The Factory
Tom Pescatore
We can find the bed forever
for whatever you want
or nothing, heaving dry promises
at the crowds, I'm full of promises
and most don't work out as I planned,
or work out for me, or ever come
to fruition,
I get caught up in making them
preparing them like a cracker
each layer folded over the last
until it's so heavy I can't lift it
and you have to chew through it,
all the flour and salt and no water
to wash it down
__________________________________________
Booby Trapped
Chris Crittenden
they told him coffin nails lurked in rain.
that if he masturbated,
god would pick him up by
the scrotum and decapitate
his penis. imagine
all the demons that could
infect a boy's mind when fear
chooses the expanse of its own definition.
they told him girls had viruses,
pus incubating between their thighs;
that vaginas were sharks hiding the laughs
of clowns. after his parents died
it was impossible for them
to be dead. their commands
thrived in the booby traps in his behavior.
only in slumber,
in REM's soon to be forgotten,
did he begin to have sex.
to struggle holding on to the edge
of a terrible brink--and ejaculate.
__________________________________________
Pathetic
John Tustin
Pathetic to be
nearly forty years old
at 2 AM on Sunday morning
in a dark room
sullenly
silently frantically
jerking off.
Shhh!
The kids are asleep.
Shhh!
The Devil might awaken
with her barbs
and her blanket conditions.
Pathetic to be
nearly forty years old
and coming
and going
in silence
and secret.
__________________________________________
While we Bombast
Dan Hedges
While we ‘discuss’ the mundane,
ember flakes and x chromosomes ascend,
so as to summate into the God metaphor;
and while we bombast in the first dimension,
totem birds achieve a still point
of decisive intuition.
__________________________________________
?10?
Felino A. Soriano
energies in the swirl
mobile dialect an ab
le movement confin
ing workable substa
nce with graphic col
or full of enigmatica
l momentums or one
+ leverage containin
g obligatory fascinat
ions with reliable im
perative opportunitie
s
__________________________________________
Fractal Patternation
Dan Hedges
thoughts break out along fractal patternation
to form semantic fields
that overlap and resonate
all at once to form
a mental chorus that is all
cellular buzz.
In this fever of nouns,
we cross-examine the haunting tense
for honest portraits of our zeitgeist. Then, we
realize that irony itself oxygenates the
greatest loopholes of our collective
mental freedom.
__________________________________________
Phoenix
Jordan Jamison
Anne drowned in Gatsby’s dirty bathtub listening to Marge Simpson pubic hair and A Tribe Called Quest. Saint Peter rejected her at the gates of Glendale coffee shops, plus Auschwitz and Wrigley Field. She sat in her car all morning eating cups of tetanus nails and chasing them with atom bombs, Olde English, and Fentanyl enemas. The Buddha tuned out her formal complaint and Maricopa County Superior Court appeal by sticking a lit cigarette through his bellybutton
and she laughed her Zkylon B laugh walking to the psychiatrist on 51st and Thunderbird muttering why why why. Her sister respected her but didn’t understand her and they went to Holocaust Addicts Anonymous meetings in Wall Street church basements also used as shooting galleries by truckers and priests and John Coltrane. She knew enough was enough and shot a 20 dollar bag of saline and Gary Sinise’s favorite ping pong paddle and walked to Nitrous Row thinking about Otto the Orange and Dutch courage and another hit of hipster typhus and she could cop it quick and easy from any Dominican in Tempe if only she could hustle up the paper. On the way up to the whippit spot she talked Dali into using her as his model for The Persistence of Memory and he agreed greedily in Gestapo glee and asked for a list of her references and she told him she was Jack’s original pick then that bitch Rose showed up but she did a photo shoot at summer camp last year and he told her to call him Salvadore from now on or if she preferred The Bear Jew or Teddy Ballgame. She left him in the smog and walked over flaccid fool’s gold and Prius windshield cow paddies and yen pox opium left out to dry and suckle by Mao and Stalin to give their timed orgies a rush and she breathed out methylenedioxymethamphetamine and she felt the Turkish semen and steak and eggs and pocket cocaine from yesterday blup out on to the basketball court of Parkridge Park and she left before Neil Armstrong’s neat anal probe could catch up to her because it was not welcome on the Row and Buzz Aldrin was always too sober to walk to Daisy’s raves. She saw Osama’s palace and the crematorium pouring out virginity and hope and balloons and empty Reddi Wip cans. Jesus was on the stoop and he fingered his pet Chia Cheeseburger and his quiet disciple Lee practiced target shots reliving the glory days of November 1963 bragging that Newt Gingrich was next and he texted Himmler calling him a Jew loving communist and when she walked by they whistled and asked her if she wanted any good Soviet ketamine and she ignored them and made it in the mansion and didn’t say hi to anyone and immediately saw Gandhi across the room blowing Spice smoke down on a stinkbug that he carried around to conquer anorexia and John Travolta jokes and the Pakistani Raj flag and she grabbed his hand from twenty feet away and they went in the bathroom and had a 56 day hunger binge and she drowned.
