Bring Your Meat, Leave the Bones

Peg and Jan have been wallowing and tonguing in a deep meteorite crater full of fleke bones at the Bring Your Meat, Leave the Bones (BYMLB) hangar. Covering as much of their bodies as possible in the stench of death and rot would serve to protect them, they felt, from the onslaught of springtime.

I see you speaking into the common mirror. Look into my eyes now, and repeat your last statement to the sisters. 

What. What's this about? 

Into my eyes. Say it. 

Ok, finally we must condemn all societal rape including those which are perpetrated among the auspices of a private governing body. 

Right, well you looked bored at having to repeat it, but it did not lack any sign of human effusion. 

As observed in my other formal appearances? 

Bitch you even do it on MonstaLine.

...

You even do it when you use the common mirror as an actual mirror. 

You're coming for my personality and that's making me extremely uncomfortable. 

I know. I can see that on your normal face that you have when you're not speaking to the mirror. 

...

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It's sad to see what's happening and I'll tell you what's happening. It's not just you. Sisters speak into the common mirror and manifest they face they think they having all the time. 

Ok, that's why the vain bitches always look so good. 

That's correct. And if you think you look like a hollowed-out shiv skank...

I look like a...

No. But some do. And it's not just cosmetics. You know the best cosmetic.

Love. 

... You know that... may be better I was gonna say self-regard but yours has more dimensions.

No. You just taught me that. Just now.

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Phyliss [trans.]

Terror v. Horror v. Anxiety v. Fear v. Panic v. Paranoia v. Puzzlement v. Exasperation v. Dread

Headlights made me squat and lie down on my back like a cat burglar. Those and other slick gangster moves made me wonder who am I?

I'd stand before the oracle dispenser and a great personality, an exaggeration, appeared to bubble into the frame, a swelling from my skull.

Was it self-regard made me lose a way to muscle outta here? I wake up exhausted from a night of paramilit'ry operations: for bread.

Reptily

admonishment

wasted bird of paradise
edging sideways through life
straight is the final arrow's flight
even if you do things right

harsh are the rains and tides
jarring are the co-confined's
needling the pines
wicked the minds

Latest Starving Titles

• Bourgeoisie, please!
• Effluvium of underarm and flowers
• i guess it's my testosterone make me wanna force things
• Torsion and beyond to what can be cured by narrative?
• Bag o' Cock
• Now! Less Panic
• No, we're not smosta spoke here but we do.
• Fagnimicent
• There's nothing for me in these bushes but cover.

By Donna

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

meatloaf with cous cous and sliced green olives served with boiled potatoes (not shown)

 2lb 85/15, 1/4 C ea chili sauce and merlot, long dash balsamic vin, celery and cumin seeds, 1 chopped yellow onion, 2 eggs, 3/4 C dry cous-cous, 1/2 C crushed wheat chex, black and white pepper (TOGETHER!). Tomato paste frosting with laurel hieroglyphics, sprinkled parm. 2 dientes gordos de ajo picaditos. aceite de aceituna, aceitunas.

Vikki Madrid

It didn't figure

wen we signed r domestic partner papers in the
taco bell attached to the arco thayv boarded up,
an I tipped the chaplain 50 bucks right outa my
wallet, not even in an envelope with a card, we
none of us cd've known that it'd end in disaster.

man show'd up in an open shirt an zipper jacket,
ona break frm workng at the local private prison
like nothing was wrong at all with corporate agre
-ements that married fasfood n' gas plus beer (or
that plus the lottery as 2 rich a gamble not a fear).

some men will linger like terraced smoke plateaus
in your life's venetian blinded rooms and hate you.
when you see them move, it lets you no they need
you, can't feed you, might leave you, may go down
with your ship. His name was Hoolie, as in "Chip."

by Mike

chicken

a sensitive man can feel the dimming of life giving jam.
as the headlights on the road out get stronger, he plans.
"this means release from an obsession-- maybe I can..."

We used to know a mexican bodybuilder named Vic.
Being in the stick trade he'd show up with a recliner
just because he's horny for me or me and my chicken.

some bitches you come home an they've rearranged the furniture.
Victor may have flipped the dinette set or every last dish for china.
he wanted to demonstrate how anything can change cep his dick.

