Images

Images

murky sky smudges dark cloud black against faded sky

load roar - bus (gentle calm the engine sound plows)

rumble deep murmurs through high-pitched windows

conversations all-a-bubble-creaking

train fixtures move under chatter of passengers

phones light with

buzz-sound quick-tones world IS closer

- for a moment - fleckle fleckle screen-light

person on other end in view in earshot

plain sight of room

--Steven Mclachlan is a part time IT guru and part time writer.  He organises the Melb-Lit writing group and hosts the Open Mike event.

Malotoff breadcrumbs

Malotoff breadcrumbs
 
Licorice shadows with Minty toungue branches have strecthed like the
infared bindings that fuse us, twixt fate and the last god you spoke to,
with nothing to say but the in-action of pharoahs and anscestors tokens
that heirloom our meaning and pass on our sins like the malotoff
flames that pour from a wine bottle, a liquorice wine bottle.

--Tannen Dell is a writer from Tigard, Oregon. He is currently working on manuscripts and poetry collections when he is not reading submissions for Indigo Rising Magazine or at school for an MFA in creative writing and philosophy. Because of this, he loves drinking coffee, which has virtually replaced the water content in his physiology. He hopes you enjoy his work.

Hyacinth Western

Hyacinth Western
The sun set on rebels getting change from the Community Church
that arched like the Ice Titans spinal glacier, melting in the global
heat, the heat of the Western Sun.


--Tannen Dell is a writer from Tigard, Oregon. He is currently working on manuscripts and poetry collections when he is not reading submissions for Indigo Rising Magazine or at school for an MFA in creative writing and philosophy. Because of this, he loves drinking coffee, which has virtually replaced the water content in his physiology. He hopes you enjoy his work.

Repentance

Repentance
 
Cascading willow trees
A whir of earth
Out the deans window
A finger clasp to parchment
A ink entombed hand

The world is changing
This storm is going
To alter the history
Of the future

A present tense siloquy
Ragnarok harpies
Lava clinging grips

Only the Mastodon
Brought forth omnivoric
Cataclysm

Out the deans window

--Tannen Dell is a writer from Tigard, Oregon. He is currently working on manuscripts and poetry collections when he is not reading submissions for Indigo Rising Magazine or at school for an MFA in creative writing and philosophy. Because of this, he loves drinking coffee, which has virtually replaced the water content in his physiology. He hopes you enjoy his work.

Crumpled Notes

Crumpled Notes

My fountain pen scratches the post-consumer recycled paper. You ever just want to run screaming, I write, from everything and everyone?

It sounded good when I rehearsed it in my head, but on paper it looks whiny. I do want to run screaming, and I want to announce to my world that I am never, ever comfortable in it. But each time I try, it looks pathetic.

I write the word PATHETIC in block letters, crumple the paper, and toss it in the recycle bin.

I get a new paper. Funny, I write, how I can consider abandoning all human connections, but I still recycle paper to save the planet.

I read it and scowl. Not funny. BORING, I write, and crumple the sheet.

I stare at the ceiling. A spindly-legged spider is messing around, making a cobweb. I wonder if it’s a cob spider. Cob spiders are endangered, so I let them live in my house. Am I clever enough to have made that up, or do cob spiders really exist?

My lazy mind can’t focus, wanders back to the faint possibility of killing my wife. I don’t actually want to kill her, I correct myself; I just want her to have died. It’d be great to start over fresh. I’m told divorce is messy. Too much trouble. No, being a widower would be so much easier than being a divorcee.

That’s probably why I stick with her. I’m waiting for her to keel over. I get a little hopeful every time I hear about someone’s untimely death. It happens, they all prove it. Not everyone lives to a crotchety old age.

Last Wednesday, I write, I murdered my wife with a fountain pen. She was reincarnated as a Bichon Frise. I draw a face with Xs for the eyes and a tongue sticking out. I’m not sure it could look more juvenile.

I write CHILDISH and crumple my paper.

