THOUSAND SHADES OF GRAY

Directionless by Linda M. Crate

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:05:12 -0400

once you were my star,

but now you’re falling from the

sky and i cannot stop your

fall no matter how hard i tried,

i turn away and close my eyes for

my love will always linger in the

creases of night’s void and day’s

oblivion and in my flowers that remain

in my heart; but you’re just another

scar after all that we’ve shared,

and my heart is growing weary of all

this waiting i told you i would

yet this love is aching with the weight of

the unknown crushing me beneath it’s wing —

perhaps i should give in, let your flames

devour me until nothing but ash remains then

maybe the ache that haunted me for

all my years of anticipation would be gone, and

i could accept people will never be the heroes i dreamed

them up to be when i once was young;

become the bitter queen of pomegranate clouds i

tried so desperately before to avoid —

why is it i always fall in love with emotional baggage,

is there something i think i can do to fix men?

maybe my heart is drawn to those that are beyond repair

like i am, and maybe that’s why i always fall into such

sorrow after the imprint of thier shadows are gone

from my soul as if their mere presence was

nothing more than an insult placed in me to cut and twist

as a knife until purpose is lost to the directionless wind.

Road by Pam Riley

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:46:05 -0400

800 miles of asphalt

assaults my nose tonight -

a gash in the highway

as my tires climb the road.

I can feel sweat pool

in my pockets,

too much of the day

still hanging on.

The highway could be my son -

sprung full grown

from my tears -

it knows me well enough.

Once it carried me to Fargo

the north star

trailing out of my tailpipe

the whole way.

I got as far as Duluth

on one tank of gas

and when the sun

came up that morning,

the road became an animal,

its damp fur

cushioning the tires.

I just keep driving

because destination

is a dying art

and this black tirade

buckling beneath me

has at last become

my journey.

decimate me by John Rogers

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:36:36 -0400

Release me from

this sixty year curse

pack me in

this suitcase

Dry me like a wet dog

Bring me inside

from this garden.

Wish on me like this full moon

Stroke me in the morning

Bathe me using

this special conditioner

Our love is like a fleet of ships

Our love is like the air force :-

Hit me like a drone strike

Decimate me

Wipe me out w/ civilian casualties.

I guide your hand

We always wake up

This way now

Love me like an airport

Land on me

I am load bearing

Load me down

Queue with me

We’re boarding

You are the gate

I am your excitement

Ascend through me

Like an express elevator

We are NYC at night together :-

Use me like this free shower gel

Use me like this clean towel

Dry yourself on me.

Sleep in me like our hotel bed

Open me like electronic blinds

I will be the

city at night for you

Wear me like this complimentary shower cap

Use me like these scissors

I will do what I can for you.

Play chess with me in the lobby

You are the rules & the board &

I am all the pieces

Take me like codeine

Keep me in your purse

Digest me when you need me

I am a tv show

About the supernatural

And you are green indoor fog.

Look inside me and

tell me nothing is wrong

X-ray me

I am a power cut

In your midwinter &

We are lighting candles together.

I don’t know how this happened

But I am your beached whale

And you are my beach

I am like the pyramids?

People used to walk on me

But now I am closed to the public

I am Iraq

You are the allied convoy :-

Come deep inside me.

glass of whatever by chase kersey

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:32:30 -0400

there is truth to the science of how the earth works

and i love that because it means i may one day

know the intricate understudies of your bones,

the variable, indestructible thoughts

you and only you are thinking,

the bound man at the bottom of the stairwell.

let me be the cool tall glass of water

that you are drinking   you are a welcome change to my material ways

a buddha two point oh and i am weak in my skull,

fragments lay around from the way you make me GO

from the way you make me divide and conquer.

i’ve seen your army amass on my stomach

and take me over with each ear as a point of entry.   i’ve seen you take a drink from my cup

and shiver with excitement,

because the secondly taste that you had

showed that the drink that i was

was tainted with a little more something

than you expected

THREE LOVE POEMS FOR A DEAD PERSON by Alexandra Naughton

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:52:00 -0500

my pestilence

my imagination creeps like silverfish

in dark wet spaces

feasting on refuse

refusing to stop when you don’t answer

you say don’t worry;

I do it like a job

overtime

no benefit

freak show

thoughts unreplied:

a half-friend from school who spoke wildly,

racing always, chain-smoking

spinning tales of her rapacious appetite,

swallowing boys whole.

