of tennies tossed over a line

as opening credits rolled; awfully loud 4 by 4 trucks, iPods and radios blasting, motor-

cycles, skateboarders rolling by at midnight, waking me up---that never happened before;

huge, clamorous line of vehicles driving on H Street whenever I step out the door; people

across the street, mimicking my every word as I lay on my insomniac bed, talking to

myself, with lips closed, how can they hear me; a U.S government car, I saw the

Federal plates, a drunken-faced man pretending to nod off, trying to intimidate me; on

one-way streets, I’ve seen cars go wrong way, their way of symbolically hanging an

upside-down American flag, signaling distress, I their target, getting away with it

because the cops let them; there’s Dogface, a person with an attack dog, barking like a

wild jungle animal whenever he/she thinks I’m not paying attention as Netflix movies

play on my monitor; every time I hear sirens from cop cars/fire trucks speed past my

home on H Street, I’ve called 911, complaining they’re disturbing the neighborhood but,

in fact, they’re terrorizing me, and I shout out my open front door, “Al Qaeda needs

more haters, more improvised explosive devices planted, join them”; my next door

neighbor, The Pimp I call him, makes certain I hear him thudding ( thugging? ) my wall,

as well as speaking on an iPhone to persons unknown, FBI agents, I assume; my dentist,

as I sat in the waiting room, fiddled with an electronic gizmo plugged into a wall next to

me, and I have only seen him on his reclined chair, not in the waiting room before my

appointment; at the clinic once I had my blood pressure taken in a tiny, claustrophobic

room, the health care worker reaching my arm from the hall, the clinic’s electric power

source, coils and wires surrounding me, I scared of touching anything in this electro-

cution chamber, the staff setting me up for thousands of volts jittering through my body,

murdering me; prosecute me, stop persecuting me I yell at that Clicker, clicks coming

from my walls, computer, microwave, Venetian blinds, hoping I would be driven to

madness, overdosing myself with prescription drugs; I am the new Jew, new Roma, stop

the hysteria, think rationally like me…But remember, Citizen Arcata, Blackie’s come to

town, ordered from Amazon, a black and shining machete, and if I placed it in my

backpack, ambling through neighborhoods, perhaps stalking a person, observing their

vulnerabilities, their daily routine, I might just yank it from my pack, bloodying my

victim, chopping off appendages, geysers of blood spouting out in surprising amounts,

dead or alive, I am happy, then dropping Blackie, waiting for the SWAT team taking me

to jail, and the trail, then, before sentencing, I’ll explain how sane I am, I telling the truth

to people unaccustomed to anything but psychiatric delusions.

The surveillance continues, people now watching every keystroke, every eye blink,

they have made me colder in heated rooms, shivering in 60 degree days, sturm und drang

a necessary function before an assassin kicks in my door, emptying his revolver into me,

bullets screaming vilification.

George Sparling

Applying Toxic Mushrooms

2012-01-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

In a room draped in royal blue

a consultant advises applying

toxic mushrooms to problems

office politics can’t solve.

The room shimmers like tissue.

I’m planning a dinner party

for you and your feral husband.

After brandy and thick cigars

I’ll propose you elope with me

to the nearest rain forest, leaving

your husband shuffling papers

in his dusty office where stainless

steel instruments glower and books

too thick to grip with his tiny hands

gloat with insufferable knowledge.

This plan will enrage him, of course.

Exposing his aspirin-sized teeth

he’ll demand an apology;

but I’ll stare until the toxic

mushrooms in his salad attack

his liver and he staggers with pain.

We’ll rush him to the hospital

and assure him of survival,

then taxi to the airport and lose

ourselves together in the world.

What a daydream. The consultant

in the room draped in royal blue

hasn’t mentioned toxic mushrooms,

but flashing his MBA smile

he offers pie charts related

to better use of personnel

to cope with a grim economy.

I made up the rest to impress you,

and would like to share it all

over cups of Earl Grey tea;

but as the consultant’s lecture ends

your blue gaze looks too bottomless

to lure all the way to the tropics,

so I won’t even say hello.

William Doreski

Something Gray Happens

2012-01-01T12:44:00.000-08:00

As we walk beside a granite wall

discussing friends whose cancers

have recurred, enemies whose wealth

has mounted, and the tsunami

that has disabled half of Japan,

something gray happens: a misstep

takes me inside the wall. I panic,

but you see nothing wrong. The day,

filtered through stone, looks final.

The density stifles my breathing

and igneous pressure retards

my already compromised heart.

You believe I still walk beside you

with rapt and human expression.

Yet I’m inside the wall, not quite

fossilized but trapped like a fly

in amber. Only my shadow

walks beside you, a muddle

of shame. Don’t touch or confide

in it. Please call a mason

to demolish the wall and free me.

Too late. Your footsteps recede,

and the tall voice of my shadow

drifts on the brittle March wind.

I try to back out of this trap,

but whatever opening occurred

to admit me now has closed,

leaving no trace of a seam.

Your fading laughter frightens me.

I fear if you accustom yourself

to only the shadow part of me

you’ll forget I used to occupy

three dimensions, and won’t recall

how much of me the stone absorbed,

how much or how little you cared.

William Doreski

The Night’s Criminal Intentions Made Clear

2012-01-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

Midnight, New Jersey suburbs.

Expressionless houses stare

into places I’ve never been.

Long streets warp into dead-ends.

The party ended with regrets,

air kisses, and many hurt feelings.

A long drive home to New Hampshire

past half-awake Manhattan,

through Connecticut’s uneasy sleep.

Too much outstanding mortgage,

too many kids in college. The stars

won’t reveal themselves until

I’m north of Springfield. Troopers

will ignore me. Huge trucks will sneer

as they pass at twenty or thirty

miles above the limit. Someone

will die alone and drunk on a curve

on a two-lane highway out of sight,

the wreckage folded like origami.

I shouldn’t have driven so far

to attend such a sullen party,

should have gotten drunk and slept

on the host sofa and driven home

in mid-morning glare. Instead I drank

club soda and stared into faces

ignited by gothic daydreams

no living man could fulfill. One

by one the women departed

with angry husbands simmering

with liquor. One by one the men

departed with disappointed wives.

The night’s criminal intentions

made clear, I packed myself

like a carry-on and drove away.

Now I’m lost in the empty streets,

desperate for turnpike or parkway.

Vast cemeteries gloom in lamplight

intended to discourage vandals.

I drive so carefully the planet

can’t get too firm a grip on me;

and as I exit New Jersey

over the George Washington Bridge

I glance at the bottomless Hudson

and catch myself adrift and waving,

not drowning, on the carbon slick.

William Doreski

William Doreski's work has appeared in various e and print journals and in several collections, most recently Waiting for the Angel (Pygmy Forest Press, 2009).

The Cost of Remembrance

2011-12-30T08:16:00.001-08:00

The slap of leather against flesh;
a pronouncement,
a judgment.
We breathe hard through our tears,
the layers of malice stripped away
by the black hand of grief.
I walk away
for the next five years,
never able to look you in the eye
without hearing
the hollow sound of your anger
reverberate in my memory.

Marie Lecrivain

Room 418

2011-12-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

to jerry Cornelius

In a hotel room far from home,
the dream within a dream
came to the fore.
The bodies
silently materialized
through windows & walls,
each one surrounded
the space near my bed.
My eyes searched through
a sea of blank faces
& placid hands
for a sign,
a sound of life,
but found none
while the room filled
with an unending succession
of absinthe colored waves.
I watched the bodies
disappear through
the windows & walls,
until I alone remained.
I awakened to a bright
unapologetic morning,
& realized, days later,
that my means of escape
had been visible all along....
If only I'd opened the door.

Marie Lecrivain

The Ring

2011-12-30T08:13:00.000-08:00

Pray you now, forget and forgive. - William Shakespeare, King Lear

How badly do you want it?

The question echoes through my head. Why am I hesitant to take it? He's can't slap me. He can't hurt me.

Daddy was not well-loved. In the chapel, I strain to hear the usual sounds of grief; tears, snivels, sighs. There are none.

I glance down at the frayed hem of my best dress, the worn heels of my shoes. The expectant, hungry gaze of my children bores into my shoulder blades; my father's grandchildren, whose existence he never acknowledged.

My two sisters stand on the other side of Daddy's coffin, their contempt clearly visible. In their hands are the coveted objects of their desires. Neither one needs more money. They both married for wealth, comfort and status. I married for love and, in retrospect, for freedom. From the first day we met, my husband made me happy, and my happiness remained, even after Daddy disowned me for marrying a bartender.

Two years ago, my husband, the father of my beautiful children, died in an auto accident. He wouldn't want me to be here, faced with this choice.

I am desperate.

The diamond-and-ruby ring sparkles on my father's pale, rigid hand with the promise of a return to prosperity: hot meals, new shoes and clothes for my kids, a down payment on a new apartment in a neighborhood where my children and I can feel safe. Perhaps there would be enough left over for a small nest egg, so my kids can to go to college.

I stare at his hand... the hand attached to the object I need. The hand that used to stroke my head when I was little. The hand that covered my mouth to stifle my cries when he came into my room at night to rape me. The hand that struck me down the day after my wedding in front of my husband and my new in-laws.

The terms of the will are clear. If I don't go through with this last task, then I fail... again. Even in death, my father determines my choices.

I lift his hand to my lips. It’s stiff, square, and cold. I try not to shudder. I wonder how I can summon the bestial indifference that my sisters were able to use to finish the challenge, to win.

I stare at the greedy bloodstained smiles of my sisters. I move his hand to my lips, open my mouth and enclose the finger with the ring inside, just past my teeth. I try not to gag. Two bloody, ragged stumps brush against my cheek. I close my lips and begin to bite down as the taste of embalmed flesh and metal fill my senses.

copyright 2011 marie lecrivain

Marie Lecrivain

Marie Lecrivain is a writer, editor, and photographer who resides in Los Angeles. She is the editor/publisher of poeticdiversity: the litzine of Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in various online/print journals, including Haibun Today, Heavy Hands Ink, Illumen, The Los Angeles Review, and Poetry Salzburg Review. Her short story collection, Bitchess (copyright 2011 Sybaritic Press), is available through Amazon.com and smashwords.com.

Silver Belle Girl

2011-12-29T14:01:00.001-08:00

Long arm dress. Jitterbug heart. Door to door. Lock teeth white clench fist stand her. Open eye Fox Trot now. Swish. Fiddle dee dee. Dos se do allmande right left. Her. Dress flounce knee wet carpet, face. Oh. Stand still hope.

Neila Mezynski

Neila Mezynski is author of Glimpses from Scrambler Books , a pamphlet from Greying Ghost Press, echapbooks from Patasola Press and Radioactive Moat Press (Jan 2012) and chapbooks from Folded Word Press (Jan 2012), Mud Luscious Press and Deadly Chaps Press.

