Isaac Offski

Happiness

I’m happy
eating pretzels
watching K-dramas 
while out there 
the sub-zeros 
hurl their bodies from cunt to mouth to ass
never touching ground
distinct subconscious reactions to flightless dark ages
keeping their reptile brains busy

I love the am/pm mini mart
the foreign pours, hot & cold
the armpit grace of the feverish
gas-pumping proletariat
with no clue where fuel comes from
where cars come from 
clothes, sunglasses
their toy pets their pet bambinos
their fucking hot dogs smothered in corn syrup sauces

it’s bankable how gullible the general census is 
don’t bother to elaborate 
because buying in is such a special privilege 
leaving shock & outrage 
to those with “-ists” ending their pronouns

outside
in a blizzard of sunshine 
a desert leveled by moronic demographics 
ocean chock fulla tunafish sandwiches
just me & supra-partial contents of a Maersk freight container
why would I bother 
time-travel piloting a murderous locomotive weapon

I don’t need 
to get to where I don’t want to go
faster

Victor Pierce

Coimetromania

Always prepared, always primed, that was Anna. She knew it. Her fiancee Phillip knew it, too. Ready for anything, including what Phillip referred to as their latest “adventure.” Smiling through her 39-year-old perfect teeth, she corrected him. “Sexcapade.”

“Evenfall with crescent moon,” Phillip said with his usual poetic flair as Anna drove the black Wagoneer up to a decrepit gate, chained with an equally decrepit lock. 

He didn’t bother mentioning the gray clouds that populated the sky. He didn’t mention the gravel popping under them. He was too busy listening to Roscoe Holcomb sing Village Churchyard on Spotify. And he was too busy thinking about their plans, things to come.

Anna put the SUV into park. They stared deep into each other’s soul. Both had brown eyes. Both wore black eye makeup. She was his immortal beloved, as he reminded her every day.

Her brunette hair was shoulder-length. She was short and stunning. She was voluptuous, her large breasts supported by a push-up bra when they weren’t in his hands. Her ass was wondrously not small. And all of her was vampishly sexy in Goth attire, from bat earrings and necklace to her scarlet high heels that looked ready to stab, if not kill, to say nothing of a low-cut black dress that would have been perfect for Morticia.

Phillip matched her style that day, the two wanting to dress appropriately for their isolated debauch. His black hair was greying, but it still matched his black shirt and sports jacket, the right lapel adorned with a pewter pin in the shape of a raven. Charcoal trousers, black socks, and black Italian loafers. 

It was time. After getting out of the vehicle, they shared the load: picnic basket, blankets, and a bottle of Freixnet.

Twilight of the sex gods into Valhalla Cemetery. Entry assured, without any key, just by sneaking through a section of falling iron fenceline. Ever the aspiring gentleman, Phillip pushed it open for his true love, his grip befouled by recent dust and ancient corrosion. 

As they stepped onto the overgrown grass, Phillip wiped his hands, not clean, but less dirty. Anna shot him a lewd glance. 

“Heels,” she said, lifting her right foot. He pulled the shoe off, then the same again with her left, no easy task while holding a picnic basket. But it was worth it. Anna would saunter through the boneyard in her bare feet, if only not to trip and fall.

Remembering his Poe, Phillip lifted an eyebrow and said “senescent.”

“Me or the fence?”

“You’re fresh as a daisy, angel.”

“No daisies in here.”

“Angels?”

“Not me.”

“Not for the next hour.”

Anna led Phillip deeper into the remote cemetery, or perhaps it was the other way around. The perfect spot beckoned, even if it was yet to be discovered.

Valhalla opened for business in 1823. Phillip was the researcher. He knew. Anna heard, and she loved it. Location, Middle of Nowhere. Contents, corpses so old they weren’t corpses. Bones, maybe. Dust to dust, certainly. 

Six feet above the aging ash was a grand collection of large tombstones and gravemarkers, some featuring the winged skull so popular in early America. Several leaned. Others had broken into pieces, just like their owners. The cemetery was home to many less-than-monumental monuments.

