IX

ALUMINUM!
Corey D. Mejia

The brain's food is thought;
it thinks, we think, things think--
though you may not know--they do--
and a can spoke to me the other day;
his name was Aluminum and it felt fresh
for his soul was open and I drank his thoughts.
In the evening, with Aluminum, and with people,
I spoke and sat on a wooden bench. And from the
depths of darkness came a series of flaming globes
and the wizard, with wand so wondrous, grinned slyly,
said, "What is this? What the hell is this? Why are we all here
thinking our thoughts seperately and where are we, why must we be,
what are we, sing! lets sing!" and hopped through a mouthful of darkness, never to return.
Do we descend when we pretend that everythings different?
ALUMINUM! WHERE ART THOU ALUMINUM!
He too was gone,
and I all
alone,
sat.


________________________________________________________________

Last Night I Kept Dreaming
James Babbs

last night
I kept dreaming
and waking up
rolling over to
look at the clock
trying to see
how much time I had
before I had to get up
and I kept hearing
the same song
playing on the radio
no matter what time it was
the sexy voice
of some long-dead singer
slithering
in and out of my ears
tongues
and warm water
washing over my body
then
this gaping mouth
waiting to
swallow me whole

________________________________________________________________

Psychogenic Fugue
Mark Wohl

      I see day light again.

     “Well there’s always everywhere.”

     “Though if it is, it will have.”

     “Eliminate, maybe?”

     “It’s always an option.”

     “Or perhaps it isn’t suppose to work”

     “Option B to the newly discovered option A.”

     “Where to be?”

     “To be there is where.”

     “Being everywhere still to be nowhere. It just may be anywhere.”

     I feel as though we’ve had this conversation once before in a place that seemed just about right. Even with earth movers .

     “It just feels kind of strange, ya know? I’m not sure if I could do this much longer.”

     “A house but not my home.”

     Home is that there, that remains where. Home, a word that’ll be left until I am found. So yeah I guess you can say that I’m uncertain. Without ruling out confusion just yet. But if it is confusion, it is an implanted device of preconceived notions. A trade of the false sense of security in occupied feelings. A bartering system with feet left planted in a quick drying concrete mass. The history will remain somewhere.

     “Is is that you’re afraid to make this a chapter? You don’t have to admit to it, but know what keeps wings from a flight.”

     A new discovery of realizing the unimportance of personal history. A time for our tangibility to part ways for the needed growth of intangible selfless beings. The unattached, a removal of the defensive conflict of reasoning through desire. Ill at ease rationality supposed to be the definitive view.

    Ra-tion-al (rash’¶ n’l), adj. 1.able to reason; sensible.

    A senseless moral code of right and wrong may define me irrational.

________________________________________________________________

Five
Stephen Gilchrist

She had stars
in her eyes
but lead
in her pockets.

She asked me
to fly
but her wings
were broken.

A smile
on her lips
but a frown
on her heart.

She danced
in the day
but cried
in the night.


________________________________________________________________

Liar's Words
Tony Burnett

Liar's words stink, mullet bloated and bursting
near brackish backwater on a red tide bay.
No pink skinned children search for shells
or form finite architecture from materials at hand.
Screaming gulls attack
and choke on liar's words.

Liar's words penetrate, a crusted gym sock
stuffing the gullet of the skinny wallflower
under the darkened risers.
Only the sound of animal grunts,
the wet slap of skin on skin.
The broken petals of her pink rose
lie glistening on her thighs.
No one will believe.
They are the good boys.

Liar's words boom, a famous fable
shouted from the pulpit
while collection plates circulate.
Conscience obliterated by scattershot repentance
and a small donation.
They believe. They are the good boys.
They will not choke on liar's words.


________________________________________________________________

Over Untruths
Lila Lavender

Honesty sits sour in stomachs
and sneaks up throats as words.

Honesty burns when you pee.

That coat wearing chick
in the city
in summer
around a circle of drummers
caught eyes
and fingered minds.