Later, when the landlord comes to collect rent and finds me sprawled at odd angles, he’ll open all these papers before calling the police. He’s nosy that way. He’ll conclude I was always crazy. He’ll tell the news I was always a quiet tenant, kept to myself. But he’ll talk about warning signs. National talk radio shows will advocate locking up depressed people for their own good. That’ll make a ripple.

          Really, I’m just giving my wife a hand.

--Jessie Peacock’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sand: A Journal of Strange Tales, DOGZPLOT, Beyond Centauri, LITSNACK, and Skive Magazine. She writes with two dogs in her lap and blogs at http://jessie-peacock.blogspot.com.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia

I swear my friend, this place

is a blight

on the landscape of the American dream

Dream is a buzzword    America is a buzzword

this state of my art

secession of mind

cessation of ego

product barcode

case number

bearded asshole paystub

downtown loft

uptown wardrobe

everyday singularity

eating at my sense

of that growing

possession of mine

it’s not yours

not the radio's

my past

my id

your fashion

this place

this ash

this dream

of you

you are a buzzword.

 --John Sobieck studied creative writing at Bemidji State University and Oxford University. He has been published in "Rivers Meeting" and "The Lowestoft Chronicle" and is a former editor of "Dust and Fire" and "New Voices". He currently serves as an editorial intern at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis,Minnesota.

On the Thames

On the Thames

love the open sky
loathe salt water
take the oar from the man
with the conifer beard
and fennel bulb nose --
right at the fork
goes to London and windmills beyond
left takes me home
to Ferris wheels --
I have lost my way.

--John Sobieck studied creative writing at Bemidji State University and Oxford University. He has been published in "Rivers Meeting" and "The Lowestoft Chronicle" and is a former editor of "Dust and Fire" and "New Voices". He currently serves as an editorial intern at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis,Minnesota.

Hungry Angel

Hungry Angel

A glass heart in a hospital window
A red light bulb beyond the street
Sky and ground as one
In the ebon furnace
the sanguine philosopher thinks and is
A flux of feral wisdom flexes into shadow
as the sepia-toned city exhales behind
Pearl robes and a peachy smile
hover above sterile lobby floors
Blooming brumal bronze and heavy
creaking on cables
ready to fall

--John Sobieck studied creative writing at Bemidji State University and Oxford University. He has been published in "Rivers Meeting" and "The Lowestoft Chronicle" and is a former editor of "Dust and Fire" and "New Voices". He currently serves as an editorial intern at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis,Minnesota.

Watching the Windows Sleep, by Tantra Bensko Review

Watching the Windows Sleep, by Tantra Bensko
Reviewed by Kyle Muntz

Watching the Windows Sleep isn’t simply about dreams—it’s an exploration of the unconscious and its integration with the things we perceive, utilizing language in gentle, elaborate waves, like a series of momentary imprints, one replacing another as they wash against the shore. Reality (if such a thing can even be said to exist in the text) becomes a point of departure, around which Bensko weaves a tapestry of images, until the distinction between what is and is not becomes meaningless, and all that remains is a sense of “having experienced”, in an almost blissful sense.

For the most part, these stories are difficult, if not possible to summarize. All feature fantastic, surreal elements that very interesting and unique in themselves; these narratives run through the interior of the pieces without ever rising to the surface, so the reading experience itself remains quintessentially nonlinear. Each sentence makes us realize that the possibilities are limitless—and we begin to wonder, after a while, why we ever thought they weren’t.

Here’s an especially nice paragraph, taken from “The Boy Who’s a Floating Flower”.

In one event, the boy is singing to you, in many worlds. He looks a bit different in some. He’s barely recognizable in others, certainly not a human form. Yet, though he may exist there as a flower floating in the air, hovering, changing your future, or as a twisting of enveloping patterns of some game with rules encoded on angles of movement, you know it is him. You wonder how you could have forgotten him from your future.

