FOUR ROOMS by David C. Porter
He lives in four rooms: the bedroom, the kitchen, the office, and the bathroom. The rooms are arranged in a square, and each room has a door connecting it to the two adjacent ones. There are no outer doors. There are windows but he always keeps the shades down. He starts each day in the bedroom, and throughout the day moves counter-clockwise from kitchen, to office, to bathroom, before ending the day back in the bedroom. At the beginning or end of some days he masturbates in the bedroom, and when he does, he tries to imagine a girl standing at the foot of the bed, watching him, holding a knife. Although he can see her form clearly, and the way her clothing sits on her body, her face is always a blur whose features he can’t resolve.
In the kitchen each morning he toasts a single slice of bread and spreads a thin layer of butter over it. The bread and the butter are refreshed, silently, each night while he tries to sleep. There’s one chair at the kitchen table where he sits and eats the toast. Sometimes there’s a bowl of fruit on the table, and on those days he also has an apple or a few grapes. When he finishes eating he washes the plate in the sink and pours a bowl of steel-cut oats to snack on throughout the day. He used to put sugar on the oats but he’s trying to lose weight so now he has them plain.
He carries the oats with him into the office. The office is a large room with a high ceiling and a dusty chandelier. The room is furnished with a black leather sofa, a small coffee table, and a desk and chair facing the wall opposite the kitchen. Each morning, there’s a new stack of images printed on 8.5 x 11 inch glossy photo paper sitting on the desk. His job is to look at them, one by one, and then place them face down in a new stack. Yesterday, there were 300 images of decommissioned machinery from a chromite processing plant in Aktobe, 83 images of sunsets, and 214 images of mirrors in which the reflection of the photographer had been heavily pixelated. On the top of the stack today is an image of a stuffed animal leaning against the wall of a dirty room. The image was taken with a flash which turns the two black beads of the stuffed animal’s eyes into minuscule points of light. One of the animal’s arms is missing. He looks at 499 more images of stuffed animals in dirty rooms missing an appendage. Beneath them in the stack are 50 images of distant galaxies captured using a powerful telescope and 17 of Japanese sedans manufactured between 1998 and 2002. The sedans all have their doors flung open, like birds with four wings. There’s no one inside any of them, although the framing of the images makes it seem like there should be. After he looks at all the images he goes over to the sofa and sits down for a while. There are no clocks in the office so he doesn’t know for how long. He listens to his heartbeat and thinks about being handcuffed to a radiator and burned with cigarettes. When he starts to feel tired he gets up and walks to the bathroom.
The bathroom is the same size as the bedroom and is lit by a long florescent tube that can’t be turned off. It contains a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub. There’s no mirror over the sink. He strips and turns on the tub’s cold water tap. While he waits for the tub to fill he takes a piss and runs his fingers along the grooves between the tiles on the wall. After a few minutes he turns the tap off and gingerly lowers himself into the water until he’s completely submerged. Tiny air bubbles escape from his mouth and burst on the surface one by one.
The next day there are only three images in the stack. All are extremely grainy, low resolution, and appear to have been taken with a telephoto lens. Two of the images show a figure, its form too indistinct for sexual identification, standing on the side of a desolate road, looking away from the camera. The third is of a face, its mouth half-open, its features disappearing into blots of silver halide. He spends all day looking at them.
David C. Porter is an only child. His work has appeared in surfaces, SELFFUCK, Neko Girl Magazine, and elsewhere. He can be reached on Twitter @toomuchistrue or via his website (https://davidcporter.neocities.org/).
3 POEMS by Peter Mladinic
The Weather
Ed Book one of the crew on Tim Peeples
in the Morning wasn’t on every morning,
but this particular one he was. There was
Clair Sims doing the weather and Tim
asked Ed what he was thinking.
“I’m wondering what Clair looks like naked.”
Clair, pretty but more handsome, shiny
lustrous dark brown hair, brown eyes in
a wide nicely shaped face, pretty mouth
strong chin seemed only slightly flustered.
“It’s not a pretty sight,” her come back,
got a chuckle from the two men. Clair
wasn’t small, didn’t look small on TV. Big-
boned, not hulking but curvy, like she’d
played sports in high school and college,
curvy in her hips and butt, with sumptuous
firm breasts, handsome, and undeniably
sexy. Not a pretty sight, her comeback,
spot on. Cool, she stood her ground, didn’t
storm off set, continued the weather.
What would Ed have done had someone,
while he was on camera, said the same
to him? What would anyone have done?
His remark so sudden. I admit I liked it,
the thought of Clair naked..she had a body,
well, it’s not hard to think men and women
lusted after her body, that went well with
her strong delicate jaw, dark eyes and hair.
“What Clair looks like”..candid, thoughtless.
Her eyes showed she didn’t like it. Maybe
right after, Ed regretted what he said.