The most fortunate residents had mausoleums, but that might have made them the least fortunate, certainly in the 21st century. Roofs collapsed. Walls crumbling. Interiors inhabited by insects, vermin, and the occasional drunk teenagers.

Phillip and Anna inspected the statuary, particularly a shrouded figure, its stone hood hiding its face and its gender. Stained and covered with mold, it was historical, but not necessarily an oracle. The sphinxlike sculpture either saw everything or nothing. There was no in between.

Valhalla’s overgrown weeds were new. Its trees were not. Here was a dank, humid necropolis, wind blowing just enough to accentuate the heat, just enough to indicate limited life among the desolate dead.

And there was that smell, not rancid, not stale, but a fetid mingling, the perfume of putrescence and the cologne of creation, the earthly and the unearthly layered into a grievously erotic aroma. The duo took deep breaths in order to relish it.

After quite a few steps, Anna halted with precision and confidence. Triple-X marked the spot. Dilapidated tombstones. One grave surrounded by its own small, wrought iron fence. To the east, a weeping willow. To the west, a gnarled and twisted tree, its biggest limb shaking unsteadily in the sultry breeze.

Anna lay the blankets on the ground, three of them, overlapping to keep the ants off their soon-to-be naked skin. Phillip opened the picnic basket. Two champagne glasses. He popped the cork. She gripped her smartphone and cranked up their latest favorite album, Bashful Billy’s Late for an Early Grave.

Phillip stuck his hand back into the basket. Three Godiva chocolates for her, each filled with truffle. A bloody rare steak wrapped in foil for him.

She began to eat. He began to read.

Phillip had chosen not Shelley, not Keats, not even Poe. He had printed out something unique, something folded and tucked carefully in his jacket pocket. She devoured the second truffle as he opened the paper.

It was Baudelaire. Phillip recited in his most dignified and seductive voice: “Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern/Essay the wreaths of their faded Past to entwine/The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine/Thy thought within me glows like an incense urn.”

Anna began to disrobe. “Say it,” she teased.

“Tenebrous,” he cooed.

“Not that one.”

“Obscurantic.”

“Nope.”

“Decayance,” he proclaimed.

Her smile grew, because he had uttered a word of his own invention. His smile grew, because she was completely nude.

Anna had cast her clothes onto the blanket, at least most of them. Her panties fell short. They dropped onto the lawn, a damp spot glimmering in the darksome light.

Phillip never knew where to look when Anna gazed at him obscenely. Her eyes or face. Her breasts or pussy. Or the curves that connected everything into a singular fantasy, one seemingly conjured by an archaic, magicke incantation. 

She looked at her best without clothes, wearing only her eye makeup, lipstick, and a pearl necklace with a handful of red gemstones that dangled downward, as if they were oozing blood. 

Anna licked her lips as she straddled a marble memorial, moving to and fro three or four times, as if she was riding a ghostly horse in slow motion. The grit felt softly hard against her vagina, and even better with Phillip watching. 

“More,” she asked, loving his arcane words.

“Eldritch,” he said, before adding “Cimmerian.”

Her eyelids half-shut with pleasure. He knew she was already close.

“Slumbrous,” he said, taking a pregnant pause before adding “Crepuscule.”

“God, more.”

“Caliginous.”

Anna had never squirted so quickly before. It trickled down the side of the marble, which bore a name, black as any ink: “Unknown.” 

Phillip read that word and offered his own in return: “innominate.”

Taking a deep breath, Anna dismounted. With her circling finger, she signalled Phillip to disrobe. In so doing, he accidentally knocked the champagne bottle over, its bubbles quickly soaking into the soil.

After grabbing the third and final Godiva, Anna seductively consumed it before grabbing Phillip by his hard cock and ushering him to the same marble stone, pushing him against it before kneeling. He could feel her juice on his ass cheeks. She smiled up at him, her teeth speckled by the remains of the chocolate. Then she devoured her next treat.

He could feel her warm, wet mouth, as well as the remains of the last truffle. He was getting “head on a headstone.” He started to laugh, but she interrupted.

