ICAURUS DREAMT by John Sweet get rid of god and all your life becomes holy do you see? not every color has been named zero has no meaning in the here and now you count backwards from 100,000,000 and call it a life and what exactly have you gained? a ruined landscape painted in shades of red and yellow maybe or maybe the poison of the 20th century turning future children into dust a joke with too many punchlines, but you need to tell it like it matters you need to laugh like there’s money to be made like the war can be won or at least ignored half a million dead and the river jammed with their corpses the pretty girls all locked in cages not everyone is promised a future worth living through
BLUEPRINT by Kayla Keyes Why when we wear long nails and braids its ghetto? But when others wear it it’s a trend and fashion. Why is the color of our skin looked down upon? But others pay money to come remotely close to that same skin tone. Why when we speak our “at home language” it’s looked at as uneducated? But others speak it to seem “cool”. Why has our body features been teased and mocked? But others spend thousands to have those same features.
I know why.
We are beautiful. We’ve been told for years that we weren’t. Our lives have been treated as if it meant nothing. Yet, everything we do is copied. Keep being the blueprint.
BETWEEN THE SUN & PLUTO by Peter Mitchell I am a word-man. In my bedroom, each book is a planet of plot, characters, dialogue & setting: a solar system of words. Boxed under the bed, to-be-read books spin on their axis & wait & watch. It is the ever-patient waiting that words do. Some to-be-reads revolve between the floor & the bedside table. Gravity pulls them to rest on the bottom shelf as if an exploring asteroid. These worlds rotate next to the top shelf & land on the cotton sheet, exploration complete. Through the night, a pocket of light launches these stories. Do these words speckle the galaxy like celestial dust between the sun & Pluto?
LICKETY-SPLIT by Will Cordeiro We were high in kumquat season when the pachyderms had panicked. The adolescents, shaking like old biddies, sluffed study halls at hidey-holes out in the boondocks—’til they got shifty, then giddy, for a gambit of group frottage. Shoppers, attention please, discounts on paper-towels in aisle nine. Nine-sense, she burped. Nonesuch, he belched. Cloud nine, they purred. Beam-me-up: puns-and-needles, that moment we shimmer into the stardust of our atomies, as they disappear into the configuration of huge, Futuristic skyhooks. The Russian kind, I mean. Cap’n Moonbeam, reportin’, Sir. I gots a bigfat marble t’ shatter all a’yers, befer ya lose ’em, Serj’nt. Sputniks and knick-knacks, obits and orbits. Philosophy’s asteroids and demoted planets. Now guess whose hoodah flaps down like a flittering fritillary, ooh-hoo? Alas, they rummaged gossipmags, dredging up the last dregs in their flasks, frisking for the latest skinny on diet fads while the wobbling conveyor-belts kept rolling on and on… Yo, Scrappleface, you’re a real ruckus, a goddamn one-man roller-derby! I found your cufflink, but only one—useless by itself. So go ahead and goose me, George. Again. Again-again! Now fuck my brains out ’til I forget our safeword. Reverberating uvulas; a mellow sweetness, the tenebrously golden-brown of home-made applebutter. Delirium tremens of the whistle-tones, organ-grinders’ monkeys clapping cymbals, puckered embouchures, and every bright trombone!! Around here, it’s the kinda thing we call a “spoonerism.” Hags flung out, all the categories hung to drip-dry, like no sweat, huh? Each day, a woe-eyed Wednesday Friday Addams, softly but surely decays according to the rate of her half-life, perish the thought. It was a runcible profusion of M&M’s. Got that right. The nutcrackers’ tutus were just too-too much, though daggit! we’ll soon be chomping on buffalo wings, a-chug-a-lugging at the ol’ watering hole, with little time to think, with any luck. Todd’s lurched around like he’d been trying to sell tickets to a solipsist convention. Paper or plastic? Paper, please. We plunged into the shade of the flower’s shrapnel. Cars glided by us, a swooshing sound of deck-side shuffleboard. Hang it all, Honeybunny, let’s order Korean takeout and practice yoga poses. Elysium had lost cachet, had in fact gentrified into its darksome approximate with fair-to-partly cloudy intelligibility. Those old feelings you’d outgrown, a crumpled pile of abandoned pointe shoes. —You’re double jointed, right, or is that your Siamese twin? Denim came acid-washed back then with designer holes, like memory. Der. Sometimes, I even think in prose. Ba-donk-a-donk emeriti from the local clown college escorted us homeward, punch-drunk in slaphappy hotpants, long overdue for our curfews, which had fallen as invisibly as a giant parachute. Why, you’d even forged your own autograph, tho’ by now, we were in a different time zone, almost a whole leap year away…
