James D. Casey IV

Hand Snakes & Fingernail Soup

maggots in the meat
puking reflections
dreaming dreams
of becoming flies

heads up
duck
goodbye and thanks
for all the fish

plastic mountains
under mind control
wooden bones
creaky souls

human teeth boiling
in cat bile
mind and body
blown away

alligator feet around
hand snakes’ necks
French kiss
pig parade

scabs on the dog
brewed into beer
turn turds
milky missiles

three cheers
for dead youth
mushroom cloud
confetti

coffee in a
crystal skull
pointing at our wrists
asking for the time

suicide notes
as paper airplanes
aurora borealis eyes
swollen and blind

angles mistaken
for parabolas in
the business of living
never follow the crowd

fingernail soup
testing the water
not all good things
come to an end

Arlen Russell

Fuckpig

Aside from a broken, bloody nose, Constance Gibbons was a knockout. A lithe figure, with pretty, vacant green eyes and toenails the color of eggplant.

Her husband, Rick, had given her the broken nose. His eggs were runny. After he’d corrected her for this grievous infraction — breakfast being the most important meal of the day and all — he’d bent her over the formica countertop in their kitchen, threw down the sweats she was wearing, tore aside her panties, and got himself ready to mount her. As a courtesy, he spat on two of his fingers and primed her pussy before he slipped inside her.

To start, there was always the brief exhilarated shudder Rick gave as he gripped her hips, and the walls of Constance’s pussy gripped him. At this point, Rick would slap her ass — often multiple times — with real fury and agitation, as though he were shocked and angry that Constance was capable of doing this to him, making him shudder and quake just by hugging him with her pussy. Rick would then embed his fingernails into Constance’s hips till he saw red blotches on her skin, and once he was over the initial shock of her engulfing him, he’d gyrate himself towards orgasm with no particular rhythm or skill.

“How’s it feel, fuckpig?” he would ask her between gasping breaths. “Feel good, fuckpig?”

“Yes,” she said, robotic.

“Ahhhhhh,” he said, getting closer. “Fuckpigs don’t talk. Fuckpigs oink. Oink for me.”

“Oink,” she said.

“Squeal for me, fuckpig,” Rick said. “Squeal loud.”

“Squeal,” she said.

“I said fucking squeal!”

Constance licked her lips, tasted the all too familiar coppery flavor of her own blood.

Weeee,” she said.

Rick shut his eyes and cried out, “Fucking squuueeeal!”

WeeeEEE.”

Squuueee—”

“—eeeeEEEEEE!”

SQUUUEEEAAaallll!”

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEELLLLLL!!”

“Aw fuck yes!”

He was getting close.

“I want you to snort, piggy, big ol’ fucking snort,” Rick said. “And look at me while you do it.”

She turned to face him and, without a trace of self-consciousness, opened her mouth and snorted. The lower half of her face was coated in blood and snot.

Rick shut his eyes and concentrated on his thrusting. He was so close now.

EEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!”

“Fuck yeah, piggy!”

The squealing continued. It grew whiney and hoarse. The grip on Rick’s dick grew steadily tighter, till it was holding him like a vice. The urge to come was momentarily stalled by panic. Constance had never felt this tight before. She was starting to hurt him.

He opened his eyes. Only Constance wasn’t there. He was fucking a boar. Unmistakably, a boar. Only a pair of pretty, vacant green eyes gave anything away.

Hell was an ammoniac slaughterhouse. Rick was up to his knees in pig-shit. Little white piglets nipped at his heels and curled themselves between his ankles, making it difficult to move without falling. Strangely, these piglets were without snouts. And Rick couldn’t see their eyes either.

He bent down to examine the little piggies more closely and saw they weren’t pigs at all but giant white maggots.

Suddenly, Rick couldn’t breathe. His throat was on fire. His nostrils flared and whatever was living in the air of this charnel house found its way onto his tongue. His senses of taste and smell were so befouled he yearned for a cup of burnt ash to imbibe. His skin was peeling. His eyes stung. His fingernails were shed as though being slowly torn out by invisible pliers.

He regained consciousness in the kitchen. It was dark now, but light enough for him to see the boar and what it had done to him. His knees began to buckle and he fell, hands clasped over the gaping wound where his cock and balls used to be. Blood poured through the slats between his fingers.

The boar turned to face Rick, its long, distended belly dragging across the kitchen floor.

Rieeeeeeck.”

Alan Catlin

Dirty Girl Scout

When God made cut-off
jeans and specially modified
wife beater tees and put them
on a woman with a Daisy Mae
body, you knew there was a
reason and a purpose to life.
That she could pound flaming
shots of whatever you put
in front of her and swear like
a stevedore, didn’t diminish
the package, actually added
traction, among the guys she
hung with in after hour, no
close bars. Used to claim
she was a girl scout in her
youth, the kind scout leaders
warned all the other girls about
and who was envied by all.
Was asked by one of the bar fly
mountain men she hung with
if she’d ever been a brownie
and she said, “Wouldn’t you
like to know.”
The way they were looking at
each other it wouldn’t be long
before they found out all there
was to know about each other.

