Opportunistic infection

Dr. Donna Thong and Peg whispered through the ancient stone glory hole of at least 9" in depth. It must once have been a Cuban prison. 

DR. THONG: I'm remembering Mike and the abdominal surgery I performed on him when I had my patio studio. 

PEG: That's after you were a Fanny-Girl temp out in Dead Beet Chank. 

DR. THONG: You know friends do continue to self-realize when you're not around. 

PEG: But you've always had emotions for Mike. Two swimmers in one pool or another. 

DR. THONG: He told me his intestines smelled like latex for months afterward. 

PEG: He sat up on the table fresh like a baby, glass bottles tinkling against the IV stand. 

DR. THONG: You remember the story like a song. 

PEG: The one that got away. But what of the others?

LAMENT OF THE OTHERS

by DONNA

it seemed as if they entered willingly

following their noses to my kitchen

i thought most necromancy to be weak

but the bottom of the pie was crispy

followed by stepping out of doors to neck

that first incision leading to the next

we woke among discarded vials of heparin

ecstatic still in the wane of hydrocodone

ready to renew our grunted oaths

until the next opportunistic infection. 

 

I hope that my illness takes you hostage

I hope my illness takes you hostage

perhaps i could pay you back

For all the times the thriving version

stood in a more perfect path

I hope I make it difficult to 

turn away as I linger

Your shackles chains and branks are lashed to

my beatific fingers

 

I can still see you in the middle 

of a constricting circle

Your necks are craned and faces cluttered

with shadows of this miracle

 

 

by Ilyn

"Not long for Illinois."

without believing, expecting

agreeable moment sitting facing

feeling all of you in my screen

and even when i turn away

i see a safe place with warm 

 

lighting, bearing my things.

The less hope keeps distributing, 

 

it must be focusing, condensing

the opposite of kaleidoscoping;

 

i'm eating all the crazy dreams, 

sucking only what i need from my

 

intestines, short-sighting, all

without believing, expecting

 

 

 

By Jan Jr.

predators

i hate the middle-of-the-boat assholes, center-of-the-herd butts

but out here in the fringes, you are weak

what's with the arm twisters, the climbing-on-shoulders nuts?

you're alone with your righteousness, freak

 

brother, loner, impossible to figure, full tank, adjacent

we've lived the same life but we auto-fear, trigger happy

they are lifted by the tendrils of their fecund archetypes

they effortlessly grow virtue like a fingernail or polyp

we are in satellites, fire wagons, sinister life rafts needing 

not shedding weight

 

what about the sanctioned predators at the apex of the pack, 

smugly leaning back?

by Ilyn

They have to mine the muscle memories

They have to mine the muscle memories or else they could leave us out entirely from the battlefields. The players' physical responses are only relevant insofar as their hand-eye coordination. The animation, the realness, comes from my own live-action experiences and instincts. I have to be at least partly paying attention for my own physical responses --even stomach acids are measured-- to kick in. At least the K's always win. I'd hate to experience death again. 

 

Some of the players I recall this guy Ken who viscera really seemed to match mine maybe from his generations of farming. He was shy to fight and almost made me switch into mate mode by wandering back toward the cliffs, some of the abandoned ones, when there were plenty of flakes to scoop up and showing off to do with simple evasions of their little sling-shot stones. 

 

 

Charnelle Casas-Cuevas

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

The South must be reined in

Look around you

it's like everything's right there

even if you can't find your glasses

when they turn up it's not surprising where

Is Braino telekinetic

I was dozing off at the command center just six o'clock from the electric rice maker on the dining room table. But Braino was upstairs in bed dreaming because that's its point of reference for sleep or fond memories of dreaming there or just because it can. But when it started thinking about not having put the rice away, like in a baggie in the fridge, it started coming down the stairs and was going at the rice maker from that descending angle, more like four o'clock, when I woke up. Sometimes you wake up and have double vision for a moment, and that's what it was like.

Big cryin' baby

For the next funeral:

How do you do

Doodlin' Song

To Sir, With Love

Over at the Frankenstein Place

To Love Somebody

You Dropped A Bomb

Viciosa 

When Will Death Come

The Valleys 

Step One

Liver

higado

plaza de los acumulantes

filtro a los moros

tan vivo como el cerebro

ven, vivante

 

 

 

por Santorabo

Now Entering The Crack

one day coming soon will be a

portal to another world, the 

difference between past and

future, a crack in believing

we'll find out who's entitled

to get in, who has to sit on a

bench in the lobby, which

relationships count as significant

we shall sit before an interpreter

of evidence in perfect robes

but mostly there will be doubt

what will happen to the kids

other dimensions are ours to

learn, not theirs, not the natives

but this time that means no one

only wondering, a beastly rent

 

 

by LaChama

 

Reptily

"I can transverse The Crack."

Jan

"I, too, have crept through it multiple times with my family."

Is Braino a boll weevil, picaresque Christ planting misery

i am a tobacco smoker. i smoke tobacco there

i've said it. i make Braino make decisions on 

tobacco and it makes her crazy and mean-- 

as the Christ. i spend time writing mental 

final direction notes how no xtians near my

bedside, no christians at my burial, at my 

grave, an unmarked grave where xtians are

not likely to go. no whispering no last rites

but of course the fear then is that you really

do want that because of your deeply embedded

culture that makes you need it like a drug.

you don't want to be strong in your last mom

ents you want to surrender and love and be

loved and accepted and fitting in where you're

going. the phrase where you're going could 

even be Braino as the Lamb of God boring, 

twisting, you'd think she'd come out the other

ear.