Donna
"Thinking about how men of color have rocked my kitchen."

Cuernavaca

Cuernavaca, under key and lock, a
passenger in his own custody for
so many gin-rocks that his massage chair
could have flown to Mexico, but they
wunt be enough air in the city for he
and his ex, who would talk about him.

They'd met at an enchilada party, shared
an edible guac basket. They breathed the
smoky ambient grease in and out and
bobbed in their pelvises to a dvd-rom.
Mouth-rolled cigarette filters littered
themselves freely on small lamp tables.

Who does it make you, a pino with no
woods, Cuernavaca? If spring birds
never seen you then what's yr name?
Are yor lungs still clenched with the
wisp of char that yr breath took away?
Cuernavaca, la enchilada ya no te quiere.

Death of Bill Naughdon

You can fast when you are mourning because
grief feels like hunger, so it's all the same,
but you can't eat to bring someone back,
and reanimation of life does not fill one
stomach.

They made it smooth for love

Was a time when love was always on the table because of so much dying,
and the one was s'posed to make the other easier, smoother to take on in.

Was a place where folks'd gather round and purge your sin as it happened.
Even a game board or janitorial closet could hostess yr transmogrification.

I remember a boy's strawberry blond banana curls on a raft of knee denim.
He could turn fearful disdain to daredevil glee of victory for a community.

Lad had a platform to make and display a vis'ral sacrifice, be taken note of.
Of course he was later either tossed in a gorge or eaten, after some beating. 

Still t-tay, my thugs and me think with the same blood and know there's no-
thing dearer, more sincere you can expect from a man than the loss of fluids.


Wayne
"Not about you, Jan."

I'm Too Vulnerable

As a deity you probably recall the ways in which I praised you, the only overriding emotions to desire having been nervousness about getting your personal attention and my unworthiness. Now I suppose my silence signifies to you how I can't bring my maiden lips to engage in this filth, but also now please know how wrong that is.

When you wrote me back I went weak at the bottom of the spine and the vision was all google-eye baby. But even frankensteins have an embryonic stage when they don't yet know how to answer phones. What you are asking me to do is way more, even further I think than you could pay for on some more tasteful corners.

Now go. If you ever imagined loving me baby, go quietly nau. I'm too vulnerable from the last assoh who thought he could catch a quick taxi to double-queer crisis in tiki-land and live on, fully able to pitch optimism and catch flack. I'm too vulnerable to let you grab my most intimate giblet and treat it like a bar snack, woma.

Phyllis
"And I'm Sorry"

Nachos "Espanto Hindu"

small red beans
media pechuga
spices
Fritos "Scoop" chips
gerlic
laurel
pimenton
>8" boner
aceite virgen de aceituna

cut a thinner fillet of store-bought whole chicken breast half.
key to this meal: a darker spice that bleeds the satisfaction of red meat.
let it shallow fry in a cast iron pan with three bay leaves and
your estimation of whatever is "a lot" of cayenne, paprika and naked gerlic teeth.
you finished the beans days ago in a pressie: heaping t or level T of turmeric, whichever is more.

Donna, at the hotplate in the privilege room
Casa Medio Camino
Desilusión, Fordamall

blue-collar mad scientist

Yor laf in m' fangers gimme dread deepina bawlz,
Sorta whut you muss feel ravaging yr taunting food
Sep it's a kinda love too as I let care grow b'tween us.
In this hot room moisture prickles erywhere b'cause
you have evolved from a 2-bit preacher to a
national shivstar lottery queen from all I'm doing,
along with the searing truth 'n chance of electricity.

You think I'd risk my tam with Jan 'n the kiyuds
'f I dint know there was sum'm better t' provide
lak a day unner direck sunlight, stan on a real hill,
outta cement caves n' twilight of wan superstition?
I want yor skeletosis to tell a story longer than th' both of us.
You can raise bribes 'n forces, try 'n blend inta rustic corrals
while yr frens tie 'n kite you with ideals 'n booshia.

