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What I Mean When I Rest My Hand on Your Ankle
Written by Charlie Bondhus I’m here and so is my arm should you wish to have it girdled about your waist like a green sash that will protect your life knotted in passion’s cinch or looped in love’s easy bow. I wish to inhabit you but first I need to check your temperature to see ...
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File Sharing
Written by Aaron DeLee Bites from a laser burn sink into your disc as if hungry— Question yourself: have you considered if it’s viral? The point of his arrow does not click or travel, yet he’s unloaded something malignant: a hundred megabytes in a second crashes programs into the polish of windows, jams boards of ...
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Cocktails
Written by Valentina Cano The lobby shone like a rat trap all angles and metal corners, waiting for a bit of weight, a step in the wrong direction. The lost, drooping flowers spit their petal to the anemic floor and dangled off pots swinging from the ceiling. It all looked muscular and angry. The air ...
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Scabies
Written by Aaron DeLee I say scabies and you think babies, but no -they’re not so cute, cradled in your wrists around your dick, waking you up in the middle of the night with automatic itching, giving you goosebumps. I had to rub lotion all over them the last I tended to their screams, always ...
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Civil War Art
Written by Valentina Cano Lost, I thought, as I watched the woman pace the room. She’s lost in a world of impatient ink and fabric taut over canvas, shrouds of colors. She winced at the pepper reds that screeched answers. The framed groaned with the effort to contain them. She staggered down the tube of ...
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Water Burial
Written by Valentina Cano His skin was translucent, full of fish gliding underneath. Crustaceans groped veins, begging for support, for fibrous anchors. He was a walking aquarium, with seaweed and rocks collapsing like sand castles, each step a balance of water. With a sigh he passed by, trailing sand like a train, salt a wave ...
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7 Murdered (And How Many More?)
Written by Walter Beck Street preachers This is the fruit of your labor, Of sermons & signs Full of lies & slander. Congressmen & governors This is where you’re taking our country With your legislation & trials, Full of discrimination & denial. People This is the place you’ve created With your apathy & cowardice, Full ...
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Cyborgy
Written by Aaron DeLee Many cables clustered here & there’s you & he & me; a licked palm that tastes coppery. Cocked, hands at hips, spaces a- part, & there’s static on your lips. Flicker of a screen gleams in 4 glassy eyes. 0! to be in the middle. To have you press into me, ...
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Nobody wants to be friends with Jakey
Written by Christopher Soden You might phone around two in the morning or drink until he gets kicked out for brawling or puking or singing too loud. Jakey is sloppy and his manners aren’t for shit. He’ll piss right next to you in the alley, farting without apology or flip off a cop who wants ...
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On the Couch
Written by Lee Colin Thomas He unfolds tent-pole legs. Plants the fleshy planks of his feet on floorboards. Raises his body upright and bends my attention to thinness, to his ribs, bared ripples in a Mason jar. To the lines of his skeletal self standing inside blue-tint skin perspiring, newly glossed in the naked afternoon. ...
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Roommate Wanted
Written by Lee Colin Thomas Sundays he appears, guitar in hand, ambles past me at the table and collapses the zigzag of his body, like a wooden beach chair, into the real chair. Lays his arms like folded towels across the furry planks of legs emerging from khaki shorts. Wet from the shower, his curls ...
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Too Many Decembers
Written by Lee Colin Thomas I kept my body lonely in the frozen darkness of a garden-view bedroom, staring out at a plot of cobalt shadows spreading across slate snowbanks and frosted chain-link fences. I could have, instead, sent my body to the bar, to stand in smoke against black walls and find invitation in ...
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Glory Hole
Written by Christopher Soden It feels odd to admit the first blow job I got was from a stranger. I guess in some way he couldn’t be, though this was the only contact we shared. It wasn’t exactly halcyon or honey gold. But I still remember the pervasive dark, the sound of him spitting my ...
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love letter in prison code
Written by Steven Fowler dear Honzo I came home & opened the bay windows that appeared over our garden the grass was cut the treefruit bulbed but a wounded horse was left behind and abandoned please come and fetch it now lest you forget to do so and I am left to clean up its ...
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Conversations in the Land of Nod
Written by Gregg Shapiro You pay too much attention to what I say in my sleep. Hovering like an electric blanket, your ear practically pressed against my drowsing lips. Yellow legal pads and sharpened number two pencils at the ready. Digital recording devices and multi-directional microphones positioned to capture every cry and whisper. Grilled like ...
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Postcards from the Road
Written by Gregg Shapiro A lecture on Boston Marriages in St. Louis. The first of seven Motel 6s in Oklahoma City. Disenchantment and desert in Albuquerque and Tucson. The hills and the Hillcrest neighborhood, the heat and the homeless of San Diego. A young movie star’s tattooed mother protecting her Mercedes Benz in Woodland Hills, ...
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bed
Written by Steven Fowler she asked me to place my clothes on the folding chair & fold & wear a paper shirt while she oiled her fingers I asked her for proof of her qualifications she laughed & thanked me for participating in the survey 9 from 10 wore a bloody bandage & could be ...
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Cold Gray
Written by Michael Lee Johnson Below the clouds forming in my eyes, your soft eyes, delicate as silk warm words, used to support the love I held for you. Cold, now gray, the sea tide inside turns to poignant foam upside down, separates- only ghosts now live between us. Yet, dream like, fortune-teller, bearing no ...
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Hookers on Archer Avenue
Written by Michael Lee Johnson Late evening, early morning, I search the night for whores, young, bloody with desire. Night streets are silent streets except for hookers and their Johns. One wants the dart of groins the other green eyes in dollar sacred treasures- snatch the wallet, a consecrated craft. Both hit the streets quickly ...
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Leaves in December
Written by Michael Lee Johnson Leaves, a few stragglers in December, just before Christmas, some nailed down crabby to ground frost, some crackled by the bite of nasty wind tones. Some saved from the matchstick that failed to light. Some saved from the rake by a forgetful gardener. For these few freedom dancers left to ...