"The Cacophonous Croak"
by U. P. Eople, December 2012
'They came up from underground. We first heard, "Give me government handouts 'cause I don't want to build my business by myself," and then "Let them burn our flags and kill our ambassadors. We got plenty where they came from," and then "Welfare benefits!"'
"The Ninth Circle"
by George Sparling, December 2012
'I've been in this cell ever since my arrest. Other convicts talk legalese, about appealing their guilty verdicts. Headphones I'm unable to remove (neat trick, "Officer Ricky," thank you 50 Cent) force me to hear voices from Treachburg. "I can't hear him," referring to my daily exercise on the stationary bicycle, cueing me that I was under surveillance and, "He doesn't have to do that," as I rearrange my genitals getting off the bike.'
"The Saxophone in the Stars"
Chapter 24 of The Diamond Kings of Clarence Checkeredfish by Brian S. Hart, December 2012
'"It must be doing some risk-taking!" the Gingerbread Boy noted, trying to think it all through. Ever since Stevie had told him about Martin ______ ____'s great marches, the Gingerbread Boy knew about risk-taking. He knew "love," like asking a lovely person to dance, needed risk-taking. "Does the Universe take risks?"'
"Neolithic Woman"
by Robin Wyatt Dunn, December 2012
"I killed her; I am willing to admit that to you. They say confessions ease a guilty conscience, but that is it not the only reason they are made. St. Augustine, in life if not in his works, was not one to dwell on his own guilt, after all, preferring that of others. Having confessed in the quasi-public realm of literature, Augustine's consolidation of his power in North Africa was made that much easier."
"The High Point"
by Aryan Kaganof, the Interdependency Issue
"Drama's a huge niggah kitted out in serious camo. Alex looks like a Russian princess except for the brilliant blue wig. She tells me her background is Hassidic. Mimitos scores a couple of E's from Drama. Twenty five dollars a pop. The stuff doesn't kick in. Only later do I realize that we've been cheated by a guy called Drama from Queens??"
"I want to be hip"
Chapter One of The Magic Window by Helena Joshee, the Interdependency Issue
"Big Bang the letters on it as, say, in other places, Keep Of The Grass, Do Not Touch The Tulips, No Loitering Here, No Hit Men Allowed, Pass Through Customs This Way, Attention! Silence Please, or say, the sign which says Homemade Strawberry Jam. Put in a jar as something special. But what if no strawberries ever and at all and hence no jam and the letters a label?"
"Next Year in Jerusalem"
by Newamba Flamingo, the Interdependency Issue
"I'd always considered myself mixed but more in touch with my Jewish roots. I'd been raised in a neighborhood with several other Jews, went to Hebrew school, gotten crap a couple times for being Jewish, and now here I was getting crap for not being Jewish, being asked not to touch wine bottles on a table..."
"Psychonautic Metaphorphosis with Franz"
by Petra Whiteley, the Interdependency Issue
"The churches of Prague were screaming again, pouring out the office hours with the injuries. Those workers were pickled bees in amber. We memorised their grievances as we had to wait whilst our flesh was stretching and swelling on metal contraptions, those expectation in mute lines of faces, the press of the shoes upon the floor."
"Charnel House Lover"
by Cassandra L. Atherton, the Interdependency Issue
"When Scottish darling left me I made a man out of plasticine to love. He was easy to manipulate. I made him a painter. Not a poet. Never a poet. Poets leave. For sunrises. For the feeling of sand between their toes. For red wine and cheap pizza. Painters stick with their canvas. This time I am the canvas. Though for years I preferred to be a tabula rasa."
"The Rains of Ramghat"
by Radha Bharadwaj, the Interdependency Issue
'"No," he said, after some silence. Then chuckled, my incorrigible evil twin. "Two can play the game." "What game?" I asked, as I moved towards his mobile and expressive back. "There's no game. You're playing a game with yourself. Shadow-boxing with paper tigers..." I put my face in the hollow between his shoulder blades—a sheltered, safe valley.'