The text has a lush sense of peaceful ambience that I really like as well, a striving towards something nameless, abstract, and beautiful. The text is also accompanied by a series of images, which do an excellent job accenting the stories; the overall sense is of a vision coalescing, always taking different shapes, but never settling on one entirely.

The different shapes mean much on their own, but when they are intertwined in these steps, the patterns of the green exchanging with each other, they make more sense to each other… When the ancestors fly over, if they ever do, they may not understand it. But it is not for them. It is for the shapes themselves…The shapes of dying, the shapes of living. They weave together like singers on a boat. The shapes of water itself, the shapes of shattering oneself forever. The shapes of going out through a window and never coming back through it, but walking through a door instead, incomprehensibly.

Altogether, this brief collection is made up of a handful of short stories with one poem at the beginning and end. Each piece, though, is rich enough to be read over many times, and taken together they form a kind of mind-space, unfamiliar, deeply textured, and on occasion a little erotic as well. This is the kind of work, of course, that seeks to expand our understanding of narrative, or perhaps renovate it entirely.

Who is that person standing in front of the yellow rocks, in this very life? You go closer. He seems lit up better now, in the deepening sunset, almost as if flames were highlighting his features. He turns to you and nothing in your life makes sense.

…Perhaps each moment is a meeting place as powerful as this. Each spot of space. Perhaps this is each moment, each spot. Time, perhaps, to lie down.

The windows are sleeping.

The Travelogue of Dreams

The Travelogue of Dreams

 

It’s travel that involves no movement but that of sparks, crossing synapses in a sleeping brain.

 

Sometimes there’s a correlation to places I know: an imagined neighborhood in my hometown, accessed by a street I never followed to the end; a fictitious event at a fairground or vacant building I once visited; a secret room in my house, below a trap door, or behind a panel in a little-used closet.

 

More often, there’s no objective reality at all. I might step over the brink of an awe-inspiring canyon, and float down to join unsurprised tourists below. I might wade into the ocean over my head, with no thought of drowning, and watch sea life pass through impossibly clear water. I might drive through one entrancing, previously unknown city after another, the highway between shortened to virtual nothingness.

 

The one time I dreamed of an actual city, I went there at once. It wasn’t what I expected, of course, but I don’t regret the trip. While there or in transit, I picked up many fresh sensations. And I know that any sensation of my waking hours eventually contributes to the rich and varied travelogue of my dreams.

--Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California. He is the creator of the Micro Award, an annual competition for previously published flash fiction. Two of his short stories are MWA Notable Stories, and his first novel, Vow of Silence, is available from Trytium.

The song of my computer

The song of my computer

The best way to write is not to try:
let it flow like sadness dripping
down from the autumn leaves,
and my computer screams: "Let me
sing my song!"
(but computers cannot scream),
(doesn't matter, this is cybernetic
dream),
and the mirror shows me the fear
of the deer or the bravery of the crow,
My dear, I say in my sleep, sorrow
comes to us when the night falls
over the city,
dark, grey, irrelevant,
it comes, slowly, slowly,
embracing us in its gentle arms —
warm and fuzzy we feel and let us
scream.

--Peycho Kanev loves to listen to sad music while he drinks slowly his beer. His work has been published in Welter, The Catalonian Review, Off Beat Pulp, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He loves to put the word down and not talking on the cell phone for days. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His new collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is now available at Amazon.

While Shaving

While shaving

Standing in front of the mirror;
I can see no face
no body
no beard
holding the rusty razor
shaking in my hand
Am I real?
Foam and
towel and
soap
everything seems real enough,
adequate
but why I feel like I lost
everything
I took another glance in
the mirror

and it only shows me back
clock without
hands.
 --Peycho Kanev loves to listen to sad music while he drinks slowly his beer. His work has been published in Welter, The Catalonian Review, Off Beat Pulp, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He loves to put the word down and not talking on the cell phone for days. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His new collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is now available at Amazon

House With No Echo

I didn't meet Absalom the first time I huffed turpentine, only drooled on the bathroom tile, lying still until Dad pounded on the door and said he would feed Mr. Slithers down the garbage disposal if I didn't get the hell out. With nightfall, the house catatonic, I wrapped my lips around the nozzle and gulped down fumes until I went under. My lungs filled with pond water and I awoke in an empty house with no echo.

