Everyone’s in a tizzy at work over our co-worker but I’m not surprised. I text my friend, yo girl, haven’t seen you for a while. She replies, what a doozy of a week— District Psych Ward —phone use supervised. I think, doesn’t this happen to everyone eventually? When...
Issue Thirteen
Cottonmouth
Colin woke up strapped to a cold, steel table, wrists and ankles bound with thick leather. Bleary, he squinted to see beyond the mucus-yellow halo beaming down from a jerry-rigged fixture, his mouth crammed and eerily hollow. He wondered how they looked. How much had...
Gen X Suite
We are Gen X we never get old I mean we get old but we never crack like the rest we’re Gen X we look younger than millennials - sorry millennials - why don’t you plug in your car and cry - it’ll be just a sec til both your parents / still married come help we...
Spike
Tripp Towers, male porn star, sat on the bench, his penis in his hand. It was late afternoon, and his dick had been hard since that morning, when he’d injected it with the drug so he could get it up and get through the performance that he was about to do in the next...
Animal Shapes
Situational awareness is just so important. Even a momentary lapse can result in a 9-year-old in a black-and-white striped Halloween costume being mistaken for an actual skunk and shot. Now crime scene technicians in full-body coveralls are photographing the...
Woodcutter
Once upon a time there lived a woodcutter. Married well. Married up. Married into family of riches. Luck of right place, right time: out chopping wood, heard a scream and went running—all chest out and ax. Cut open wolf. Out came grandma and future wife, Red. My my,...
The “I” Poem
The I is the one who drives down a two way highway in autumn. This is the future. The I is a member of the LGBTQALMNOP+ consortium. Guess which one. The I is the one I never see but other people do. Because he is different. The I must write he is disabled. Sees...
Voices
She hears voices, but not clearly. And not in the other room, either, but from outlying districts. They seed themselves in her mind: Whiny and nasal, like early Woody Allen. Flat and affectless, teenage girls tamping down fires. Rich and scurrilous, rappers choking on...
Sombreros
That's how you sell sombreros, from the bottom up, truth to tell, Where a neighborhood girl with fine big thighs in little shorts[1] And a Mona Lisa face has one foot up on the second step Of her row house, her ass pushed out to traffic as she alternates Trying on her...
Ice Floes and Bipolar Bears
A piece of junk mail flutters in my hand, but a few of the words are already feathers torn out and sifting in the air somewhere between the floor of my consciousness and the floor I am standing on. Like the wings of a dead bird, the ripped envelope still hugs the...