Honesty bites and nips heels
with teeth behind lips softer
than those of liars lying
locking eyes
unblinking
never flinching
or second-guessing.

Pretty pretending and lazy play-alongs
palpitate behind liar’s solid ribshields.

Honesty hits hard in the heart
leaves it hollow or halved
but never blasts a hole
cannonball sized
in your backside

like the love of a liar.


________________________________________________________________

Sometimes I Don’t Answer
James Babbs


carrying a hangover with me
this morning
on my way to the hospital
visiting my mother and
she’s been in there
for over a week now
since I found her
inside her apartment
lying on the floor and
I needed to get drunk
last night
I don’t care about
what anybody thinks
all of us get lonely
sometimes and
emptiness
comes without warning
in the middle of the night
silence falls
inside the well-lit room and
sometimes
I don’t answer the phone
when you’re trying to call me
because
I don’t feel like talking to anyone


________________________________________________________________

Seven
Stephen Gilchrist

i saw him go down like a ton of bricks in the liquor store parking lot today
he wasn't drunk but he was dressed wrong

Those guys told me he started trouble
that he was hanging around where he shouldn't have

i didn't want to get involved
so i walked away
as i heard one of them mumble 'nigger.'


________________________________________________________________

Nobody Famous Ever Lived Here
James Babbs


I don’t know
why I think of it
now
after all the years have passed
recalling my younger self
and how I wanted to leave town
right after high school
how I didn’t want to
go to college right away
but wanted a year for myself
maybe
hitchhike across the country
get into fights
in beautiful locales
and write it all down
because
I was desperate
loaded with restlessness
and these dreams
flooding my brain at night
each morning I awoke
feeling like I was drowning
trying to catch my breath
and I yearned for more than
what I was born into
son of a poor man
living in a small town
the middle of nowhere and
nobody famous
ever lived here
but I live here
still
to this day


