Hot Ukrainian Grave Diggers

1.

the skin on his outer back across the ribs is so white, while the back of the neck is shiny, shiny coffee.

2. 

the sexiest one with his ornery chest and beard hairs

lines of words on his forearm and the tats the

south-pacific islander/ celtic/ native american/ burning-man tribal symbol don't make sense

the saint's medal hung from the neck and jutting chin claim his earnestness

the snarl as if he stands just pre-coitus before you naked

the squared-off nose as if he had been born to shovel

high tight titties

the funeral chrysanthemums appear to be there for him not the dead

3. 

but then they all have these chains

the little one, with little black socks and trainers, his jeans cut off

his abs a blueprint or map in soilure and creases

if you hold him close, any point of his body or being could be within reach

if you are much bigger, he could have strong feelings about you

if you are the same size, he may not like you or you will be brothers

i love sitting in a barber chair, like a king on a pyramid

there's a special vestment and i feel like my appeal is concentrated

4.

our experience with sodomy has been overwhelmingly positive

though it's much more fun when it's illegal

and would be better if you could top each other at the same time

i think it's impossible but keep trying to figure it out logistically

he's not porn or a doll that you're humping but 

another human being working with you and against you wholistically

and if you're weaker than him that's hot and if you're stronger that's hot

you might try to guess what he's thinking but it doesn't matter

sodomy supersedes thought law reproductive excuses for fucking

fear of death wrath of god precedent history science cocksucking

for some it's got to be the logical choice when bombs are falling

by Jan

4 classifications

Hey Sylvia

Spotted you out in the CCC parking lot this afternoon snapping clouds with your long-ass lenses and your convertible looking cool.

Your story: world is divided into following classifications: annoying, agitating, exasperating, and upsetting.

Yet there you were maybe grooving or maybe gathering evidence.

And then those of us who survived
realizing nevertheless how sluttily
chilling in the dez on mandated recreate

Remainder of world gaydom reeling
but seasonally flooding the pool
may they take home some flavor

of days when men roamed live
like it was life's last laugh
every night a glowing surfeit

alcoholic firebrand drumkits
there was this was a counterculture
so many soft-cotton swaddled dicks

everyone a similar golden color
workers were crowning paramount
unlimited beer and cigarettes

now freeze dried forever, a residual
fanciness, snide or glassy earnest,
not flannel or denim in that sense.


Love, Tom

Sixty-Nine Cents an Hour

My first real corporate gig since shilling boner at private pool parties for the Chicago mob landed me right in the peaking tip of the dot-com boom. This time I got to be the old shuggie with the time-done-alive cred if nothing else. The mean street in between had been a beautiful government sliding down a rainbow of duty and patrimony, but I was ready for all the opportunity and glamor of a whurl-wide pyramid schemata. Even though you know already my only retirement income said and done now is from leasing out these tracts.

My new boss was half the size I had been at his age and twice as green. With a twitch. Always seemed to be sweating it out, this guy Pete Steeves-- what if they fire me, well it's curtains for me and the wife and kid, that's whut, and forget about the options. Just lettem get you drunk and goofy after work, dick-flip yr earlobe now and then, fetch a few things, learn the acronyms. VC is no longer Viet Cong.

But Pete also had another thing i didn't know he had, what they called hunger back then. It's also when they started leveraging the word leverage's leverage all over the place, almost like they were leveraging it. Just like when pundits and academics started saying the word "piece" all the time. Like, "And then the other... oh, i don't know...PIECE of this is, i think..." (they had to pause before the word piece as if they had just then thought of using it in that particular kind of brilliant figurative play). Around that time or a little before they also decided that the "UH" sound is too like a troglodyte. So everything has to be "AH" instead, as if a light bulb is going off over your caricature. AHnbelievable. Then the final golpe with the engine-like, throaty cackle talk, wicked-witch-of-the-west schtick to sound hip, ironic and also sassy!