The Longing Of Meaning

2011-12-29T08:41:00.001-08:00

These daughters become white bitches and old hags

take travel for learning, most of life for granted

and love for refuge

The brothers will become old men and dirty old men

work for sanctuary from white bitches and old hags

and love making for broken promises

And the children born to these tides

will watch the slow low suffocation

pretending to know

what only death can follow

David Groulx

Sometimes To Bow Is To Disappoint

2011-12-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

I wait here in the garden

to watch the flowers wilt

away

with the light

The hummingbirds to eat

lick the last of the nectar

Slugs make their way in

follow the flowers

frogs follow them

Beetles tumble up the earth

digging its way to its desires

The light lifts everything here

and I waited to be lifted

David Groulx

A True Fact Of Love

2011-12-29T08:37:00.000-08:00

No ever falls in love

We fall through it

We endure it

Sometimes we even survive

Tattered

Torn

Lovers die alone

David Groulx

David Groulx was raised in the Northern Ontario mining community of Elliot Lake. He is proud of his Aboriginal roots – his mother is Ojibwe Indian and his father French Canadian.

After receiving his BA from Lakehead University where he won the Munro Poetry Prize. David studied creative writing at the En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C. where he won the Simon J Lucas Jr. Memorial Award for poetry. He has also studied at The University of Victoria Creative Writing Program.

He has published six poetry books – Night in the Exude (Tyro Publications: Sault Ste Marie, 1997); and The Long Dance (Kegedonce Press, 2000). Under God’s Pale Bones (Kegedonce Press, 2010), A Difficult Beauty (Wolsak & Wynn: Hamilton, 2011), Rising With A Distant Dawn (BookLand Press:Toronto, 2011) as well as Our Life Is Ceremony (Lummox Press: California) due out in spring 2012.

David is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, as well as a member of The Ontario Poetry Society.

David recently won the 3rd annual PoetryNOW Battle of the Bards.

David recently read at the IFOA in Toronto & Barrie.

David’s poetry has appeared in over a 120 publications in England, Australia, Germany, Austria, Turkey, India, New Zealand, Scotland and the USA. He lives in a log home near Ottawa, Canada.

In Sickness and In Health

2011-12-28T14:54:00.001-08:00

I am holding the hand of my husband’s mistress after her insides have been scraped away. It is a curiously intimate moment. Though she is calmed by local anesthetic, it still feels like she is being ripped inside out, her womb dismembered, as if it were a body on its own, with limbs to sever. I cannot conceive, there have been too many tumors; I am kinder than I should be, given the situation. We are strangers, we are the darkness and shadow on one another's lives.

Give me something to think about, something to distract me from what it feels like down there.

I tell her to imagine what childbirth would be like.

She shuts up.

She sleeps. Later, I give her Tylenol, an ice pack for her headache and hot water bottle for the cramps that will besiege her for days. These are contradictory cures for one common poison that we’ve both now tasted. My husband, who only uses that word when it suits his interests, is in the other room. He is nervous that we might be sharing secrets.

I told him: There are no secrets anymore, just one big wreck that I’m cleaning up.

It is when he’s been caught acting least like a husband that he chooses to behave most like one, creeping up like a prowling cat, seduction on his mind. I will not be able to pay the light bill this week, I think, counting the starbust patterns on the plaster ceiling of the living room. I hope I get paid again before it’s disconnected. I have spent the day cleaning up after him, from the sink of dishes and mountain of rotting garbage in the kitchen to the sheets that stink of sleep and sweat in the bedroom and the stray hairs and shaving scum in the bathroom. Right down to the raven-haired girl sleeping in my bed, bleeding and toxic, while he busies himself trying to lift my skirt.

Quit it, I’m making dinner.

Christ, and you wonder why.

This is not what I had imagined it to be like, I did not think that the ring on my hand would feel like an ax or an anchor, halving me on its blade or drowning me into the black depths of the forgotten cracks in the ocean’s floor. I pretend my dinner is the meat of his bones, eat seconds, gorge myself to make myself so sick I’ll never want to taste him again. I will sleep on the couch for weeks, the smell of her clings to the sheets even after I’ve washed them. I turn in the night, finding cracks in the sofa cushions like the crevices in my marital bed.

I leave the light on, hoping that he will come home.

Allie Marini

Allie Marini first started kicking ass in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. She is a 2001 alumna of New College of Florida, which means she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has appeared in a number of literary magazines that her family hasn't heard of. She has lived all over Florida and Washington State but has called Tallahassee home for that past decade. She is a research writer and part-time hairdresser when she’s not playing with her make-believe friends. Allie is pursuing her MFA degree in Creative Writing through Antioch University Los Angeles and oh no! it's getting away!

Abstract Painting, Worm Wars, Attack #2

2011-12-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

Jim Fuess

Jim Fuess works with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. Most of his paintings are abstract, but there are recognizable forms and faces in a number of the abstract paintings. He is striving for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. He likes color and believes that beauty can be an artistic goal. There is whimsy, fear, energy, movement, fun and dread in his abstract paintings. A lot of his abstract paintings are anthropomorphic. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures and movements are recognizable. More of his abstract paintings, both in color and black and white, may be seen at www.jimfuessart.com

Black Dog

2011-12-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

They found it tethered by the wall,

Its eyes bleeding impotent fury,

Its thunderous growl just audible,

In the bitter cud of consciousness.

A red eyed devil looming over you,

In a stench of blind indifference.

They found you, all tangled up in knots,

A mess of broken wings, tattered feathers,

Whispering some song of anguish,

Tearing at slipped down slithers of soul,

Slowly, slowly, breaking down;

Until nothing remained

Save for a serene absence of will.

John Stocks

Spring Clean

2011-12-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

On a day of April light, scalpel sharp

I cleared my draw of receipts, tickets

Of fragments, tiny teardrops of poetry,

Contorted collage of narrative and dreams

Half stifled screams, image and resonance.

It leaked reminiscence, revived

Odd moments from my own mythology,

Dissipated love and death together

Torn, fading scraps, burnished with regret,

Pages shivering with souls deceived.

I weeded it in stages, discarding,

Deep piles, all except the most assured,

Marginalia, the rest just tossed,

Falling easily, like loves confetti,

Into the shredder of oblivion.

John Stocks

John is a widely published and anthologised writer from the UK. Recent credits include an appearance in, ‘Soul Feathers’ a poetry anthology, alongside Maya Angelou, the English poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, Bob Dylan , Len Cohen, Rimbaud and Verlaine. This anthology was the second best selling poetry anthology in the UK in January, is raising money for cancer care, and can be ordered online from Waterstones UK. He also features in ‘This island City’, the first ever poetry anthology of poetry about Portsmouth, also available from Waterstones. In 2012 John will be launching a collaborative novel, ‘Beer, Balls and the Belgian Mafia’, inspired by three of his primary interests.

Rain Over Oil Fronttyy

2011-12-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

Eleanor Leonne Bennett

2011-12-27T17:44:00.000-08:00

Eleanor Leonne Bennett

CCTV Memory

2011-12-27T17:42:00.000-08:00

Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic,The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science , Fennel and Fern and Nature's Best Photography.She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian, RSPB Birds , RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash ,Alabama Coast , Alabama Seaport and NG Kids Magazine (the most popular kids magazine in the world). She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.Only visual artist published in the Taj Mahal Review June 2011. Youngest artist to be displayed in Charnwood Art's Vision 09 Exhibition and New Mill's Artlounge Dark Colours Exhibition

www.eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com

The Newness of Being

2011-12-27T17:29:00.001-08:00

A long night

it was

the beginning

or the end

not knowing

one darkness

from the other

dark

my body

from yours

as one

two

sometimes three

we spoke

in open mouths

and tongues

languages

I never knew

feelings

never known

a sense of

being never felt

I came

with morning

at your side

the sun and I.

Neil Ellman

The Colors of Desire

2011-12-27T17:28:00.000-08:00

The color of desire:

green, sometimes,

or the suddenness of red

when flesh

catches fire and spills

onto sheets

of crumpled white

orgasmic nights

becoming blue

in the after-glow

of spent desire.

Neil Ellman

Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey. He has published hundreds of poems in print and online journals, anthologies, broadsides and chapbooks throughout the world.

Easy Heat

2011-12-27T12:24:00.000-08:00

With the wind howling in his face, Ike Rehn ran as hard as he could toward the edge of the cliff. His strides were almost as long as his arms. He felt like a kid again running on the beach with a kite. Just as then, he ran as if he were being chased, his heart pounding so hard he could barely hear the wind. In another moment, he was soaring through the air, the red-and-gold sail of his hang glider swelling in the brisk east wind. Like a giant moth he circled above the meadow beneath the cliff, a chiclet-bright smile spreading across his face. Tightly he gripped the control bar as he maneuvered to find a rising current of air known as a thermal. As usual, the straps of the harness dug sharply into his shoulder blades but he didn’t mind because there was nothing he enjoyed doing more than piloting his glider. Up in the air he was relaxed, in control, completely confident of his skills as a pilot.

Cackling with excitement, he swooped low over a cedar tree, nearly clipping one of the limbs, and soared back toward the sun, cackling even louder.

Rehn held the shot glass up to the overhead light to make sure it was clean then, satisfied that it was, placed it on a shelf behind the counter and began to clean another one. A bartender, he had worked at the Wichita Bar and Grill almost five months but it seemed longer so he figured it was about time to move on and find work elsewhere. He didn’t intend to leave the area, though, because the wind conditions were nearly always ideal for hang gliding.

“Slow night,” Cassie, a new server, complained as she watched him clean another glass.

“Wednesdays are always slow.”

She frowned. “Tonight seems slower than usual, though.”

“It’ll pick up.”

“God, I hope so,” she sighed. “I need the tips.”

“Don’t we all.”

The bar was owned by a widower, Abe Calhoun, who lived around the corner but seldom came into his establishment when it was open for business because, as a recovering alcoholic, he didn’t want to be tempted by others to have a drink. About the only time Rehn saw him was when he picked up his check every other week before he started work. He was a pretty gruff character, still mourning the unexpected death of his wife a few months ago, so the less contact Rehn had with him the better he reckoned. He was always worried he would say the wrong thing then have to listen to one of his harangues for four or five minutes as if he were still a schoolboy.

Around a quarter to ten several people came into the bar after viewing the first showing of North by Northwest at the revival theater down the street. Rehn recognized them all because they were pretty regular patrons and, for the moist part, was able to make their drinks before they ordered them.

“I understand you had some trouble the other night,” Quinney, a mail carrier, remarked after Rehn served him an Irish coffee.

He shrugged. “Nothing that got out of hand, really. Some guy I’ve never seen in here before complained that I watered down his drink and refused to pay for it.”

Quinney glanced at the young woman he was with tonight. “I heard you brought out the old Louisville Slugger.”

“Yeah, I let him have a peek.”

“That was enough, was it?”

He nodded. “He paid, reluctantly, still convinced his drink was diluted.”

“Some of the other folks who’ve tended bar here would not hesitate to whack a troublemaker across the arm or shoulders with the bat that Calhoun keeps behind the counter but not Ike,” he told his date. “More than likely, he’ll try to dazzle them with one of his tricks. Isn’t that so, son?”

Rehn grinned. “If I can avoid violence, I will every time.”

“Ike, see, is a ball player not a fighter,” he continued, nudging a little closer to the young woman. “He was almost signed by the Pirates right out of high school.”

“Well, I had a try-out with them,” he explained to the woman, “along with a dozen other prospects.”

“That’s impressive enough for me, son. I couldn’t hit a thing the one year I played Little League. Not a blessed thing.”

“It’s a hard game. No question about it.”

“But the things you can do with a bat I bet are as good as anything anyone in the big leagues can do.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“Why don’t you show Patsy here something and let her be the judge?”

“Please do,” she said at once, sounding as if she meant it.