But because you have killt fr hunger, shiny coins, boredom,
or jus the sum of whut you were born being worth,
We cn bestow on you 'n honor greater than th' crusader kings
as you unfold these thinly fleshed and hideous wings
and a war helmet's gouging horn is organic to your face.
You may rise now awful Chama, and step in terrble knowingness!
Epistles loaded in yr chips will tip you into streaks of righteousness!


Wayne
Beta Invocation of Operational Systems

Hunger's always a bran new idea

Kep dreaming of a patteren or a mark:
from when they drove me spanking from poverty?
Regardless of how I'd been, I would be holy.
The gowns and injections, the bars.
I had to learn to twirl like a goat on a pin.

There were circles, lines, and curved lines.
Faces aimed at me filled the biggest caves.
At least no one marches a goddess around by the elbow.
She pulls on ropes, reveals tureens of fragrant smoke.
Preservation Society pays her in cash from the plate.
There is public housing for these special creatures.

Wayne, I'm awake.


Chamatilly, to the rescue

siberian rent discount

The worshipers have cleared out my home, split up the bitches. One of them, I hear, is fed on canned corned-beef hash and Hawaiian bread. If it's La-La, she could get bloat.

The pool torches, the Yukio Mishima collection, all gone. My pants suits, stethoscopes. Do you know why I'm not bothered by your pictographs in flames?

As long as they burn here, for me, they are good to no one else. Your hand on my breast was spit-blown with oxblood all around like a dissolving turkey star.

No rent to pay, no dishes to cull. I am on cement detail for a long career. The pulsing glow of my ankle bracelet is your good eye, the one that only looks this way.

I take my moles wherever I go. They were needled into me by heaven. All my attempts to extend into space from my torso, however far, have sprung me back to a single cell.

mob action

Donna reports:

One of my Spanish ex-husbands' families mobbed me once, so maybe that's the connect with the term mafia. *A* mob is loosely associated, maybe just by geography and emotion, an employer, or not even. *THE* mob is by definition an extended family.

Conchi, Paco's sister explained by telephone: "Es que somos casi como una mafia."

But he lies to you, I pled. I bet he told you I was the one gave him Hep A.

"It doesn't matter. And don't surprise yourself if suddenly there is no water or power."

This isn't because I never brought children to the tribe, that your husband stated my arroz al horno was exquisite? That I mirror your sterility?

"1400 hours tomorrow. Under the M60 bridge, Parque Caprichon, near the statue of Satan. With the keys. We'll have your check."

Father Unamuno had secured some goat pen in the mountains to hide our hooptie, so I had nothing to get to work in.

The family estate on a low floor of a suburban apartment block was shuttered up with painted steel blinds.

Conchi's husband since the age of 9, Jose Maria was nearly a lawyer who could draw up the documents necessary to make it all seem above board.

Mrs. Unamuno only participated passively and hid as well as could be her disappointment at no longer having one less chico pijamado around the house to serve and mop up after.

Paco's brother, needle hanging from a vein, saw back to a time where the two boys'd lived in ecstatic flannel and hardons on thin mattresses over spring cots or at their homework desks or in the formaldehyde veneered pressboard dining salon sipping at fideos or steaming puree.

The jamon, in its holder atop the sinfonia in the anteroom, conspired to seethe with translucent mites.

Quinoa Barn

Without the Filter of Loathing,
these moments might be
painful enough to remember.
Poignancy is spread too evenly
across the laminated planks
of the middle chanks

when it comes to you and me.
Can you still feel the time
we discovered together
that birds are blind in the dark?
If this place was real,
we'd be part of the scenery.

Standing in a puddle at the
bottom of a quinoa barn,
watching an artifice prove it
can only hold its own weight,
nude farming suddenly rings
trite and fake meat, ungodly.

"For Donna"
Hoolie

Joy Laffter

Joy Laffter shows up at Ted's in big sunglasses with a box just as the sun's popping behind Chukka chank. Her blonde wig is human hair, a little frizzy. She stands there in nothing but a black pantsuit but for a khaki parka instead of the jacket. The vest gives it a tank-top affect. Ted answers the door, all negroid with maroon-rimmed eyes. Peggy was seeing so much red his blood seemed to swirl on the wrong side of the skin. Who are you? asks Ted, on his day off, after a couple of mad dogs. Joy Laffter, Peg responds. Her lips are pink-orange. And she steps on in.

