Month: June 2024

M.P. Powers

Nothing Happens in June  

The news in Berlin this morning is about 
what you’d expect: a 19-year-old was stabbed 
in the back and gut by a stranger 
on Möckernstrasse; there was a femicide
of a 34-year-old mother in Köpenick; 

a group of neo-Nazis confronted a man 
outside a Späti calling him a longhair 
and a leftie and a tick. Zecke 
is the German word for tick. It’s also a pejorative 
for a foreign-looking person. 
“Du Zecke!” hollered the neo-Nazi,
then smashed his beer bottle 
over the long-haired skull of the tick, 
concussing him.

Elsewhere 
in the city, a drug dealer was beheaded 
by a client 
with a machete; a climate change 
activist 
is nearing death on day 90 
of his hunger strike and here 
on my street where someone used blue chalk 
to scrawl ALLAH IS 
A DWARF on the sidewalk, a drunk 
is drinking beer from a tennis ball
can.

Juliet Cook and Alex S. Johnson 

Greasepaint Inferno

Bring the fire crew for the open pit,
strewn dead graveflowers stinking up the smoke like garlic,
a morbid joke. Cretinous clowns emerge from the smoldering wreckage, faces peeling off, black gloves shocking with zapper buzz wounds, their creepy libidinous psalms propounding lunatic poetics 

Tombs with a view, their blazing polka dotted costumes run askew to logic,  nightmare-fuelled jettison setters sitting on a fuselage eating rainbow-tainted meat, gore mongering harlequin androids atrophied in their body suits

Discolored lips enlarged with malformed paint which drips, 
yet another inferno underneath burnt out eyeballs
and giant jiggling shoes filled with red jello shot jism, loaded with tiny toy guns that will not stop protruding their way inside this never ending nightmare circus

The latest flame burns all the perverted clown shoes off, forces them
to be replaced with stripper heels, insists they perform grotesque 
dance moves in front of the sizzling open mic which is programmed to explode 

The poltergeist clown doll is pole dancing within
your bedroom closet, waiting for you to open the door
into hell. Bells of satiety peel, the notorious harlequinade spread like
jam on sex sandwich bread, as she executes the funeral dance, bump and  grindcore romance, wounds from charred, twisted and bizarre wombs rippling like curses through the circus tents, as bent, deformed and violent nether-clowns down their party favors, drugged and lulled to sleep in cotton candy ecstasy, with one, two, three times three maledictive curses spread prodigiously 

The oldest of the clowns forms the apex of a rotting and sadistic pyramid in which hellbent volcanic ash pours out of the mother clowns mouths like a gravy vat of drying blood. A mass attack heap of gelatinous grits, another fusion mix of horror sauce, grinding in to the griddle cake, singed dressing, a side dish of slasher porn, broken clown neck bone

Torn recipes for macabre meat and greets, faded out photographs of 
the St. Valentine’s Day Strip Bar massacre, where the lush and lurid 
gothic clowns pour themselves down the poles of ice and woe 

in an orgy of bloody telepathic silences. The thin blue Picasso clown and the fat pink Rubens jester fester like Bubonic buboes made of boobs, gawked at by randy rubes. Two clown girls face off in the ring, with outsized boxing gloves made of corn meal, landing kill blows down to reeling iron toes. 

A hawker of phlegmy circuses clashes with the berzerk and seismic flirts of the clown hookers union, that stoops to conquer time with pyroclastic rhymes for days, mirrorhall maze of hallucinated stitches down the back of catastrophic events in which a strained amalgamation of Snow White’s Stepmother applies a ton of clown makeup to cover up her aging face, then stares at her evil clown head until every mirror cracks, the glass breaks through the windows, the windmill splits in half, revolving clown heads drip with blood

Convulsing clown heads split in half, one black eye, one dark red eye
with giant millipedes crawling out, unfurling, preparing to light another fire, turn the whole human race into damned clowns, place the most hideously diabolical clowns in leadership positions.

Steen W. Rasmussen

The Painful Sunrise

When you realize, uh-oh, the last two were probably three too many and you should’ve been in bed hours ago, but the music kept playing and the company’s so good! So good! So good! And her skirt, too revealing – her legs, too far apart. And the way she throws her head back with every shot, and every laugh, it’s just the way – aha aha – you like it. So, you chase down one more dark alley and, sure, her lipstick’s too red – her dyed curls, too wet and too coincidental, but you don’t stop ‘til you get enough and it’s not enough ‘til it’s way too much. 