“Maybe later,” he replied as Cassie passed him another order slip, “when it’s not so busy.”

Quinney smiled at his date. “Believe me, it’ll be worth the wait. Ike is a goddamn magician.”

Rehn’s father, unlike him, was a professional baseball player who spent two and a half seasons in Triple A ball before a severely torn kneecap forced him to leave the game and abandon his dream of one day playing in the Major Leagues. A pitcher, who threw what one coach called “easy heat” because his fastball was delivered with such a relaxed wind-up, he was also a very good hitter. Indeed, he was the real artist with a bat who taught him many of the tricks he learned first to amuse teammates during rain delays. One of the earliest he remembered his father doing involved a fungo bat. Occasionally, while hitting fly balls to him, he would hit a ball so high above his own head he had time to drop the bat and slip on a glove and catch the ball before it touched the ground. Rarely did he miss, and when he did he invariably blamed it on the sun getting in his eyes even when the sky was gray as a battleship.

About midnight, at Quinney’s insistence, Rehn got out the chipped bat and performed a few tricks for him and his date and the three other patrons still in the bar. Carefully he balanced the 34 ounce Slugger on his elbow then his forehead and the tip of his nose. Then he planted the head of the bat on the floor and balanced himself on it for a good minute. He finished with the swinging bat trick which, by far, was the most difficult stunt in his repertoire. With an empty pretzel basket serving as home plate, he assumed his stance above it then swung the bat until the head was directly in front of his body, spun the handle back, and let the bat spin free for one complete revolution then caught the handle again and completed his swing.

Quinney immediately burst into applause, as did the others, and Rehn smiled in appreciation.

“Didn’t I tell you he was a magician?” Quinney said to his date while he continued to applaud.

Rehn smiled even more, always enjoying the enthusiastic reaction he received after performing some of his tricks. Over the years more than a few people had urged him to look into making some money as a performer. He appreciated the suggestion but knew that was impossible because he could not risk the publicity. He had to remain anonymous otherwise he was afraid he would be arrested.

“I told my boyfriend about those tricks you did last night and he said he’d like to see them,” Cassie told Rehn shortly after she reported to work.

“Well, I can’t do them every night because I’d get bored but let me know the next time he’s going to come in and I’ll show him a couple.”

“I’ll do that.”

Nodding, he split a pretzel in half and offered her one of the halves.

“You know that guy last night might be right when he said you could earn a nice chunk of change by performing your tricks right out here on the corner.”

He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“You should think about it, Ike. Everybody can always use some extra money in their pockets.”

Ever since he was a small boy, swinging at pitches thrown by his father in the backyard, he always figured he would earn some money swinging a baseball bat but never imagined it might be as a street entertainer. He was bitterly disappointed when he wasn’t signed by the Pirates, especially after the strong slugging percentage he posted in the playoffs his senior year. His father, as always, was full of encouragement but probably for the first time he considered that he might not be as good a player as his father was and began to wonder if he ever would receive a contract to play baseball. Still, he enrolled in a small community college downstate and played on its ball club but didn’t hit much above his weight and suspected he was only kept on the roster because his tricks amused the coaches and his teammates.

After he completed his eligibility at the college, he never played an organized game of baseball again, only pick-up games in the park and the occasional game of stick ball. Instead, becoming involved with some former students who still hung around the college, he started experimenting with drugs. And before long he was snorting lines of cocaine through milk straws and doing whatever he could to get money to buy more of the hideous powder. Though he had a part-time job as a cashier in a convenience store, he also cut lawns and washed cars, sold pints of blood at the Red Cross Center, even occasionally shoplifted watches and rings and necklaces that he swapped for cash at pawnshops. But he never seemed to have enough money until Bergman, one of the former students he snorted cocaine with, enlisted his help in torching a cement factory so the owner, who was Bergman’s uncle, could collect the insurance money. He was offered $3,500, and though he knew it was as wrong as wrong could be, he couldn’t resist and made the worst mistake of his young life. The day after the blaze he left town, telling his parents he was going to Las Vegas to visit an old teammate who played for the ball club there, and never returned because of his fear of being arrested.

That was close to two years ago, though it seemed twice as long.

Breathing hard, Rehn limped out of the lake and collapsed on the striped bath towel he left on the beach. He had swum nearly half an hour in the bracing water and his arms and shoulders felt as heavy as fence posts. He stared at the sun for a moment then at the silvery white waterfall beneath it. Above the waterfall were several young boys waiting their turn to leap off it some twenty feet into the lake. Each time one of them did the others cheered excitedly. He smiled, tempted to join them, but figured he was a little too old and would not be welcomed. So he just watched until his eyes grew heavy and he nodded off to sleep.

A few minutes later, he was startled awake by a fierce scream and immediately looked up at the waterfall but no one was above it then he heard another scream and turned to his right and saw a pudgy woman in a purple muumuu pointing toward the water. He assumed someone must be in trouble and got up to help then thought better of it and waited to see if anyone else was going in and saw two wiry guys charge across the sand and plunge into the water. Not budging from his towel, he watched them approach a struggling boy from behind and seize his shoulders and haul him back to shore. Relieved, he sat down on his towel, bitterly reprimanding himself for not helping the boy. If those two guys hadn’t responded, he wondered if he would have helped then. He hoped so but he wasn’t really sure because of the publicity that might ensue if he rescued someone. The last thing in the world he wanted to happen was get his picture in the newspaper.

He was so ashamed, so embarrassed, to think that he could have let a young boy drown in order to protect his identity. It was pathetic, utterly pathetic. He was paralyzed by the constant fear that the slightest attention that came his way might result in his immediate arrest. Others involved in the burning of the abandoned cement factory had been arrested and he would not be surprised if they had implicated him in an effort to strike a deal with the prosecutor’s office. Lord, he hated what he had become, he thought, as he stared at the waterfall in the twilight. He had changed his name so often he couldn’t always remember which one he was using and sometimes didn’t respond when others addressed him.

The next afternoon, walking through a park on his way to work, Rehn paused to watch half a dozen boys play “Over the Line” on one of the scabby softball diamonds. They were about the age of the youngster who almost drowned yesterday in the lake, he thought, standing against the backstop. He and his father and two or three boys in the neighborhood often played the informal game when they didn’t have enough players to play an actual game.

“You mind if I take a couple of cuts?” he asked after he watched for a while.

The boy at the plate turned around and looked at him, not sure what to say, looked out at the pitcher then looked back at him. “All right, if you want to.”

“Thanks.”

Quickly he stepped around the rusted screen and took the bat from the still puzzled boy. It was so light it felt like a wand in his massive hands. Smiling, he flicked it back and forth a moment then took his place in the batter’s box and nodded at the pitcher to throw the ball. He swung hard but barely managed to make contact and hit a bleeder back toward the mound and the pitcher smiled in amusement. He crushed the next pitch, though, dissolving the smirk from the pitcher’s round face, and was so pleased he burst into a huge grin. He lined the next pitch past the shortstop then another one past him then crushed one over the head of the outfielder.

He felt good about his effort, as good as he had in quite a while, but he always felt better whenever he had a chance to play ball. Somehow he wished he could always feel as comfortable and sure of himself.

“You sure you want to go through with this, Ike?” Craven, another paraglider, asked as he stood behind Rehn on the narrow balcony on top of the Heritage Column---the tallest structure in town.

“I couldn’t be more sure.”

“You’ve got a gusting east wind that should be just about perfect for gliding today.”

He nodded, making sure the straps of his harness were secure.

“You know you’re taking a hell of a risk doing this,” Craven reminded him, “and I’m not just talking about flying your glider, either.”

“I know that.”

“You’re absolutely sure now?”

“I am.”

“All right, then, whenever you’re ready.”

He knew it was dangerous to launch his glider from the Column, knew as well that it was against the law. He didn’t care, though, as he edged farther out on the balcony. He deserved to be arrested for his refusal to help the boy at the lake, and if he was, he hoped his picture was put on the front page of the morning paper.

A moment passed, then another, then he was off, rising higher and higher in the core of a strong thermal, the sun burning in his eyes.

T.R. Healy

T.R. Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, his stories have appeared in such publications as Camel Saloon, Ozone Park Journal, and Steel Toe

Higher Power

2011-12-27T11:44:00.000-08:00

Houghton County Jail, Michigan

October, 2006

That afternoon the trustee brings the local newspaper, The Daily Mining Gazette, to our cell and drops it off. The jail provides one paper for the whole jail and it is passed from cell to cell by the trustee. On the top of this paper is a handwritten note from this nut over in the cell across the hall. Before I came to the jail he had threatened an inmate in his cell so they put him in solitary. When the guy he threatened was released they put him back in the cell with the other inmates. There were already six guys in the cell, so he had to sleep on the floor, but said he would rather do that then go back to solitary. Then he found God, which happens to a lot of the people in here.
I've always wondered why it's easier to find God when you're miserable than it is when you’re feeling good. The note on the top of the paper is questioning our morality over in this cell. I guess he must have forgotten he’s in jail just like the rest of us, and this place isn't a reward for being good citizens. It’s about punishment, which is what it's supposed to be about. I might be an idiot, an alcoholic, you can even question my sanity, but I do know why I'm here and I don't question them putting me here.

And there’s plenty of misery to go around in here: six bunks to a cell with a steel table bolted to the floor in the center of the room, and nothing else, no electricity, no radios, no clocks, no pictures on the wall, nothing. You can’t wear a ring, a bracelet, or a wristwatch, not even time is allowed to exist in here. Through the bars you can watch a TV out in the hallway, but otherwise, there are no activities. There’s no place to go, unless you consider an isolation cell someplace to go. You’re never allowed outdoors, or out of your cell. The exercise program is a half-hour walk down the hallways once a week.

This evening the guard comes by and asks if any of us want to attend an AA meeting here in the jail. A local chapter stops by the jail every Tuesday and holds a meeting for anyone wishing to attend. In space the expansion of the universe exceeds the speed of light. In a jail cell the speed of light slows, time ages, deteriorates slowly to a crawl, the expansion ceases to exist within the confines of this steel and cement manifold. I would do anything: I would scrub toilets to get out of this cell for a while and see someone other than my five cellmates and the guards.
At eight o'clock a guard called Doug comes and I go to the meeting. Doug walks me down the hallway lined with the cells to this small conference room that is just outside the visitation area. There are only four of us attending the meeting out of around five hundred inmates who are almost exclusively here because of getting stoned: me, my cellmate Deaton, who is tall, imposing with his long narrow oriental looking beard, the pill popper with no teeth from the cell across the hallway, and this chubby, pimply faced gay kid around twenty years old who has already tried to kill himself once. There are two guys from the AA group, a long angular man with light brown hair and a younger man, portly, dark and wearing Woody Allen glasses, who looks like he was gassed last night. Both of them are wearing dark suits with black narrow ties. They could pass for the Blues Brothers.