So this is your dive. The back of her parka flutters cape like.

Ms. Laffter. I have an office. I'll give you an autograph outside.

I have something for you.

Ted takes the box.

Then all the eaters of the world swarm out. They cover his flesh except for his mouth. They have evolved to let a man scream during dinner because it makes him taste better.

Empathic Implant Report

Empathic Implant Report: Birth Boot
Mod#GAYSHINER89.1-6.10 Glass n’ Foolz Gold Filament
WD40

Sun about 80% of the way down, straight ahead. Visor employed. Two men about 20 years apart stand close enough to touch in a V facing me. They both have long goatees: one is grey, and the other is red.

A trailer with silver stripes frames them in back. A campfire oranges up the nic-stain faces. Subject A waves. “Hey Micah howya doin!” it says. It gives too loud and too fast even at 50 yards, its movements cartoonish. Pfist is projecting a man who is giving himself to you and fighting you. He acts as tho he would perform fellatio and shoot you for having let him do it.

Flakes can be found easy in trailers. Rolling up to the big one, made clean with stucco, there were the bitches. La La’s eye fur is bruising in mocking tear blobs. She sports a fresh jaw bone from the carcass of an escaped embra kid. M’Lady comes fullallopping up to the truck and scratches the trim with her gnarly black foot pads. Amygdala has some degenerative hip going on and smiles her painful greeting with fangs.

Sometimes her eyes glow red, as if she’s in a spoiled foto. She nods her head toward wherever there’s trouble, never taking them off you. Her front legs are permanently mangled into a hug. I, too, have a disease of giving.

Mike and Jan came out to help lug groceries and my cameras, tripods. Pfist runs up pulling out a gun. I’m caught with sun in my eyes for a moment-- too many glinting metal objects. Jan and Pfist take me down to the vegetable garden and set up an empty 2-liter PowerShiv bottle. "Shiv" is any worldly comfort that simulates death.

Jan’s clothes are apparently meant only to constrict her hottest parts. There is not much warmth or protection. She feels this intimately when she shares her eyes with you. She is always scrubbed clean and ready for sex. She passes out $100 bills coming back from the casino. She and her kids once lived with Wayne, or Jack. There she is posing with the tiny Colt Automatic 25.

I get my training with a beer and fire off the only copper pellet in the clip. La La & M’Lady’d followed us down and laid there patiently in the rows. I’m standing like a cap’m on a ship or ready for a big-star bow while jazz dancing. Ball went high on the kick, made an explosion in the sand, and the girlz jump a good 10 feet. From there my moral standards were set for the weekend.

The next step was to run shiv for the whole mountain. It was the only thing Mike was out of except butter, mayonnaise, vinegar, salad dressing or any other balm or salve for things that raise themselves from the ground. Me and Pfist take to the truck for the local PharmSupply.

There’s a flake in the road who rents out his Caterpillar and a day’s work. He’s walking three giant mastiffs in the dust, one of them in an empty saddle. Hey, Joe! You don’t remember me, but we dug a hole for a whole lot of cattle. And a dog. And a cabron. Which went in first. It must have been 20 feet down. Perfick on his knees, a bowing pony clown. And then a Dalmatian. With the bullet stigmata. I had to fling it by the ankles. It ended in the predatory pose gravity'd chosen: teeth dead across the back of the old goat’s neck; legs struck, spread so hard as to pop the nails. We used to call it Death Farm 3000. Say—you were the one in the cockpit that time, on yr backloader!

No, I don’t remember you.

The Flake in the Road squinted into the extended cab. Nope. Who are you? I could hear Phyllis, my editor, cackling in the auditory node. On the way back Joe was walking in the same direction but about 100 yards behind where he’d been.

The liquor store guy reached for his alarm when Pfist came in and they both started laughing. Pfist starts to rant: I hate you! Everything’s free today! I want that, that, and that! while I get the libations. And one of those, please. At a discount! Pfist chimes in, then quiets down. Yeah, guy knows me. I beat up a flake in here. He was, he was touching chillun. He’s doing time now.