________________________________________________________________

sublet lampblack (where no gentle breezes blow)    
Davy Carren


I rarely can ever figure out if I’m being sincere or not. I go out and stand around on street corners in the wee small hours. I duck under porticos of ancient buildings to stay dry as the rain machineguns the street. A woman in chartreuse rain boots tucks her small dog-- a Papillon, it turns out-- under her arm and joins me to take shelter from the deluge. We talk about carrion, roadkill, the five best ways to be indiscreet with a shovel and leather gloves. There are branches to unfurl, claims to discredit, and the momentum of a union’s busted chops to take a few heavy swings at. We get up in arms about op-ed pieces we haven’t read. I take a deep bow and flee the scene. Nobody worries about clammed up handouts. Not around here. Not when it’s pouring. Not when this cab’s coming at me like suicide’s back in style. God. I’m leafing through papers, playing hangman with pigeon shit. The usual. It’s copper and steel, the sky, and we’re all under it, trying to spatula ourselves up over a fading rainbow. I’ve got a nervous disposition. I’m the kind of guy that’ll knock over the sugar shaker at breakfast and then, as I’m getting up to clean it up, dump my coffee over. But I stay out of the trouble most folks dive neck-deep into for the most part. And waking up with a land’s end headache, fists clenching ground ore and a Michigan twenty-gauge. There are more famous guns than these, the ones I show, the ones I never keep. Get me far, get me behind, get the robes from a thousand lawyers and soak them in gasoline. Fool around with love long enough and you’ll get a couple of eyes blacker and more blue than this. She wrote notes on secret Polaroids. Were there never scraps in the hayloft? We’ve got proofs that don’t blame anyone. Seagulls tell more. Smoke Throat Mira loses paychecks like marbles. Life’s just a short vacation from being dead. Faces fade like reputations. I mumble more first names than I know, cussed back to breathing again. Bastards mill the gin before they talk tough about speak-easy dreams. Shove another plug in the candy machine, I’m lowing myself into range. There’s a crooked life straying to get in line. Some of it’s plowing over roses. Some of it’s nothing but what it’s not. An overcoat, pants, or vest away up on Pacific Street, with the moon in my pocket and an introduction at the melodeons to The Galloping Cow, Lady Jane Grey, The Roaring Gimlet, and The Dancing Heifer. Go get melted and poured into your pants while Happy Jack gets saved from the purple crocodiles by the ladies of the Praying Band. I am less than weak when it comes to the destructive effects of temperance. In low places where the terriers fight ten-cent rats a toothless kid talks of Haymarket Theatre, Sydney Ducks, the Hop Sings and the Suey Sings, dollar melodrama, the company-girls contralto of Madame Bertha, La Rosa Del Peru, Emperor Norton’s bills, and a blood-stained trampled violet. We cater to the rain. The Bella Union’s gone under, and if it’s midway to another we’ve got mouths that don’t want to be fed. Rust is just a gilt edge on the wrought-iron thoughts I’ve got, the ones that sleep dewy in worried concrete gardens where they’ll never be found. Engaged to snapped-off tree branches and closed-down clothing stores. Very little is lost. Tap my shoes on the pavement, guess at some change in my pocket, toss a pretzel to the birds. The marquees are drooling Casablanca with a rubato wheeze as the moon hangs its head towards a rippled halo of fog. But the finches sneak up on me, and class wears off, and even the snails are rushing off somewhere else. Hell, people want to reduce you to the smallest molecule of your personality. So save it up. Don’t go spilling it all over town. Try not to pencil too many people in to the circumstances of your life. Wait until the air’s so still it’s like being underwater, then make a splash for the brighter of the lights. Some mornings you wake up, go into the bathroom to take a piss, and the rod for the shower curtain’s collapsed, taking the shower curtain and your bath mat with it into the tub. And your mule’s left without you. On a day, too, when you wake up with strange phone numbers in your coat pocket written on crumpled dollar bills and bits of cocktail napkins. Maybe there’s some bricks slopped with orange paint that are doing their best imitation of a wall, and that’s about all that’s holding up your head as you wait for your order of broccoli and beef chow mein. The whole place smells like white-bread toast. There’s something that comes begging, hopscotched, into your life at around noon or so. And they call this business show. There’s something that’s very too-close-to-call about it, huh? Like bologna on rye. Big whoop. That’s what I say. This business called show. So what? It’s all about as exciting as watching paint dry. And I’m eating chocolate cake for breakfast. Insert cello solo here, you know? Something reeks. Oh lord, I just burped the Subway five-dollar-foot-long song. A smile that’ll fix a flat playing a split-squad game with my emotions, while I go around with a pair of baby-sized moccasins in the breast pocket of my Salvation Army suit. But, maybe, just maybe, I don’t know, you spot a couple of skillets on the sidewalk resting atop discarded couch cushions, and you get to thinking about the rut you’ve been calling your life lately-- the long sobs of the violins of autumn. Shit, I was just a deadbeat kid with skinned knees and ripped pants. We’re going everywhere from now on. Hats are no longer optional. Easters spent getting drunk in a coat-check closet. Dipping more than big, the blasted wreck of the sky’s ship is anchored to streetlights and hydrangeas. The tattered silver vest of a three-piece is hanging from a fire hydrant. Done with doing something, living conditions straying towards anorexic. A glass eye’s take on the surroundings, a few booze-soaked aperçus leveling the playing field for schmaltzy daffodil hoarders and train conductors. But, who knows, maybe there’s another reckless pull left in you. And, well, maybe there’s more left to lose than this. But, you know, probably not.


________________________________________________________________

Fowl
Carl Fuerst


Steve and I were supposed to inspect the chickens each night and quarantine birds with open wounds, but we never did it, and one morning we discovered that a half-dozen chickens had pecked a cut on one of their sister’s backs until she had become a hollowed out bowl, and they were still pecking, bloody-beaked and silent, when we opened the coop. The victim was alive, her knobby spine exposed. She greeted the sunlight with contented clucks, perching vacant-eyed and oblivious while her hatch-mates ate her alive.