With his cock in her mouth, Anna said “more.” It came out as an inarticulate, guttural sound.

Phillip knew what she wanted. He complied, thrusting in and out of her mouth as if he was fucking a rupture into another dimension.

And he spoke, though not much better than she had with her mouth full. “Sonorous horns sound into sepulchers, heard by embers glowing.” 

She removed her mouth to move her jaw. 

“Poe?”

He shook his head “no.”

“You?”

“New poem.”

“You deserve some pussy for that.”

They returned to the blankets. She got on all fours. 

“Heels,” she asked.

Before Phillip snugged them back onto her feet, he had the wild urge to lick a few of her toes. Combined with cemetery dirt, they tasted preternaturally sexy. 

He breathed inward, slowly, his cock leaking jizz. Exhaling, he shoed her.

“Eat me,” she said.

“The steak?”

“And the steak.”

Phillip removed the meat from the foil, holding it in his hands while gnawing away with his canines. Bloody grease dripped down his mouth onto his chin, and down his fingers onto his paws. Three big bites. 

The sound of him ripping into the steak thrilled her. She couldn’t see Phillip, which made him seem all the more ravenous. She listened to him chew and swallow, her titillation soon transforming into impatience. 

“Eat me,” she ordered. “Now.”

Phillip tossed the rest of the steak onto the grass and grabbed her ass with his ruddy hands. He licked her from stem to stern. They often fought gently over who loved it more, his tongue slithering up and down her crack, from one hole to another. 

But he stopped abruptly. 

“More,” she moaned, wiggling her ass.

“Thought I heard something.”

“Me saying more.”

“Before that.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know.”
“People?”

“No.”

“Tell me something, quick,” she said while touching her clitoris. 

“Ebon shades gather,” he said.

“And?”

“And I want to fucking eat you.”

Phillip smashed his face in between her cheeks, oblivious to the fact he really had heard something, if not some things, now unvaulted.

He munched. He flicked his tongue. He lapped and lapped, until another enigmatic noise distracted him. That prompted Anna’s next move.

“Do me slow,” she said, rolling over and looking up at him.

Phillip understood that slow meant glacially slow, except for the temperature part. Creeping pace and torrid heat.

“Siegfried,” she said, grinning. That was her name for his cock.

The two as one, locking eyes, before synchronously closing their lids, like a vampire movie when it fades to black.

Phillip and Anna remained in the cemetery, but now it was in them. In them as much as it was around them. They were encrypted and outcrypted on Valhallowed ground. 

“Speak it,” she said.

“Elegiac.”

“More.”

“Encrimsoned.”

“Oh, yeah, baby.”

“Triumvirate.”

Neither of them understood why he chose that word, but both of them simultaneously did, in this elseplace that allowed them entrance. 

Light rain fell, landing rhythmically on their bodies. Fingertips from the river Styx or from river nymphs. It didn’t matter. The lovers succumbed without hesitation. Bashful Billy was singing about “vast waves eternal.”

Phillip moved in and out of Anna as she held him. 

Her nipple was pinched so hard as to not be hard enough. It was not his hand. A crow soon cawed above them.

Something scratched Phillip’s back, so deep as to be like getting finger-fucked, but it wasn’t a fingernail. More like the tip of a rusty coffin nail.

He saw through the eyes of dead romantics, staring at long-gone women who passed through the past back to the present in the form of Anna, his truest of loves.

She envisioned men of different eras, gentlemen of the nineteenth century, goth rockers of the twenty-first, all embodied in Phillip, her cherished partner.

They heard the howl of wind. They heard something else. Not a person, but something that sounded pleasurable, something that sounded like it was being pleasured. That which festered now flourished.

No questions. Anna and Phillip wanted more, needed more, so much more of memento mori. Their mouths agape, dirt lightly coated their tongues. It tasted good. And nasty. They French kissed, sharing the flavor.

Warm stone seemed to move against their bodies, its shape reminiscent of a statue’s hand. The lifeforce of the dead. The hereafter was after her, or at least something was. Interred and instirred. Inhumation and exhumation. 