I imagined her as soap opera heroine/circus attraction

unhinging her jaws.

like bowl of scarred tomatoes, too-full breadbasket, possessed

I envy her youth

[richer than my timid hours fortress blanketed]

not her self confidence, but how she exuded it.

her needs to feel, fill.

on scattered newspapers, cup stains keep time like fallen leaves,

chopped tree rings.

bare feet feel nature but thoughts of decomposition consume me,

as a drunk refuses water.

coffee stirs and sickens

it’s not even 8 and I feel like ending

love

I am the bath towel you use and don’t wash for weeks

I am the spit-cum crust on your roommate’s sheets

Consume The Exit by Lexi Roberts

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 01:37:01 -0500

Sometimes when it gets really quiet
I imagine the earth curling in on itself
Like an ouroboros
That just can’t help but love the fact
That it consumes
It’s end
So the earth eats its own
And I’m the last to
Go, and not the last to consume you
Sweet withering love

Guatemala by A. Lenkeit

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:33:50 -0500

in all my time
i breathed in so many shuttered blinds musty ways and dark rooms
open to my experience
and was trapped with-in
the existentialist narrative/crisis
never ceasing
never resigning
I just want to ssssssssssssigh
and die
like so many of the rest
to be within and what ever
whatever

The Courtesy Wipe by Dustin Hyman

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:30:37 -0500

For those who don’t already know, a courtesy wipe is needed when you’re walking around with a slimy butt and you need relief. It’s wiping your itchy ass between shits. No need to sit down, just bend over and get stuff out. For some reason, I need more courtesy wipes than other people, but I’m not addressing that issue here.

I had a good paying job that I was under qualified for. Feeling inadequate, I limited my interactions with professionals inside the building. I compensated by making friends with interns, janitors, and the parking attendant, Dean. If they wore a suite, I was a ghost.

My desk was far from the only restroom on the 3rd floor. I had to be calculated with my visits. I risked my anonymity every time I took a poop. I hustled through every bowel movement, trying to play them off as long pees to anybody who might have been keeping track of time.

I assume people in the office were like me and tried not to concern themselves with how often others went. But it’s hard to ignore somebody like Greg Benson (accounting) when he goes every twenty minutes. I never overheard people talking about him, but I believe they were thinking what I was: what the fuck is he doing in there?

The women always went in pairs. It allowed them extra minutes—people could assume they were gossiping in there.

Some days required no courtesy wipes. Other days…I could have spent hours in there messing around. It was during a bad day when I heard them singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Pam Edwards (marketing). I took full advantage of the distraction. I flanked the group and slipped into the restroom, undetected. They were having store-bought cupcakes anyway. I slipped into the stall, closed the door, and dropped trou. I wadded some toilet paper, bent over, and dug in. The toilet bowl looked clean. During my second wipe, the stall door flung open. I had forgotten to lock the door. Greg Benson stood there staring directly into me.

Drive-In by Meg Tuite

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 03:59:00 -0500

Every Friday night a throng of cars lined up at Hansen Beach in the parking lot. Someone always brought a keg. Someone always had weed. Someone always had a flask of something hot that blasted away a life in no more than a few deep swallows.

I sought the depth and strangeness of tunnels inside each mouth. I moved from car to car on weekends, each with an older boy inside it, searching for something that shoplifting and bleeding never challenged. So there I was at the beach. The waves were breaking inside my chest. I jumped into a truck with a guy who spent seven years never graduating from high school. He wore black frames as old and foreign as an atlas. He was shorter than me, but his bravado, his button down shirts, the smirk of his cologne had already pinned me to a place I had every intention of traveling to. I was already drowning and he knew it, when he put his arm around me and smiled.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

He palmed the back of my head and pulled it toward him. I was the rising action in his pants. My hand was guided to his crotch. We were grappling toward a climax. Mine was to stretch past the boundaries of my stagnant neighborhood, clutch at the borrowed yesterdays of girls with narrowed eyes, lips swollen with the vagrancy of back alleys, raw with apathy, while boys sniffed around them, waiting for some scraps to come their way. His erection was meant to conquer the uncharted territory of other dicks that might get further than his. Every guy in every steamed car was determined to get deeper than the one before him. He withdrew his tongue, looked at me with shadowed eyes and said, “Baby, I’ve always wanted you.”

I sucked down the remains of his flask. Alcohol molded my bones. They didn’t break anymore. My backbone hollowed in on itself and allowed my vertebrae to float, swimming in some boundless wreckage of a sunken ship waiting to transform the explorer who discovered it.