James D. Casey IV

The Neverending Nothing

painted faces
painted on the faces
of a triple-headed frog
walking through the rain
whispering to itself
things no-one can hear
that only come out
at night

pagan free wild
ripped apart
for less than a dollar
trees stripped
bone dry
lissome beings
crying
under satin sheets
torn away

strange chords play
stars dance
asleep
inside the deep
everybody
wants to rule
the world
but the nothing
lasts forever

walls of amber
behind blank stares
black eyes
broken dreams
glowing embers
forgotten

too many things
too little time
great feast
rotting promises
smoke filled lungs
taken
chance by chance

odds and ends
stolen away
better safe
than sorry

Lee Kirk

Bad Pill

Rose poured
from her friends’ nose
as he pulled his fist back.

Near midnight,
halfway up Sauchiehall Street.
Under a neon casino sign,
he came towards us.

My screams were louder
than his shirt,
more feminine than
the girl hiding behind my back.

I used her handbag
like a shield,
defending us both.

The windmill for insignia
kicked in,
making my jaw sloppy,
my eyes rolling backwards.
Feeling sunburnt under
tungsten lights,
I felt something,
stir from my belly.

As he got closer,
you could see the coke
around his noseholes,
flaring like a mad dog.

Throwing a punch,
clipping my left ear.
I was about to strike back but
Instead I was sick, sick, SiCK!

Projectile, steaming hot,
all over his chest,
looking like an SVQ level 1 art
abstract island.

He stopped
as sirens got closer.

Looking down
at his shirt,
then back up at us.
Then he ran away!

She thanked me for saving her.
My breath pumping harder
than any muscle in my body.

I said
you’re welcome.
She said
her name was Lisa.

Two fire engines zoomed past.
I asked Lisa for her number.

‘Naw, you’re alright’.

So I walked away in slight defeat,
towards the smoke of where
the fire engines went.

The art school was on fire.
The universe can protect you
In the strangest of ways
sometimes.

Jonali Sorensen

Millennial Woes

An envy plagues me
Turning color to grey
I’ve always enjoyed the glamour of celebrity
Or maybe I’ve been programmed that way

Will my Legacy remain
Once I float away
No one can see
No one sees me

I’m just a pixie pixel
Adjust the brightness & display
Like a ritual
I put my hands together
Look down at my phone screen
to pray

Walter Ruhlmann

From the Depths

I would need the depths,
the immeasurable abysses:
the gaping holes, the bottomless faults,
the caves opened like mouths ready to suck.
They are regaled with the spurts,
they revel on the warm, fecund flows,
submerging the skins of the cheerful beasts,
on the disruptive, turbid rivers.

To hold back the currents in these gorges,
because drowning is forbidden.
Yet the flux goes beyond reason,
it takes away:
the leaves, the trees, the flowers,
the scarabs, the centipedes.

To brush the ground littered with corpses,
animals, undone, skinned, ripped.
A heap of rotten plants on which the slugs wallow.

Dubious surface, superficial am I,
the depths spit me back, vomit me,
no depth of thought,
I treat myself to no arpeggio.
I lay bare, bottomless, with nothing,
only white blood runs in my veins,
they empty slowly on the forehead
of a bitter and cancerous elf.

Wayne F. Burke

Lethal Beauty

The gun Mai Ling held in her hand, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, had come packaged in a velvet-lined case, like a musical instrument.

She slid the gun barrel into her mouth. The taste of the metal was unpleasant. Would she die, she wondered, or only maim herself? Instead of casket, would she end in some institution, sitting in some horribly drab common room before a television that played 24/7?

She cocked the hammer. Squeezed the trigger. The hammer made a loud click, like a door being shut inside her head.

She set the gun aside, got up off her couch, and walked out of her apartment to her car in the lot. She drove to the Sporting Goods Store, bought a box of bullets from “Fred,” a short overweight salesman, so smitten by Mai Ling’s statuesque beauty and long silky raven-black hair that he had trouble speaking.

Back at her apartment, and on her couch, and holding the gun, Mai Ling’s China-doll face grew pensive. She wondered what would happen to the bullet. Would it go through the wall and kill Mrs. Dearborn in the next apartment? Would it go out a window and kill some passerby?

She got up off her couch and drove herself back to the Sporting Goods Store. She told Fred that she had decided to take-up ice hockey and was in need of a helmet. Fred showed her a line of helmets. She decided on a black and paisley blue number.

Back at her apartment, Mai Ling strapped the helmet on. It capped her head like a melon-half.

She put the gun barrel into her mouth. Curled her finger around the trigger…

She hoped everything would go smoothly; she hated watching television.