We all sit around in a circle. AA meetings always begin with the Serenity Prayer and the reading of the preamble: How it Works, which has the famous Twelve Steps in it. After the readings everyone gets a chance to speak. You go around the table one at a time, introduce yourself by first name only, and you’re free to talk, about anything; yourself, a question, a belief. Kangas goes first. “I’m Tony and I’m an alcoholic” he says. He then relates to us how he was at the hospital yesterday for a bunch of tests. The doctors found a growth in his brain, and are going to schedule him to go to Marquette to have further tests done, they are going to open up his head and see what’s in it. It was funny when he said it, but he isn’t trying to make us laugh. His voice is quivering, he is frightened; no wonder he’s at the meeting. He will be next to join the violent nut in his cell in finding God.
But the strangest thing at the whole meeting is when Deaton talks. The subject out of How it Works this evening is the second of the Twelve Steps: Came to believe that a power greater than our selves could restore us to sanity. Most people accept this to mean God. I took a good look at Deaton, into his eyes, when he said his dead brother was his "Higher Power."
His brother had died of cancer at twenty-one, but Deaton said he was the happiest person he had ever met. He had a good attitude right up until the end and never stopped smiling in spite of his pain and facing a young death. And to AA's credit, though they maintain you have to have a higher power to succeed in their program, the higher power does not have to be God, it can be anyone, or any concept you may have of God. It can be Deaton’s dead brother.

DJ Swykert

DJ Swykert is a former 911 operator living in Northern Kentucky. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in magazines as diverse as the weekend edition of the Detroit News; 360 Degrees, the Alpha Beat Press, Barbaric Yawp and Bull: Men’s Fiction. He is currently signed with LifeTime Media in NYC for two novels.

Nails

2011-12-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

On January 8, 2011, a gunman fired one shot into Congresswoman Gabrielle

Giffords’ left hemisphere, from back to front, giving me confidence that I could kill Dil

Hickendooper, Mayor of Arkada, my brother, with a portable, compressed air, roofing

nail gun. I had a record: assault and battery, drunk and disorderly, sentenced to hit and

run, plus jail time for non-payment of alimony checks to my ex-wife. I could not buy a

gun. I would wait for the upcoming election, duplicating in my way what the shooter

wanted to do, kill her, only I would succeed in murdering my brother.

Dil lived with his wife, Blodge, and their seventeen-year old son, Slaterly, in a seven

room house, built by Dil and myself. Dil owned Hickendooper Construction, I, a Jack of

all trades carpenter and sometime roofer, worked for him fourteen years. My house,

where Kirby, my fifteen-year old son, a child having had tense relations with my ex-

wife, Cataline, lived in six rooms and a basement.

In the basement, I had thick four-foot by eight-foot pieces of plywood, a poor

substitute for Dil, snuck in while Cat held a part-time night job, took the nail gun holding

120 black nails, and systematically squeezed off hundreds of one and three-quarter inch

nails, a poor substitute for Dil. I worked compulsively, feverishly, my muscles aching,

my heart pumping faster and faster, sometimes passing out, laying on top of Dil’s

“corpse.” The entire board looked like something out of dystopian movies, production

designers and art directors snapping up my boards, not only for the intense labor I put

into them, but for countless blood spots dripping on the boards from my sore fingers.

Either an idiot or genius could do what I did. If I played in a death metal band, I would

not mind having my studded boards serve as a stage set at our concerts.

I bet I could make ten boards, each totally covered on both sides with black nails, and

take them to an art museum, having the curator accept them for exhibition. Titled “Black

Nail Death,” I bet buyers would pay good bucks to put one or more in their posh living

rooms. Even Dil might buy one standing on a plinth in front of Hickendooper

Construction, but utilitarian motives were stronger than artistic impulses.

“Well, well, come in, Addle. It’s been too long since your last visit,” Blodge said,

gesturing me into the living room. Slaterly played a video game, with lots of electronic

music and shooter’s noise. Blodge had been watching a Dexter rerun on a large TV

screen.

“Dil’s on a conference call with a councilor. The election is getting closer,” Blodge

said, half looking toward me, the other half zoned in to the serial killer.

“I don’t vote. I’m strictly independent,” I said, my eyes averted, watching the screen.

“You mean you won’t vote for Dil,” she said, drinking a Heineken from the bottle.

“Want one to go along with your meth?”

“I gave that up. I looked like shit, old, wasted, and ugly behind it. Anyway, I can’t

afford another parole violation,” I said. “They criminalized me, just because Cat ran

away. How could I make monthly payments with all my bills? I couldn’t comply with the

court order.”

Dil came back from his office, sipping red wine from a glass, and then buried his eyes

in a printout. “Addle? What are you doing here? I’ve told you never come over, we’re

strictly on an employer-employee basis.”

“Just a friendly chat with Blodge and Slaterly, what’s wrong with that?”

“We’ve heard strange things about you, Addle. Has Blodge told you we know why

Cat ran away from you in fright. The basement business,” Dil said.

“She never walked down those steps, even before I renovated the basement, saying

she was afraid of rats, the damp making her asthma worse, and she’d read an article

describing radon gas leakage from the concrete in basements.” I was pleased with that

explanation, fluent and factual. “Kirby feared for his life. Cat whipped him with a riding

crop. Must’ve enjoyed reading about Iranians, seeing them lash kids on YouTube.” I

frowned as I spoke.

“Cat informed me about the basement, noises sounding like bullets from a pistol,

sometimes for hours, you telling her to ‘Stay out down there if you know what’s good for

you,’” Blodge said, downing another beer.

“It was early winter when Blodge told me about it, that Cat wanted to check what went

on ‘beneath the house’, as she put it, but by then you installed an electronic lock,

requiring swiping a card with a code, and you never gave her the code,” Dil said.

“Since when had Cat been that sensitive? Radon?” Blodge’s face reddened.

“The truth was I’d been staying out drinking, sleeping with my biological mother’s

adopted daughter. That’s why she packed suitcases and a large duffel bag full of clothes.”

“Aren’t some Greek plays about incest,” Blodge said, getting up, bringing back two

Heinekens. “Cat had good years with you till you spent ungodly time in the basement. Dil

and Skaterly heard Cat describe your ‘hobby’. Your affair she could accept, as I accept

Dil’s.”

“Why does everything come down to blood? People are too damn close to one another,

that six degrees of separation means we’re all related as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s not true, you’re absolving yourself of guilt. Dil hasn’t any. That’s why he’s

successful. I like men with gump.” Blodge guzzled beers, green Heineken bottles at her

feet. “You fear people, don’t you, Addle.”

Slaterly, in faded jeans, sat on the couch, eating a slice of pizza. I saw his strong right

hand and arm.

“I’m a social animal, aren’t we all. Maybe Slaterly isn’t ‘cause he doesn’t feel guilty

about Bengalese sandblasting his jeans, workers getting silicosis.”

“But I don’t have any guilt about working at construction sites, getting paid in cash,”

Slaterly said. “Dad wants to shit-can you, but you might do something else that harms our

family.”

“Dil will get his books examined by the IRS. Can’t always get away with murder.”

Words like murder made my brain explode in anticipation.

“Speak to me, not the floor when you say that,” Dil responded.

“I stood next to an underage guy named Slaterly, putting in a hardwood floor,

accidentally nail-gunning his hand, crippling his left hand, causing painful nerve

damage,” I said.

“Dil should’ve canned your butt. Instead, he only hates you more.” Slaterly waved his

damaged hand at me, the only finger working was his middle one, wiggling it at me as if

invisible nails shot my heart.

“I tried to have you arrested for injuring my son’s hand. He sticks to his statement, that

you aimed the gun at his hand, and for that you should be legally punished.”

“Punished? Why flog me? Cat and I were nice-and-cozy-like living together. Later,

my only problem was failing to pay alimony.”

“You’re not drunk, are you? What about all those other times in prison? You’re a

pathological liar. Either that or you have early-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” Blodge said.

I wanted to rebuke her, saying before I paid them a call, I razor-cut in half a ten-

milligram Oxycontin tablet, then took a few bennies before driving over there. A small

dose of Oxy and speed for work: roof or wall framing, finding the rise and run of

each step, nailing the bottom board to the floor and the studs against the exterior wall,

hammering, pounding, and I always came home with stabs of pain.

“I’m a insomniac, didn’t I tell you. Hard to keep things straight without at least four

hours of sleep.”

“I’ve seen you sleep nine hours on your days off,” Kirby said. “Your right eye

twitches right now.” Cat’s beating left scars on his back, chest, and legs, showing no

mercy to a child born by a girlfriend before I settled in with Cat.”

Dusk, and the house was dark except the TV, its sound off, lights bubbling in a large

fish tank, occasional headlights on the quieter street, deep barking of a big dog, Kirby

making noises with his mouth, popping his lips together, lips not touching teeth,

mimicking the sound of bubbles from the fish tank. He does that when Uncle Dil got

overbearing. I should not have brought him with me. Poor judgment got me in shitloads

of trouble. Dil’s iPhone rang, he answering immediately.

“Ok. I’ll speak to people in the councilwoman’s district. When, where and what time?”

A real trouper, Dil. Where had he gotten that energy, that force, that commitment? I

guess from the same place as mine, all those nailed boards, a force of nature.

“Fine, the community center, this coming Monday at seven o’clock. See you then.”

“How in hell can you hold two jobs? The Mayor’s salary is nothing compared to what

you rake in from your business.” Bating him, I knew some secrets.

“My knowledge of real estate and housing are in play here, and they’re always

kickbacks, perks, you might say.”

“I know that, Dil. Brother Addle knows that. Giant sinkholes will choose the houses,

developments, and office buildings you constructed, plunging everything you’ve done

into oblivion,” Blodge said, drinking brandy from a snifter.

At six a.m., Election Day, Dil and Slaterly came to my door. I was up, drinking my

third cup of cola nut tea, getting high. Each carried a canvas bag. I brushed away suspect

thoughts, having just swallowed a Dexamyl Spansule. Slaterly pulled a knife with his

good hand, Dil pushing me back, then shutting and triple-locking my front door.

“Get that damn card and open the basement door,” said Dil, his voice gruffer than ever.

“I lost it,” I said, knowing how false that sounded. “I could contact the firm that I

bought it from, though.” I felt sad. If an earthquake would now shake this house into

shards, the three of us miraculously unharmed, I would start again on those boards.

“Get it now or we’ll take turns slitting your throat,” said Slaterly.

I obeyed, pulled the card from my wallet, Dil snatching it out of my hand. We walked

downstairs, and Dil switched on the lights. Two-dozen boards, stacked in six different

piles, a 25th one set aside. I heard Dil grunt, the big-bladed knife still held at my throat.

One board had not been consummated with nails, only one side solidly packed with my

unfinished handiwork. Dil drew a .22 revolver good for certain types of hit-man killings.

My heart knocked fiercely; the drugs could not account for it. I sweated, perspiration

slithering down my face, getting into my eyes. My legs trembled, fearing Dil would pull

the trigger. Elected or not for a second term this would not save him from prosecution.

Dil handed the gun to Slaterly, he pointing it at my heart. Dil flipped the board over,

finding a clean side of plywood. He slid down the board leaning against a workbench,

placing its uncreated surface right-side up on the basement floor.

“Turn around,” barked Dil. His son jammed the barrel into my ear. I would rather take

my chances with the board.

Dil opened the bag, pulling out duct tape, then reached behind me, wrapping the tape

around my eyes, nose, and hard around my mouth. He hit me on the head with something

blunt, and I conked out a while, then opened my eyes. He bashed me again, a sliver of

consciousness remained, but a dark kind.

He kicked my arms so each laid on either sides of the board. Weak and motionless, I

heard the nail gun as he triggered large nails into my forearms, allowing me to feel the

awful pain, how it inflicted more pain than bullets would. The speed intensified the

pain; it never solved anything. After three nails entered my forehead, the next rounds into

all parts of my face, then the crucial three nails into the back of my head killed me.

