Issue #008
ISSN 2179-8805
Aberration Labyrinth
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
October 2013
Issue #009
A Note From The Editors: It seems like GreenSubmissions has been having some trouble lately. We’re looking into alternate submission systems to help avoid the trouble you’ve all had navigating GreenSubmissions. We’ll post updates on our site. Thank you for your patience and loyalty! We hope you enjoy this issue. -AL OUT OF BODY Jeffrey Park
MAKING THE ROUNDS Jeffrey Park Hello in there, do you hear us tapping at your door? We’ve come for a visit, we’re so eager to talk to you. We want to make sure all’s well with you, mind and body, body and soul. A quick look around the place, help us help you allay our worries. Everything neat and clean and spic and span, no clutter, no potentially upsetting or inappropriate materials? Not that we don’t feel silly for asking. Come grandfather, come children, unlock the door, welcome us into your happy domicile. Don’t keep us waiting, don’t tax our patience. We don’t want to huff and puff and carry on and make a scene. See, there’s no threat or coercion in our voices. We just tap gently, respectfully with the battering ram, careful not to damage the paint. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. You know we know you’re there.
I had arms once like you and eyes and lips, nipples, skin, fat, cuticles, tendons, nerve endings – human things, animal things, decaying blood-pumping things, a body just like, quite like yours. I think I liked it in some odd way before it was taken from me, peeled away, burned up, purified – like you, not knowing any better I was afraid at first, worried something would get lost in the translation. But my fears were misplaced. I can assure you now that I don’t miss it, and you won’t either, won’t miss it at all. In fact, soon enough you won’t even remember how missing something goes. PLATITUDES Jeffrey Park Banal things people say like don’t worry, his bark is worse than his bite or wake up and smell the coffee tea sausage gravy or if they don’t want to learn our damn dialect they should pack the hell up and go the hell back to where they came from where their parents came from where everybody talks gibberish like them or I guess this is the last time we’ll ever see each other which was true. © This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
October 2013
Issue #009
Give Me Disease Billy Harfosh
"Jonathan Harker Inside of Dracula's Castle" Benjamin Welton I should probably spruce these entries up, no? After all, no one wants to know about the lives of Romanian peasants or the dinner fare in Austrian sleeping cars.
Today I started smoking I want cancer Not for the slow death Only for the sympathy
These days they all want sex and violence and blood and guts. They want to hear about Irish bombs and Mahdists run amok.
I have never been so alone I need you cancer Anything to divert these voices Lingering between my ears It hurts As suicide creeps closer
Even my lovely Mina told me to come back with some kind of trauma; some sort of sickness. She was delighted when I told her about vampires and the Count’s original sin.
Dear Cancer,
She jumped up in the boudoir and said “jolly good!” before seeing me off to Berlin.
Grant me a natural death So that my mother Will never think She failed
She is not here, which is for the better, for she’d be sad to hear about the Count’s pitiful state. He stays up all night asking for his old armies and his long lost throne.
"Sick Inside of the Citadel" Benjamin Welton
He talks to himself about the Turks and eats his dinners alone.
The headache came back today it’s speaking in French. I don’t know French, so I suffer without translation.
I am sure that within his coffin he weeps often for his former glory
Don’t we all, though? The mysteries remain mysterious; it’s still all just Greek. We, the Islands, have no choice
and his forgotten ability to terrify. The Gypsy children throw rocks at him and the bitter Saxons openly mock him. I for one leave him to his burning miniature minarets and his midnight dances on the parapet.
but to be mute against the tide. It will swallow us in time, and rarely can we gage the current, but we can see the moon
He is a sad creature, unworthy of my time. I should close this journal here and let this be the last entry.
and think: “Somehow, I know that He is awake tonight.”
The British reading public will be disappointed, and Mina will hate it, but one cannot create a monster
when it would simply not fit.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
October 2013
Issue #009
The Prodigal Duck Elisa Sims Mother Duck said quack, quack, quack, quack and you can only pretend you didn’t hear her so many fucking times. Stupid baby duck, you don’t have to come back, but if your bill says you will one more fucking time— I’ll rip your wings right off so that at least the sky won’t hide you anymore.
What Once Was Light Elisa Sims The Starry Eyed Pink of Romance sets in; darker, darker until now it burns red. Bitterboredbrokenbent, but still beating heart. Though my eyes tend to cross, they still balance the stars .
Evanescence Sy Roth Thought played Like a cavorting imp, Unrestrained, Struggling against the leash used to bind her. She mewled cat phrases While she tore at the frayed edges Of crenellated brain cells With her uncapped claws. All downstrokes, Ripped blinding synaptic gashes. A phone winkled In surprise visit And the thought, Scared child, Swept itself into the darkness, Darted away into the ether Lost forever. © This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
October 2013
Issue #009
Gollydigitalized Egghammers Robert McMahon
Fellowship Ian Schoultz
i. Hemmingway told me to bulletfuck warthogs and Bukowski, to get down as many pints, port bottles, and women as possible. EE toldme
In the butcher shop, I watch the swaying carcasses of cows bump their neighbors as if to remind each other they are still here. If one is cut down the rhythm changes.
to ex plore
And they all notice. There is nothing like the love of a cow carcass for another cow carcass.
phenomes and structure. Dylan showed the green grass of breakneck cliffs; Williams, Preemptive, hid Bukowski in metaphors of fruit.