__________________________________________
Chief Seattle
Dan Hedges
Picture in a vast white space,
Chief Seattle forward-facing endless time,
gesturing the occasional dragon-fly,
and the generalized spirit of the whole.
__________________________________________
To dream of Reality and the Outcome
Tom Pescatore
We stood back-to-back
against the insane map of the stars
bordering on un-reality,
I saw every twinkling existence
the shroud of the milky way
the black holes and supernova
births, we stepped toward them
and the darkened moving away,
our footholds were hard, invisible
but concrete, space was something
else entirely, not what we'd been told,
each time we moved forward
it was like gigantic light-speed leaps,
the stars were merely illusory lights
a thumbnail of burning gases on black wallpaper,
there was the great charade, the great
universal lie,
our lives were vindicated.
__________________________________________
Hit
Chris Crittenden
what was was fragile.
a shard of scream to the jugular.
he had no could not compensate.
to come back was not to couldn't be a new start:
only trench itch and a mouth of cotton,
friends blown to fleshy scripts
sheaves of them in sheets.
there was no did no had no
felt no saw no meant no god.
bodies left by the bulldozer
in mud that turns red where
even a worm is great. five worms
are almost tender, like a girl's hand.
there would no couldn't kiss a girl again.
less fireflies than stars
under the battlefield moon.
such secrets in breath!
strange that ever would surprise him,
or that legs weren't sticks.
bird lying wings cracked back broke by canon roar.
sad chirp stomped boot-flattened
last thing couldn't be but must
he had to see.
__________________________________________
Kill the fingers. Kill the clock.
Zachary Hamilton
I am early bird. Unraveled from a mechanics torso.
A piece of the puzzle is a piece of me, forming somewhere beneath my
fingertips. I am dressed in a system of wires, packed in Amber,
winterized nostrils, while ice enters my mattress. It is in glazed donuts
(like hats) that I see the strangers and mixed lights exiting my forehead.
An effortless, heavy air mixed with grease occurs. This is all very
confusing for the witness already being inbred for the mechanic family
values.
Twelve fingers kill the clock. Orange thumb, plastic pointer finger. Red
gloves. They tear it to shreds, down to the very second it stops ticking.
Brutal. No warning, the digits are maimed somewhere at the turn-of the
eye. (between cups of coffee.) When the helium enters the room, the
malfunction begins. Opened, the orange plastic thumb relinquishes it's
grip. A ringing from somewhere inside its housing is heard and the bits of
the clock fall onto a vintage door next to my head.
You left the portal on again. I mutter and roll over. I haven't even
began to get into the mirror effect I used to manipulate the rest of the
maimed digits in the clock or the piece of chewing gum I pulled apart
and studied.
I am early bird! I am early bird! I shout, watching the eleven
pointer fingers stretching apart and being understood from every angle
the way the chewing gum had been.
I am party train! I am early bird! I shout, watching the nail of the
thumb crack open and get stuffed into a can of shitty beer the way you
would a cigarette butt. This is option one for the twelve fingers that killed
that poor clock. This is doom, a judgment, a sentence, fate. Ruin and
death. When I wake up at the wheel, the party train is already running
throughout all of the hosts, devastating option number two which is
(recognition, a recognizing or being recognized. Identification of a
person or thing as having been known before.) I turn and see it. The
crack where all of this is coming from, under the park bathrooms. This is
where it is all happening from. These twelve fingers killing the clock.
April, 8 2033 when it occurred.
I am early bird! I am vintage fucking early bird!”
__________________________________________
We killed them
Tom Pescatore
Artists don't sit inside all
day to write and type and suffer,
they play on their iphones and macs
with dull eyes editing music files,
remixing old sounds, taking
photographs that seem
somehow older even though they
don't know why, they catch the movie
to marvel at the book (it's YA fiction)
then the next day read it on the train
cover out and facing the crowd, and
they dance at night clubs to hip-hop and
techno in the nearest up-and-coming
neighborhood, their drunken image tagged on
facebook, exchanging that for actual fame,
and remain blissfully ignorant of the truth
because artists don't think for themselves
or think at all anymore, hell,
they don't even try, because
for the most part
when their head hits the pillow
around 5am
they're plain fucking dead
and nobody gives a fuck.