Get the phuck out of my store, liquor-guy stage yells. Yeah phuck you brother. I’ll see ya now. Pfist smiles like Clark Gable. Pfist is OK! the guy says. Are we all done here, I ask him.

Back refreshing remnants of our earlier cloud, we rumbled out of town again and toward the stucco trailer. Cactus whiz past so close they could give Pfist a ruddy shave while he sounds off in the open winda. Yeah, he was coming in, and me and some friends were coming in, and he says here come the snitches. I say good cum goes to things who wait. Then I was all saying shit and he was all saying shit even more, and then we just let free like when yr drinking and you get to the point where you know it doesn’t make sense, and you just feel this hate, and you just don’t care? Well we were both getting to that point and he hit me and I hit him and knocked him on the floor, and then I beat him up until he got knocked out. He was all blood and drool. And I said, “I’m a felon; I’m on probation, and I can’t even vote. I got some meth, and a gun. I’m goinda jail. I’m goinda jail.” Pfist said this in an exaggercized way that would make you think he was ready to suck your dick or mad and ready to really wail into and murder you or both. The question was when. I felt excited and sad then.

Should I pull my briefs looser in my jeans or mourn my own offing. Back at the ranch we poured the shiv into the rest of the morning coffee and broke up a box of hard brown sugar into stones perfect for casting in with some ice. Skole!! Pfist shined with his mug of beer and played a game of stealing mine at the point of toasting. We were clicking just fine as he let me claim a joke about Johnny Walker and answered Right on Micah, friends for life, or if not, phuck you!! Phuck ya’ hard and in the head!! His glass had raised to cover one eye and wink at me through it.

OK here’s the deal I say. If I die, and it’s of natural causes, you can phuck me in the head. You can phuck my cerebrum. You can phuck me anywhere cuz I don’t care. But if you kill me, no. You can phuck my stinking corpse in the ass but that’s as far as it goes. Hell I can phuck you in the nose for all I care; you can’t do anything about it, says Pfist, who’s pulled in; You’re dead. I’ll come back to haunt you, I keep on. I have friends. They know how my head’s supposed to look. Where the holes are. I’m sure they do; I’m sure they do, wavers Pfist. Man, that’s sick!! You one sick Mthyuh phucker.

Meanwall Jan is done marinating pork steaks. Ooo. What are you guys talking about? That’s sick. Sick Mthyuh phuckers. Jan, you look beautiful, I say hoping to piss off Pfist. She looks at him. Thanks. Pfist gives me a thumbs up with the top row of his teeth pressing on the bottom lip. Taking a piss, I find a bar of baby soap.

Ya’ll have littluns yr not tellin’ about? Nah. Just my baby. The girlz caught her mousing in the bedroom the other night and now she ain’t right. They got her in their teeth. And shook, chimes in Mike, staring at the beets in the salad spinner.

Mike, yor a scientist; why don’t we all go down and have a look? You can tell us, on a scale from one to ten, how grave it is. Pfist wants a wager. I’ve got 8 and 9, him one through 6. Seven is the Wild Savior. 10 is dig a hole, Chihuahua meets its maker.

So after dinner we all tramp on through the stickers to the silver trailer under no moon, just torches. You can see the fabric of stars and boobs and thongs and hear Pfist and me working through the conditions. There is no payment unless my numbers prevail. We call a vet. No responsibility is required in the unlucky event that the scientist pours his tube in the direction of your fate. Mthyuh will be in charge then. But we don’t know yet.

There is a tiny, dobie-like bitch trembling in a pool of yellow light on a 99-cent astro-turf Welcome mat as a space-age altar to the sofa on the mauled and hoary w2w carpet. Get out or pipe down; we can’t hear anything, warns Mike. Yeah you guys, says Jan sitting, looking up and hugging her own naked brown openings. We can’t hear a thing. Get out.

A casino girl and a scientist through an oval plexiglass window. Pfist and I smelt glowing acorn smoke and an accordion RV hose dumping slowly under some oak. Mike'd got his training with a swimming scholarship and a grant from the Preservation Society. He was stroking the pooch and listening hard for a job or sounds of protest when he pressed for trauma and/or seeping. Ouch! Pfist barked at the sill. Bitches get all the attention. The night was still.

Micah
with Phyllis, Embedded