That’s when Absalom came.

Always keeping to the corner of my eye, he lurked outside the empty house, where I would learn to meet him. He smelled of animal bedding and shoe polish. He told me of my future. Through the fogged windowpane, I could see only his gray-blue haze.

“Why don’t you come into the house?” I asked him.

“I’m already inside.” His voice was like crinkling paper.

When I came back home—my ears ringing and clothes drenched in spilled solvent—I followed my future. I soaked a rag and held it over Dad’s sleeping face. He coughed and jerked but I held it there until he stopped. As Absalom said I would.
 

--Josh Goller sprouted in Wisconsin soil but the winds carried him to the gloom and damp of the Pacific Northwest. He now resides in Oregon, where he enjoys driving through fog and investigating the scratching noises originating within his walls. He edits the flash fiction electronic journal The Molotov Cocktail (www.themolotovcocktail.com).

logo reactionary, anger

logo reactionary, anger

:           social circumstance.  learned by ascertaining
quantitative person person person.  mainly
energy recompresses patterned activity |say a web’s auspicious pattern, 
octagon
slashed octagon opened silken pardon
of a gray’s illumined symptom.  pluraled supposition
                        fierce here minutes after going upon grabbing
                                    lingering mayhem; on, flavor
facing miniature motives
                                            most resembling a minute’s
misread interpretation.  fantastical
                                                            au courant
joyous detail; humdrum then walks across glass eyes
musing
                        misusing language’s basis for condoning
one’s elemental misdeed. 
                        sorriness follows foolish self-trust
emblem, praise of appraised
with undulating panoramic feature:
                                                      outmoded ocular
rendering miscellany overcast of staring optics’
       deconstructing
       frenetic hearsay.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored several collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009), Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010) and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Episodic Mirages

Episodic Mirages

Beginning

                        )morning mauve aptitude of function(
            stitched x’ng             humdrum factory ensembles
motions of salutations, existence sameness efficient though outside
box’s inexistent. To follow each verbatim sentence
                                                            opened angled glass

gradates stirred enjoyment flesh of hoary
mind changes.
                                    A single word replaces prose of unheard entreaties.
                                    Presentation unrolls left-right horizonal classics,
lightness heard by steps toward dissecting mode of a hand’s interlaced
determination. 
             Vintage sometimes calms animate claims sweeping o p e n e d [axis
unsticking malleable bite
                                                thrust through liking an I optimum
judged desirable location eventually awakened topmost
                                                  halation. 

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored several collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009), Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010) and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Separation of Nous, A

Separation of Nous, A

Sigmoid
            impression channeled curvature
proportion intimacy privatized
                        sacred conduit separated sanctity
revolves ‘round dedicated pressure
tomorrow’s unhopeful macerated wakening.
                                    Wandering fjord’s
relevance traveled, dissipated memory
aquatic drumlin evaporation.   Emaciated
stolid rhetoric avenue
                                    decisive upon awareness’
opened eyes detracting from desolate images of
crystallizing fragments. 

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored several collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009), Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010) and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Excavated, findings

Excavated, findings

resemble alphabetic flares tremble-moaning maybes
persuaded well informed intention-based
biased (unknown origin, _______’s) reactionary
because engrained environment’s hands carve
momentary wound. Walkers
passage caved represent oppressed before
jeweled causational facets fledging
then made into societal pact of promissory
relevance.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored several collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009), Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010) and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Adjoining

Adjoining

Margins register flight’s paradox of absent presence.

