Andrew Graber

 What Is Happening To Me

Can I call you back up in a few minutes, Margie? Someone is knocking at the front door.

I hung up the phone with my wife, and I opened up the front door. 

Standing outside was this beautiful looking woman who had tears in her eyes.

What’s the matter, I asked?

Why are you crying?

Please come in and take a seat in the living room with me. 

We sat down on the couch and she thanked me for being such a nice man.

So, why are you crying?

Please do not think that I am losing my mind for what I am about to tell you. If I do not have an orgasm within the next few minutes, I am going to turn into a giant poisonous snake.

Oh my goodness, are you feeling alright?

You see, I knew that was going to be your reaction, sir.

Why can’t you just have an orgasm by yourself?

Those were the rules that were given to me. My orgasm has to be given to me by another person. It is a long and complicated story, sir.

You have got to believe me.

After I have my orgasm, I will tell you all about my current predicament and where I came from.

Is this some sort of practical joke that my wife set up for you to do to me?

Of course not, the lady replied to me.

By now, she was crying out of control.

Please, I beg of you, please help me.

That’s it, I cannot waste any more time. It’s only a matter of moments before I turn into a snake.

Suddenly, she began taking off all of her clothes and then started to take off my clothes as well.

What are you doing? I am married!

Please, I beg of you, your wife will understand if she knew what was in store for me.

Then, she stuck her naked rear end in my face and told me to put my fingers in her vagina and in her asshole.

That’s it, do it just like that, but with more passion. Oh my god, that feels so incredibly good. I feel like I am within seconds of having my orgasm. I feel it coming any second now.

Suddenly she vanished and I just stood there in total disbelief. In her place was this gigantic snake staring straight into my eyes, its tongue was darting in and out of its mouth.

Oh my goodness, she was telling me the truth.

The snake was inching closer and closer to me.

Help, somebody help me!

It was then that I heard a loud, blaring noise.

Just as the snake was just about to strike, I realized where the sound was coming from. I reached over in my bed to turn off my alarm clock.

Honey, are you alright, my wife asked.

Yes, I just had a very strange and terrifying dream, my love. I’m better now, though.

Thank goodness that it was just a bad dream.

Come closer and give me a kiss, Margie.

As my wife opened up her mouth to kiss me, I began screaming, as I noticed her tongue had transformed into that of a snake. It darted in and out of her mouth as she asked me what was wrong.

I thought that you wanted a kiss from me?

How come you are not kissing me back?

Is my morning breath that repulsive?

Jonathan Hayes

If Bukowski Worked at Trader Joe’s

If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
We’d know who ate all the hash browns
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
He would never make coffee in the breakroom
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
He’d call out sick all the time
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
The CEO would commit suicide
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
Its stock would go up after he died
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
He’d crap his pants just like I did writing this
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
The Horse Racing Form would replace the Fearless Flyer
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
He’d sell booze to everyone without an ID
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
The restroom would be flooded with beer shit
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
There’d be no health insurance
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
Everyone would transfer to Safeway
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
Two-Buk-Chuck would become One-Buk-Fuck
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
He’d call HR and ask to speak to Sean Penn and Bono
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
A “Wow” customer experience would be throwing up on them
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
His name tag would be a shame tag
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
You could sample the new products off his shirt
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
There would be porn mags at the registers for an impulse buy
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
Your receipt would be typewritten and contain a poem
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
The grocery carts would have whores in them
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s
He’d only last as long as a short story
If Bukowski worked at Trader Joe’s

The sales floor would look like a cheap hotel room
with the room lights permanently off

And there would always be classical music 
and cigarettes to smoke, until…

“You’re fired!”

Kristin Garth

Everybody Needs A Daddy 

Daddy holds your ID in his pocket because you don’t have those — clothes at all.  College girl, southern drawl, bites the Big Apple, 23, where everybody doubts you are old enough to be at this sex party, stripped, spanked and whipped.  Small town Southern breeding exacerbates a physicality of young-eyed innocence which disturbs the local swingers enough.  A “little girl” who likes it rough, doesn’t want to cum from pain is the kind of girl rich sadists put on planes.   

Need to cry, scream, suffocate, sometimes bleed  — at movie theaters, you’re still IDed.  This new daddy likes the side-eyes he scores holding hands with you in candy stores, your hair in braids, his pinstripes Michael Kors with a houndstooth seven-fold tie, the vanilla disapproving scoffs that make you shy.  He could take out your ID any moment — always keeps it close by.

