Month: March 2023

Ken Fleckenstein

The Boy off Steinway St 

You looked just like your picture yet your eyes were more afraid than mine. We learned we both lived in Providence at the same time, had went to the same bars, hated the same clubs, and had the same types though I wasn’t here for small talk and commiseration of our overlapping time periods.

I remember your apartment was dark despite feeling the sun pulsating through your bedroom. You told me you didn’t have an air conditioner and I really wish you had put that in your profile next to your intimately detailed body measurements. You nervously offered me a lime seltzer and told me your ex had just moved out so you had his leftovers and even an old pile of his clothes that sat in the corner. You took a second to point it out and stare at the pile in silence. I could see you were still trying to get over it yet you made sure to tell me you weren’t one for this kind of thing and that you had just made an account because, as a single queer man, that’s what you were suppose to do, right?

I didn’t know.

It would take more soul searching than this to fully understand that. It was not my first and certainly not my last.

You must’ve read my signals wrong as I unbuttoned my shorts so you grabbed your bottle of lube. It was running low and I wondered how much if it was shared between you and the ex I thought nothing of and how many other small things like the lime seltzer you’d ask me to share of his. Your actions seemed so familiar yet your shaking hands understood the weight of emotions breathing down our necks in this dense, thick, summer sweat.

I urged you to slow down but you didn’t know what that meant until I was grabbing my underwear from the corner of your mattress with no box spring. We both had different lessons to learn of desires, needs, and what to do with piles of dirty clothes that belonged to someone that moved out a week ago. I didn’t want to stick around to learn and you didn’t want to try.

Tying my shoes on the way out your cat waltz over to me. With a small pet I asked if it was a boy or girl.

“Oh, he’s a girl but he has male cat energy, you know what I mean?”

Truthfully, I had no clue what you meant; my brain was too ashamed to process the gender fluidity of a feline I’d never see again.

Paige Johnson

Sugar/Salt Baby

Another date on Surfside, beside the ocean-white 
apartment tower with beautiful, blue balconies. 
The same that will collapse in five years’ time,
leaving no Wi-Fi to leech an Uber from
or shade to smother an emotional hangover.
In other words, no escape from the crumble. 

So, I’m kicking it with strappy platform Janes,
lace flats stored in a puke-brown purse with fraying handles
for when I have to run out of fear or fun.
Securing a bag’s not all the reason that I’m letting 
a wannabe Banksy sales-pitch me over pastel smoothies. 
More of a two-birds, one stick situation. 
Like men way older, a story almost as much.
Hate boredom, detest sharing a bedroom.
My homegirl is a good time, but she blows 
pot smoke into her hamsters’ ear and
speaks of closet romps in front of her son.

Call me old-fashioned, but
I need space from the viceous people I love and orbit.
Straightedge at this point in life, so I seek a square. 
Need a quiet hunter, a hustler with inspiring (work) ethic.
Someone who will compensate my complaints,
compliment my accoutrements,
fund my sexual revolution.

Okay, so that’s exaggerating but that’s the art I’m paid for.
Maintaining smiles, looping arms at company luncheons.
Nobody believes I don’t sleep with the men,
but I’m more of a meet-and-greet girl.
A dinner debutante, 
cell phone companion,
video game Valentine.
Leave a tip for the waitress and me,
watch me instead of the movie and maybe 
we’ll make out if your hands are soft enough.

Wearing black-fleece even around whores, 
I’m an experience collector, old soul aficionado,
get off to conversation, bedroom or boardroom.
When did trad-life become so perverted?

If we make it to the second or third date,
I might flake like a mil(quetoast)ennial,
hold the L—just one because this is a partnership.
I don’t dip because I want to, but ’cause 
the girl at GUESS hip-checked me, 
scoffing I wouldn’t fit in anything, 
even though I arrived in their smallest dress.
I don’t always feel worthy of men 
who’ve already made it,
and that’s my biggest problem.

Miami sun’s melted everybody’s mind,
disordered me by osmosis, got me runnin’ on E.
My ex too, because he scream-insists he’s not gay 
even though I never asked. Guess I got more in common 

with Patrick Bateman’s secretary than skirt suits.
My taste in men has never not been under scrutiny.

Worse yet, my daddy’s in-person pick-up line is 
asking if I’m “fully shaven down there.”
I don’t know how he’d react to “nine-tenths”
so I keep quiet, a mouse who knows how 
to thieve cheese without getting the guillotine.

I can watch an idiot savant slurp linguini for half an hour,
twice as long if it means three days’ pay at the pet shop.
Either way, I’m watching a crustacean shrivel slowly.
I’m adding to my story and subtracting a shy shelteredness
so nobody—not me—can say, “She never lived, she never tried.”

Most of the men are normal in nature and the exterior,
but always on the clock, in a different city.
They need a nick of normalcy, the feigned familiarity
of “brunch with a girlfriend,” a young thigh to squeeze, 
a bitch who doesn’t bark when they don’t text back. 

This dud of a daddy doesn’t fit the bill 
but pays a few of mine after just one plate.
He paves the way for a cute Chinese immigrant to take his 
seat next Sunday, admire my toe polish and offer a condo
if I’ll be his editor-slash-ingénue a few months from now.