"Why I Never Walk through a Chinese Park during Spring Festival"
an excerpt from Calliope's Boy by Tom Bradley, the Interdependency Issue
"Beyond that periphery, just out of those PLA men's eyeshot, tucked behind South China foliage in a quadrant of jungle where, incredibly, humanity's pullulation thins out for a brief space, a certain former Red Guard used to camp out. He still squats there among the shadows, for all I know, foursquare in his formidable integrity. We don't exactly keep in touch. I was a friend of his family, in a manner of speaking, and I admired him, but he never returned the compliment."
"The Duel"
by Elmore Snoody, October 2012
"This detail got out to the press—Jane had told a bunch of her friends. It made me somewhat of a laughingstock; the way I used my position at the bank to coerce her caused my manhood to be questioned in more ways than one: this guy bullies married women into going out with him, and then when the time comes to start getting busy he can't even have sex with her like a real man..."
"August"
by Rudolfo Carrillo, October 2012
"Maurice says that is from the time he was taking a shit in the alley behind the Albuquerque Tennis Club and got himself caught up on a chain link fence. He tried to make a run for it but for a bright nemesis, angelic in crisp white clothing and heavenly shoes with new laces, who ambled casually up to that rattling-in-the-wind, galvanized barrier with his voice raised and his racket arrayed before him like a conquering war club."
"Yipping Kvatches"
by Jack Colton, October 2012
"My kvatch yips at me as I sit in my ruddy gray plop-down. The glimmer glows blek color up in the highest air and brights up pointy glass biters round my window hole on my next. I've got my flicker-burner going on my front and I wiggle my fingers real close to melt out the shivers. The air has been biting more these last few brights. My kvatch, all rounded up by the flicker-burner, keeps yipping and I say 'OK.'"
"Zebra"
by B. Z. Niditch, October 2012
Abby: "Are you sure, Belinda, you saw a zebra?"
Belinda: "He was white and black."
A: "But are you sure he was a zebra?"
Dunwoody: "You know how it is, especially with Belinda..."
"State Controlled Paprika"
by Rita Bozi, October 2012
"The average Hungarian worker today earns only five dollars an hour. I remember as a child how cheap everything seemed to my mother and I when we converted our Canadian dollars for forints and headed out shopping to stock up on everything from leather gloves to aluminum pressure cookers, our relatives painfully aware of their meager currency and our ability to buy all we needed."
"Bobby"
by Suvi Mahonen, September 2012
"The skin of Bobby's forehead not covered by the cap was furrowed as if caused by a frown. This accentuated his eyebrows, delicate lines of barely there hair on the ledge of his sockets, inclining medially upwards to form an arc at the top of the bridge of his nose. His nose was short, more like a nubbin, tilted slightly upwards at the end like mine; its tip was a little raw, as if wiped by a tissue one too many times."
"Where Poems Come From"
by Bud Smith, September 2012
"As he flipped to the center of the publication, his heart froze. There was an all too familiar poem. It was about a man who was skipping stones on a lake and the stone just keeps skipping and goes flying up into the sky and causes the moon to spin out of control and spiral down to the earth, crushing him.
"It was his poem. No doubt in his mind. Lee had written it."
"Ugly Friend"
by Tim Millas, September 2012
"You look tired. No shit Sherlock. Just did three time zones in four days covering every region. Well, old buddy, that's the price you pay for being important. Just because we once worked together he calls me old buddy in front of everybody, and when I set the record straight—he's not my buddy and never was—Fred laughs. He says: Frank and me have what you call an enduring relationship. I love him and he hates me."
"Repressive Desubliminators and Me"
by George Sparling, September 2012
"Females, who ran a radical women's liberation magazine next door, started singing The Internationale. "Arise ye workers from your slumber..." and then three others near me leaped up and joined others in the hall. "Servile masses arise, arise..." I was the only one who didn't get off their butt and start singing because I was ignorant and failed to commit to memory the immortal lyrics."