BLACK FRIDAY by Ben Nardolilli Supplementing my precautions, danger awaits everywhere in my diet, the one time a year I get to declare war on everyone and everything is already rising up against me, what does it know? Is this holiday coming earlier than last year, just like Christmas? Insubordination is rising: clothes are tearing, bed legs are getting wobbly, containers of tacks are just falling off of my desk, and these are just the inanimate objects I’ve surrounded myself with People are becoming a problem too, all of them acting like they’re ready to show bravery in battle against me, cackling loudly behind the walls of my house and spreading across available seats, I should call the offenses off, if this is how they’re going to see me: as a threat ready to break down and advance against them, it’s unfortunate, really, and a bit of an insult on top, how dare they not trust me before I’m about to become their enemy
THE CURSE OF THE UNDEAD KING by Adrian Sobol In a past life, I burned my bridges for money. In another past life, I was a dog who owned a boat in a landlocked country. In another, my regrets were essentially the same. In another, two twin boys performed surgery on me (their third and therefore most evil twin). They closed me up and buried my organs where I would never think to look. But I looked. It didn’t end well. For me, or them, or civilization, really, in the long run. Believe me, I’m not taking credit. I know how this goes. You open one wrong tomb, and that’s it. You’ve unleashed the Curse of the Undead King, Jeremy—crowned at 2009’s infamous homecoming dance. You remember, I know, how we carried him in our arms. Passed him from table to table. Anointed his body with bottles of Smirnoff ice smuggled in from the car. His handsome mouth, hung like a box canyon, echoed back our laughter. It’s a shame what happened to him, there at the end. How no one considered how much confetti would kill a man. But I try not to think of that. Instead, I think of Betty, her dress, lit up there against the burning dance floor. As paramedics rushed in around us, she held my hand for the first and last time, and promised me that if we could get through this, we would get through anything.
CONTRIBUTORS
BEN NARDOLILLI Ben Nardolilli currently lives in New York City. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, The 22 Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, The Northampton Review, Local Train Magazine, The Minetta Review, and Yes Poetry. He blogs at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is trying to publish his novels. WILL CORDEIRO Will Cordeiro has work published in AGNI, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Nashville Review, The Offing, [PANK], The Threepenny Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Will’s collection Trap Street won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Will is also co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.
ADRIAN SOBOL Adrian Sobol is a Polish immigrant / musician / poet. He is the author of The Life of the Party is Harder to Find Until You're the Last One Around (Malarkey Books). He lives in Chicago. He tweets @yo_adrianididit KAYLA KEYES Poetry has not always come easy to Kayla Keyes but she strives to achieve expressing her emotions through poetry. Her pronouns are she/her. She is African American and is very interested in Black literature and poetry. She attends Illinois State University and strives to become a High school English teacher.
PETER MITCHELL Peter Mitchell (he/his) is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Conspiracy of Skin (Ginninderra Press, 2018) and The Scarlet Moment (Picaro Press, 2009). Living in Bundjalung Country (NSW, Australia), he writes poetry, short fiction, memoir, essays and literary criticism. His poetry is published in The Blue Nib (Ireland), Verity La, Bent Street and Soft Blow (Singapore), among other journals. Conspiracy of Skin was awarded a Highly Commended in the prestigious 2019 Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry while his first full poetry collection, The Loam of Memory awaits publication. His website is at https://peter-mitchell.com.au and on Insta @electricmoonpete.
JOHN SWEET John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A FLAG ON FIRE IS A SONG OF HOPE (2019 Scars Publications) and A DEAD MAN, EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).