He unzipped his pants. He pulled it out. The beacon of the night was blazing up at me to guide my path. My mouth had never navigated this hidden terrain. Virgin lips were a high commodity. He stared into my bloodshot eyes. “I never thought you noticed me,” he said. “Are you really mine?” he asked. His pupils were full-mast as he swaggered through his script.

Myself said, “You are indomitable.” Myself said, “He will fracture without you.” Myself said, “You will swallow him whole and he will liquidate. He is the watery remains of foam against the sand. He is nothing without you.”

I lowered my head as the brain of his being raised itself up to meet me.

Common By Ben Tanzer

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 22:34:26 -0500

To say we are small and insignificant compared to the vastness that is the universe, is not to misspeak, but to say that a common person cannot profoundly impact the world is wildly inaccurate.

The fact that I always believed that I would someday travel into space is true, but to give the impression that I believe this imparts some special kind of legacy on me seems less than humble.

I want to touch the lives, and hearts, of people everywhere, serve as an inspiration, and show them that anything is possible, which may want to make both of us puke, but it’s true.

Still, if I am to state anything through either my words or actions, it is this, I have spent my life being curious, not just seeking knowledge, but imbibing on it, and continually consuming the next thing, and the thing after that, so I could share this knowledge with others, it is who I am.

And so this thing, this amazingly magical opportunity, represents the ultimate chance to be who I am, and do what I do, everything I care about encapsulated in this moment, or series of moments.

It represents something else as well, however, the chance to get out of my own head, because if it is true that I have consumed every piece of information that I could from my earliest days, and if it is also true that I always took my students out into the field so that they could experience the real, I have also existed in a bubble of my own making.

I have lived in my own mind, and hands-off in so many ways, intellectual, logical, sensible, safe, and pragmatic.

Does that mean that I don’t somehow value the importance of molding young people or grasp the awesome responsibility parents put in my hands on a daily basis? Because I do, and I have each and every day since I first entered a classroom.

And I treasure it. I do. But it is not adventure. I am no Amelia Earhart or Sally Ride. I am not free to spread my wings, but instead am earthbound and yearning for flight.

I know people like to say that with teaching, there is no safety net, but we should not confuse metaphors with reality, much less real life.

Most of the time there is a safety net of some kind, rules, systems, policies, families, social networks, norms, and mores, things that protect us from being damaged, even if they cannot prevent failure and frustration.

This though, this is happening without a safety net. This is epic and unbound. This is space. There is nothing above, and nothing below, but that which surrounds you, a floor, and a ceiling, and then what, physics, theory, hope, something?

No, not even those things, not really, there is nothing there, and that’s that.

And with nothing comes possibility, and in space the possibilities are endless. Yes, there will be experiments and communication with the students back on earth, but that’s the practical.

What you can’t know before you’re there is what it means in terms of your faith, your relationship to God, and ultimately the universe itself, for which we are such a small a piece, a speck of dust, a blip in time, though still part of something vast, now and forever.

To go into space and to avail yourself of its vastness is to become one with the very DNA of time itself, and part of the fabric of everything that came before and is still to come.

And that’s beautiful. It’s everything.

Is there pressure knowing the whole world will be watching me, a teacher from New Hampshire, that for some I will be a projection of the things they cannot at times bring themselves to think about, and for others I will be their Amelia Earhart, a representation of dreams both unfulfilled and those still being nurtured and finding shape?

No, that is not a pressure at all, what it is, is both an act of selfishness, for am I not leaving my family behind to fend for themselves as I pursue my own dreams, and an of selflessness, as I am making others dreams real.

And I gladly embrace all of it.

I can handle it, all that desire, and all at need, because not only do I possess those desires and needs myself, but in space you are weightless, which means everything you heap on me, even your unfettered hopes and emotions are weightless as well.

I suppose now, here, and still on earth, my feet planted firmly on the ground, that the most difficult thing may be what comes next, after we return home, gently landing in the country’s warm embrace, extolled for our fearlessness, and righteousness, for being the best we could be, which in this context means we will be treated as heroes, deserving of spotlights and love, and all that befit a god come to earth.

All of which will go away at some point, it has to, new heroes are born, and while the old ones remain etched in the firmament, they are not thought of in the same light, nor as often, and that’s just the way it is, and has always been, throughout time, and beyond.