Stumbling along a quaintly sooted, deeply rutted urban lane only meant for drunk young guys in ties leaving downtown bars at night, a street like the hormonally ergonomic curved charnel chutes for beef, Pete mistily confided that he trusted me in a special way. He expressed that as, "I feel like I can tell you anything." Next thing I knew I had responded to an urgent-toned invitation to his country home for a meal.

The Steeves' house was so old you could not even change a diaper in it due to its landmark status. It looked like "Shakespeare" condos, but lower, maybe where the ponies were groomed by jockeys. The double-dutch doored entrance with the capital X's on each under-wing opened wide to reveal an eerily medievally scene for riding the information revolution. The wife-- was it a bonnet? No, one of those prep girl tortoiseshell tiara deals--perched on a short stool across from the daughter, who was actually in a bonnet, being a baby, in a Georgian wicker, no, a varnished Confederate willow-switch ship bed, squeaking slowly. Was it a tyke rocking itself to some primordial Esperanto hymn in a flammable cradle edging our land's hearth, or another shriveled and catatonic relative?

As in a roadside "Mystery Spot," I could not stand up completely straight at any point, angle or coordinate in the structure. Pete and Nancy had developed stoops, though they could have geometrically fit erect in a technical sense, maybe just not psychologically quite like duck's backs around the time-travel/ anachronistic lifestyle piece. Pete, intuiting that I wouldn't stay on for whatever was boiling in the cauldron at the end of a hag's long spoon, immediately presented me with a gift. It was warm from being in his hand, and it stayed that way even after leaning-to in the cool vinyl toll-coin tray of my GM tank for the hour it took to get back home to Highchank.

Pete's gift is made of a hard, dark wood that holds energy beyond its own life better than most other previously living tissue. It is so much more valuable as a dead absorber of however the sun can stir dust into sparks and finally fish-lizard-rat-ape-calculator. Pete's gift you might call a totem he picked up from some port where they give a tourist a dark kernel of place and a little more, which can taint. You might call Pete's gift a fertility symbol with just the suggestions of parts carved roughly and all from one piece, but that was also the whole point. Along with how it can't stand up even though it's obviously a man. The soles of his feet are badly cut, really more like hacked at by a god making sixty-nine cents an hour.


by Donna
for Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist, Autumn Double Issue

bronze sailboats

On a five-wood deco vanity,
whataya say we nod to roots,
how each of us, equally strung,
experienced a knot of co-occupancy
and why we shouldn't share frankly.

But seeing's how we simultaneously
wiped index knuckles across nuts
watching psychodrama among a
whole pen of our likenesses,
blood kin can't go without staying.

This is where we gather and molt.
A hundred others combine the shame.
While not the godz-favorites, the
anonymity of obscurity has its fame.
We're heavy light triangles on water.

Whore of abstinence

There seems to be a tiny niche for someone to get away with this booshia, for men who are let's face it trying to shore up their years, yet still showing up ever more popping it new, as in styling moves, as in risky, nothing to lose.
Here's what you do: you say I admire your assertiveness. If only
I could be like you I'd end up the stud of this establishment or even including all the organic matter that surrounds us. My daily order, personal venues, would be irreversibly turned inside-outz.
But I'm a local girl. I have a responsibility to this my watering hole and community, self, a kind of watching, nurturing bitch energy that will go so far as to walk you to your car and let you kiss me.
**Barkeep, I help laborers in the tourism industry map out and monitor quadrants of their payload, responsibility. In turn, I hope they'd be honest if Someone ast if they'd seen me lately.**

Connie
"Some nights I'm gifted hot, and I can't waste it on the oracle dispenser. I tell the outta towners I'm just there for some human con-tack, but I start receiving earnest knee organ just the same. This new technique can nevertheless put off a century of dog days for you know who you are, baby. I will be welcoming and loving in part because I know you are on the way."

al be-ashamed tomorrow

al be-ashamed tomorrow, al be-ashamed at the end of it all.
al cop a plea an take a fifth of whatever been a-served to thee.

