Into the Ice Night

drunk mornings that smell like vomit
evenings loaded with junk and ice
blurry months where suicide was chased but never caught
the big brown dragon soaring through the flaming meadow remains free
priests trying to teach the words of the Lord
helpful naïve youth handing out Narcan in dark alleys
mice and elephants fucking in dilapidated shooting galleries
barfing in the kitchen sink as a strange woman’s taking a dump in the toilet
staring at the rising sun at five in the morning while shaking a plastic
bottle full of chemicals and lethal reactions
the vapor’s released into the air all that remains a piece of
ice meant to eviscerate dreams and engender grandiloquent nightmares
algid embraces that could never heat up the summer nights
a single pair of lips that turned even frigid winter days scalding
lost years of blurry memories
a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s somehow acquired
attending university while drunk and high
meeting people at parties
faces never to be remembered
names never meant to be recalled
friendships doomed to obscurity
a parade of people lost in the fog
nothing was there just blank years staring at
the window and it’s fucking alright
nobody to care for nobody to care for me
friends out of necessity
one-night stands that could never become anything more
Emily’s eyes chasing me everywhere
her late-night embraces were superior even to junk nirvana
no one ever came close to replacing her
despite the hundreds that tried
more Four Roses in the glass
it’s time to disappear into the night for the last time

Happy with Christianity

Space ghouls leer through the hatchback
rear window
rays of karat gold pierce solid buildings
gnomes emerge from under tufts of sod
clutching skulls with matted hair
frankensteins are seen laughing
in their lab coats
in Le Jardin
overlooking bays of swill
pumped out of their factories
Pimpled growths appear on bites of fruit
You would not recognize a strawberry
It is you –
not the strawberry
Beeves hoof up in a pasture
and many people think that this is the end
Then hockey season starts
the Pope appoints a bishop
a mayor brays over airwaves
airplanes they come and go
Boats still exist
Radiologists send bills
and hump the blond mons
So it was just our paranoia
here at the bottom of the world
hiding inside the curtain
here slipping on the peels
looking at that chunk of grapefruit
Fair enough
I need to sit and think it out.
No one mentions her.

My Friend the Pimp

It happened at that budget hotel
out by the highway.

Popular with travelling hockey teams
and horndog businessmen.

And my friend worked front desk overnight.
Seventeen and very gay, back when it was 
far from fashionable.
Had to open the continental breakfast nook
first thing in the morning.

The pay was first job awful, but my friend had a side gig.
Worked out a deal with the girls, so they could
bring their tricks back to the hotel.

They paid him a special rate for a room off the books,
and he pocketed the money.

He didn’t even clean the room when they were done.
Just straightened up the bedspread 
and rented the room out to unsuspecting guests.

So, you’re a pimp,
I laughed.

No I’m not!
he covered his mouth 
in obvious embarrassment.

How are you not a pimp?
You collect from all the hookers,
and even provide them a venue to conduct business.

I could see him thinking, my friend the pimp.
He seemed noticeably bothered by the accusation.

But that pocket full of money 
was hard to explain away.
All the fishnet girls that kept coming
and going.

He turned the camera around to face the wall.
I was surprised that management never
asked him about that.

But they probably all had their own nefarious things
to conceal, so my friend kept pimping out all the girls for profit
and no one said anything.

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 2025, the curated collection from Horror, Sleaze and Trash!

Featuring poetry by Salvatore Difalco, William Taylor Jr., Francesca Miele, Brandon Diehl, M.P. Powers, Juliet Cook, Andy Seven, Charles Rammelkamp, Casey Renee Kiser, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Jon Bennett, Sean G. Meggeson, Nicholas Alti, Maia Brown-Jackson, and Nathaniel Sverlow.