At times the presence definitely seemed male. At times female, being flowers, not of evil, but of mournful and joyful neverending remembrance. Bashful Billy promised, “This night is going to live forever.”

The stone hand went from monolith to monolilith, lavishing attention on Phillip. Anna felt sweet stings on her butt, as if from snake bites.

The funereal was fun and real, so it seemed, so it was, even if it wasn’t. Wreaths of a faded past had perchance grown vibrant again.

The sordid scene intensified. Weeds encircled Anna’s wrists, holding her arms down. She was uprooted by a root, as if being doubly penetrated, Phillip in her pussy, and something beautifully rough in her ass. She had wanted it. Now she had it, in all of its bubbly and somber glory.

Droplets like hot wax spattered on both of them, his back, her nipples. Anna imagined that it was molten wrought iron. She was probably right. 

Bashful Billy sang Beyond the Vale. Wind gusted, blowing everything and everyone. The weeping willow no longer wept. Where once there was wither now was strength, rigid and unyielding. 

Thunder clapped, as much with applause as with fury. Lighting cracked, striking the big limb on the gnarled tree.

Those present simultaneously orgasmed. The ground shook. Everyone shook. Had he been able to speak, Phillip would have said “effluence.” 

The tree limb fell downwards, hitting the ground. Phillip and Anna opened their eyes. Catacombed, marked by markers, they realized that an unfathomable third party had taken part in their party. Anna had not planned for it. Neither of them had. But it happened. 

When they stood up, their bodies were deliciously weak, their genitalia moist. After dressing, they packed their belongings. Once again, he carried her heels as they returned to and through the sloping fence.

“Coimetromania,” Phillip said.

“Your’s?”

“Webster’s.”

“And?”

“Abnormal and strong desire to visit cemeteries.”

Anna started the Wagoneer. Phillip thought about playing Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, but the ground hadn’t been cold. So he chose Götterdämmerung.

As they bounded down the gravel road, bits of stone sputtering under them, the cemetery became ever the more distant. Without speaking, the lovers agreed to return. They needed to. They had to. Fornicari in pace.

Daniel de Culla

A Painful Wedding

I was invited to the wedding of one of the daughters
Of a son-in-law of mine who pretended to be a doctor
At a private clinic.
She arrived at the altar dressed as a bride
Not knowing which priest was marrying her.
Beforehand, because the groom was taking so long
She went to confession with a priest
Whose face was hidden.
-Hail Mary, Father.
-Hail Mary, my daughter.
What sins do you have to confess?
-Father, I have a fever in my pussy
That pierces my heart.
Did you make love yesterday
And did your boyfriend rip your flower from its place?
-Yes, Father. But without my consent.
“We were going up the stairs of the house
And, like a lion, his penis got hard
Grabbing me from behind
Shoving it in
And I couldn’t do anything.
-Were you not wearing panties?
-Yes, Father.
-For God’s sake, my child.
 Don’t provoke the men.
They only thinks about getting laid wherever he can
And they even kill the birds and rabbits
The ones they raise at home.
Say three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers
That God will forgive you.
But, daughter
Judging by the way your dress is flowing
It seems you’re already married.
-Yes, Father. Don’t tell my fiancé anything.
When she arrived at the altar
The groom was already waiting.
When the priest approached the bride and groom
In all his Mass vestments
To congratulate them on their marriage.
She was stunned
To see this priest who, when a child, baptized her
Sprinkling the holy oils on her pussy
And, when a girl, at her Confirmation
Sticked the aspergillum in her vagina
So that, when she grew up
She wouldn’t offer it to any son of a bitch.
Since she was little
And didn’t know what it was or what it was for
Other than just for peeing
She answered:
-Yes, put it in deeper, Father
Because it itches.
When the wedding was over
The father told them:
-Pepito, whenever you want to enjoy
Pepita’s beauty
It must always be
With her consent.
And your windows and balconies
Must not face the street or the square.