If they appreciate the extra space, none show it.
Shot In The Azz By The Revolution Of Love Cattfish McDaris
shakespeare… ….he just annoys me…
When my lady is happy, singing in Spanish and French and I smell the perfume of Mexican vanilla, cinnamon, cloves, cilantro, and sage
ii. GASP! that’s like saying that im bothered by the single cells of the cenozoic, and their trite manipulations of evolution. but grays put poetry into will’s. overthought iambic hands, like no one in the days since the earthen fireball cooled thought, “hey. I shouldn’t lie to myself…” or “to live...or to die?” Im told he invented many words I use. Well, fuck if I make up words will I get famous too? Here goes: Gollydigitalized egghammer. No? © This work is the property of the individual authors within.
The cats are purring on the bed and the snow is melting and chives, garlic, daffodils, and grapes are looking at the sun with love I smile inside I no longer care how much money I have or owe, or that I don’t drive or my hair is thinning or that I’m closer to death than life I put another quarter in the parking meter, laugh at the shadows and think, my turn to pull the rabbit from the hat.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
November 2013
Issue #009
The Girls Visit Their Old Friend Ashley Stewart Marianne Szlyk
Gospel swoops and pulses overhead, but in this store it isn’t even Sunday and the lowest number is a generous ten. Humming along with the songs of praise, Thelma picks through the racks, studying the camo print wrap dress, holding it up to check the length, squinting, putting it back. There’s nothing in her favorite colors: blue or purple. And the hi-lo dresses are not her size. Callie flits, flipping through the blue jeans. She feels nostalgic, remembering striped trousers bought at this very store. She was happy to squeeze into them, just as happy to give them up and to shop closer to home where the music is thin and spiky, sometimes even in French. Thelma watches and frowns. It’s just a matter of time before that girl is buying Miss Ashley’s jeans once again.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
October 2013
Issue #009
Unorthodox Scott Bratcher Somewhat distasteful this collusion of Tingling and immersing able-bodied Waves, your shallow, arcane duties of Frozen belief. Where you faltered among Sprinting wax collecting broad axis to Sally forth, zeroing in beleaguered, Cost-effective breeding. It warrants, Merits, reveals, achieves and pretends Your boring circumference plays on a Little classic engine blowing smoke Sideways. Scale a wall and notice The brick joints, how gritty and these Broken, untried telegraphs where you Plotted a dimly lit avenue so that it Creates common sense, so that it sees You enter the firm, grand, ungainly gates And settle for unorthodox testicles. June’s Cleaver Jessica Gleason It fits well into my shapely female hand. Where once it may have chopped carrots or heads off of fish, It’s now stained with the blood of last night’s stale conquest. It’s stained cherry like my chapped lips.
Writer Dan Flanagan Write her Maybe that means I am a true contemporary writer For if I do not Write her I feel burdened Feel guilty for not doing so, Doing her I cannot scorn another woman who offers love And so my love interest in writing is karma ridden For I desire her strongly, seek her Need her, be inspired and treat her well She never repays me, never relaxes me, never satisfies me Financially, sexually, intellectually Damn you, writing But if Slim did it Shady, id and ego all Perhaps my background will drive me Perhaps my Kim will return with the fame. What I wouldn’t give for one unlucky dame to call mine. For the fights fuel me, So I provoke them, stroke her, she strokes me, I strike her Now I finally have something to write. She wipes the blood off her lips and runs to the fridge to grab me a Budweiser, She has been trained well. It’s time for a new one, She is growing stale, pale because she is too afraid to leave this motel room. So I kick her out, she falls again, Don’t worry, no one sees. She will float out to seas. Bliss, I will cherish the miss Kiss kiss, goodbye bliss
Cherry like the color of my mother’s discarded apron, the one I’ve resented since birth. © This work is the property of the individual authors within.
Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805
November 2013
Issue #009
Thinking about Charles Bukowski and My Daughter Laura Michael Estabrook Whenever I walk the tracks I come over here take a look beneath the trestle with the blue and red graffiti sprayed on the cracked walls and the piles of old rags and railroad spikes and bricks and broken boards and broken bottles and the remnants of a fire and a torn partly burned book and puddles and pigeons and pigeon droppings and today I've been working on this cheap bottle of red wine in honor of Charles Bukowski, may he rest in peace, and in honor too of my daughter Laura getting her driver’s license finally. I hope her life goes smoothly now from here on out and I know it can as long as I stay the hell out of it.
Kitsch Little Bitches Anthony Arnott Yes, your songs are pretty and sweet. Girls in skirts and boys in shirts and ties. You romance and dance, perchance fall in love with them on the way to your bedroom. Yes, your songs are catchy and cool. Smoking and sex and much much more. You cut to the core of teenage uncertainty from the viewpoint of one who has been there. And I know we’ve all been there, but not like you have. Yes, your songs are neat little stories. Life’s glories and defeats. About how the streets you used to hang on were like the streets I used to hang on. Except I never used to write about them. Until now.
© This work is the property of the individual authors within.
All artwork for this issue has been provided by Jessica Gleason.