It's not as if we don't have feelings

but it's not as if we don't have feelings

having given up the agency but kept

the brains, and if not the actual heart,

the part the ancients saw in the ceilings.

 

we bear the psychological consequences

of your rampages through flake towns and

 

remote desmadre at the mercy of autistic 

High Chank teens who dump their adrenal

 

charge into our thought jars where it stirs

dark and slick across our already tortured 

 

logic spurs, amygdalae and venal charm 

receptors every day and even as we dream

by Charnelle Casas-Cuevas

charnelle, a gladiate

styrofoam wings

lungs jump and squeak

rewarmed remains

the dreaded stank

500 miles of ribbon cable

5 days from the cradle

the rewards are weak for 

the revived so to speak

they get to watch crowds 

cheer their corporal missions

from the comfort of a 

cupboard consciousness

by Charnelle

the rock method

the first time i climbed to the top of Mthyuh my hair was still long and very red

 

i was still barefoot from dancing shiv on a slab of ancient desert pavement scrawl

 

i had to see the top and what her raging bottom looked like from the highest chank

 

summiting and launching and diving in were a single stroke, an ancient character

 

Braino knew my arc would blend and assimilate The Crack's northmost fissure

 

instead of bouncing back on the sheer force of rejection by her drumskin i rolled

 

and entered a natural vent, tearing upward through rock and sand and insect nests

 

red like magma my hair and blood left pooling on arrowheads and pots not touched

 

by human hands since before there were summer thaws and green tendrils to munch

 

that day i felt the gravity of knowing that stopped the endless stasis of my cart

 

and let me out onto the landing strip of time the frictionless rink of deadened glass

 

my feet still green rinds, sticky pink pads, gotten slick with the dust of monuments 

at the center of the longest day among the range of moments contending for noon

 

i wished Shab well and his eyes glowed red in recognition of the end of our scam

 

 

 

by Ilyn

My toplessness

i am ready to take my immune system to a new level

ready for any number of cosmetic chiroplastomies

open to broken companions, fresh interlocutors

or am i fine in these gnawed out stones of yore alone

in some of the passages you can see your breath

in others the lost heat of industry allows my toplessness

by Reptily

Two trains

I later found out that my entrance into their society was staged after the famous Cleopatra in a gilded cage scene, carried on a tunka by slaves, from the famous remake of ChukkaChank Rules, WD 77. 

 

Everyone seemed so young then. Weird how they age all at the same time here. Then my freedom was gone.

 

It is a life of rooms with plastic panels and light bulbs and dark corners and water tanks. I am an administrative shook in a tube to them. Until I started getting out at night.

 

I learned to access their finest salons and gank their golden coins and leave bodies strewn upon marble steps in shame. They could not prosecute nor understand my flights without the book of LaChama and the book was her only power so the book was my power through our mother LaChama and the book is my cartridge of plentitude and of finding love and adventure beneath the aluminum flooring and safety wires. 

 

Why they bring us here only as spiritual guides or amusement rides I ask bitterly during a spinning, thrashing shiv demo right on their most famous stage, the Apollo. 

 

Two trains I can sometimes hear in here:

the inner one screaming when they turn off the filter of loathing and the flakes are allowed to wander in the streets and engage with events

the outer one chugging each time a car melts from the inner train and lets off techs and managers

 

 

 

by Reptily

Preen gland technician

They brought me inside the control room of my own mother's puppet corpse. I could look down over the switches and buttons and through the glass down five stories and watch her feet drag and thud, drag and thud across the empty Sears parking lot, which was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Once we had triggered The Crack, it was a watery world of carelessness; a sort of sleep paralysis of the shock reflex set in while we were fed through a peristalsis of the dimensional organ. 

She was/ was not my mother. This was the flesh of the great beautiful young K who could toss me 100 meters into the sky with her beaque and catch me easily in her seal craw, where lightly blood-dappled pelts were stacked and crumpled into a very stinky but gossamer safety net. The woman they extracted from her inner ear during a shiv molting also is/ isn't La Pegyuh. She seems to carry all her memories, fears, quick tongue. Her body, as well, is now tortured day and night with Remote Tissue Decisioning in order to coordinate with image mirroring protocols and functions. They say she was a random preen gland technician who took a wrong turn somehow. 

by Reptily

No more community theater

The stage is dark at the center and it's one of those setups where the players are seated or standing around the inside of the three walls waiting to take their turns. Giant leaves made of plastic bags get caught up in the breeze of a fan and bound noisily across the upstage out of doors like plastic bags. 

"But then I'm telling you we love to have her and she's so talented but she does her writhing ritual really in breaking of character and does it right in the middle of the stage when others should be starting their lines and action."

"Jan, I can sympathize, but she's over 21. I can't control her even with the shiv. She has the fins of an embryo, but she'll never develop any further or take on the exclusive markings of any particular species. She feels like shiv's the only way she can find freedom as she will never sprout wings or a full claw matrix, so the ancient hooting and dancing are her expression of a foiled archetypal and organic need."

"Don't get me started on the topic of Institute for the Talk Therapy Apologist Movement mumbo-jumbo, Donna. We all knew from the start the risks we were taking by having Reptily here full time. I mean, not just a goat you can tether to a tree. And it's really no problem. Just no more community theater, k?"

LaChama

The Lady Bug

i coughed so hard i

closed my eyes and saw

perfect geometric displays

 

a functioning and energetic 

system of squares and the

angles that connect them

hipsters beware: it tends

to degrade into a dry and

gauzy parody of order

now as i turn two-handed

to the door frame and lean

i reflect on the drama of

the lady bug who must

be reminded of her destiny

during stops along the way

 

 

 

by Peg

life's little mercies

cracked microwave oven

atomic bomb tests

industrial farming

office smoking

hepatitis

deviated septum

demon possession

mistakes

house fire

house fire

house fire