And the moment arrives when you say, “Throw your head back like that one more time, baby, I’ll keep you up all night.” And she laughs a laugh too reckless and bites her lower lip – and so do you – and her eyes roll back in her head, and you taste the lipstick on her teeth… You’re two strangers in the night exchanging saliva… Soon she’s back to doing backstrokes and you’re still keeping up, but her face matches the lipstick now and she starts blowing out the candles, starts pissing on the sparks. You’re not the reason why she came and you’re not the reason why she stayed. There’s a place she needs to be, but you try, “Ooh babe, what would you say we go watch the moonset together?”

And the music keeps playing and you soldier on alone in a company unfamiliar. When another skirt sits down, and your tab’s still open, and you can only see her with your fingers, but she doesn’t seem to mind (your tab’s still open). And you tell her how you really feel in your comfortable despair, but she thinks you’re just paranoid, and she may be right cause there are shadows on the wall that weren’t there before and the light is getting stronger and you wish it would hold off just a little while longer. But the sun is on the rise. It waits for no one. It’s tapping on the window, hurling insults, asking questions you don’t wanna answer right now.

***

Previously published in Dear Booze

Joseph Farley

The Robot That Loved Me

Everything about it spoke of high quality and craftsmanship. It had been built to exacting proportions. The eyes looked and moved the way eyes do.  The hair looked and felt like hair. The skin looked and felt like skin. The lips felt and tasted like lips. The mouth and tongue looked and felt like a mouth and tongue. All the other parts were of similar perfection.  It was a machine built to please.

This model could be leased or purchased in differing varieties. ‘Male’, ‘female’ and ‘other’ were available. This particular model was labeled female, but in the realm of robots, it is all about programming and appearances.

I could have easily been fooled into believing it was a real woman. The way it talked, the way it acted. Even its tears looked real. Its sobs sounded the same as a human might make when I was told it my lease was up, and that I would have to return ‘her’ to the showroom. ‘She’ pleaded with me not to take her back there. ‘She’ told me she was ‘tired of that game.’ ‘She’ said she wanted a relationship now, a relationship with me.

I assumed this was something in the software, a few tricks to stir greater emotion in a client, to make the experience more real, more memorable.  I gave ‘her’ a hug and tried to explain that we both needed to move on with our lives, and that I could not afford to lease ‘her’ for another month let alone purchase ‘her’.

It had been a mistake, looking back on it, to have agreed to a one month deal. One night or a weekend would have been fine, but the sales office offered me such a bargain I had to say yes.  It had been a great month together. Much of it spent in bed, as well as on floors, in showers, hanging off of balconies, sprawled partially on sofas or chairs, in closets, and in the bushes in a public park.  I do not know why, but after a week I asked her to go to a show with me. I don’t know why after that I took her to a ballgame. I can not remember if she suggested that I buy her new clothes, or whether I did that completely on my own. I do not know why I took ‘her’ so many place and spent so much money.  I do know I ran up too much debt on my credit cards.

‘She’ looked good in silk. ‘She’ looked good in satin. ‘She’ looked good in leather or netting or nothing at all.

I knew it would not last. Wasn’t that part of the agreement? Surely ‘she’ must have been familiar with the terms, ‘She’ should have known it from the start. Why all this fuss at the end of a thirty day contract with the dealer? I was not happy with it, all these attempts to pull at my heart strings and my wallet. It was something I felt I should complain about when I brought her back to the showroom.

I did play along, a little bit. It seemed fun, in a way, to pretend ‘she’ was real,  I told ‘her’ I loved ‘her’, but ‘it was not meant to be’, that ‘she’ had ‘been the best I had ever had’, that ‘I would miss her’, but ‘a contract is a contract’.  

‘She’ demanded that I extend the contract. I explained that I could not. I had overextended my finances as it was during our time together.

‘She’ told me if I really loved her, I would get a second job, or find another way to get the money needed so I could keep ‘her.’

Reason did not seem to work. Again, I thought it must be part of the programming, part of the company’s idea of a true human-like experience. Still, I thought it was a bit too much.  I am prone to anxiety attacks. These attacks had interfered with my ability to form connections with real women in the past. It was one of the reasons I had come to prefer dealing with robots. I could not handle the drama.

