Today Is Your Day

-Today is your day, tough guy
Uncle Pepe told me happily.
I’m not going to taste her before you
Because I’m going to sleep with her mother
Who is a beautiful widow from Cadiz.
-That sounds great to me, Uncle Pepe.
You know? Although this is going to be my first time
In which I’m going to plow a carnal field
I’m well prepared
Because I’m bringing donkey sperm elixir
And period essence
From my classmate Lo
Whose pussy, which I sucked one day
It seemed sour to me.
I want to be devoted to that chestnut
That girls carry between their thighs
With their proper little dick
And become a whoremonger as you.
-I can’t help you
To do your job as a macho man.
Don’t think this is
Something out of this world.
Even if she sighs and screams
As if she had an orgasm
You keep on working love
Until your love bursts inside her
Crying with joy
She is left excited and calm
When you take your plow out of her.
When Uncle Pepe came out from lying with the widow
He came to congratulate me
For he said to me:
-Their daughter, with whom you have lain
Is very happy with you
Well, you have behaved
Like a true male
Since today you have left her field
Looked beautiful.
When we left the widow’s house
The bells were ringing
Of the church of San Isidro
And I was excited
Because Uncle Pepe invited me
To a fried squid sandwich
In a bar named
Next to the Plaza Mayor in Madrid.

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

Featuring poetry by Casey Renee Kiser, Charles Rammelkamp, Brooks Lindberg, William Taylor Jr., J.J. Campbell, Tempest Miller, Francesca Miele, Andy Seven, Mark Parsons, Noel Negele, Davide Nixon, Scott C. Holstad, Jeff Weddle, Julian Thumm, and Damon Hubbs.

FREE EBOOK HERE

The Age of Vicissitude

Empty bird’s nests in front of an old-fashioned
gumball machine. Smooth fiberglass covering
one small part of a dirty garage. My aging face over
powers my brain canal. I mean the drain pan
from which the latest assortment of new and improved
insects crawl out the holes, aiming towards my receding eyes.
You get what you deserve, they cry, even though
they can’t talk except inside my recurrent nightmares. 
You don’t deserve pretty dreams anymore.

My brain is broken. Slashed like an old horror
film scene, retching and dragging my un-tight legs along
this antiquated, soon to be autopsied linoleum floor. 
Cracked allure of concussive gore. Bruised and confused
and wavering away from reality. Disabled runway model.
Old cat lady with swollen feet and scratches across
flimsy wrists. Another pair of cat eye glasses
falls off my head and breaks and the room grows darker. 

I might let the black cat sleep
on my bed but he keeps hissing as if on the brink
of attacking his best friend, which I pretend is me,
but I’m nobody’s best friend and never will be again.
The black cat will soon morph into another venomous rat, 
secreting an evil fetus that is born to die. I won’t name him.

I’m not a fan of naming someone after someone else.
I want everyone to be themselves, not part of another
herd. I’m not a ceiling fan except in that
repeated nightmare in which the fan lobs off heads
like a guillotine hanging from my bedroom ceiling.
I am connected to a small multitude of paper cutters
lurking in every room of this hostile hostel until
all the paper and visitors and viewers bloody disappear. 

I do not anticipate becoming mayor, I only
anticipate spiders on a wall all of the time.
My brain is brimming with ampersanded eruptions
of malformed spider eggs or convoluted teeth 
trying to hide themselves inside
every blood-drenched pillow case.
My tooth fairy is running in circles, falling, 
stagnating, rotting away into nowhere land.

The men here are staring at porn stars
dressed like scantily clad tooth fairies,
offering special treats for all their teeth,
open wide and see the holes.
The men here are drawn to porn stars more
than 20+ years younger than me
or the men. My body parts are vestiges
being disposed of. Stuffed in a shut box
instead of poured in a shot glass.
No longer anyone’s fantasy, 
not even my own. 

Apply this cream twice daily
to make us disappear!
This cream is inside a bottle of wine. 
I drink it up, throw the bottle in my trash can.
Nobody will notice all the wrinkles I’ve accrued
because they’re not looking at me anymore. 
My bottle of wine stopped sparkling.

Even some of the men who say otherwise
have no problem jerking off
while watching women 20+ years younger than me 
and younger than their kids.
No problem spending their free time 
scanning through online boobs
above flat stomachs and shaved
wet pussies. Sticking their dicks in
young lovers in their poems,
naked bodies on their screens,
lines and curves of women crawling 
around their floor, shaking and spreading
and opening mouths younger than their daughters.

I break open another bottle then break that bottle in half.
Slash off my sagging breasts with shards of glass,
throw them down the dispenser, watch the blood
spew and chug itself down the drain. 
Nobody else will notice because
I’m not new, fresh, and purring.
I’m not a special sacrifice. I’m not a body
of christ. The saints died younger than me
and had tighter pussies.