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Phonelight

After the party is over 
Awareness sets in
Like dementia’s wicked twin
The saturation of reality 
Naked as the sky
Shorn of its dream of long-dead stars
Instinctively, we reach for the nearest device
Dispel the pain with dopamine distraction
Of greater pains and the coming apocalypse
So we walk, ghost-hand in ghost-hand
Into a curated future
Under the life-caul of the phonelight 
We witness the end of the world 
And lift only a single finger
To put it out of sight

‘D’                                       

my grandmother 
kept her 1924 
high school yearbook 
handy
and whenever 
one of her classmates would die 
she would take out a black pen 
and write a capital ‘D’ 
on the top of their b & w photo. 

my grandmother lived to be eighty-nine
so in the end almost all her classmates 
had earned  
their ‘D’ 
my grandmother never told me 
about these people
and wasn’t one to write down her thoughts 
so I have no idea how any of these ‘Ds’
affected her, but if it were me 

I think I would get a strange feeling of power 
and satisfaction 
every time I marked a new one down
especially if some pattern were forming
or a column had been 
knocked down. you see the problem
with school shooters is they just don’t have
enough patience.

Fresh Brewski, Duder

You can’t reverse osmosis now, you soulless 
sentiment of loss, you can’t masquerade my 
oblivion of confusion, you can’t even forget. 

Spooky boo, ghoul fiend, want to slumber party
my little sludge buddy? We can wander back
-wards toward euphoria, collapse in a puddle of 
brackish acid. Tickle each other as we try to
stand back up, but we always fall down, always
liquefy just like and until silence.

You can crush this conversation, you can crush
a palm of grubs, you can crush a bougainvillea 
pink pill, you can crush a future without touch.

No function is fully pooped until I shoulder in,
gagged with a paperweight, open wounds all over,
sporting a rather Spahn Ranch ensemble. 
I cut the music. I scream in the startling language
of actual exorcisms. Nobody makes a sound. 
Yes, excellent. I put on my own music.  

You can crush this fresh brewski, duder, you can
crush any scant savings on bail, you can crush 
cathedrals with the full hymn of your hurting. 

I confess, I’m a part E-Animal: half cyborg,
three-quarters dumpster centipede, endemic
to stratums of critically higher altitudes. Spirit,
who scared you to death, anyway? No biggie,
though, my astral amigo—another data hazard
won’t really my ruined organ mend.

Pentecost Dickshorts

In the happy Spain of my innocent childhood
National, repressive, and Catholic
I believed wholeheartedly
When I looked at my cock
That the Spanish priests
Didn’t have cocks
Because my mother had told me so
Because they were apostles sent by God.
-Son, when we pray, when we sing
When Sunday and holy days
Are a joyful celebration of the day
When we carry in our crotch
The best of life
It’s wonderful to know
That beneath the cassocks of our priests
Lives and throbs the bird that died on the cross.
They are celibate, son
But not the German priests
Nor the Dutch priests, the Swedish ones
Those from France, the English
Those from Italy, the Swiss
Those from Russia, the Turks, the Greeks
Those from Portugal, the Mexicans, the Americans, the Caracas
Those from Chile, Peru, Havana, the Brazilians.
All of them, all of them fuck the same
In their accents, successes and failures
Whimsically
As if the winds were blowing bad or good in their asses.
-But, mother, I, without meaning to
At my Confirmation
I saw Father Cortapichas Pentecostés
A big, pretty, beautiful cock
Similar to my father’s
But nothing like
Uncle Flores’s Dapple-Duck Donkey
Who is a good donkey and knows how to bray well
Like the father in his sermons.
-Son, when you grow up
You’ll see that the member of our priests
Is the member of Christ and his Church
And their motto is to say:
“I hold it high up to the Lord
In mystical silence.”
-So, mother, when the force of Lust
Which is hidden
Overcomes me with its power, and wants to burn
Is it good in the eyes of God
When I touch myself and masturbate?
-Yes, son. When Lust breathes within us
When Love propels us into life
It is pleasing in the eyes of God.
-Well, mother, I want to surpass
Father Cortapichas Pentecost.
Priest, priest I want to be!
Take me to the Seminary of Madrid
So that, while I live
Condemn my cock to eternal silence
Although many saints, while they lived
According to passages from the Santoral
Earned from their cock
A clamor or a resounding scream
Fucking adults or children.
But what I don’t want to become
Is a pedophile priest.
-Fine, my son. Your cock will accompany you
All the days of your life
And will dwell in the house of the Lord
For years on end
Unless, one day
God forbid!
You drop out of the Seminary
And start looking for the whores’ shit
In the Casa de Campo.
-If I drop out of the Seminary, Mother
My cock will be my light and my salvation.
No whore will make me tremble.
One thing I ask of you, Mother:
To dwell forever in your house
Of Carabanchel Bajo.