Even more than the loss of adulation though will be those moments over morning coffee as the sun is coming up, or at the end of a long day in class as the shadows carve the room into pieces, when I realize that I will never wake again, nor drift off to sleep, afloat, and alive and hurtling through space and time immemorial.

I will be back to normal life. I will have the love of family and friends, and the crises and joys both big and small that comprise one’s earthly existence, but it will be normal, I will be normal, and once again my feet will be planted firmly on the ground, though now with no pretense that that will change, that something big will be about to happen.

That’s done. I will have done it. And it will be over.

I worry about this, I do, but I have always understood what it means to have your feet firmly planted to the ground, its importance and import, and I suppose it’s one of the reasons I was chosen for this opportunity in the first place.

I will come back and I will be the same Christa McAuliffe again, teacher, mom, wife, wannabe adventurer. The difference is that I will have had a taste of what it’s like to be out there looking back down on all of this

The Hand Strikes Eleven by J. Bradley

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 20:13:56 -0500

We bonded over tainting the water supply, glazing dinner plates, boiling pasta with hints of hydrocodone and Xanax. When my wife left me for a prescription, I shed the weight. When yours left, his sisters became your daughters; I should have told you then I’m not into Charles Dickens.

Hull by Michael Andrew O'Brien

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 21:35:49 -0500

it’s 2:45 am again

& i’m still under-employed

& i’m still looking at pictures of unicorns on tumblr

this is an attempt to nostalgically authenticate a childhood that never existed

sometimes i pretend really hard that other people like me

sometimes i pretend really hard that i like me

big enough to fall

too small not to cry

this time of night is perfect to replay all the awkward shit you said throughout the day:

where are you from?

hull

oh, i’ve never met anyone from hull

[awkward silence]

[the conversation changes]

in my defence i could hardly say to someone i met literally fifteen minutes ago

that i had a friend from hull called simon ash

we lived together in north holland for over a year

he went back to hull & over time we lost contact

a few years later i learned he was beaten to death on the docks

that’s all i know about hull

oh & larkin lived there

i never want to go to hull

i feel strange even thinking about the place

it’ll be light in a little while

& i’ll be hollow, metallic & pale

i’ll check your facebook page to see if you’ve deleted me as a friend

& then go to bed

i need to exist in your internet

i start work in an hour

When you ask me where I'm from, I show you by Pramodini Parayitam

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:51:21 -0400

where i come from the screen narrows whenever a leather-booted dude challenges me to a duel

and then i’m like “yeah, i’ll be your executioner,” and sometimes if he doesn’t get it,

i tell him his laces are untied

he looks down

i break his nose

he looks up, and says what the fuck?

i punch his mouth ‘cause cursing

is wrong on all eight planets including where i come from where getting

drunk in dark clubs is not just for John Wayne (‘cause he was taught to share, too), and girls are damsels in stilettos or buttfuck ugly with buckteeth,

AIDS floats in the air and if you breathe too deep during yoga,

you’ll catch it

‘cause it’s on top of that veggie-patty burger with no mayonnaise extra vinegar, lettuce, and tomato.

even if you don’t breathe it in, there’s a good chance

that while your farting, your butt will intake enough gases to where ‘yoursick’ will mean

‘yourfucked,’ will mean buying a solid, mahogany coffin, will mean killing the dude(ette)

who sneezed his snot near your arse

you should be nervous that where i come from

women fuck men

men fuck women

women fuck women

men fuck men

and you’d think those were all the possible combos,

but you’re wrong,

‘cause medicine’s a modern miracle,

so whenever you talk to a woman about a possible fucking,

make sure she doesn’t have an Adam’s apple

(unless you’re into that which is okay),

but by the time i get done punching the snot-nosed, cowboy-hat wearing dude,

i turn to you and you’ll probably just nod your head…

Darling by Dianna Dragonetti

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:38:00 -0400

***

Hello, faded lover,

sitting on a crooked stool in a bar somewhere

tracing varicose veins

You are all red lipstick stain on a cocktail napkin,

Ragged runs in a nude slip,

Patent leather shoes plastered with the grime

of decadent evenings and industrial decay

The showerhead is a negligent lover, no?

Unrepentant in his boredom

Wrapped in a towel, hide your shame

Hello, wilted sweetheart,

batting sooty cigarette ash eyelashes

at anyone who will meet your gaze

You are mascara smudge,

chipped tooth,

curling wisp of smoke,

You are the noxious floral fragrance left behind on a subway seat.

You are a tired, beautiful vacancy,

haunted behind those heavy lids

by distorted images of your son’s grave in the rain

Your eyes are empty sea glass, now.

