Friday 21 October 2016

Always Friendly by JD DeHart

"Secret Hallway" (c) Kevin Dooley

In these digital landscapes
we trickle and tickle with words
etched in glowing cursor

Sounds meet and merge
in bound affinity spaces,
one would hope packed
always with friends

Gathered around a literary
cause, assembled by love
of writ and lit, always
submerged in the latest story

Always drafting the next verse.


Previously published in Leaves of Ink

*****

JD DeHart is a writer and teacher.  He has recently been nominated for Best of the Net and his chapbook, The Truth About Snails, is available on Amazon.

Friday 14 October 2016

plaint by Mark Young

One of the problems with short-term memory loss is that you forget that your short-term memory loss has made you forget that you went up to the local supermarket last Friday & discovered it full of elderly folk, many of whom were doing their obligatory filial duty & taking their even more elderly sole surviving parent—almost always female—for their weekly shopping trip. The aisles full of walking frames & skin complaints & canes & great-grandmas in trolleys, the checkouts clogged by the elderly whose short-term memory loss means they've forgotten how to swipe their cards & what numbers to key in.

& you've forgotten all that, & go up to the supermarket this Friday afternoon, & all the imprecations you'd forgotten you'd uttered last week come flooding back.

&, afterwards, you go & get petrol & have to wait for half an hour because the elderly have forgotten how to queue & park across the space between two bowsers so no one can get by them, & you, being courteous, see a clear space to park & slot into that, only to find that the elderly person two cars ahead of you who's just filled their car has forgotten where they've put their keys, & that the only station you can get on the car radio is one playing non-stop Phil Collins songs for half an hour....

& one of the things that short-term memory doesn't do is let you forget that you don't like Phil Collins. So, in penance for your intolerance, you force yourself to listen to him. & hope you forget who you're listening to.

*****

Mark Young's most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore, from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago.  An e-book, The Holy Sonnets unDonne, came out earlier this year from Red Ceilings Press; another, a few geographies, will be out later this year from One Sentence Poems; & another, For the Witches of Romania, is scheduled for publication by Beard of Bees.

Tuesday 11 October 2016

A Line From Patrick Bateman by Texas Fontanella


Impossible is nothing when Xbox live accounts and password recovery protocols are disabled for income tax purposes. How puberty impacts Western Union exchange rates. Extensive load-disabling cues determine basics card eligibility thru wavelength analysis plus the frequency of visually effeminate articles appearing in conversation as a indirect result of Get Smart. So check Defacebook, move on up and atomize. Solve radical equations with anagrams. Apply now adequately warm linguistic driftwood to the irrelevant literature over long distances indeed. No gravitas was eaten in the making of this erasure.

11:30ish pm 9th September 2016