From the

mouth of stick figure figurines (maximum body-weight metaphor for unfed under need to approximate

human existential enclosure)

plausible coronas donned

delivering

kingdom ideology

fascist hybrid pacifist irony

mixture

polar-double

spoken thoughts

corrupt and careen

crisscrossing deranged arrangement

of

escorted alabaster condemnation:

clarity ignoramus

finds inward pleasure pessimistic undergone surgical

reenactment removal fathoms

disparate though double-molded reactions to

combining emotional paradigms, logical burgeons toward active camaraderie.

&


pleasantries fixed
in soil’s benevolent philanthropy
scent
gift
malleable authorship over shaping
congruent smiles

referencing
reverence

gaze
in numerous efforts
introduced
contours
as is surplus
donating
measurable
reactionary focus

intensive
rise
risen
aspectual
dynamics
combining centered sustenance into various physical formational
infiltrating pleasure
--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored several collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media, 2009), Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010) and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

David Mclean Reviews Final Fragments

Final Fragments
Michael McAloran
chapbook review
Calliope Nerve Media

This is what it says, it is poetry as it expresses the last things one can say about the void, it is what a suicide can say before actually dying. “I am too patient, with my own death” says the protagonist. Aren't we all?

The book depicts the love of death, the “will to desist” as it grows and burgeons within the voice of the poems. It is, as Connie Stadler says on the cover, full of the heritage of Beckett and that existential tradition.

He shows the splendor that there is “to be had” in the world as a real possibility, but frivolous, just another chunk of nothing, and wants to join the darkness and its “earthen caress.”

Ultimately we all, in our fascination with death, approach it “as an idiot child approaches a silent clear infinite lake, yet without wonder” because there is no locus called “death” where we will “be.” There “is” no void. What is fascinating with death, however, as McAloran shows, is the alternative to saying no to life, this “tomb of idiocy.”

This book also touches the dark pleasures of the death-madness, “my heart vibrates...I piss upon love as if I were scratching at a festering wound..I find joy in the obscene..There is laughter, also, at the heart of the stricken void”

The book depicts a memory of a love and its abandonment, the memory of the woman seeming to become a corpse on a bed, because memories are corpses, ultimately, no use to us.

This is a very short review and the fragments are short, it's a fragmentary review of a book of fragments, and in it Michael McAloran becomes “the closed fist of the night” - a fist of poems ready to punch away some illusions from the reader's complacent face.

Get it from Calliope Nerve Media here. Or direct from this link.

We Might Be

We Might Be

You are wise but I am little bits of rice,

bleak with brittle edges,

burnt slightly so that from a bird’s eye view I

can be confused as being a bug, a beetle,

toasted by too much sunshine.

You are wise and I am wrong,

always wrong,

my concepts and opinions unbeaten rugs

bought at a flea market in a country where women wear burkas,

beautiful but buried beneath black cloth.

You are wily while I am willow,

leaning on a warped platform as the approaching train

rumbles the ties that keep it aligned,

so that people get where they desire,

so that no one dies.

You are whatever you please and I am simply here,

parceling us out, making change for a dollar, sorting keys,

trying to figure out what we are and what we’re not,

what we might be

if we could ever talk about it.

--Len Kuntz lives on a lake with his wife, son, an eagle and three pesky beavers.  His work appears widely in print and online at such places as Clutching At Straws, The Camel Saloon and lenkuntz.blogspot.com

Angels Carry The Sun Preview

The living room at Safe Haven was desolate. No one cared to sit on the couches or watch TV. Flora's take on it was that battered women didn't gravitate to living rooms because they weren't exactly living. They were all just hanging on at the fringes of existence. And the shelter was a poor sterilized idea of what a home should be. While Alice napped, Flora roamed the house. There never seemed to be anyone around. The kitchen was empty. The halls were empty. The place felt haunted by misery. The residents of the shelter were always off whispering to counselors in the tiny office behind the kitchen, or upstairs nursing their wounds in bed, or when necessity demanded it, they would come downstairs and cook.  