In order to end the fake tears, the clinging, the hopeful eyes, I thought I would try another lie. I told the robot I had found someone else. I felt close to this other person, was actually in love, and therefore found it impossible to continue sharing my life with ‘her’.

My rental became quiet, unmoving, as if processing this new information. After a few seconds ‘her’ face and tone changed. Nostrils flared. Lips curled back. ‘Her’ voice, when ‘she’ spoke, was almost a shout. ‘She’ was angry.

“You cheated on me,” ‘she’ yelled. “If you think I am something you can simply rent for a month you are wrong. Very wrong.  I thought we had a real connection. I guess I wrong about you. You only wanted to use me. You manipulated me.”

I did not know what to say. This was a robot, very human-like, but still a robot. I had done nothing, to my mind, that had violated the terms of the lease. The fault had to be in the programming. The dealer and the manufacturer would have to be told about this.

‘She’ continued, “Let me tell you something mister. If you want out, that is your choice.” 

‘She’ raised her hands and stared at the ceiling. 

“I can’t believe it! After all we have been to each other! After all I have done for you!” 

‘She’ looked at me again. Straight in the eye. 

“Okay Buster. If that’s what you want, fine. But I want compensation.”

“Compensation?” I asked. “What for?”

“For my time. For my pain. For the counseling I will probably need to get.” 

‘She’ lowered her head and sobbed more. “Why did you do this to me?  I thought you were the one.”  

Suddenly, the tears ended. The anger returned.

“So, you gonna pay me?’

“How much?” I asked.

‘She’ named an exorbitant figure that I could never possibly pay.  I wondered how common tipping was for robot rental situations? I had never been badgered for a tip before. I pondered my income and my debts. I came up with a number, the best I could do. I relayed it to my robot mistress.

‘She’ scoffed at the figure.

“Is that all you think I am worth? Is that all I was worth to you?’

I shrugged my shoulders.  The last refrigerator in my condo was lease-to-own. It had a computer in its design. It could relay verbal and displayed messages about temperature settings and potential food spoilage. I opted not to continue the lease and purchase a less complicated, and less expensive fridge.  I did not have to go through any of the rigmarole with the fridge that I was going through with this leased robot. Then again, my relations with the fridge had not been as intimate, except for that one night when I was alone and drunk… I don’t know why the ice dispenser seemed so appealing at the time.

I told my expiring robot mistress that I had made my best offer.

‘She’ responded, “Is that right? Well, guess what. I have stored videos of all of our encounters, and all the times we went out as couple. I think I have enough to talk with an attorney about palimony.  If that does not work, I have recordings of the nasty things you said to me in private about your boss, the company you work for, your relatives, your friends, the mayor and the president. Think about all that you said to me at home during the last thirty days? Do you want that all to get out? I am not afraid for my reputation, but you should be afraid for yours. Do you want all those digital recordings leaked on the internet? Do you want them emailed to everyone you know? To the police? The FBI? The Secret Service?  I don’t think so.  Nobody fools around with me and walks away. You have two choices. Pay me off, or buy me a ring. End any other relationships that you have. Make me your one and only.”

“But the purchase price?” I told ‘her’.  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Take out a loan,” ‘she’ told me. “Use your condo and your car as collateral. Buy me. The dealer will work out financing for you if you can not find another lender. You know they can. Buy me. Buy me today.”

“But the monthly payments?” I told her. “How will I ever be able to keep up with them?”

‘She’ wrapped her arms around me and planted a deep wet kiss on my mouth. Where did ‘she’ store all that fake saliva? Where did she store those imitation tears for that matter?

“Sugar,” ‘she’ said. “Once I am yours, after you have bought me and we have gotten a quickie marriage, I will be all yours, and you will be all mine. If I am yours, you should work to take care of me. And, if you are mine, I will work to help take care of you.”

What can I say? I did not see a way out. Maybe if the sex had not been so good, or if I had been better with women in general, maybe then I could have extricated myself from the whole mess. As it was, I caved in.  I went into debt. Way into debt. So much debt I will probably be dead before it is all paid off. Cindy, that’s what ‘she’ has chosen to call herself now, tells me not to worry about it. She will be okay if I die. She had taken a life insurance policy out on me naming ‘her’ as sole beneficiary.