I drowned her in a five gallon bucket. I’d done the same thing once before, to a kitten, back when Maddie still lived at my apartment. This time it was out of mercy. That time it was out of something else.

“That’s fucking hilarious,” said Steve, the teenaged drop-out standing just far enough away to keep his sneakers dry. He was hired on the same day as me and since that day he was a constant source of stories about the fake bullies he’d beaten and the fake babes he’d fucked. He slurped Mountain Dew and chain smoked and took great pleasure in torturing the animals under our care.

Later that week, we drove a trailer of goats to the animal auction. On the way back, Steve asked me for a ride to work the next day. “My Mom’s using my car,” he said. “She’s a skank.”

I said yes, because I like to make people I don’t like owe me favors. It’s my secret way of lashing out.

The next morning, there was a peacock on his driveway and two vehicles on his lawn. One had a garbage bag window—that was the one Steve usually drove. The other was a rusty Bronco with a baby bottle on its hood.

Steve came out before I could honk. He got in the backseat, taxi style. He lit a cigarette. “Fuck this place,” he said.

I pulled away.

”Mom fucked her boyfriend in my bed. I slept on the couch.”

I’d never heard anything so honest in my life, and I hated that it had to come from him. “You might want to burn those sheets,” I said. “Disease control.”

When he laughed, it sounded like his lungs were packed with muddy rocks. “That’s sick, man. I’d puke but I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

I remembered what he ate yesterday: a bag of chips and an old piece of birthday cake.

I tossed him one of my two peanut-butter sandwiches.

I watched him in the rear view mirror while he pecked contentedly at that sandwich, vacant-eyed and oblivious, and I wanted badly for someone in this world to be his friend.

And I was relieved by the knowledge that it would never be me.


________________________________________________________________

James Babbs has published hundreds of poems over the last several years in print journals and online.  He lives in the same small town where he grew up.  He workw for the government but doesn’t like to talk about it.  He has a cherry tree and two grapevines in his back yard and several pesky rabbits.  His books are available from www.xlibris.com, www.lulu.com & www.interiornoisepress.com.


Tony Burnett is a member of the Writer's League of Texas and an award winning songwriter. He writes a science and nature column for a regional Texas newspaper. His short fiction has appeared in national literary journals including, most recently, Tidal Basin Review, Fringe, Fiction 365, and Larks Fiction Magazine.


Davy Carren was born in a barn, raised in a circus, and currently resides at the top of a good-sized hill in san francisco.


Stephen Gilchrist is a Long Island native who is currently drifting, somewhat perplexedly, through his mid-20s, trying to make some sense of the world around him. At the moment, he's happily unmarried and spends most of his time reading, writing, cycling, or going on walks with his beloved canine companion, Caoimhe.


Carl Fuerst is a writing teacher who lives in Madison, WI. His fiction has appeared in A Capella Zoo, Annalemma Magazine, Underground Voices, and more.


Lila Lavender resides in Idaho and spends her money on cheap champagne from the gas station where she works.


An undergraduate at Queens college, Corey D. Mejia thought he'd be graduating in the summer, though now he's discovered that he's been royally screwed by the CUNY system and must remain for another semester, even though he's completed his Literature major already. It's horrible! He wants to get out and travel all over the place and not be confined to a destination; and he wants to see, to feel, to hear, to taste, all the ways of the world. He wants to ride a motorcycle into the horizon burning the dawn with the cool wind and hot dust going against his face and hands. Corey's a writer: He writes. He enjoys writing of society and its many oddities, though he wouldn't particularly consider Himself a part of it, thus he's the odd. He drives and delivers food for a Sports Bar & Grill near a Long Island railroad station. And he's a beast on the drums.

Mark Wohl loves sound. He doesn’t masturbate his time away. For a second helping (or thirds or fourths) visit www.wideeyedgroove.com, www.mocksun.net, and www.reverbnation.com/opiuslilt.