standard anatomical position

i developed autopsy photos, acting as death’s hyperoptic 

eye. on my screen, a woman with an amputated right 

leg, cleaved just superior to the knee. her torso yielded a 

Y incision that began under each second rib, met mid 

sternum, and ended near the pubic synthesis.

her dulling husk was held together by taut thread which 

made the adipose erupt from the fissure, and push out like 

jaundice fingers from within her torso; the way a cicada 

emerges from its shell. her trimmed pubic hair showed 

that she had better plans than laying on surgical steel, naked, 

photographed, measured, and taken apart like an old 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

     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

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

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

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

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

An opening, prose as emotional

            connection, curtain of eyes’

elongated 

                                       concentration.


Felino A. Soriano