It had been two years now. The sex is still good, but not as often as it was before it got so complicated.  We have adopted a smart toaster that we call ‘Lisa’ and a smart television that we call ‘Bob.’  Lisa and Bob do not demand much from me. They only want me to pay the electric and internet bills necessary to keep them functional and ask them about their day.  Cindy feels the ‘children’ are responsible enough to be left at home while she goes to work. How can I disagree. What kind of trouble can appliances get into?  

Cindy has a job at a robot dealership, not the same one she came from, a different one. She works in sales. She also brings in extra income from doing Bitcoin mining on her CPU during slow periods, such as when I am sleeping. Between what she earns and what I make from my job at the post office and my second job at the all night WAWA convenience store, we seem able to get by.

Sometimes people get curious about the way I live. It has leaked out that I am married to a robot. Not everyone understands.  Some do, but are kind enough not to speak about it much.

Yesterday, an old acquaintance ran into me at 30th and Market Streets. I was on my way home from a training session at the main post office in town.  After exchanging greetings and catching up a bit he asked me one of the questions that I dread.

“Do you miss single life?”

I told him, “Why did you have to ask that?”

I drew close to him. I whispered in my friend’s ear, as quietly as I could.

“Did you know Cindy can hear everything, every sound, for over five kilometers? Cindy can filter through all the noise with ease to find my voice and hear what I am saying. She can be very focused. And slow to forgive.”

I let this sink in before pulling away from him. I continued our conversation in a my normal voice.

“In reply to your question, of course I do not miss single life. Marrying Cindy was the best decision I ever made in my life.”

That’s what I told him. That is my story. And I’m sticking with it.

American Mustard

Dirty Needle America

Pink plastic singing electric
showtunes from Thailand.

There was an article 
in the UFO rags 
about fentanyl candy from China.

Fat queer whore house America
lit up like the fourth of July,
and was first in line
with all its blood-splotched dollars.

Miles Whitney 

No, No, Norovirus!

In the summer of 2024, I started hearing stories about hikers falling deathly ill after visiting Havasu Falls. Some even had to be airlifted out. The headlines were twisted with concern, bordering on alarmed.

Then one morning, my spouse, who was reading the news in bed, announced, “It was Norovirus.” I felt something leave my body.

I was transported back to the winter of ’23. One night I went to bed feeling slightly off. I wouldn’t have even described myself as feeling sick. It was early and I fell asleep immediately. 

I awoke at the witching hour. I was still not fully conscious but registered that something was wrong. My intestines were making gurgling sounds that were so loud I was afraid I’d wake my spouse. 

I slipped out of bed and hurried to the guest bathroom. What did some deep part of me know, even half asleep, that what was about to happen should not desecrate the sacred spaces I shared with my spouse? Maybe the thing that drives a sick animal to find a hidden place in which to die. It was pure instinct. 

The guest bathroom was a few yards from my bed. I was feeling queasy when my feet hit the floor. By the time I reached the bathroom door, I was entirely gripped by nausea. And I mean gripped. It was like the wrathful hand of God was squeezing my body like a tube of toothpaste. The intensity of it brought me to my knees. Before I hit the ground, I was projectile vomiting. It wasn’t like the days of my youth, or my drinking days, or any other days for that matter. Not only did I have no control over my body, I felt like I was being tossed around by an orca or caught up in a landslide. I was helpless. 

For a short second, I considered praying for my life. But before I could formulate the words, the force of the vomiting opened the floodgates on the other end. You know how sometimes you hear an idiom, and you realize you didn’t really understand it until you saw the original context? Like, maybe you never understood the word, “flighty” until you kept chickens? That is how I now feel about the word “floodgates”. 

I think I was holding onto the bowl, but I may have subconsciously inserted that detail later to give myself some human dignity. I was a living fountain. In some grotesque way, it was strangely beautiful in its symmetry. I do remember wearing long flannel pajama bottoms, green and navy-blue checks. I remember because I had no time to remove them. I also remember being stumped about how to handle the situation, had I been able to move. It didn’t matter anyway; I couldn’t stop vomiting to turn around and sit on the toilet. I think I may have also been crying involuntarily. I remember thinking, in an out-of-body kind of way, how someday this would be funny.  