George Sparling

George Sparling has been published in many literary magazines including Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, Unlikely Stories, nthposition, Rattle, Word Riot, Slow Trains, and Zygote in my Coffee. He has a story in the current issue of Crack the Spine magazine and one due out in the next issue of Ascent Aspirations.

"Best job: Times Square bookstore. I could be as psychotic as possible and it blending in perfectly with New York City at that time. Worst job: Payless. I sat atop a huge pile of heavy boxes and could have toppled them down upon the head of that damn shipping boss; he was that vile."

VIOLIN INSPIRED

2011-12-27T09:05:00.001-08:00

the flowers—tiny white snowflakes piled on top of each other. soft petals oversaturated with warm, burning opium. four seeds star the middle and cackle. it’s all so gentle. so light. like a fairy’s dream. I am glowing. The wind pulls me along in my flying hammock. every once in a while, I hit a cloud, and it swallows me into its wet shadow. the drops attach to my skin like leeches, and I pull them off to find my bleeding scars. But no one can hear a scream from inside a rain cloud, so I have to save myself this time. This time it’s finally possible. This time I can use your power to turn my neuroses into witchcraft and your body into a toad. I won’t hurt anyone else. Just you. because your foot taps too lightly and I just wanted to waltz. But what just happened? Something went wrong. Negative energy still managed to sneak in the back door but I’ll turn it into steps and walk right through my gloriously holy light at the end of your wretchedly mind-numbing tunnel.

a moon drenched walk through a 1920s flashback. the whole damn thing is conducted by the circus ringleader. it’ll be a wonder if they make it out alive.

rapid musical fairies pour their glitter across the farmland. bubbles and diamonds drench the cows and pigs, and they all grow wings. some try to fly and fall. others never turn around to notice them so they remain land-bound. but the rest, the smart ones, move in with the birds and start taking notes.

you hold your beauty in your hand and nuzzle it with your cheek. I’ve never seen you so gentle, so slow, so patient. A young boy who refused to wait settles down and takes his time with the beautiful sadness. a merman. the magical weatherman. whatever it is, it’s magic, and I doubt your spells are only for me, but they’ve definitely found their way into my energy field, and I have no weapon. What is your power? Distraction? Independent provision? It’s love for sadness...beautiful sadness. like warm water when ice would burn your throat. sometimes almost too low, but perfectly refreshing, given the moderate climate. but right now, it’s way too hot, so I just feel too stuffed. I’ve had my fill, thanks.

Close your eyes and reach with the faith that your fingertips will grasp whatever it is you immediately need. Trust your own manifestation power combined with the knowledge of the multi-verse. When you open your eyes and look for something, you lose everything waiting at your fingertips. Acknowledge the fact that the system knows what I need better than I do, so reach out and grab what is being offered. Trust everyone else’s magic, but most of all, trust your own. As soon as you need something out of desire, it will not be found. You cannot possess anything or anyone. You have to meet in the middle. Bend two points to exceed the speed of light. Stop looking because it’s all happening way faster than that. I met Peter Pan, and he wants you to know you have the power to create your own world and live in it. Be mindful of the system, if only to use it for your own power. The world is your wonderland...so open wide and eat what’s given to you. Define your own witchcraft...your own magic, and wait for others to show you theirs. It can’t be taught. It’s intuitive. It’s individual. It’s between you and the multi-verse. Brew your own potions and watch them turn your world into a magical playground. Alice in Wonderland. The indomitable will. Meditate on the world, and you can control the energy. The control is deep inside of you. Can you find it?

Emily Calvin

NAUSEA

2011-12-27T09:03:00.001-08:00

She presses her palm to the left side of her abdomen, and my flesh dissolves into her hand. Her left hip sinks beneath the pressure into the empty space behind her, and the string between her body and mine yanks my stomach out of my skin. No one notices. I quickly grab the pounding organ and shove it into its proper hiding place. As a child, I would hide my feelings underneath my blankets. Sometimes my feelings would lock sleep out of my bedroom, so I would drag my sleeping bag into my parents’ bedroom. I would place it on the floor, tuck myself inside, and hide. My parents would awaken to a bedroom full of 6-year-old emotions, but before they had a chance to decode them, I would snatch them all, stuff them into my mouth, swallow them, and sneak back into my sleeping bag. Out of sight, out of mind; what you don’t know can’t hurt you; and other such clichés. Unfortunately, too many secrets before bedtime can cause indigestion, and they don’t make Tums strong enough for that kind of acid reflux.

Her body twists in and out of the absolute potential surrounding her, and I watch as she deconstructs the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th dimensions until I have melted into her and the floor and the mirrors and the music and her movement and myself. I am the river, and she is the current. I am the rock, and she is the water. I am the möbius strip, and she is the enigmatic boundary connecting me to the universe. But I think it’s time to get back into that sleeping bag and consume consume consume until my stomach rejects everything and my flesh becomes slave to the porcelain altar once again.

I watch her watch herself in the mirror behind me as I sit with my legs crossed. Her eyes lift up and down, scanning the fluid motion of her ethereal body in a futile attempt to burn a carbon copy into her retina. But she forgets her movements a second after her body performs them. A millisecond. A nanosecond. A fraction of a second smaller than the human eye can see, hear, or taste. So I devour her insipid body, and it dances down my throat, down my esophagus, and into my stomach, where the butterfly wings flap back and forth around her flailing arms and legs and torso. I look down and lift my shirt. My stomach has turned red, bright red, blood red. No one notices. She keeps dancing, but I can no longer see anything but my bleeding torso. I have finally internalized her entire body, and my own red flesh stretches and pulls as her legs kick every which way from within. My stomach continues to stretch and grow until it feels larger than a woman pregnant with quintuplets, and I can finally see where the red is coming from. The stretch marks on my abdomen have opened, and I can see inside myself. No, not the metaphorical self; blood, intestines, tarred lungs, and my last pay check (I swallowed it for a bet one time, long story). I see myself looking up at me, and I fall into the stretch mark, down my skeleton, past my organs, and onto the grass, looking up at myself.

I watch through a fisheye lens, terrifyingly aware of the curvature of my surroundings. I look up from the bottom of my chemical snow globe and watch tiny white pills float around my spherical existence and disintegrate into blurry lines and invisible energy transfers. My neuron sensors wail and gnash their teeth as I fail to dispel any feeling floating through thick air. There is nothing I do not feel. I close my eyes and kick off. I reach my arms in front of me and press my palms against the oversaturated space, absolutely melting away as I spread my arms and push through time like a frog through the pond.

I rest my head on Mother Nature’s mattress and dream I am a freak. I paint friendships on my walls and speak to their paint chips about reconciliation. I carve ice cubes into tongues and swallow them whole. I confuse Martha Stewart with Sylvia Plath and decorate my entire apartment according to her poetry—stuffed wolves, rabbits, and fathers, accessorized with jade stones. I stand in my kitchen and laugh at the top of my lungs, wearing nothing but a ripped t-shirt she gave me years ago. I awaken in her bedroom and immediately vomit on her hardwood floor. At least it wasn’t carpet.

Please don’t tell me that was—

Yup! That was my first time with a girl!

Fuck; now you’ll never leave me alone.

She giggles and flirts while I put my on my pants. She only stops when I close the door to her apartment. I know because then I press my ear to the door, and her tears give me swimmer’s ear. My bike sneers at my ridiculous predicament, accidentally letting slip a tiny snigger as I draw closer. Fuck you, Beatrix, I tell her in an attempt to silence the laughter swallowing my eardrums, but she has no ears. She stands in silence and waits for me to tell her where to take me. I mount her sleek, shiny body, sexier than any woman I’ve woken up next to in the last year. Take me home.

Where? The house in which I spent 16 years enduring misdirected fists and foodless refrigerators? My first girlfriend’s flat full of hypodermic needles and queer fantasies? Or the apartment I built with my own hands out of sacrificial cigarettes, New Year’s resolutions, and my mother’s bruises?

My bike stops short of the last option, and I dismount into a world of overly sweetened tea, pounds of makeup, and thick drawls. I thought I left this hell years ago, but it followed me, as expected. I walk down the street and force myself to respond to glimmering greetings and uncomfortable eye contact. I drown myself in fake friendships and asinine acquaintances until the whiskey pours from my eyes like tears from my father’s cracked fingers. I retrace the events of last night, last week, last year, and try to recall how I got here. I can’t seem to remember anything anymore. How long ago did I live in Ohio? How did I get to South Carolina? What happened to California?

Are you going out with friends for your birthday?

I don’t really know if they’re my friends, but they’re people I know.

Enough with the negativity. You have lived in four different states since you left home. Will you ever be satisfied and just settle down already?

I fucking hope not; that sounds terrifying.

You’re an adult now. It’s time to start thinking responsibly. If you continue this behavior and this attitude, you’ll never amount to anything. What happened to the 8-year-old who used to want to be the first female president? Now you’re a nobody.

I’d rather be a nobody than an everybody. I slam my phone shut and throw it in the trashcan. I look past the trashcan and see a bus stop. Maybe it will take me home. I cross the street and see a southern gentleman sitting on the bench, pretending to be ignorant of my presence so he doesn’t have to stand. I lean against the bus stop sign and stare at the back of his shirt. “RUSH ΣAE.” He has on a backwards cap, with the Red Sox “B” staring at me and my lack of conviction. I walk up to him and knock his cap off. He looks up and pulls the cigarette from between his grinning lips. Hey sexy lady, he laughs as I grab the lit cigarette hanging limply between his two fingers and place it in my mouth. He fantasizes about throwing me against the pavement and boarding the bus, leaving me lying stunned, motionless, and freshly exhausted, and I realize I am in love with the girl I just left. I envision her still lying in bed, thinking of me, wondering when I’ll call and crying when I don’t. I see her two years from now. I see her gaunt complexion and sallow face from too many years of neglect and drugs. I want to tell her I am in love with her. I inhale and hold in the cigarette smoke long enough to eliminate my need to breathe. I think about flicking the cigarette onto his face and ripping his stupid cargo shorts off so he never makes the mistake of wearing them in front of me again. I turn my head and exhale. The bus pulls up; I flick the cigarette into the street; we board the bus, and the doors close behind us.

