Look at the world and consider its plans for you. Lost is the best you could hope to be. The middle of a darkened wood Is all you should expect of good. Everyone says help me. But you aren’t supposed to take it literally. The nightmare’s purpose Is to hide the actual nightmare. You have […]
Poetry 91
Kevin Dobbs: Desert Zombies of Doha
133 Fahrenheit just outside My office window—people do live Out there, and if they stay outside Long enough, the over-heated fluid Just under their skulls will kill them, At the very best erase cells. People, Born here, all have simmered Frontal lobes, making them Desert Zombies. The filmy look in their eyes is Unmistakable. They’re […]
Jim Cory: Excerpts from 777
(86) dream last night new job involves meeting & greeting historic personages (Bismark, Benjamin Britten, et al) meanwhile wearing only this miniskirt of white paper towels (101) the cabal: thought they were all against me so I acted like they were all against me & then they were all against me
Grant Clauser: At the Occult Flea Market and Used Book Emporium
Every bargain is deceiving— the cost of trinkets hidden in the fingerprints of those who held them last, pins abandoned in the second-hand voodoo doll the way comets leave a trail of shrapnel suspended in their wake or Spock, exposed to radiation in the Wrath of Khan can’t touch his friend goodbye
Michael Derrick Hudson writing as Yin-Fen Chou: Walking Home from the Redwood Inn and Making Excuses for Still Living in Fort Wayne, Indiana
So here’s to all those pretty waitresses you’d break up over who don’t really want to be waitresses. You inchling! I over-tip three soggy dollars and some silver and you’d think I’d screwed an archduke’s monocle into my watery left squint, slapped my thigh with an ivory walking stick and strode forth in jodhpurs from […]
A.D. Carswell: The King and I
You got me all shook up, baby he says, leaning resplendent in sex and rhinestones against a fastidiously clean countertop, next to a blissfully burned out and overall dull husband. Book him a room at the Heartbreak Hotel I listen, while eating a hunka, hunka burned toast, eyes trained on twitching hips that escape spousal […]