Willie Smith

Breakup Number Forget  

I go alone to pick a bone with the lady 
gives me the strength to 
tear myself apart. 
In her eyes lies the art 
to give and to take. 
But make no mistake, 
she gives one, she takes five. 
Broke with her last week. 
Tonight we meet 
like sea lions 
to seal the deal. 
She says the only seal be with a kiss. 
And I learn what is obvious 
to anyone not in love with hell: 
walk away once, 
come back to make sure, 
is twice as ever 
hooked on the bait of kiss the witch. 
And when you taste the tongue, 
you know it’s done. 
Oh, my dear god in hell – 
can you not just cut me 
one break? 

Leah Mueller

Magic Fingers

Iowa City’s massage parlors
catered to forsaken gentlemen
of all vocations—truckers, day laborers,
shift workers, nervous students who
didn’t have time for girlfriends. 

I perched on a couch between two other women
and waited for patrons to make their pick.

Some guys liked blondes, others, brunettes.
Each chose a masseuse as casually
as he might select a six-pack.
A one-girl back rub with extras cost the same, 

no matter who supplied it. I started with 
shoulders, running my fingers 
along stringy muscles, squeezing flesh 
like overripe fruit, eventually working my way

downwards. The men liked to pretend 
I was an innocent conquest, perhaps 
sipping beer at an off-campus haunt
on an awkward first date.

“Are you a student?” 
“What is your major?”
“What do you do when you’re not working?”

They finally emitted milky streams
of pleasure, grunted a couple of times,
and wiped themselves off with a hand towel.

Afterwards, I joined the other women
on the well-worn lobby couch, and we
watched Rockford Files reruns until it grew so late

that Iowa City’s cache of lonely guys
had all gone to sleep: solo in a single bed
or curled beside their unsuspecting wives,
but alone either way. 

Josh Young

Heat

It was hot, an understatement I cannot
overstate. Meanwhile, good boys and
girls sat in crisp, cool air-conditioned
cubicles, with cat calendars and birthday
cake for the receptionist. We were dying
from heat, gas station diets, and
Marlboros. Their souls died young, but
their bodies would go on another seventy
or eighty years, assuming the
apocalypse would not happen before
then, just staring at blue screens, neither
alive nor dead, zombies in skirts and ties.
Sweat poured off my face into my eyes,
stinging, constantly wiping away. The
men fawned over the new girl, wiping
glistening sweat from her forehead and
cleavage, giving momentary distractions
along with the fights and betting. She had
them wrapped around her finger even
more than the boss. It was hot, an
understatement. 

Jon Bennett

The Water Board

I had a temp job
with the California Water Board
but I was a grungy piece of shit
smelling of cigarettes and Paisano,
a cheap Gallo chianti
I’d swig over my shoulder
as I crept along in my 4 door Nova
Those would have been the days
accept for
the unmitigated misery
“We expect professional attire,”
said my temp boss
“Is this okay?” I asked
“Um, I guess.”
My flannel shirt was purple and brown
it was the ugliest shirt in the world
Why would I wear
a shirt that ugly?
Because I was exhausted
and it was
the only clean thing
about me.

Ronan Barbour

Haunted

I miss them
their bodies
their softly yielding 
bodies
their lovely
lively
lips
that I somehow managed
to fill
for a while

But when I think of them afterwards
I think of their teeth
imprinted on me

Smiles glowing behind red eyelids
shut against the sun
buried in layer upon layer of summer
days
turned cold
I still yearn for
with digging hands

I used to only think how good it was 
to have many lovers

Now, sometimes, I wonder
if I have only become
the architect 
of a large, empty house.

Maria Barnes

But What Would Live Instead?

Without eyes he haunts you. 
He finds your every dream
and turns it into blackness.
And before he disabuses you of your hope,
he drills new sockets through your skull,
so a new pair of unlighted eyes 
can look into his silent soul
and see there nothing.

Noah Zimmerman 

Christmas Comes Early For Santa

Santa stares at himself in his bathroom mirror, jowls hanging low and heavy, his hangover written all over his sad clown face. Sad Clown Nimrod, the drunken king of being drunk, the joke of the North Pole. Mrs. Claus has finally after many long and frustrating years petitioned the court to have their sham of a marriage dissolved. A sham, a shame.