Emily Calvin

Sexistentialism

2011-12-27T09:01:00.000-08:00

He bites her neck, and she sighs because someone wants her, or her body, but, does it even matter? she wonders. She can’t be too loud because her roommates might hear her. None of them are even around, but they might come home while she’s, you know, in the middle of it. It. It? She doesn’t even know what it is. It is whatever everyone says it is. That’s all that matters, right? Wait, no, that “right” is supposed to be in a sentence alone. That’s all that matters. Right? That implies a sense of security in the first statement that doesn’t belong there, though. The whole thing should have a question mark attached to it, not just the “right.” But grammar never aided passion. Ani DiFranco’s playing. He doesn’t even like Ani DiFranco. Most men back away in fear of women like Ani DiFranco. Oh well, it’s not like she can push him off and go change the music now. She’s committed. To what? To this, so she might as well be in it. What’s he doing now? Taking off his shirt, so does he expect her to take hers off? Probably. He pauses at her small breasts, on his way down her tall, slender body. Well, maybe it’s not so slender. Everyone else seems to think so, but she can’t agree. I mean, look at those hips. Just one touch, and she can feel the fat on those love handles. But she loves her small breasts the breasts she used to jokingly call anthills in middle school, hoping they’d grow even though she knew they never would. When she puts on a tight tank top and stands in front of the mirror, when she steals away from everyone she knows and hides in her room, she feels more like a teenage boy than a girl, a feeling she guiltily enjoys. Just the other day she was telling her friend how she might be a lesbian, but now she’s in bed with this boy. This boy. This boy. This boy. If it were a girl, would it make a difference? She wouldn’t be able to do what she’s planning on doing tonight, but maybe that’s better. His hands. They slide lower, lower, lower. They find wetness, and she tries to identify with what she feels. She moans because that’s what she’s supposed to do, right? Why did she put her iTunes on shuffle. This could be embarrassing. The Spice Girls could come on. Aren’t they back together? Her friend was trying to get her to see their comeback concert. At least she had enough sense to refuse then. What about now? It’s different. She moans and something moves near her thigh. Is that what she’s planning on allowing inside? It felt so…weak. Shit. Why didn’t her best friend talk her out of this when she called her yesterday? “It’s your choice, ultimately,” she said. That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem. She doesn’t want to make the decision. Her best friend was molested when she was little, and now she fucks every guy she can. What’s the difference between that, being molested, and this, having sex? Consent. Somewhere in her, she decided to give consent, and now he’s devouring her as if she is his last meal on earth, and who’s to say she isn’t? She’s the bread and the wine. She’s the vinegar and the sponge. She’s the wood and the…but that’s enough of that. She made this decision days, months, years, lifetimes ago. There’s nothing she can do about it now. Her hands move to mirror his; she forgot to hang her favorite blue skirt up this morning, she remembers. As soon as this is over, she’ll walk over there and hang it up. Her closet door is open. That’s what’s been bothering her. Her skirt lies crumpled on the floor, and her closet door hangs open. She will clean her room as soon as this is over. If she’s lucky, he’ll go outside and smoke a cigarette. A Marlboro, just like her father used to smoke when she was 8 years old. Even then, she knew there was something wrong with his smoking. She used to kick and scream in her room, refusing to talk to anyone when he went outside to smoke. She would sneak in his closet and smell his shirts to see if he’d been smoking that day. Of course, he always had been. Eventually he replaced cigarettes with chewing tobacco. No smoke to make his shirts smell, but that circle the outline of the can made in his back pocket. That was the culprit. She always knew what to look for. She found it in his glove compartment when they were on the way to the mall one day; she dumped it out the window; his face twisted with anger, and he turned around in the Citgo station. She tries to remember when she stopped crying that night. Did he stop chewing after that? Probably not. He stopped eventually though, and nothing happened. No cancer. No nothing. Not that she wanted anything to happen to him. It’s just funny how some people can never smoke a cigarette in their life and die of lung cancer, while other chain smokers can live until they’re 90 years old and sound like a dying frog. Life is just. She bought detergent today and took the nice sheets off her bed. Such calculation for such an irrational decision. She could be sitting in her bed by herself on her good sheets reading Sylvia Plath, but one can’t live by reading Plath all day. That would be too easy. Life would make a lot more sense if she were a literary character of someone’s imagination. She wouldn’t be making her own decisions then; a narrator would be; an author would be; anyone but her would be. If someone else were writing her story, would she be lying in bed naked right now? But someone else is writing her story, and she is lying in bed naked right now. If someone else were writing her story, would she stop him before he entered, finally taking power of her situation and life, refusing to allow anyone else to tell her who she is or should be; or would she lie docile and let him do what he came here to do, freeing herself from all the limitations of conviction and morality she placed on herself at age 5, allowing herself to live without fear of anyone or anything? But someone else is writing her story, and I know just as much about what choice she’ll make as you do.

Sexistentialism

Emily Calvin

My name is Emily Calvin, a.k.a. Kairos Rae, or simply MLE. I am a 24-year-old cat lady, a wannabe mother, and an aspiring rapper, working on my masters in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. I currently brood and write in a hermit crab's hole in Portland, Oregon with one foot on the East coast and another in California. My writing's been called experimental, fantastical, fabulistic, disjointed, inaccessible, and "interesting...". I am just grateful I have fingers to write, a brain to think, and people to read and reject or accept my submissions.

standard anatomical position

2011-12-26T08:09:00.001-08:00

i used to develop autopsy photos for

lehigh county coroner's office.
visceral voyeurism.

on my screen there was a woman

with an amputated right leg,

bifurcated just superior to the knee.
her torso yielded the Y
incision which started under

each second rib then met each other
at the xiphoid process, endeding near the

pubic synthesis. the sections

were held together by taunt thread

which made the adipose under the skin

appear as jaundice fingers

pushing out of her thorax
the way a cicada emerges from it's shell.

her trimmed pubic hair i took as proof

that she had better plans than ending up on

surgical steel naked, measured, photographed,

and taken apart like a new puzzle.

i sat back indenting my computer chair

as my breathing slowed and gravity

doubled on me,

jealous of all the attention

she was receiving.

Kyle Apgar

A Promise to Keep

2011-12-26T08:03:00.000-08:00

An angle of sun rayed through the narrow window behind the desk. Two men sat

across from

each other with only the sounds of rustling papers filtering the air before-

“How’s Rachel doing?”

“Good. She’s been thinking about going back to school.”

“Oh, what’s she going to study?”

“Art.”

“She’s a great artist now, what’s she need to go to school for?”

“She said it was something that she always wanted to do. Hey, she supported me in my

dream so I want to support her in hers.”

Bob nodded, “I can understand that.”

The room was quiet for a few seconds as James began feeling tense.

“I ran the loan by the board-”

Bob’s expression worried his senses.

“I’m afraid we have to turn you down.”

“But I need that loan,” he blurted out without thinking.

“I understand, but the search engine field is dominated by Google and Microsoft has

Bing now- well, there’s no need for a new one. Plus you haven’t turned a profit one time

in five years. The board doesn’t see how you can turn it around.”

“But you read my business plan to turn it all around.”

“I’m afraid we’re just not convinced it would work.”

“But my life savings is tied up into this business. If I don’t get this loan to pay my bills

I’ll lose everything.”

“I’m afraid my hands are tied, James. The board said no.”

James was becoming panicked. Alternative plans of action blanked his mind.

It was over. He could see himself losing everything. His house, his cars, his future.

“Have you tried another bank?”

“Yeah, I tried ‘em all. You were my last hope.”

“I wish I could make it work for you. I’m afraid the economy right now isn’t the best

time to turn a struggling business around. People don’t like to change their computers,

they’re afraid something will go wrong and they’ll not be able to use their computer again

or they’ll not be able to understand the software and then worry that they can’t change it

back. You know how people are. They like the familiar.”

“But we’re friends. We went to high school together-”

“James, no. I understand you hate me right now and I don’t want it to cost us our

friendship, but I can’t give loans out based upon friendship. It would put the bank’s

money at risk.”

James shook his head “yes” and looked out the window. He couldn’t bring himself to

think of all that this meant. His gaze was distant. His world was falling in on him and he

had to-

“I’m sorry, Bob.”

Bob was confused by his statement.

“Sorry? You don’t have any reason to be sorry.”

James reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper and placed it on Bob’s

desk and slid it over to him.

Bob picked the paper up and began reading it. It didn’t make any sense. It was

just website addresses that didn’t seem-

Bob then glanced up at James who was still looking away as if he wasn’t proud of what

he was doing, but he was desperate.

“What is this?”

James turned to him with his eyes glancing down.

“It’s a list of your computer searches for the past six months.”

“How’d you get this?”

“Everybody’s computer searches are kept on file- forever. And if it’s on file it can be

retrieved.”

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“I need my loan.”

“Or what?”

“I’ll give this list to the police. I’m sure they’ll be interested in some of the searches you

made. So would your wife and kids.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this. We're friends.”

“Bob, I can't put my financial life at risk for mere friendship, now can I?”

The room grew quiet. Neither knew what would happen next as end scenarios stormed

through both men’s minds. Then Bob made his own calculation of the consequences

and made his decision.

“If I get you your loan will you promise me that you will never bring this up again?”

“I promise.”

“How do I know that?”

James looked down and then back up and the unease he felt earlier was gone. He just

stared at him hard. Like a lion going in for the kill.

“I guess you don’t.”

Kyle Owens

Headmaster’s holiday

2011-12-25T16:52:00.001-08:00

The announcement came after formal dinner when degenerates were lacing

up their fancy tennis shoes to sprint down to the infirmary for meds--it was the first

headmaster’s holiday of the academic year. Fall term had barely begun and nobody was

expecting such a fledgling victory for degeneracy. The room erupted, digestion interrupted,

girls standing on chairs, boys slamming spoons on glasses, banging fists and knees on

tables; an orgiastic roar of five hundred fifty morons who would be so wired they would

not eat for thirty hours.

They devoured their lines, frowns turned to smiles, then back to frowns as they

filled the bathroom stalls with starch and moaning, flushing bowl after bowl after blowing

their first series of lines and pyramids for the evening: Adderall, Ritalin, cocaine--hell, they

will snort Vitamin C if they can crush it with their Kent School issued debit cards and rail it

through a plastic Bic pen. The plastic currency is intended for the stat store and snack

bar; to purchase pizza slices and soda (from a dirty hirsute man behind the counter who

is mercilessly denigrated by snobs), tapestries, notebooks, highlighters, sweatshirts,

pens for blowing more powder, or a new window fan to puff weed through a toilet paper

roll stuffed with Bounce fabric softener.

They fill Snapple bottles with vodka, holstered in their socks, remove the wall

panels and walk down into heaven after traversing purgatory in darkness--crawling

downward on purple stomachs on a slight incline with limited oxygen for half the length of

the varsity football field--where the head coach wishes to be buried next to his trophies.

Meanwhile, smelling their own decay, bumping noses into the asses of High Honor

Roll degenerates, appendages squashed by Birkenstocks and dirty sneakers that

cumulatively cost more money than their English teacher’s monthly salary, the advisors of

deans indoctrinated into the madness of the underground asylum. The smell of fresh blood,

third form (freshmen) girls nervous in the labyrinth for the first time whining, whispers

in the cool draft float upward and echo like chapel hymns. Beetles, cave crickets, and

hornets buzzing as students struggle to continue onward before using up all the air like

scuba divers descending on a half-empty tank. They make love with their nightmares, the

secret chamber of kilograms and Snapple bottles full of sweet poison, yellowed stacks of

newspapers from the 1940s proclaiming victory in World War II.

The third world is that inhabited by Senior Prefects, Vergers, Blue Key Heads,

Sacristans, Library Proctors, and Dining Hall Stewards. Macedonia rode one wave toward

the Antikythera mechanism--huffing Glade half-naked through frosty towels hanging from

door racks like Christmas stockings. Many of those currently surfing the network are

blowing powder or perhaps flipping some moron’s head into a cement wall at 4:25 in the

morning as a hazing ritual: debauchery, depraved decadence of the world’s richest and most

influential children.

Most prefects with the map to the tunnels and dungeons of millennial degenerates

have already earned early acceptance into the Ivy League. In ten years they will be

ambassadors, gynecologists, and garbage collectors.

For this moment in time, on this first headmaster’s holiday, they are nothing more

than blunted amber ashes in a Norton Anthology textbook.