My brain is surrounded by an exoskeleton,
but the inside is disintegrating, shriveling,
drying out, dissolving, breaking another sun
glass into shards of unwearable,
unbearable, unseeable, almost non-existent.

If not by my own hand, FAMILY SUNDAY would have murdered me
eventually. Tossed me in the body of christ
and made you swallow me
and then perpetually gag.
Then tied me up in the hog garden
covered with manure to improve
my ongoing dry spell.

From grim nemesis into dull into almost invisible, 
I sink further down in the mud
and drown underneath gutted ground
where nobody can see me anywhere.
Then nobody can hear me.

When I open my mouth, 
dying limbs fall out
from the space where more
Eucharistic cosmetic surgery
should have been inserted.
I try to un-repress myself,
but my jawbone collapses in on itself. 
My blood dries out on the page,
gets crossed off and ripped away.

Poems are dead trees sawed.
Body parts broken and dispersed.
Burnt out. Another nightmare fuel fire
followed by Morphia ashes swallowed by maggots.

Hacked, rotten branches dropped into riverbeds 
like outdated, eroding paper products.
Not enough bandages to cover up
all these damaged goods. 

I might ration one eye
into the old fashioned gumball machine
if I could still figure out how to open it,
but my eyes have turned the color of blackened jelly and mold.

***

(Sources: Aside from the Italicized lines in the first stanza, the other Italicized lines in this poem were taken from the book, “Casey Anthony, Renowned Trapeze Artist” by Joseph Goosey, published by Schism Neuronics, 2024)

Your Stupid Heart

Hey friend, tell me
what’s left 

of your 
stupid heart.

I want to know
what music

is yet within you,

what secret joy 
untrodden,

what scrap of beauty 
you’ve kept hidden 
from the thieves.

Have you harnessed 
the horror of the average day 

with some new 
form of laughter,

a graceful movement 
of the hand?

Have you learned
to sing like fire?

Tell me as we drink this wine

and cast tomorrow 
and all their dumb 

and empty faces 
into oblivion.     

Pictures With Cristy

We unraveled
and she asked me
to take some pictures.

She wasn’t shy.
She was beautiful 
and she knew it.

The way she seduced my camera 
made me jealous.

And my camera had its way with her,
turned her this way and that.

Ass-up, face-down.
On her back, legs spread,
horizontal 
and vertical smiles.

Like I said, not shy.
When I told her I’ve got her naked 
for everyone to see
forever 
in the lens of this poem
her wet lips 
smiled.

Poor me

Like a doubleshot of Kentucky’s best unlabelled
she came on strong, legs intoxicatingly smooth
100 proof breasts. built to spill
eyes so striking. instant addiction
pour me another
Sue, her name. Eager mine
We had 25 minutes to go till last call
time to kill and time to fill our glasses
My place was closer
Between drinks and tokes, kisses and gropes
her story, like our clothes unraveled
old school heartache
sadness and survival
country trash turned urban myth 
when she gripped my
not-so-long neck with lips cherry red
I believed the legend
but before the beast
in me became
the beast in her

b     l     a     c     k     o     u     t

Wakefulness
proved educational
the Southern Baptist ping pong tournament
in my head indicated way too much to drink
the wig on the chair, like a long black veil
appearances can be deceiving
Sue’s dick and the sheer size of it…
nature does not play fair and the southern discomfort
my ass was feeling that hell ain’t heaven
and I’ll be damned if Ring of Fire
ever sounds the same

wronged

a dead baby 
floating downriver 
eyes unseeing 
somewhere 
a man strangles 
his wife & kids
pass me another 
beer, would you?
he died in jail. 
they got him 
just like they 
promised 
they would. 
his 
mom probably has 
him sitting on the 
tv at home, a 
nice frame around 
the photo.
i’m sitting by a little 
fish pond, watching 
the fish vie for 
dominance. the 
big ones are winning. 
reminds me of jail.
i slid a piece 
of broken glass 
down my arms 
slowly, slowly 
and the blood 
flowed gently 
until it formed 
a mural on my 
arm.
just call me an 
artist.
Bukowski was wrong. 
these words 
don’t 
matter. 
you pound them out 
and send them off 
and they’re gone 
just like that and 
all you’re left 
with is a blank 
screen staring you 
in the face.

Crash Victim, 1965

The lone occupant and fatality was the driver,
extracted from the remains of his Chevrolet Impala
that crumpled head-on against the unsuspecting lamppost.
His car radio, fractured and bloodied as he,
was still playing a song by The Supremes.
There was no evidence that it was a case of DUI,
and the last words that he struggled to whisper on the stretcher
were a justification on why he ran the red light: I only stop
in the name of . . .