I won’t, but I’ll throw a little extra tongue into my kiss goodbye.
I’ll write a passage for him in my free time,
and spend the rest of the season
wondering if he meant it—
or if I woulda ended up in the pretty pre-rubble
of the beachfront property I passed on my way to the date,
doomed to an art deco death for reaching too high into the sky.

 Most days, I’m glad I’ll never know.

J.J. Campbell

in the wastelands of america

random acts of violence
on the back country roads

a slit wrist night in the 
wastelands of america

hope is the last train that 
leaves on a friday night

you remember drinking 
moonshine under the 
bridge on a rainy 
afternoon

trading kisses like the 
world would be ending 
soon

those lost dreams still 
come to me on every 
other lonely night

it wasn’t supposed to 
be this hard

to be nothing but broken 
bones, broken homes,
streets filled with needles
and curious little kids

the rain drops off the 
roof like blood

the neighbors are starting 
to wonder if the rumors 
are true

good thing they don’t 
have the balls to ask

Johnny Scarlotti

end game

i get on stage
and all the girls scream

i begin reciting my poetry
and girls are throwing their bras and panties at me

girls are pushing past security grabbing at me
stroking my dick
rubbing their pussies

i tell security
it’s aiit let em thru

and girls come on stage with me and take my pants off and begin sucking and fucking my enormous penis

and the crowd is going crazy
sold out stadium

and i’m reading my poems and they are screaming HOLY SHIT
he’s a FUCKING GENIUS
the G.O.A.T.

they shout ENCORE ENCORE and i come back out
rip my shirt off
revealing a suicide vest
it’s my favorite part of my set:
where i kill us all

Sex Doll Gumbo

Horror Sleaze Trash proudly presents Sex Doll Gumbo, by Ryan Quinn Flanagan & Catfish McDaris. Comprising two chapbooks, Saga of Juanito and Alphabet Soup, this collection represents a dual effort from two of the most subversive voices in underground poetry today.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been translated in Bangla, Spanish and Italian. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.

Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. He’s been active in the small press world for 30 years. He’s recently been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, Yoruba, Tagalog, and Esperanto. His most infamous chapbook is Prying with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. He’s from Albuquerque and Milwaukee.

FREE DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE

BUY A COPY HERE

Charles Rammelkamp

Reds

You know how sometimes a song lyric 
just enters your head, unprovoked,
like a visitor showing up unannounced?
This morning I heard Mick Jagger’s voice warn,
Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues.

A drug reference, of course,
reds Seconals, greens and blues barbiturates, 
downers, or so I’ve heard.
And I hid the speed inside my shoe.
“Sweet Virginia,” half a century old,
from the Exile on Main Street album,
a song from my college days
we listened to religiously, 
smoking dope in the dorm rooms.

And I remember the guy who sold drugs
from a locker in the student union,
bags of not-very-good marijuana,
a variety of pills in all the colors
of a Crayola crayon box.
Brian only lasted a semester,
flunked every class he’d registered for –
but never actually attended.
I wonder whatever became of him.

Got to scrape the shit right off your shoes.

Karl Koweski

dead old guy in a casket

no different
than any of the other
hundred corpses
in a hundred 
other boxes.

I’m stopped before
I can make it
back to my seat
by a wilted woman
flanked by grown sons.

I’ve never seen them before.
they’ve never seen me
but I offer the grieving
family my condolences.

“did you work with Jon?”
the presumed widow asks.

“no, ma’am, I did not,
we were lovers,” I say
loud enough to be heard
by those gathered.
“when I was thirteen years old
he was my big teddy bear
and I’ll never forget him.”

her eyes glaze over
bottom lip quivering.
her sons request
my departure, apparently
they have enough trauma.

I walk out to my car.
no one follows.

sometimes, they do.

I spread the
obituary page
across the steering wheel
and read down the column.

near the bottom,
Donnie Allridge.
his wake at
Godwin’s Funeral Home
is across town.
if I hurry
I can arrive in time
to rewrite
another man’s history.

Jay Maria Simpson

The Light Switch

Up and down
Left and right
Side to side
Round and round

My filthy fingers touch the pendulum
stimulate the lighting switch
play with your vulnerability
its neediness to understand
the refracting light the desire
to escape and to stay

The metronome smiles into the distance
keeping a perfect beat
remembering the practice required
to beat out
the pleasure
the spontaneity

The drummer leans back and teeters
she strokes the snare
possessively
rides the cymbal relentlessly
the tension rods, the tuning keys
the drumheads

The unwound clock the lightning switch
sync like lovers fucking
for the first time
smelling flesh and wonderment
shaking
at the slightest touch

We turn the light off and on
second by second beat by beat
like a broken whirligig, heart petering out
rising up pulsing hard
speeding up giving up
fighting to survive

Damon Hubbs

Taste

in the ash yard hounds bluster and bark
a divine comedy of complaints,
why has she lost her taste for hell? 
the Trans Am boys do donuts in the dark

a divine comedy of complaints
circling like black hair in a bathroom drain, 
the Trans Am boys do donuts in the dark
slicking roadkill, surfing the blood of saints

circling like black hair in a bathroom drain
bad habits weed the craving void,
slicking roadkill, surfing the blood of saints
love was once a fentanyl rain 

bad habits weed the craving void
in the ash yard hounds bluster and bark,
love was once a fentanyl rain  
why has she lost her taste for hell?