Matthew Dexter

The Bus Route

2011-12-25T16:50:00.000-08:00

The exit ramp never changed: the screaming children, graffiti of his girlfriend eating

the guardrail, as if two decades floating into one moment, Travis aimed the yellow bus

through her familiar signature. The children bounced against the ceiling; they still wore no

safety belts; the strap burnt into the driver’s cheek and neck as he watched their backs crack

in the rear-view mirror. They busted all the tires, obliterated the hood, demolished the

windshield and half the widows--landed it safely on the grass in front of Mrs. Warren’s

mailbox.

Travis had checked himself out of a fancy clinic in the hills of Montana hours

earlier; one of those houses that treats alcoholics, sex addicts, and obsessive compulsive

hoarders. They have two chimneys and a horse tied to the front arch. There is no need to

address which category Travis fell under. He was a good-natured diabetic who collected

Frisbees and brewed his own beer in his mother’s basement. He was haunted by passengers

who had grown up--many had turned into monsters.

“Stay calm idiots,” he said, swinging the rear emergency door wide open.

Many of the children were already crawling out the windows. The injuries the driver

anticipated had not occurred. The girls were brave and stoic, the boys disorganized. The

bullies and big shots began to cry when the flames were borne into the bus from the engine.

***

Travis always paid attention to his retired passengers. He saw them in crosswalks,

sometimes they looked at him, usually through him. Their giggles stirred his memories: the

flash of their eyebrows frosted in snow sent tremors, smell of sweat and a hand job in a

magnified mirror on the way home from the zoo.

***

Only one of those ladies lives in the neighborhood today. Mrs. Miner inherited the

house from her mother. Most of the gang lives nearby and all keep in touch. On the first

Monday of May they meet to plant seeds or release baby turtles into the brook in the

backyard (on the stone bridge where Mrs. Miner forced the future Navy Seal to stick his

finger down her pink floral blouse).

***

“He hurt me, it was cold, fingernails, and then it got warm,” she said in the seat

behind Travis the next morning.

***

They told Travis everything. Another seventh grader begged him to take her back to

his apartment, but the driver promised God and his grandmother he would never abuse

power beyond steering the yellow machine--the time capsule of his dreams now

abandoned--he bandaged a boy’s head, waited to greet the women jogging toward his

wreck, instinctively grabbing their garden bonnets in the breeze; a moaning orchestra

conducting mosquitoes with soiled fingers.

Travis could smell champagne on Mrs. Harrison’s breath. A strawberry skin was

stuck to Mrs. Addison’s upper tooth. He could smell the sex on Mrs. Joplin as she brushed

past him toward the bloody bully.

“What happened here?”

Nothing had changed, Travis tried to rediscover those black hairs that still curled

out Mrs. River’s nostrils, but he failed to accept them as he once had. They were blown in a

strange manner by the warm exhalations of a furious woman looking for answers. Those

freckles once so harmless had become the farthest thing from innocuous. Lament and

madness crumpled frantic expressions when they recognized his pupils. The moon fell

closer to the ground as the sirens wailed and the driver buckled from the weight of a bus

crashing down on him, again.

Matthew Dexter

The Nondenominational Tourist

2011-12-25T16:48:00.000-08:00

The man was enjoying his vacation so thoroughly that after pontification, he

decided it should never end. In the lost decades which followed he found seven Mexican

wives, lost all his teeth, burnt out his lungs, gave up frozen margaritas, took up warm-aged

tequila, and pitched his tent on a different beach every evening. In America he was

considered odd and unattractive; south of the border he was exotic as a mermaid. He made

love to currents, dreamed of buying a sailboat--though he knew his finances and decrepit

credit rating (all three scores) would weigh down his sea-drenched catamaran until it was

no more than a leaky kayak. The man understood all too well that his consumption was

nothing more than delusions of grandeur and a fledgling case of tuberculosis.

He was shitting in the warm starry moonlight. He cracked open a bottle of Casillero

del Diablo wine stolen from Mi Casa Restaurant from a disillusioned busboy in exchange

for a small gram of marijuana and a large rock of cocaine. This defecation of

Australopithecus was sleeping inches from a sandy used tampon and a rusty needle. He

never got pinpricked--so it did not bother him; the crabs are a different story.

The wives and mermaids wax as he pops his warts with a sombrero. Alone tonight,

he busts most of them--the large ones anyway--pus slithers down his shaft. A good man

despite his misery, as pigeons listen, a survivor howls amid the pain of the nightly

procedure.

Familiar with fishermen, drunken captains often indulge him on sunset cruises.

There is an uninhabited island that enchants him in the Pacific. Rocky and rough, he

fantasizes about being immersed in this oasis. They say it´s too dangerous to land. He will

prove them wrong; knows it’s only a matter of time, and luck. The stratosphere is his

overturned hour glass.

The man gambles his wine for a fine lady tourist searching for her hotel in a nervous

stupor; ends with another mediocre whore with an enormous mouth that never closes; legs

always open; scabies and hairy, she chews on the man’s mustache during negotiation. As if

studying the menu of a steakhouse after a month of Ramadan, unfastened bloody stained

blouse, she exposes herself like a lobster trapped in a cage. Lost in the labyrinth of tent

fabric, they become the moons of Jupiter; a gassy planet orbiting the sun.

As the crabs bite and fish fall from the sky, crimson bodies dripping lust for

something neither can understand, embracing the carnal ecstasy already fading, they ride

the already cresting atavistic wave to shore, unsure of the outcome as always.

He ends with a boat; she a crack pipe stuffed with wet rock, four bottles of wine,

and a varicose spider nest of throbbing misery. Grinning toothless, she amuses the nipples

of the nondenominational man and hands over the keys of the panga. The man does not

bother pulling up his pants; tripped by shredded khakis, he rips them from swollen ankles,

gives them to the woman, her fluorescent lighter aimed at the Big Dipper. The zipper hits

her in the cheek, doesn´t faze the beast focused on her rock as if it were a hidden

constellation: Ophiuchus.

His satellite is the decrepit boat tucked into the cove. Hers is the melting yellow

snow of paradise. Both avenues are escapes in their own. The woman disappears. The man

hits rock on his island, guided by the waxing moon. The panga sinks within minutes, so

weakened by butt cheeks of women. The man swims to shore with crabs.

Matthew Dexter

Like the nomadic Pericú natives before him, Matthew Dexter survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine. He lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Downtime

2011-12-25T16:15:00.000-08:00

the body, eventual fascination

unfastens skeletal ambulation

portending rest as

blackened

proportion of

unbalanced causational sustenance|

unbound modulation

focal extract the blend of moments and

reconstructed effort into

hitherto absence, emanation

Felino A. Soriano

Prayer

2011-12-25T16:11:00.000-08:00

An opening, prose as emotional

connection, curtain of eyes’

elongated

concentration.

Felino A. Soriano

Somewhere

2011-12-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

desolation | fractions

syncopated exhales unravel bouquets of prior fascination, rumination—

vertical hands misuse pleasure as

dominant feature beyond physiological circumstances provide,

the

hours of noise

encompass musical revelation with

closure of soul then eyed rejuvenation passes beyond halls and

circular confinement

encompassing desire’s multiple renditions,

altered

Felino A. Soriano

Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. Recent poetry collections include Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (Desperanto, 2011), Pathos etched, recalled: (white sky books, 2011), and Divaricated, Spatial Aggregates (limit cycle press, 2011). For information regarding his published works, editorships, and interviews, please visit: www.felinoasoriano.info.

A gift from God

2011-12-25T15:49:00.001-08:00

His wife gave it to him straight: You should be locked up, strapped down, balls cut off, and fed to the pigs.

He moved toward her…

-Get away from me…

He reached out…

-Don’t touch me, motherfucker…

He touched her.

She screamed. She slapped. She scratched. She pushed him hard. He got mad. He saw red. He shot her two times. The gun wasn’t real; it was a water pistol, Sonny’s water pistol. It squirted her blouse.

She grabbed her chest. She fell down and she died. Just like that.

-Heart attack, he thought. Runs in her family. Father,

mother, both brothers… all dropped like shit out of a donkey’s ass…

He looked down at her. Her face had turned blue. It stopped him dead. It was magical. It was spiritual. It was life-changing. It was a gift from God. It was perfect… the color was perfect… Perfect…

-It’s like the sky, the sea, my hydrangeas…It’s like the color of Sonny’s eyes… I can’t live without it… The color is perfect… Perfect.

He trembled. He kneeled. He kissed her blue nose. He kissed her blue ears. He wept. He looked for his camera to capture the moment in living color.

-I’ll take photos, he thought. I’ll shoot ten rolls. I’ll shoot twenty. I’ll put photos upstairs, downstairs, attic, basement, garage, in the bathroom above the toilet. I’ll surround myself, drown myself in it… in the color… The color is a gift from God… The color is perfect..

He aimed the camera. He zoomed. He was about to click when the smell stopped him…

Something came loose in her stomach and flowed onto the living room carpet. The carpet was green. She was leaking brown.

He dropped the camera. His stomach flipped. He gagged. He held his breath. He held his nose. The smell covered him, smothered him. It smelled like Sonny in the morning, dirty diapers in the morning. It smelled like death in the morning.

He opened a window. He took a deep breath. He cleared his head. He looked down at her. Her face had changed color. Her face had turned gray. His legs wobbled. He felt weak.

-No, no, no. I’ve lost it, he thought. I can’t live without it. It was perfect. The color was perfect… It’s like the sky, the sea, my hydrangeas… MY HYDRANGEAS…

He went outside to visit his hydrangeas, to pick them all, to arrange bouquets, to place them in the house, everywhere in the house, to surround himself, drown himself in it… in the color. The color was perfect… perfect… It was a gift from God.

His hydrangeas were dead. He had forgotten. The cops murdered them. The cops dug up the garden looking for Sonny. They didn’t find Sonny, but they killed his hydrangeas. They killed every one.

Now what? he thought. I’ve lost it. I can’t live without it. It was perfect. The color was perfect… like the color of Sonny’s eyes…

He hated playgrounds. At nite, shadows made the jungle gym looked like bones, skeletons, Halloween shit. It spooked him, but he dug anyway. He knew the spot.

-Sonny, it’s Daddy. Where are you?

No answer. He dug deeper.

-Daddy can’t find you.

No answer. He dug deeper.

-Daddy needs something.

No answer. He dug deeper. Blisters popped on his hands.

-Be a good boy, Sonny. Daddy needs something from you.

No answer.

-Daddy needs something from you… Just one little thing…

His hands hurt. He was desperate.

-OK Sonny, let’s make a deal. Daddy will bring Mommy for a visit if Daddy can have one of your pretty blue peepers. Just one. Daddy will rip it out of your head so fast you’ll hardly feel a thing. How’s that sound, Sonny?

Nothing.

His hands bled. His spirits plunged. He was losing hope. He prayed: Please help me, God. You gave me a gift and I lost it. I can’t live without it. I don’t want to live without it. Please help me find it again. It was perfect… Perfect…

That nite, he dreamed blue. He dreamed blue sky, blue sea, blue hydrangeas, Sonny’s blue eyes… His wife’s blue nose, ears, face… blue blue BLUE…

He woke up with an idea. It was perfect.

He found the water pistol, Sonny’s water pistol. He filled it to the top, ice-cold water.