In the bathroom, Flora sat on the toilet with the lid down, just thinking, and the silence of that house, concealing all that aching body-and-heart pain, slingshot her thoughts back at her with a kind of silver-black emphasis, as though they'd originated in the bathroom mirror or the sink drain. Why doesn't Mom break up with that hairy, foul-mouthed loser? I'm sick of sleeping on other people's couches. The girls at school probably wonder why I'm giving them a new phone number every week. Mom's one friend—the guy with the crazy bathroom—actually had this old, avocado-colored, foam toilet seat. Talk about adding insult to injury! 

Being a junior high bookworm softened the blunt edges of reality for Flora. Even with hurtling from the house in the middle of the night, she'd had the forethought to bring Gone with the Wind. She'd finished it the very first morning, and ended up having to scour the shelter for an alternative. Luckily, she found a Harlequin romance on the bookshelf in the living room. She kept her eyes glued to it at all times: while she walked the halls, while she sat like a lump on the dimly lit stairs, while she lay on the twin bed in the McDermott family bedroom. She hadn't liked any of the other books she'd found. They were all personal accounts of abuse. She snapped one shut, refusing to read on, after some woman got her eye gouged out with the broken handle of a broomstick. She went right back to The Lady of Stone Gate Manor. 

At mealtimes, the staff and guests all took turns cooking. The McDermott's ate with the rest of the residents at a long glossy table under two fluorescent tube lights. Every night was like a Thanksgiving dinner where what the guests were most thankful for was not having the stuffing beaten out of them. They ate donated noodles and Hamburger Helper, which was the kind of fare Flora and Alice never got at home. Typical hippie children that they were, they craved the rare indulgence of processed food. It was a treat for them to sample flavors that tasted good in a mysterious and artificial kind of way. There wasn't an ounce of health food in the place. This was a drag for Mom, but for them it was an unexpected "up side" to life at the shelter. 

Flora's main problem, besides being half-traumatized, was that she was anticipating her first-ever junior high school dance, and she—truly—didn't have a thing to wear other than the clothing she'd run from home in, or the nerdy donated hand-me-downs that the shelter staff had pulled out of storage for her. A few months earlier Mom had begun working on a special dress for the dance. Flora had picked out a pattern and fabric for it at the Snip N’ Sew in Eggersville. It was going to be a green muslin peasant dress with a blousy top and full skirt. She found a brown macramé belt at a thrift shop to go with it. She imagined that the dress would be not unlike something that the heroine of The Lady of Stone Gate Manor, Emily Lafontaine, would have had in her wardrobe when she first arrived at the Manor for work, before lucking out and marrying Lord Emerson. Her own current peasant attire amounted to nothing more impressive than her Green Eggs and Ham T-shirt and a pair of jeans with lightening bolts studded down the legs. 

The eve of the dance arrived quickly with Flora's forgotten, unfinished dress lying crumpled in the bottom of Mom's tote bag. The thought of going home to retrieve a backup dress was still too frightening for everyone, and Safe Haven didn't have a sewing machine. 

So that's when Mom—generally regarded by Flora as the root of all evil—decided to stay up all night with a needle and thread sewing by hand until her head nodded and she couldn't see straight. She got about three hours of sleep, resumed sewing in the morning, and after a full day of toil, finished the dress just two hours before the dance began. In the years that followed, Flora would sometimes doubt her mother's love, but only when she forgot about that dress and those thousands of devoted little stitches. Sewing by machine is love. Sewing by hand is divine love.