The many depressions of life #2

My schizophrenic grandmother 
has lost her passport and her birth certificate.
She married when she was fourteen.
She bore her first child at sixteen,
it was no biggie back then.

Her age now is anybody’s guess.
She’s mid-relic level old
like a miniature of sorts,
made of wax and wrinkles
and as far as eye sight goes 
she barely sees halfway
across her extended hands.

She lives in a house 
barely livable.
She still washes herself with buckets of water,
a woman a century old,
and never leaves the house anymore—
a house with rotten wooded floors and tore up carpets
and leaking roofs—
A slow poisoning of sorts happens in that house.

One night she wakes me 
from a drunken stupor.
She looks petrified 
even in the dark.
“Can you hear them coming up the stairs?”

It’s a dangerous neighborhood.
I am alarmed.
I go outside shirtless—
nothing. The dead of night.
Some cicadas—
the unbearable heat.

In the dark she heard voices.
Wouldn’t let her sleep
so I always left the television set
on in hopes the noise of the T.V
would drown some of the disease 
that kept talking to her from within.

Ludicrous conspiracies
she wholeheartedly believed in:
“They’re fixing me to get married,
I can hear them through the window,
I’m not stupid! For Shame!
In my age? 
Your grandfather’s grave is still warm.”

My grandfather died 
twenty five years ago 
and I’m pretty sure they’ve dug 
him out and burned him.

You only rent that hole in the ground.
It’s a question or whether 
you want to rot first or burn straight away.

We’ve implanted fake 
surveillance cameras 
all over the house. 
All her five children live abroad.
We’ve persuaded her 
that no matter what, 24/7
we were keeping a close eye on everything.

It seemed to help her.

“Look at my phone” I told her once
and she leaned closer to look
and I said
“Can you see? I’ve connected the phone
with the camera in the room and now
You can see the both of us.”
She leaned closer, still. 
She’s so blind she smiles and agrees.
“Yes, yes. I can see us.”

Sometimes I’d catch her knitting 
and stop midway
staring at something at some corner of the room
or another—
staring with disgust on her face 
Something despicable,
something to be dealt with.

It isn’t the disease that 
torments this poor creature
the most,
it’s loneliness.

Most of the time she lives alone
with the voices 
and the inadequate medicine
or inadequate pension 
or those buckets filled with water.

Last time I’ve seen her
she begged me to stay one night longer.
Begged. But I had to go.

She said
“You cry and you cry and you cry
and then you run out of tears
and you just stare at the wall.
What else is there to do?”

Some people will never be happy 
as others will
and if some people can live
way past the age they should—
some live a tragic amount more.

None of This Makes Him Real

The gate slowly opens after a loud buzzing sound, the guard says what they always do, don’t want to see you back here again, next time he won’t get caught, he walks into freedom, free with nowhere to go, 56 bucks all in singles in the pocket of pants too tight, no one to greet him, no one’s forgiveness, he knows he doesn’t deserve, should have pissed before he was released, now pissing where he stands.

Looking up at the sky, shadeing his eyes with his hand, deciding it looks like rain. Remembering his highschool girlfriend, backseat romance, can’t understand why he has this memory now, his mother will remind him how he ruined his life, ask again why he dropped out of college? 

He and his little sister haven’t talked in years, can’t think of the reason why, it was probably something he said, but most likely money he stole, his bus is at 10 tomorrow morning, has a shot at a job as a painter. if he can show up on time.

All the signs say no sleeping in the bus depot, rent a cop gives him a glare, he steps thru doors to the outside, cars splash puddles when they drive by, his socks get wet from the holes in his shoes, everything he owns amounts to nothing packed in a garbage bag, a cop car slows down checking him out, the cop gives him the once over, he tries not to make eye contact, finds a small smile in between raindrops, good to know it hasn’t been lost. there’s a liquor store on the corner, he’s got nothing to lose, knowing none of this makes him real.