Them wrecks, them crimz them scavs... it's why we discriminate,
but al take the fall, for brotherhood sake an unanimity.

Wayne

Missionary Guilt

WAYNE:
the redness of your lips is extending its boundaries;
kissing a man with a goatee can really rip you up

JAN:
more than sucking my husband's mustache, only the smell of
his loins, close enough, represents the call of life for me

WAYNE:
gripping your upper arms, I can tell just how strong you are.
it gives me confidence to tangle with your weaknesses.

JAN:
why must I fear a sociopathy in my brothers
with you, an apologia for masculinity?

WAYNE:
my greatest crime but that which I am most prone to do
would be holding you dear enough to serve as an off'ring.

Shiv Overdose

Family of Consumers

We live interdependently, buying style and smartly. Any moment of piggishness is copacetic in
the privacy of your home. We are a network of understanders, tapping heaven's color palette. If
you sign up for automatic transaction, you barely feel the entries and egress, and if you get the
rhythm, it starts to generate a flow, a chi-wave. You can look like the foto in the public oracle
dispenser if you stay up to date. We are all on the same page: a rubber slide that feels like
leather. It's a company with roots, entanglements, holes. We can produce chillun this way. We
can whistle them like smoke into another century, remembering. As we speak, my fingers are
writing checks. We know the weather in Orlando, Bensenville, Cliffe Suites. We can be there on
the morrow, while always in reach of the beam. A two-way street means we take our knocks in
the surf. The elite might be hypnotized by their space on the curve, no matter how far they've
turned. It's the bold hang from a big arm that will catapult our moon shots. It's the brave step we
don't take, for the wurl, which the generations wud want this way. Boys and their machinations
are under branding, butterflies, every gesture, expression, attempt: ours to claim. Every knee
jerk or shudder just creates more gism. We are a chain of strangers, enemies, happy to be sealed
from any one asshole's greed. Leadership means take our emotions and lay out the whole runway
so we can see our land. We will work for solids, make waste of air, enter a future every day. Our
aim is to clock in, collaborate, live, breed. Salt of the Sea and cream soda is the Mthyuh's fetish.

Donna
Sears Parking Lot

Wayne Come A'Knockin

All's I can say is I was on a sabbatical from aerospace right when TRW had community days where you could stroll through their newest foam in your bellbottoms. It was a Billy Graham mission, and I'd had an unsettling interaction with a disbeliever at breakfast just about when I was ready to try and witness. So I took a golf day, and next thing, I am delivering a slimy percussive being onto a fetid pagan tuskless trunk floor. While my family sloshed in clippered jungle growth. I am the prayer of prayers, and they just got silly after I responded to Sylvia's first birth knellz without getting done. I did not feel it it my ears, as one would an ambulance or a robin. This was a primal alarm in my pelvis perhaps significant to the kind of society we had settled into on that plane. Jan had said she could see the evil rising in waves even from the runway, but I told her and truly hoped it was sublimated libido, even beginning to drum on my plastic foldout tray.

"Hello? May I help here?"

Drop-In Center

In this village, there's still a camera shop.
But the money stopped with a red dream
And chop, chop. We put a drop-in center
For the third gender made whores of, but
They mothers started showing up. My son,
You told me you went for bleach, shaves.
Sheaths. This is where the rice thrasher's
Dogs and chillun play Carom with poker
Chips. The neighbors came round with
Sticks and chrysanthemum paste. There
were fights, but now when we see goat heads
In the street, we can say, here, I brought
Some money. Internationals need batteries.
No more swatting; you must say hi to me.