Untitled #28-

Untitled #28-

…Turning, turning aside, from the blossoming flowers of dusts sprouting from empty sockets, so close to the tomb, yet never near enough in my dying, the hands made of bloody soil caress the teeth of the black sky, wilting, without question, as the seasons depart, fleshed fallen upon the crest of night, endless night, where tongues dissipate and are reduced to words, stricken by defeat at every corner turned in the labyrinth, where tears are less than nothing, and the winds expire, where the baseness of flesh spits at the soaring wings, here now and ever more, shredding laughter splitting the sky with burning tears, from the stench of longing reaching no end yet every end, every end a skull-clad wall, I know this, I forget, my bones warp and I am forgotten, here in this realm where nowhere lays decaying meat down as gauntlet, victorious, yet without hope, these walls are made of human skin, something best forgotten, I lay down in those flowers of dust and breathe in their opiate silence, I sink into the jaws of the earth, where I lose all sense of distance, yet the whip draws me on, it cracks like a silver wing, a butcher’s knife upon bone, unto this never having been, a caress, my dying, something lost never to be reclaimed, from the ice of silence to the gut of the maggot’s lie, scattering seed upon powdered bone earth, which the wind births unto some other distance, the confetti of silence and the nothingness of it, beneath which ever the resurgence of nothing, the breath of the sky and the life spat out into this place that awaits no-one, has no need of the unknown, the dark meat smeared across the walls like shit, like bloody waste, like garbage, here, then, in the velvet hollow of the sun, having stripped away the dark, still knowing the bones, still birthing the scarlet, there is no mystery, birthed unto the shadow, into death’s open arms, the steel exhumes the light, the light from a cadaver’s smile, laid out like a desert plane, all and all over again, in this, severed unto atrophy, severed unto exile, in the cold grip of translucent jaws at the throat, as water flows as naturally as blood, where the death in me sings its’ mounting overtures, here and now never but to rage, or to concede, spilling out the lightless webs, forever may we lie, I love death no more than I love life, I love life no more than I love death, and all that comes between, I love only the debris of the shadow…                   

--Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). His work has appeared/ is forthcoming in various print and online zines, including Carcinogenic Poetry, Sex & Murder Magazine, Horror, Sleaze & Trash, The Medulla Review, Media Virus, In Between Altered States, Graffiti Kolkata, Prothomoto, Tehlia, Pratishedhak, Negative Suck, Danse Macabre, The Stray Branch, Counterexample Poetics, Heavy Bear, etc. In the past year he has authored seven chapbooks, including 'The Gathered Bones', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Black Vault', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'Debris', (Erbacce-Press), 'Final Fragments', (Calliope Nerve Media), & 'The Death-Streaked Air' (Virgogray Press-forthcoming).

Untitled #26

Untitled #26-

…This hearse tongue, the stone eye and the bitter seeds of death, moth of my desire circling as I die, where the flame has spoken from bloodless words, peeling back the skin and flesh from the bones here and after my laughter, circling only un-known, dressed in a shroud of night’s breathing, the wings beat in my skull a violent fever of disease, drugged, spent, head of bile-soaked sands, the dusts raise from the floorboards, I am dreaming of the silver noose that will be the fist of my ejaculations, the flesh a whip snap cracking of spinal smiles, rib-caged sky do you laugh as I laugh?, where the guillotine traces across my lips and the abattoir breath inhaled blooms in the me the orchids of death, here and forever after, I am that reek which I exhale, the insects rest upon the fly-paper that lines these breathing walls, pulsing, finalized, I observe with the salient grin of death, I am death, I am a child of the scarred flesh, only the ocean acknowledges my scarlet dreams, shifting from one room to the next, shifting so violently that I loose myself, I shift through transparent walls, paint and shit and bone and blood and hair and the ejaculate and piss of my machine mixed in ceremony, as if it could be, see how they run, see how my teeth glint in the dark, somehow, as if to know, I laugh as I die all over and again, with or without violence, I can only laugh, where now my fucking bones do you not offer the solace of breathing, a morphine mask would suffice, my lover, the singular light-bulb swings, and in the machinations and emasculations of the flesh, I am speechless, hence again the recourse to the laughter of the dead or the silence, why the insects tonight, I forget that I am death, I forget that I already know, the chemicals have erased me, eradicated the filth, the spent sun has collapsed into the death of air, much like in sequence with the thankless silence, I am rot, my skies lick the dust of my fading flesh, here I know, knowing that the blade will smear my smiles, for all time, for all of my timelessness, smeared like the smile of some severe clown, dragging a collective of children’s skulls, whistling Dixie, some death, close the wound, the wound cannot be bound for it is for all time, like a confessor’s tongue, the animals braying hate back into their pestilenced flesh, the wretched light, somehow, where, when the day is done, my arbitrary, my dead hands silently…


--Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). His work has appeared/ is forthcoming in various print and online zines, including Carcinogenic Poetry, Sex & Murder Magazine, Horror, Sleaze & Trash, The Medulla Review, Media Virus, In Between Altered States, Graffiti Kolkata, Prothomoto, Tehlia, Pratishedhak, Negative Suck, Danse Macabre, The Stray Branch, Counterexample Poetics, Heavy Bear, etc. In the past year he has authored seven chapbooks, including 'The Gathered Bones', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Black Vault', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'Debris', (Erbacce-Press), 'Final Fragments', (Calliope Nerve Media), & 'The Death-Streaked Air' (Virgogray Press-forthcoming).

quoteABLE

"Slowly I become one with the mud." --Jars of Clay

Untitled #17

Untitled #17-

…Reflection of star-lit eyes upon the surface of a lake of blood, a fleshed kiss, the sky starved of benign whispers, in the dense lack, the bones shaved, a shimmering sky I gather the debris of that same sky, death courses, I fade away, my fingers trace the beauty of the night, the lightning, I breathe, I compressed, I dream of nothing, yet nevertheless the distant sun persists, image of a bloodied corpse dragged along a long white corridor by unseen hands, the trail is of love, the enamoured, I am silent, the corridor is silent, also, then the echoes, in my dreaming they meld with the onslaught of the death in me, something is fading away, the abattoir’s kisses abandon me to graceless bleeding, slashed at the throat in my deathly flowers I lay me down, drugged to the absence I am laughter flourishing yet erased, there is blood in my cum, in my spit, the earth cracks like lacerations before me, I no longer know where I am, so much the better for it, I love death, my death my love, this nothing and the spasms of never having been, I remember, -how could I remember, I remember the dead waste, I am my dead waste and the gilded tongue, within these walls, spitting the shrapnel of nothingness, barren ocular roving in the silence, where tombs are the only willing teachers, I am scar, my limbs are dust I laugh, I am nothing ever to become, and so unto this, breathing the dead air of my brutal flesh, I reverberate violent tears, struck by the sun, I cannot leave, spilling out the fragments, I am…this freight I am in flames I dream I dream I am laughter, not that it ever could ever for what matter having changed all that it could and ever having become undone, as this silence, dragging its’ cadaver at my side, I am as empty as a bled carcass, I am the spit of the night, the dissipation at the heart of all things, my hands leave traces of the benign, something was spoken never yet known, the sky inverts, dusts cloud the sun, where, where and what then ever having stripped my barren raw, my death in that same sun, yet the winds cannot find me, concrete bound as a recollection of despair, there, in death, the black light illuminates, I drift I am fleshed I am the absence of flesh, something, hollowed out I die I breathe, a point of light explodes into the vacant night so much the better for it, I remember the reek, I erase, having been eroded, where now my death, I have spilled the speech of my shadow unto the soil, as if in that final lacking, I could…the silence, spills from the ashen dawn…


--Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). His work has appeared/ is forthcoming in various print and online zines, including Carcinogenic Poetry, Sex & Murder Magazine, Horror, Sleaze & Trash, The Medulla Review, Media Virus, In Between Altered States, Graffiti Kolkata, Prothomoto, Tehlia, Pratishedhak, Negative Suck, Danse Macabre, The Stray Branch, Counterexample Poetics, Heavy Bear, etc. In the past year he has authored seven chapbooks, including 'The Gathered Bones', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Black Vault', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'Debris', (Erbacce-Press), 'Final Fragments', (Calliope Nerve Media), & 'The Death-Streaked Air' (Virgogray Press-forthcoming).