__________________________________________
Four Fifteen
Tracy Hauser
Seven.
The Man was foaming at the mouth at her vibrating along with him, from his electric toothbrush, in his dirty mouth. Her picture, fitted in the wall mounts of his reflection, showed the cement community park, chained in by a wraparound fence. In it, were 5 year-olds nagged two Septembers ago, to kneel on the recess mulch, hiding the leather trim of Miss Sindy’s sear-sucker skirt. Behind her was his high-rise, with the pale lozenge molding covering the second and third floor brick work. His apartment could magnify easily the black elementary name plate, stained from split rain gutters tarnishing its intentions, with run-off.
Seven fifteen.
The eraser backing on his Oxfords made it manageable for The Man to skulk along the floor remarbling without hearing the echo of shuffling, that his leather wingtips would have made. He studied soccer bulletins taped to cluttered cinderblock, announcing parents wanted for the varsity soccer committee. Now at Ms. Sindy’s diamond wired door, he saw reminders for lacrosse practice, with stipulations. When he looked passed these he saw Friday’s agenda in chalk scrawl. Next to the “April”, was a period separating the fifteen from the “2004”.
Miss Sindy was repeating rudimentary arithmetic from a friendly printable. And her pen was capped on a Weekly Planner pad, filling up the second week’s Tuesday with Plural Worksheets. This was before the children came, asking at once, about Shape Recognitions, torn too fast from the perforated Easy Readers. When she was still, before them, he could see her brows perk at the staff bulletin, before squaring at the sound of the 7:45 homeroom bell.
Ten-thirty.
Mr. Terry, the Principal, misspelled “acommodating” to parents’ in his awkward letter of explanation. He e-mailed the mistakes to the school secretary, who on the phone when receiving it for proofing, handed two teachers back their tallied attendance sheets. She sighed at the collapsings of the biology one and the other, earth science, against the office’s high back chairs. They vented:
“I just don’t get it. Their helixes don’t look remotely spiral.” The biology teacher said. “I showed em a video of how to model it, and everything.”
“Try using what Mr. Sekress does. Different kinds of gum. His class always wins for DNA models.”
“Mr. Sekress?”
“Yeah. Four years in a row now- highest MSA scores. Man works wonders with riboflavin.”
To Vice Principal Atkins, Mr. Terry continued, “The girls locker room? The girls saw a man? In a skull mask? A black shirt. Urinating. Outside the window?”
Vice Principal Atkins confirmed: “Yes, Mr. Terry. That’s what they said.”
Principal Terry was using the search bar, typing in “schools” plus “neighborhood watch” . “And outside?”
“The only one I saw was Mr. Sekress. And he was doing his check-ups off the Petri planters alongside the hose ground.”
From the results, he clicked on a link. He studied the outcome of school filed complaints. “Well he must have seen the guy.”
“He did. But he caught just the back of him; tall man. Blond hair. Running towards 35th.”
Principal Terry suffocated the radio. The principal of an elementary school, West Gate, had been granted an industrial fence. Mr. Terry wanted to know how and why.
At three thirty-five The Man stood behind a supply loader, stacked up to its pulley with commercial paper, and under cabinets holding $50 EICO bulbs. Mr. Kordman, the Algebra 1 teacher needed packs of pencils for his distributive properties test given on scantrons. From behind glasses, he saw the supply door- open. After walking in it he eyed someone unrecognizable, taking out Casio calculators from the second shelf.
“How’d you get in here?” Mr. Kordman asked.
“I got a key,” The Unrecognizable Man said.
“Oh. Mr. Sekress, I just recognized you. How’d you get one?”
“They gave ‘em out yesterday.”, said Mr. Sekress. Apparently Terry was sick of lending his key back and forth at lunch. Use mine for now if you want.” He tossed it to Mr. Kordman who dropped it on the floor. Mr. Sekress said, “I got two students waiting for me in coach class.
“Let me know about the soccer fundraiser.” Mr. Kordman yelled. Mr. Sekress was walking away. I’ll have that check for you on Tuesday. You find an assistant?”
“Working on it. The kids are waiting. See ya Tuesday.”
Ten after four.
She had switched out the lights nearest the overhead, and chose from four piles that needed grading. When she’d switched the light, the level A and B course aid workbooks, double flapped, were in her arms. Outside her room now, she jangled keys to find the skinny one for the top bolt. Before exiting, Miss Sindy stopped, staring at a picture tacked to a locker, of her former second grader’s name, in loose spaghetti wands.