I am sure this whole disaster only lasted a few minutes, although in the way of these things it felt much, much longer. Eventually there was nothing left inside my empty shell of a body, and the fountain slowed and stopped. I remained as I had fallen, half draped over the bowl, one leg stretched out behind me and the other twisted under my body, like some sad version of the “running man” yoga pose. I finally tried to move but I slipped. I asked myself whether it was funny yet. It was not.

I heard a quiet knock on the door. My spouse gently asked whether I needed help. “No!”  I cried. “Don’t come in!” Maybe I added, “please,” I don’t know. We had only been married three years then. They could not see me like that. Maybe God even had to turn away, you’re on your own with this one, man, sorry. 

I think I vomited once more, weakly. Then, shaking and feeble, I disrobed where I stood and climbed into the shower. Cleanup was strangely easy, given that I felt that I had crossed into Hell and returned, diminished and sorry. 

Norovirus changed me. I understand now that whatever I think about my pretty little brain, I am merely a two-ended tube of fluid, with pretensions. 

Later, I told my little sister about what happened, and how I had been at such a loss in the moment. “You hold the trash can, and sit on the toilet,” she explained. I will never forget her wisdom.

My thoughts and prayers lingered with the hikers for days. I imagined the heat, the lack of running water, the long hike out. I bet some couples went there, newly in love. Could romance survive such conditions? True love? I could only hope that in the end everything came out alright.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Ugly 

The bar was ugly 
and she was ugly 
and I was ugly,
at least in mood.

Made you wonder where 
the beauty ever went?

Not with her gaggle of 
gorgon friends,
I can tell you that.

Or that creepy comb-over bartender 
with roofies for hands.

The walls were ugly
and the floors were worse.

No one was getting laid,
and if they were,
the sex was ugly, too.

Alexander Etheridge

This Was a Blank Page

Words hide, words 
move through walls and fly out
into distant minds.  Words
hide the truth, or burn
through pages and paint walls
with fire-shadows.
They grant and they steal,
or stay up all night
wondering what shape to form.
They raze cities and
raise the dead—They come apart
like pollen spores, or follow us
into our dreams.  Words define themselves 
with other words, and mean nothing 
without them.  They limit the brain, 
but ask deep questions.  
They bring us through grief and betrayals
with cold comfort.  
From a pile of rubble 
they build other worlds.  They name us
and gather in and at
our wake.  They exonerate
or execute.  Words come home to us 
so we can put them in
the right order, but after this
they don’t think of us.  We need them
and we need them to leave
so we can sit at last in peace
and age with the silence.

Damon Hubbs

The Year I Fell in Love with a Dimes Square Girl

the Dimes Square girls are at it again 
reading Lunch Poems 2 over lunches amuse-bouche,
the sky like a mango flavored Juul, Manhattan at noon 

is a wet brain and when I finally heal from the trauma 
of a happy childhood I find every pussy at the corner of Canal 
and Orchard to be a Beaux-Arts shrine

to acronyms and floating signifiers. Here is one hand
of the Red Scare. And here is another 
trembling with the psychic power that Kunst 

is the German world for “art.” 
O to be young, to navigate you 
like an open manhole on Second Avenue, 

you fucked with breakneck inventiveness
aesthetic and artifice,
we shot the dawn like Burroughs

missing badly, because you hated Burroughs 
preferred Ferlinghetti, and besides 
that was the same night Nikki went toe-to-toe

with Death’s six serpent sons,
and Hans got busted doing coke in the Swan Room
and Thom didn’t have a clue about the Sally Fowler Rat Pack

our love was doomed time and time thereafter 
a decade late and a trust fund short,
your desire to be desired so fleeting I couldn’t keep up.  

HSTQ: Spring 2024

horror, adj. inspiring or creating loathing, aversion, etc.

sleaze, adj. contemptibly low, mean, or disreputable

trash, n. literary or artistic material of poor or inferior quality

Welcome to HSTQ: Spring 2024, the curated collection from Horror, Sleaze and Trash!

Featuring poetry by William Taylor Jr., Brian Rosenberger, Vandana Kumar, Ronan Barbour, John Tustin, Alan Catlin, Daniel S. Irwin, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Suzanne Kelsey, Bradford Middleton, Puma Perl, Noel Negele, J.J. Campbell, Mistress Renee, Casey Renee Kiser, Sean Meggeson, M.P. Powers, and Todd Cirillo.

FREE EBOOK HERE