Santa watches violent reindeer porn and jerks off. When he completes there is sweat between his rolls of fat. He doesn’t feel like crying but he is crying. His doctor has warned him. You need to lose weight, you’re not a healthy man. You need to avoid stress.

The elves are not virgins. There are brothels at the North Pole, it’s a dirty business. The elves who can’t cut it in the workshop still need to make a living, someway, somehow. Santa is too high profile to go to a brothel. How could he look a low-productivity elf in the eye and threaten him with a year at the bottom of the well if he saw him the night before at the whorehouse?

Santa is not really their boss. Nominally he is but they enforce their own frontier-justice if things go too far, and they always do. “Go too far.” Santa grunts to himself in front of the mirror, watching his swollen lips moving, a pair of pallid slugs. “On Blixen. On Trollop. On Slattern and Floozy.” The elves, continuously involved in an endless series of blood-feuds. It’s the old story, no one can remember what started it all off, and just when it seems like it’s finally over it flares up again, the screams of children in the night as homes burn in the permafrost.

There’s an old joke: “The North Pole, where the elves are ugly and the reindeer wear rape whistles.” The brutality of the world is conveyed through short declarative sentences. The truth is Santa doesn’t use reindeer to pull his sled anymore. His health problems prevent him from personally delivering presents. The job has been contracted and sub-contracted so many times that Santa has no idea how the presents get under the tree anymore. He’s not the only one to notice this, there’s grumbling around the elf union hall.

Santa Claus goes ice-fishing. He enjoys the companionable solitude of the other ice-fishers visible across the terminal flatness of the lake, huddled besides their dark circles where the line of continuity from water to ice to air blurs. The fishing line collects tiny shards of ice, plucking them right out of the air along its length. Soon it is encrusted in icy fuzz. He warms himself out of an old flask. Who gave him this flask anyhow? It has his initial on it: SJC. The booze in the North Pole is made from fermented snowberries mixed with carefully rotted seal blubber. It’s an acquired taste.

The night sky shines colors, but everyone at the North Pole is used to it. Hawaiians don’t freak out over every sunset the way tourists do, Pisans can’t get excited that their tower is leaning, and elves don’t care that much about the northern lights. Aurora bores they sneer, those little shits. They are hardened, opaque, they are not crystals capable of transmitting light. At best a clouded quartz. 

The eternal night of the wintry North Pole lures in no tourists. Santa would like to do some traveling himself someday. But he’s confused about his finances. These details are taken care of by a comptroller, a squat little gnome who Santa is afraid of. He and his executive team do almost all of the day to day management, not just of the gift operation, but of Santa himself. When he last brought up the idea of a vacation the comptroller gave him a stare. He’ll ask again next year.

Santa waits and waits for a bite. Taking little swigs of blubber-rum every few minutes. Across the ice field is some other redundant version of himself, mild and uncomplaining, filtered out of the thing he created by the simple economics of the new efficiencies: Automation. Decentralization. Logistics. Supply lines in squiggles and loops unfathomable. When he wiggles his line it sets quick darting concentric circles reverberating out to the edge of the imperfect circle he has carved out of the ice. For some reason they don’t ripple back. For bait he uses chunks of smoked reindeer. He chokes down a slug from the flask. It feels like it warms him a little less each time. He chokes down another. Wiggles the line again. Forgets what he’s even doing here, what manner of fish he hopes to catch, what he would do if he did catch one. Chokes down another slug, snorts and shakes his head. There’s a heavy vagueness to it all, and he lets his eyes close.

Time passes in this way and each time he starts awake it’s with a gasp of cold. The shiver of the stars in the sky tremulous and distant, but lending their sympathy to him anyhow. That’s ice in my beard he tells himself, but it feels remote, as if he’s telling someone else. He knows if he lets this go on too long he may get frostbite. Mrs. Claus isn’t around anymore to send someone to find him if he doesn’t make it home for dinner, to stare at him with that admixture of longing and contempt. He thinks about that expression, wonders if he misses it as he slowly freezes to death atop a fishless, unnamed lake. No one misses him for a week.