Of Parties and Awards

Too many poets smiling from back covers
quilts festooned with praise
too many dedications to estranged wives, hated husbands,
once innocent children, forever guilty parents
the usual weeds that stifle Bosch-like imagination
and now twitter, this moment’s rage
preempting the tweets of undomesticated birds
with the cawing of the art

I
a singular curmudgeon in my own eyes
dismiss the sisterhood of clucking hens
that praise everything like an over-conscientious mother
and syllablelize so insincere “ohs!”
as if each poem was baked with such love
that serendipity licked the world clean
the pristine vistas were all of enchanted harbor views
even the grief departed on a Cleopatra barge

and that silence, that place-setting without my name
that surprise that walked through the front doors
the lifted eyebrow, a monumental nudge of recognition
soon lowered by those infinitely false lashes
batting welcome like dust under a rug

my buddies, those rough drunken louts
await for descriptions of how the broads broadened their formals
the golden imitation silk narrowed into two straps
each holding the girder for those mammary treasures
that only poetry could grip at their nipples gently
and moisten and playfully chew and suck
primordial conscious adult joy

the veneer of civilization is thin
and the fancy dresses, the uniform tuxedoes
only hide the naked orgy of procreation, survival
like religion clothes the body’s death with mythic
smokes and scents into a rarefied undulating imaginative heaven
where doilies hold glasses of ambrosial adoration
and God is a light show like years back Janis at the Filmore

the poets at this party of awards, recognition, reverence
get not to talk but to sit like a musician’s score
and their part, this chorus of so serious moon-faces,
is to applaud, is to nod the head, as if each node of language
weighted the balance of expectation and memory
into that momentary echo, that riotous polite nod
of an empty head or one so demonstrative
of its own good taste—ah, the eyes closed reaction
of poetic orgasm, of social approbation, of spontaneous
murmuring from an intelligentsian heart, so educated
and degree’d agreeable in the community of
approved art—Art—the art of using words
like arranging place-settings, the rolled up napkin,
the perfectly planed napkin ring,
the pleasant pheasanted good china, the shining silverware
elegantly patterned as if Boucher were a smith

I
certainly a body of gluttonous appetite shrink into a corner
sipping a glass of water, watch while almost hidden by a column
and with others in the overflowing crowd, take all the beautiful in
with lust and hunger and thirst and inordinate unexplainable frenzy
as if a woodwind or a reed or a string atremble
with the jazzy improvisation of the moment
the swell of brotherhood, the identifying with the silver candlesticks
the medium to rare slices of a cooked carcass
juice tastefully flowing from each bit of pressure on the meat
like the poems that address the senses, the carnal feast of love
or the mythic mirages assuaging the knife of death

how civilized the pawing of women, the meows of their eyes
how they entrance me, like vampires their pride is nourished
with my adoring blood, my eyes bleed with desire
oh the imagination, devoid of any puritanical restraint
reaches its invisible arms and strips the society
of its pantaloons, and oh, if for only a fleeting moment
the dance consummates itself, all that death-forgetting,
that death-denying, that ego imprisoned in the solitary pod of skin,
the beans burst, sprout, shout in temporal exaltation
Hallelujah the bodies groan en masse on the shining hardwood
Oh, that moment before imaginative exhaustion and commonplace fact
return like the symphony of a left on cell phone
and the disrepair of a moment is too visceral
to continue private reverie

I
truly nominated for nothing but an early exit
or complete invisibility, am water left out in a glass overnight
and out of sight in the morning, not even a brush of wet
on the leaves of the social hedges

I
who am the beginning and ending of all my own personal paragraphs
clap politely for my art is the art of the extra, the nit of applause
the hush of sucking it all up
the river of movement and stillness collected between rock
and walls and channeled response, oh the irrigation of the arts
I am a drop of a river of funds raining down on the receivership
the universally universitied degreed, sealed, approved memberhood
of good experimental taste and outrageousness, socially accepted aberrations
and pushing the envelope ad infinitum eternibus ah-ah-opprobium

I
accepted like a dollar on the street
buy my stay in the arty palace of the rich, famous and recorded

I
after the party breaks up into many a ménage a trois
or retires to where it lets its envy down,
drops the formal dress and swigs champagne
with the grace of a construction worker
finally 23 stories down and relieved of all that rarefied air

I
become little i again
walk to my used car
dents, rust pits on the bumper,
rubber insulation peeling from the appointed crevices of the door
turn the ignition key
and hurry home to write my very own unpublished, unheralded
poem

I
spike my imagination with a beer
and the ghost of Charles Bukowski
the barbarian
 

Seth’s Naked Pic

I strip nude
Exposing bear belly
Dream tits and a black bull ass
And that’s all I get?
I bend and pull and reach with my phone
When the only thought is to position myself perfectly for you
Spreading my bull ass for a hole exposure
And that’s it?
Thighs spread wide on my mother’s ottoman
Jacking my fucker of a dick slathered in Vaseline on video
And that’s it?
That’s all I get?