The Misfortunes of the Clown Child by Barrett White

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 14:08:49 -0400

The clown child believes that thru a strict regimen of chronic masturbation and comalike sleep he has reached a meditative state, a sort of transcendence. Not blissful because it cannot be qualified in our way of thinking. He does not leave his room. He believes in the coming months he will become a mime.

He looks thru google image searches of deaf family portraits. He burns his allowance. He burns his dick with a candle. He watches his favorite shows on mute on projectfreetv.

He one day decides to cut his hair, buzzing it. He sprinkles it with dew from the faucet, wetting his jagged red locks just so, a little bit better, you know – a little bit different? A little bit better. A little bit different looks not the same. He read an article about gender reassignment surgery. He vomited into a to-go cup.

In the chair, he thought about chakras. He neglected his pet seal, which used to balance beach balls on its nose, and the seal died. Its bones were shitsalted and were pecked by gulls with mad red eyes. He hadn’t been out of his room. Inside the realm a beehive was whirring inside of a gap behind his nasal cavity, a constant whirring. A hallway of doors that he and his seal chased each other down, in one door and out the other, somewhere in the walls a labyrinth of rooms. Comedic music plays.

This…inside of my head? Falling off his unicycle, he breaks an arm against a coffee table. The white bone sticking out matches his powdery skin. Two hunters step in thru the shattered window. The clown child says nothing, is already a mime.

“Well shit, Jerry, looks like you got another one. That’s a double if I damn well ever seen one…well, nothin to do but go ahead and finish the job…mind the neck, tho…”

Jerry walks up and grabs the wounded clown child around the neck. As he touches it, the colors drain from its unitard, the rouge from its lips fade. With a quick motion, Jerry snaps the clown neck.

The two hunters open the door to the clown child’s room. They drag the monochrome corpse out into the hallway with them. There is a pile of dead seal carcasses on top of a dune of sand. Jerry throws the clown child’s corpse into the pile.

There is an illness inside me by Carolyn DeCarlo

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 22:19:57 -0400

There is an illness inside me. It crawls up my spine, fracturing

things. You can tell where the illness is by the way I walk,

sometimes with the stiff leg, others curved. Some days when I

wake up, I find the illness higher, rattling behind my neck like a

rainstick. When this happens, it will have travelled to my brain by

bedtime, a small thudding in my right temple, a twitch in my

eyelids. When I close my eyes I can feel it coiled up around the

lobes, occasionally snaking up through seams to press the buttons

in my forehead. The illness goes exploring. It makes me tired all the

time, makes me vigilant. I watch for it in my fingernails,

picking at their edges. It bruises my arms and legs dark from the

inside, numbs my toes. It rubs the enamel from my teeth and fills

my fingers with water and salt. It bulges at my wrists and thighs,

mutating my freckles. I scratch and scratch the illness but it stays

inside. I pick the trail of scabs and try to squeeze it out but it’s

always one step ahead. I rub its deposits from the corners of my

eyes or pluck the long clear threads from my eyelashes and pubic

hairs but it always regenerates. The illness is always there.

The illness is ever growing. The illness will never leave.

Know How Warm You Are by Nicolle Elizabeth

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 22:13:54 -0400

Start slow, let’s act disgusting. Say all kinds of prayers. Fall in love with a God. Chant and I’m in the heating vent. Make your life like a quilt, make it so it reads courage enough for two.

Giving Him The Business

The sum of our parts starts here across this map you make on me. In your arms I was a fountain.

If You Want To Get a Point Across Take Out The Sound

Ways of falling ways of failing this is how to spell my name: Play it til it breaks, show him what he can’t have, but give it to him forever

As Serious As Your Life

You call me drunk from the bar you walk home to me while yelling at girls asking you for a kiss you fall into your bed I am that bed I am that air I am this shitty cellphone connection I am waiting.

On The Next Tip

We walk over hot rocks two at a time three crows sit I think they are waiting, too.

I Will Die I Am Made Of Flesh

And these malformed bones will grow into chards of grass you keep finding on your denim.

Well Let’s Be Nice

There is a shadow under your eye and I want to sit in it and walk around with you I will tug at your bottom eyelashes and say Excuse me, have you seen the moon?