Fifteen after four.
Miss Sindy turned up Broadway and held her skirt at the exhaust of an accelerating bus’s pass. At their necks, she studied collars of commuters, whose hair the tired, behind her, stretched to estimate above, the metro line’s distance. First, a backstage hand with a cool-wave outlined her costume on Miss Sindy’s blue sweater back. Then an old man, scratching at hair regrowth chemicals, did the same. She passed men fanning vinyl covers and walked through alleys in between cold pizza displays and the humidity from a Hoover vacuum demonstration.
A third person shadowed. Ms. Sindy’s heels walked on wet napkins, so she watched the ground for polluters instead of ahead, and next, focused her attention to avoid a box of Kikklerand straws. He was close now and his hand closed her mouth. She did scream, but it was time for the U-Haul dumpster to haul down 56th Street. Maybe if the Laundromat had called for the linen van to do a night drop-off instead of a morning pick-up. Then someone could have seen Ms. Sindy’s heart stationed bracelet, abandoned.
In the end, only an elderly women, crooked with Parkinson’s, commented on Mr. Sekress carrying Miss Sindy up the street. When she offered to call, he’d said the paramedics had been phoned. His wife was given to fainting spells come the break from spring to summer. Maybe if the lady had made one anyway, then Miss Sindy would have taught her granddaughter the next year. But as it was it would be another one, trim and fit, hired to replace her. Set to handle future conferences beyond the pasts’ tragic one, from the lady who would forever teach, “before”.
__________________________________________
Chris Crittenden lives 50 miles from the nearest traffic light and has a lot of voices. He strives to sing tear-stained deep in forests.
Zachary Scott Hamilton is the author of fourteen 'Zines,
including Temple of Sinew, The Orchestra of Machines, Wallet of
Hexagons and HAIR LAND (named 'Zine of the month by the
Independent Publishing Resource Center).His work appears in various
magazines including: The Portland Review, Trigger Fish and
HOUSEFIRE. He Recently went on tour with the band Holy! Holy!
Holy! And installed artwork with partner Molly Pettit for a photo series,
which appears on-line at his website WWW.Blackmonsterzine.weebly.com. Blog:
www.zachabstract.blogspot.com
Tracy Hauser is an MFA graduate student at the University of Baltimore’s Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program. Currently she is the editor of the Strange Detours online magazine. She has been published in the latest issue of Abandoned Towers Magazine, the Urbanite, Epiphany Magazine, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, Writer’s Underground, Trivial Typewriter, the Colonnades Literary Magazine, Literary Brushstrokes, Blood & Roses, The Rusty Nail, and for the 2012 4th edition of Welcome Hon, You're in Baltimore!. She is involved around the city in promoting writing through project-based learning activities for schools and organizations.
Dan Hedges teaches English in the Sir Wilfred Laurier School Board of Quebec. He has also taught at Sedbergh School, and the Celtic International School. His studied English, History, and Education and Trent University and Queen’s University. His writing appears or is forthcoming in The Monarch Review: Seattle’s Literary and Arts Magazine, Ditch Poetry, The Maynard, The Camel Saloon, Wildflower Magazine, Rigormortus, Fortunates, Inertia, Crack the Spine, Short-Fast-and-Deadly, Coatlism Press, Whole Beast Rag, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, Kenning Journal, The Rusty Nail, Wilderness House Literary Journal, Retort Magazine, Certain Circuits, Touch Poetry, Poetic Diversity, Haggard and Halloo Publications, Jones Avenue Quarterly, Blink Ink, Greensilk Journal, Literary Chaos, Subtopian Magazine, The Euonia Review, Undertow Magazine, The Legendary, Record Magazine, Nazar Look, The Apeiron Review, The Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Muse Pie Press, and Mad Swirl.
Jordan Jamison is from Northwest Phoenix and has never been published.
Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia, he is an active member of the growing underground poetry/lit scene within the city and hopes to spread the word on Philadelphia’s new poets. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he'd rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia's old Skid Row.
Felino A. Soriano has authored 51 collections of poetry, including Of oscillating fathoms these nonverbal chants (Argotist Ebooks, 2012), Analyzed Depictions (white sky books, 2012) and Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (Desperanto, 2011). He publishes the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. His work finds foundation in philosophical studies and connection to various idioms of jazz music. He lives in California with his wife and family and is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. For further information, please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.
John Tustin is the divorced father of two perfect children. He graduated from nowhere, edits nothing, and has no awards. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry is a link to his poetry online.