"Beer Mystic: Last Day on Earth"
a video-story by bart plantenga, August 2012
Beer Mystic is a novel about beer, mysticism, darkness, dogs, post-punk, and the streets in new york, 1987. It's excerpted in over 50 media outlets & zines, as well as Up Is Up And So Is Down [NYU Press] and was recently published in an online global pub crawl.
"You should never open the cellar door"
by Alain Marciano, August 2012
"They were about big houses with huge black cold cellars, huge stairs that went deep under the earth and were inhabited by frightening creatures. Normal people like me or mum or my father disappeared in them. This was it. At that time, I was too young to understand what parallel worlds meant. And my uncle knew that, of course. He just told me what he could..."
"Mother of Us All"
by Larry Goodell, August 2012
"I'm not your slim pickens, I'm not your dishrag, I have a right to inflate the toilet seat before I sit on it, I don't want to go to Mars I don't want to go to Venus I don't want to go anyplace but up, up, up where there are no concaves and no convexes, no babies and no adults, no circuses, no old movies like Moonlight Bay with Doris Day & Gordon MacRae,"
"A Glow-in-the-Dark Rosary"
by Marc Olmsted, August 2012
'"My soul cries out for a little rumpus," the old man said. "Has your soul ever cried out for a little rump...us?" Seriously, the things these guys could say sometimes. Unbelievable shit. Buster looked straight ahead. These dudes knew they weren't paying for some fucking girlfriend experience—they wanted the danger, anyway. Maybe I'll die this time—maybe I'll get the brick. Yeah, maybe you will.'
Three Minguses by Kyle Hemmings
"In the post-apocalyptic dawn, Mingus walks down streets of dirty glass-eyed homeless, bottles of Old Texas Pistil Water & Gunk, echoes of bird-to-tiger couplings from the open windows of 3rd class Limbo Hotels, the slow burn of irradiated nights. No e-beam intended. Mingus is young but old inside. He has swallowed nails to protest the hunger of the living."
an excerpt from Acting Alone: a novel of nuns, neo-Nazis and NORAD
by Tom Bradley, August 2012
'In a wicked little whisper she sang a damp lullaby into his ear: "We're in the money, we're in the money." And, just to see the teepee in the middle of the blankets get taller, she sang it again, this time inserting a naughty word that she rarely used under normal circumstances. She stuttered in her excitement and sprayed a little bit of spit into his ear. "We're in the f-f-fuckin mon-n-ney," she sang, and started to laugh too loud.'
"The Human Mystery"
by Alan Bigelow, July 2012
"The Human Mystery" is a vision of extinction in an apocalyptic age. The reader navigates the work using a draggable button on a visual timeline of human evolution. Each "chapter" of the work, out of a total of seven, uses text, animations, audio, and images.
"Police State"
by George Sparling, July 2012
"Twice daily, I flossed my teeth, rooting out particles, tiny shards caught vice-like in between teeth, breaking them loose and free, unlike the villains' strategy of threading my mind with corruption and rot. I looked in the mirror, seeing myself in the mirror, awkwardly angling the floss, transmogrifying my face into the image the villains prefer: ugly, haggard, wretched."
"By the hills of Wanda I dreamt of Wanda, or, Polonaise #34"
by Arturo Desimone, July 2012
"I was calm, my face washed with cool wind after seeing the ugly tourism at the Auschwitz-Birkenau center—I had shrunken horrified at their fat rolex hands folding the posters they bought with stacks of shoes, T-shirts photo-airburshed with the Arbeit Macht Frei Protestant work ethic gate; the river of women's hair that ends not in a sea but in a meadow."
"The Business Trip"
by J. Edward Vanno, July 2012
"The whores stayed until the money was gone—three days, a week, impossible to tell—and it was great. I skipped meetings with a solar executive, a wind farmer, a diamond mogul, a developer of high-end malls and heard no protest stateside. I stayed in the hotel with the curtains closed until each of the small medicine bottles was completely empty. It could be the apocalypse. Aren't we all waiting?"