Instant Film by Murdoch LaMarche

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 12:22:50 -0400

Chris had received a phone call from his friend Ron. Well, Ron wasn’t really a friend. He was just some middle-aged guy Chris had met somewhere at some time for some reason neither of them could remember. They didn’t fraternize. They didn’t talk to each other. They were simply aware of each other’s existence. Ron wasn’t sure why he had called Chris. He just felt like Chris would be interested in what he had to offer.

Ron’s uncle, a World War II medic turned veterinarian, had died a few days earlier and, for some reason, left Ron a house and a substantial sum of money. Ron obviously wanted the house and the money, but the house was filled with everything the uncle had collected through more than eight decades of living. Ron didn’t care about most of the stuff. So far, the only thing Ron had found that he was interested in was a cache of old coins. He was calling Chris to extend an invitation to come by the house and look through the stuff before it would be thrown away. Chris could have anything he found except for money. Any money in the house was Ron’s. Chris told Ron that’d he try to get by the house the next day.

The day after the phone call, Chris drove to the house. The driveway was nearly completely occupied by a worksite dumpster that Ron was filling with pieces of his uncle’s life he wasn’t interested in. Two men were throwing broken furniture out of a second story window into the massive dumpster. As Chris walked towards the door of the house they screamed at him to watch his head because they really didn’t give a damn if they hit him with a leg from some piece of shit table.

Chris made his way into the house and greeted Ron. Ron showed him through the house. All of the plates and cups from the kitchen cabinets were arranged in a spiral on the floor. Chris paused for a moment to look over the glass and ceramic spiral.

‘I used to have mugs just like those.’

‘Well do you want another set? Take ‘em’

‘No. I don’t think so. No.’

Ron continued showing Chris through the house. One room was filled from floor to ceiling with copies of old journals of veterinary medicine. Another room was just an empty table with a cardboard box in the center. The box was the only thing Ron had found so far that he cared anything about.

‘I’ve gotta give it to the old bastard. He had some really nice coins.’

Ron was a numismatist. Ron also had a gambling problem. He would buy entire coin collections sight unseen from people at swap meets. Occasionally he would get something valuable, but not often. Ron’s wife had threatened to take their kids and leave him over his more traditional gambling, so he had switched to betting on coin collections. So far she hadn’t figured out why he kept coming home with boxes filled with coins. She just thought he was really into coins.

‘And, no, you can’t have any of these. Actually, here, you can have this.’

Ron handed Chris a silver dollar.

‘Okay. I guess there’s one room left for you to see. Are you sure you haven’t seen anything you want so far?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Okay, well, the last room is the son of bitch’s office.’

They walked into the office at the far end of the house. Chris looked over the bookcase. It was filled with a surprising number of instructional manuals on sex, illustrated guides to sex, and just general sex-related books. The sex books had their own section, separated from the textbooks on parasitology and large animal muscular structure. Chris laughed and pointed at the sex section.

‘Jesus, I hope those weren’t part of his practice.’

‘Shit, I hope not.’

Chris found a leather case on the shelf. He opened it up and found a camera. One of those old Polaroid land cameras. The ones with the bellows from the 60s or 70s, he wasn’t sure which. Before he could ask, Ron spoke up.

‘Yeah, obviously you can have that. What the fuck am I going to do with it?’

Chris was fairly certain that was the only thing he wanted out of the house. He thanked Ron, stepped outside, and walked towards his car. Halfway to his car he stopped and stared. Ron’s sons were standing in the driveway surrounded by stacks of dozens upon dozens of books. They were playing a game. They were throwing books into the dumpster, and seeing who could make the most shots in a row and who could make a shot from the greatest distance. Chris realized their game would make a great photo. How often to stumble upon children throwing books away unprompted? He reached for his camera, but stopped before taking it out of the bag. They hadn’t made film for that model for decades.

‘Shit.’

He stopped staring and walked back to his car.

Story of a Worm (Pages 37, 51, 89, 115 & 131) by Chad Redden

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:59:00 -0400

Story of a Worm (Pages 37, 51, 89, 115 & 131) by Chad Redden

My Early 20s by Amy Bummer

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 16:52:00 -0400

My early 20s feel so far away
I talk about them like they are a place
I haven’t given head like that in years
That’s what I spent my early 20s doing

Pretty much. I like the taste of cum
I’m thinking of your thick dick in a meeting
I’m daydreaming because I hate my job
I mean it’s fine but who wants to be working

The sun is out, we all have genitalia 
It’s perverse to sit inside all day
I want to bury my face in your chest hair
I’m not sure but I think that it’s a portal

That could take me to my early 20s
Are you ready to find out? Let’s go