-I’ll go to Mrs. Spleen’s house, he thought. She’s old. She’s sick. She looks like shit. When she opens the door, I’ll hit her with a fucking tsunami. Fifty squirts. Ice-cold. With luck, she’ll drop like a bag of hammers, turn blue and I’ll be back in business. If not, I’ll go to the next house, then the next, then the next…. I won’t give up… Never…I’ll find it again… It was perfect… The color was perfect… Perfect… I can’t live without it, won’t live without it. It’s a gift from God… A gift…

He put the water pistol in his pocket… and he went shopping.

###

William J Fedigan writes about who he is, what he knows, where he’s been. Contact: HYPERLINK "mailto:wfedigan@aol.com" wfedigan@aol.com

The wrong old lady

2011-12-25T15:48:00.000-08:00

Rocco had a job to do. He kicked Feather’s kidneys in. Feather pissed blood. It was bad. Rocco kneeled Feather down like he was a fucking altar boy. Feather began to cry. He said: It’s a mistake. I’m sorry. Please don’t… It didn’t matter. Rocco shot him two times, back of the head. Feather fell forward. His nose broke, his mouth broke on the sidewalk… pieces of teeth on the sidewalk… blood and brains on the sidewalk… Feather dead on the sidewalk. It was bad, real fucking bad. Benny watched. Benny wanted to scream.

Benny knew Feather died because Healey fucked it up.

Benny told Feather: The kind of guy Healey is would sell babies if he knew how to sell babies…

Feather didn’t listen. Feather smelled money. Feather smelled the old

lady’s money. Feather listened to Healey. Healey set it up. It’s easy, Healey said, easy. It wasn’t easy. Feather died because it wasn’t easy. Feather died because Healey fucked it up.

Healey told Feather: You know the old lady, the gimpy old lady drags her foot when she walks.

Feather said: Yeah.

-What I hear is she keeps cash, a lot of cash, in her house. What I hear is she’s goin away for couple of days, Healey said.

Feather listened. Feather liked it. Feather smelled money. It smelled good. Feather was hungry.

-So we go in, we find the money, we get out. Easy. A quick in-out, Healey said. Feather liked it.

Feather went in. Healey stayed out. The house was big. Feather smelled money. It smelled good. Feather was hungry. Feather followed his nose. Feather heard noises. Feather tried to hide. The front door opened. The old lady walked in. The old lady was holding a pocketbook. The old lady was holding a shopping bag. The old lady looked at Feather. She squinted her eyes. The old lady looked at Feather hard, did-she-know-him hard. Feather looked back hard, did-he-know-her hard. The old lady didn’t know Feather. Feather didn’t know the old lady. Feather froze. It was the wrong old lady. Healey fucked it up. Shit!

-You sure this is the right house? Feather asked Healey, wanting to be sure, no mistakes, no fuck-ups.

-Yeah, this is the right fuckin house, Healey said.

Healey was wrong… It was the wrong house. It was the wrong old lady. Healey fucked it up.

The old lady screamed. She was scared shitless. Feather was scared shitless. Feather grabbed her, put his hand over her mouth. It’s a mistake, he said. I’m sorry, he said. Please don’t scream, he said. The old lady bit his hand. Feather squeezed his hand over her mouth. The old lady kicked. Feather squeezed his hand tight, too tight. The old lady stopped kicking. The old lady stopped breathing. The old lady shit herself. The old lady turned gray as cement. The old lady turned cold as a sidewalk.

The old lady hit the floor. The shopping bag hit the floor. The pocketbook hit the floor. The pocketbook spilled out old lady shit… dimes, nickels, rosary, Mass card. The rosary beads were worn down smooth as bones. The Mass card said: In loving memory of… Feather read the name. Feather knew the name. Everybody knew the fucking name. Feather pissed his pants. Feather said: Help me, Jesus. Feather ran out the door like his hair was on fire. Healey was gone. Feather was alone. It was dark, pitch black, no moon. Feather was scared shitless.

Benny told Feather: The kind of guy Healey is would sell babies…

Feather didn’t listen. Healey fucked it up. Feather died. Rocco shot him.

Rocco asked around. It didn’t take long. Rocco found Feather at Benny’s place. Benny told Rocco it was a mistake, it was Healey fucked it up. Rocco said: I don’t know who the fuck Healey is. I don’t know who the fuck you are. Get out the way and let me do my job.

Rocco shot Feather two times, back of the head. It was bad, real fucking bad. Benny watched. Benny wanted to scream. Benny wanted to do something about it…

Benny asked around for Healey. It didn’t take long. Benny found Healey hiding in the boneyard. Healey was drunk. Healey was scared. Healey was pissing on some poor bastard’s grave. Healey told Benny maybe he got confused, it was dark that night, pitch black, no moon, maybe he made a mistake, wrong house, wrong old lady, but it was Feather snuffed her, not him.

Rocco was crouched down behind a tombstone. Rocco listened. Rocco heard every word. Rocco walked up behind Healey. Rocco shot Healey two times, back of the head. The muzzle flash caught Healey’s head on fire. Healey fell forward into his own piss. That was good. Healey’s head torched. That was better. Let the motherfucker burn, Benny told Rocco.

Benny and Rocco watched Healey burn.

Rocco asked Benny: What kinda guy was Healey would plan to rob an old lady?

-The kind of guy Healey was would sell babies if he knew how to sell babies, Benny said.

Rocco asked Benny: What kinda guy was Feather would rob an old lady?

-Feather was the kind of guy would listen to a guy like Healey, Benny said.

-Healey was bad luck for Feather, Rocco said.

-Healey was bad luck for the old lady, Benny said.

-Not all bad luck, Rocco said. Healey’s burning for both of them.

Rocco was right. Healey burned like dead skin. Healey burned and it stunk. It stunk like garbage stinks when it’s dumped in the street, and even the rats won’t touch it.

Benny didn’t mind the stink. Benny didn’t mind at all.

###

William J Fedigan writes about who he is, what he knows, where he’s been. His latest work appears in Swill Magazine, Horror-Sleaze-Trash, Yellow Mama, Short, Fast and Deadly, Muscle & Blood, Metal Scratches, Blackheart Magazine. Contact: HYPERLINK "mailto:wfedigan@aol.com" wfedigan@aol.com

Visceral

2011-12-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

The dream only lasted for a minute. I came to in a clearing surrounded by creaking maple. The shaft of the right leg was caught in a bear trap. The tibia had snapped in beer bottle shards and the fibula had disintegrated below the teeth of the trap. Only sheets of fascia and fibrous tendons held me to the iron. For once, I felt no pain. My skinny shoulders could not contain the pleasure.

When I woke, I found myself in more absurd teeth.

Kyle Apgar

The Wise Dancer

2011-12-24T18:14:00.001-08:00

Dr. Ernest Williamson III

From Africa 2 Asia

2011-12-24T18:12:00.001-08:00

Dr. Ernest Williamson III

Show of the Show People

2011-12-24T18:11:00.000-08:00

Dr. Ernest Williamson III

Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 350 national and international online and print journals. He has published work in "The Columbia Review","Bricolage: University of Washington's Literary Arts Journal, and many others. View more of his work here: www.yessy.com/budicegenius

Bullet Kiss

2011-12-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

Gunshot merging gone, I found her

the vet’s curtain waves breezily

like a Spanish matador’s cape

early she always burrowed her

moist black nose under my arm

lifting it high as the door latch

I’d soon be lifting for her—

early at the river we’d watch

sun rays surf atop driftwood

only high grade green earth past

the Venetian blind’s crinkling V

David S. Pointer

Exposed

2011-12-24T09:16:00.001-08:00

Nobody to save us on

Interstate 65, instantly

four large canisters of

bull sperm came rolling

off a Greyhound bus and

Bibleman had already

flown off after his financial

backers demanded 65

million dollars in incentives

for their biblical theme park

in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

as drivers swerved like

Speed Racer to avoid

taking the full load

Davis S. Pointer

Warning

2011-12-24T09:15:00.001-08:00

dieselpunk instigators

popping enhanced rivets

and coated rebar like

pills into my headache

should not come undone

like infrastructure or the

brain’s interatomic bonds

on interlibrary phone loan

throwing cage pro kicks

from a moving motorcycle,

as I fathom a way to stop

those brain eating amoebas

from intercepting the next

transformational surgical

procedure on my woman’s

breast reduction radar

David S. Pointer

David S. Pointer has work in the new anthologies from "Static Movement." Titles include "Christmas Fear 2, "And I Swear This is True," and "Static Poetry V." He also has a forthcoming chapbook at "Writing Knights Press" entitled "MPs, Snipers and Crime."

THE WORST

2011-12-24T06:19:00.000-08:00

It’s true,

I always imagine

the worst,

the small circus

in my head

closing,

the bearded lady

forced to shave

twice a day,

the lion dying

of hunger

under the swing set

in a neighbor’s

backyard,

people saying

about me

that he used

to write poetry.

Howie Good

THE BEREAVED

2011-12-24T06:17:00.000-08:00

I mash down on the brake.

Hardly anyone ever mentions

just how slippery blood is.

That son of a bitch, my heart,

waving and shouting

what sounds like hi! Hi!

when there’s nobody there

but clocks and mirrors.

Many suicides

are misclassified

as accidents.

Then it’s spring.

Howie Good

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the 2011 poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book goto a charity, which you can read about here: HYPERLINK "https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red" https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red

No One's Perfect.

2011-12-23T05:44:00.000-08:00

Kyle Apgar

Old Wounds

2011-12-23T05:33:00.001-08:00

Before the telencephalon had morphed into the seat of cognition

the architecture of disappointment had already been branded

into every nucleic acid.

I’ve always questioned if a conscience had time to form

before the burden of crushing years had crippled emotion from creeping across her face.

This Suicide bomber, a wound collector herself.

She operates with coy somatic integrity.

Contents of broken glass held taut by armored, smooth skin.

She digs deep,

spitting vociferations of shrapnel that price far

into my frontal lobes causing erratic neuron firing and bouts of spontaneous vertigo.

I’d be better off without her, but these times alone are fingers in the throat.

Kyle Apgar

Dead Beat

2011-12-22T17:21:00.001-08:00

Ginsburg, you motherfucker.

You really screwed with my mind.

The tectonic plates of my bones have been shaking like a rape victim.

I haven’t had an original thought since you put your dick in my brain.

Why did you slide from hallowed earth and wrap bare bones around me? It’s well known my heart’s a two-pump-chump.

Swinging, neck stretched, in the cool shade of my family tree.

I saw you, neighbor, doing the same.

Was there a point to crashing my pad, burning all of my poems, drinking all my gin and force feeding me jazz?

The cherry fell off my cigarette.

Pale blue smoke among the

gasping,

ailing,

leaves.

I hope it goes out. I’ll feel like a fool

if I burn down my own damn house.

A digression, I know, but, you. You angle headed hipster, made me pee a little.

The pills in my pocket dissolved and were

absorbed through my femoral pores.

My Right leg won’t stop dancing. It jittered and jigged down the street and won’t come back to this homely hip.

I’m a cripple! I’ve been leaning on metaphors for days.

Sometimes, you’re the wolf, and other times,

just another hapless mauled victim.

… I hope you and Walt Whitman are happy together,

you son of a bitch.

Kyle Apgar

Gnome What I'm Talkin About

2011-12-11T13:40:00.001-08:00

Kyle Apgar

love hurts

2011-12-11T13:31:00.001-08:00

Anonymous