But he saves that for parties.  Takes it out of his pants for both the concerned and his dom sycophants curious about this new womanchildish addition to his ddlg retinue.  If he pulled out his own, they would know he was only 32, just nine years your senior though his hair’s going prematurely gray.  It adds to the gravitas of his character in this polyamorous age play roleplay.  

You learn this lawyer was once a stage actor when he takes you to Broadway, a play about people putting on a play with Robin Rees, Frances Conroy.  Detail of a life amidst interrogations, you discern, is less about care than decoy.  The more you learn the less mysterious he is to his most impressionable toy.  

But it’s acknowledgement, at last, he wears a mask — not just in sadomasochistic displays at naked parties where you are always cast, one of his favorite props.  He wears three piece suits, this persona in ice cream shops.  Drops more interesting facts over pink peppermint about his former affluent wife who outgrew their kinky experiment. You know real love will require he drop this false face.  Each peek behind it he gives you teases a taste of trust you must earn one detail at a time.  His parents are missionaries, you learn after anal sex at bedtime.

But it’s after a sushi dinner your whole worldview is changed.  You are the only female amidst a table of aged male doms where sordid stories are exchanged about power and control and acquisitions like you.  You blush frequently, answer only when spoken to — until the waiter, refreshing your water, questions is that cute skirt a Burberry plaid?  Not even really a flirt, but you giggle until you see the glowering expression of the hirsute man, mad, on your right, ruddy brute in gray suit, you have only just met tonight.

“Mind your collar, child.”  He speaks while dark irises spark.  No one hears the correction but you in the diaphanous dark only punctuated with tapered light.  You look to Daddy at your left, afraid he might have, but he’s recounting a tale of a torture by toad to the others there.  You stare at your plate, fiddle with hair. 

When dinner is over, before you go home, you spy the two of them speaking alone.  The elder’s hand on Daddy’s back, both looking toward you.  His has the coldest of stares, the iciest blue.  You ponder your decorum in silence all the way the home.  The man who dined on your right has powers unknown.  

Alone in the guest bedroom (Daddy doesn’t visit tonight), you cry for your sins, however slight, until you hear feet by your bed.  Raise your head.  Hope it is him, but it is his primary, the lover, live-in.  She has a sophisticated power, submits only to him.  Hasn’t been nice to you unless he’s around.  She is not a fan, it is clear, of little girls from small towns. 

Helpless to disguise this pain before one who’s happily restrained you for varieties of hurt, you listen to her explain the master’s mind as she toys with your skirt.

“Mark was his dominant for some time.  He is still very much — a mentor, a daddy to him.”

She wipes away tears as you quietly process the biggest revelation to date.

It’s not this new information that Daddy isn’t straight.  You’re bisexual yourself;  he’d not be the first bi guy you’d date.  It’s the submissive part that is hard to process. You’ve never met a man who could finesse such a tearful plea, dominate without a modicum of indignity.  In negotiated public scenes at times as brutal fights, he always found his way to what he likes.  Safewords in place are rarely used.  You’ve kissed, time and again, his whipping hand, self-abused, from overuse on needy skin, a plethora of curious women because everybody needs a daddy to hurt them right — even yours, you learn, in New York City tonight. 

David Arroyo

Professor, Please Tell Me!

My English professor is a tentacle, secretly.  Wears a plaid flannel shirt and a babyface.  His glasses — white mirrors — reflect the distracted/fragmented glow of androids.  When he speaks of poetry, he will tip-toe down the aisle like a ballerina, twirling, his hands out as if hugging an old friend; the mirrors reveal hidden gifs, faces of the bored, faces of the absorbed, the word “sestina,”  unless the poet is Sharon Olds, then he strides like a cross-bearing altar boy.  My thigh, molded in blue jeans, is etched ecchi across the lenses.  With a sour apple flash his eyes peer over the rims, asking “how do they do it, the ones who make love without love?” and he swallows hard as if digesting a fantasy made of broken glass.  I suppress a smile and bite down on my lip so hard that my nose bleeds a single drop. A small pool of green slime hugs the heel of his red converse sneaker and an emerald tendril peaks out the bottom of his black khakis, flirtatiously. I am the only who notices; I am the only one pining for an answer.