"I Am Alice!" and "Mr. Charlie Jones"
by Rudolfo Carrillo, July 2012
"Anyway, all that legendary status stuff imbued the little black vinyl disk in Alice Cooper's possession with magical properties. For instance, the record would talk to him at night, telling him how he was gonna be a rock star in his own right someday and that he ought to call himself after a famous musician because that was a helluva lot more exciting than the name Steve Mason would ever be."
"Dreams In Time"
by Eric van Hall, July 2012
"In the time of George Michael, Def Leppard, and INXS, neither Casey nor Nick knew all that much about HIV. Nick only knew his sex with Casey had not been "safe," in 1980s American parlance; as if sex could ever be safe, emotionally, physically or in terms of consequences."
"Ned's Short Life"
by Sam Vaknin, June 2012
"I felt guilty, somehow threatened, imbued with the profound sadness that other people—normal people—associate with grieving. Reflexively, I surfed the Internet frenetically for answers; I downloaded a dozen books and read them; and I got up at all hours of the night to change the water in my Ned and Fred's minacious cesspool. I woke up with dread and bedded with foreboding and so did my version of Fred, my Lidija."
"Rowdy Days: An Open Letter to Occupy!"
by Dean Kisling, June 2012
"He was aiming for a tractor-driving job. He noodled on his guitar and sang a church song about a better life a'comin, away from this world of woe. He sang a song from the 1930s by the singing brakeman, Jimmy Rodgers... sang it like it was his own days gone by, sang it through his gray beard stubble and missing teeth, all mournful, but with an impish smile. I think he had taken some acid."
"The Ann Rutledge Mysteries"
by John Dutterer, June 2012
"So what was she really? Posterity decides, as always. More specifically, I could decide. After carefully considering current literary trends, however, the most satisfactory answer is that she should be a detective; given that detectives have been made of such unlikely stuff as Freud, Kant, the Rat Pack, and Jane Austen, I think a teenaged girl in 1820s Illinois is a perfect candidate for becoming a sleuth. Best of all, a certain honest young lawyer will be her Dr. Watson."
Sleep Tickles
by Uzodinma Okehi, June 2012
"The ongoing mythology was that we were both excited about it, that for a while now we'd been convinced Benoit's Thai girlfriend, Noi, was a prostitute . . . And did it matter that Noi wasn't even Chinese? I asked myself because unlike Benoit I felt conflicted. The one thing I could say for myself was that I was no kind of sinophile, that none of it occurred to me beforehand . . . But then there was Noi; easy, buttered thighs, no ass at all, but still with the tight shorts, and yeah, some kind of mystery . . ."
"violence from my mind to your body" and "alone is a state of mind"
by Anne McMillen, June 2012
"people wonder what we see in each other, honestly, i don't see much. this is no buddhist reflection pool. the days are cold-shouldered into months. i always find some person to latch on to. it's all contrived. i am a parasite that is constantly looking for a new soul to call home. myself has never been enough for me."
"Waitstaff"
by Bruce Memblatt, April 2012
"Your socks are soaked. You wonder what the topic of conversation will be tonight. And then you wonder if they've heard any news about a woman murdered in the park nearby a few days ago.
You pray the subject doesn't rear its ugly and revealing head. But even if it does you'll get past it. You're smarter than them."
"Civil Servant"
by Tom Bonfiglio, April 2012
'"Oh, fuck. Don't go getting all weepy. Please spare me. Your dead father. I know all about him. I know everything that happens in this town." Anderson takes two of the empty glasses and holds one in each hand. "Just answer me this one question. Why the hell you marry that girl? The mouth on her. She could use a bar of soap the way she talks."'
"Listen, Arcada: Riffs on Invasions, Violence, Doom, and Other Pathologies"
by George Sparling, April 2012
"I sleep with a black machete beneath me, flat and cold against my face when I toss the pillow aside and rub its sharp steel blade. The reason: A fulltime core of hard-asses with unfathomable motives have placed me under surveillance for over five years and twisted my genial personality and kind disposition, transfiguring my finer characteristics, turning me against the better angels of my nature."