I am Hoolie

HIV Bros

They had their shivknives drawn steak sides up, and Jer felt his upper gingiva pulling back and drying out. He was hissing like a possum in a corner. Then he looked up at Ken and had to chortle. They were 2 skeletons dipped in Flesh-Color Paint. It was a kick when they argued cuz they knew they were already ded. "You are funny to me just as you are tragic to others," explain Jer. "Phukyu bitchcunt I pis on you; I cut you," was Ken's retort. Then they both busted up laughing and allowed themselvz a few moments of cardiac arrest. Gasping for breath, Jer say to Ken: "You know I hate everyone else even more than us." "That's coo; me too," sputter Ken, coughing up blood.

Lady McBirth

Hot neighbors' sons with shorn hair empty onto
the street and crawl up the block at night, spray paint
the garage. Reptily mom call police. Neigh-
bors complain, "Therz alwayz trubble over thayr."

She knew it was not at the law that they jeered,
but rather marked her as sodomy doer.
And their votes were against sodomy, not her.

She thought of the way shit stink stays in your skin
and wondered whether that was yet another
shame for mothers.

Feed from the Air

Hoolie last memry of Peg:

"Somewhere in other places there are flakes who feel a little hungry every day, yet continue to read, bike or swim. Or they roll from work station to station wagon to hueco opener and spill out onto a candy-glazed Rascal what could be paid by the corporment. They don't self deny as much as behave like adults, kiddies: They say: 'Yes, I'm quite famished but I will eat tomorrow no prolm. I can ride my desire right on into a fevered dream of red-faced happiness.' Others of our species are glee deities and can never be gluttons because they absorb unlimited richvictuals and calming vines through their smiling lips with no worry nor wonder."

She was pinning homemade voodoo dolls with human hair to wicker tombstones she had made at home with dead Easter grasses and nailing them to trees. They resorted to baser traditions when the kids were around and/or holidays. Everyone would gather up surplus ribbons and scarves and make masks of K guano and fruit paints. They got mud-doo hair. Meet in the public square like freaks. Then someone from the high chanks show up to buy a loaf or some slurry. Now it's a single-file fool parade with jesters with rape whistles, hand bells, mace, car keys, tape, a drum, seasonings, exhibitionism, and the long-nose high chanker led the fray in a grim backward cap. Afraid.

These were alleys and gutters twixt houses that are flat black stones stacked one upon another. In windows, wooden poles hold up the backs of more flat chalk, shale, flint. Chalk Chank Knolls hadn't been up and coming but would forever be a noble culture no matter how destitute or raw. These life forms are weird polyps of their mighty blood predecessors, aphids milking aged meat who only causes goodness to drop by summoning feed from the air with its smell.

Hot Drifter

You are 53, so you are cunning and cynical in a last-ditch
effort to hump your days and walk on top. Soon your risk
taking will give in to begging wonder for life outside d'bed.
You have bright eyes and a mustache you call the Womb
Broom. In one small town where you stopped they said m
-aybe you were a con man but anyone could guess it was
juss a chick or boy you moved and disrespected. Don't piss
off unions or steaming membranes with an itch for your c
-ock. Hot drifter, many may mock; none can hold your p-
ower over major regions of the wanting brain, oh, and nex
time you wan to stop by, jus come on in; don't even nock.

Serving Christians, yor trajectry brings you wide and on s
-ome dire affairs. The churches take you in an cut you job
-s at carnivals, car washes, and for burials, loan you a suit.
You safe in this town as a fart that smells like food. Erybo-
dy thinking ways of how you, as a man, are theirs. Imagin
-e wuhda local wife wunt want to stow you in her sk-
irt. You've never been a brother on the grid. Some men th
-ink that they can find themselves in you, but they are da
shed on rocks and ashes worse than wymen. Ashamed of
loving you, hot drifter, we offer up r babl verse an wicca.
I for one dont play that praying game. You are my sistuh.

All-Male Gay Nude Hemp Farmers

Gol, just a little fire drill, and everyone's
groverling before gods and murdering th
-eir firstbornz. Grow up, collective. We t-
he dults now. We pragmatic inda face uh
storms: dey moths 2 flame. Mud, the sa-
-me. Clouds of arrows, solar radiation, b-
rothers save the nation on they two feet.