But Tim Peebles’ chuckle hinted he too
wondered what Clair looked like naked.
What do I myself look like? My swarthy
body with no clothes to mask who I am.
Young Executive
This is about race, about me, a white man
writing about black men, older than I
when I was 18 in Cutler, Maine, in 1966.
This is about Marks, Harris, Guy, Brown
and Johnny Williams, youngest of these
men, sailors, as I was. I called Johnny Willie.
In his high-pitched voice he would say,
The kid’s gonna be a young executive!
He wanted, after the navy, to work hard
and for that work be justly compensated,
what many, even most people want.
The kid’s gonna be a young executive!
Most of the sailors on the base were white
as were most citizens in nearby Machias.
Racially, this area, 30 miles from Canada,
was overwhelmingly white. Of the sailors
I’ve mentioned Marks had the darkest skin.
He was married, as was Guy, a corpsman.
Both were married and had kids. Harris,
Willie and Brown and I lived in the barracks.
And another black sailor, Whitfield, lived
there, he may not have been there when
Willie was there. One night Willie drank
too much, and peed on the floor
between his bunk and his locker.
I mention it because it was an indication
of something wrong, of turmoil going on
in Willie, who worked with and for Brown,
as I did. Brown, a lifer, would say, when
civilians came to the warehouse,
not to give them anything extra. He
might have said, Don’t give those civilians
shit, though he rarely swore. I think
a life in the navy was a refuge against
the racism outside for Roland Brown
and men like him. Though to me no one
was like him, and no one is like him.
It was so unsettling the afternoon Willie
came in drunk and got in Brown’s face
eager to punch Brown. Willie, shorter, stockier
darker skinned in contrast to Brown’s
lighter skin, could have beaten Brown up.
Brown said something to back Willie off.
It could have been big trouble. Brown
was tall, slightly stooped and wore a trim
mustache. He chewed gum and twirled
in one corner of his mouth a toothpick.
He often sang quietly to himself
in a high-pitched voice. We visited once
when stationed on ships in Norfolk.
It was good seeing Brown. I don’t know
where Willie went after Cutler, I hear
the upbeat tone I heard back in ’66.
The kid’s gonna be a young executive!
Schaeffer and Sheila
How sad when your son dies you lose
the will to have sex, almost the will to live.
Someone Schaeffer knows: I don’t mean
to sound cold. Sheila and I met online.
Soon she’s telling me she loves me.
Are you nuts, I thought; you don’t know me,
you’re making declarations of love.
What? From a few pictures, a few words.
She retired and moved to the mountains,
where she’d wanted to be. Then her son
and his wife moved in with her. When we met,
only online, she was wishing them gone
so she could enjoy her home in peace.
I got the impression they were meth heads:
Deanna a convenience store clerk,
Rick, good with electrical stuff, didn’t work.
Freeloaders, I thought, and used that word
more than once. She said maybe
they’d buy a trailer her brother owned. No.
She bitched about their being with her,
also about missing jewelry and money.
Meth heads, I never said that to her
but to myself. Then Rick died in his sleep.
Mother and son, they’d never been apart.
Sex talk stopped, and love declarations.
I didn’t mind; it was online, going nowhere.
Even if Rick hadn’t died the chance Sheila
And I would ever get together, “get it on,”
Was very slim. I never said I love you back.
When she said it I felt irked, annoyed, but
Never told her that. The sex talk was good
For a while, my feeling she wanted me.
Then Rick died. Not having a son myself
I couldn’t plug into her grief, I imagine
Its depth, but can’t feel it. I only know
While Rick was in her home with his wife
She mentioned missing jewelry and money.
Freeloaders, thieves. All her adult life
It had always been she and Rick, now he
Was gone, and her sex drive. Her will to live?
SLEEP WITH THE DEAD by Andrew S Watson
I shuffled forwards. Got into an extra-space cave crevice. Chamber is the best term for it. Enough space to swing a cat. This is something I thought of. I had premonitions of a cat but I could not remember one clearly. Furry animal. Then I realized that I was not alone. There, in the middle of the chamber, was a stone slab. The natural bottom half of a massive stalagmite. Shiny and bare like the rest of the cave.
This was the part where I realized that I was not alone. It was not the slab that was inhabiting this space but a cold-looking maiden that was difficult to see clearly. She had elfin features and was very pale. I guessed it was a she as I could make out the soft curves of her body. I stood still. She was lying very still. A pose that is akin to sculpture. Forlorn and bereft of the world. Crumpled, her head buried in her arms. Head buried in the subject’s arms. This was something that rang true of the pose that I was witnessing at this moment. An alluring composition of limbs. She could have been made out of porcelain. That is how pale she was. Very smooth. A tangle of limbs like the branches of a tree.
I moved around her and further ascertained the nature of her sex. I witnessed aspects of her that certified that she was a woman with a head of fine black hair to bury her arms in. Knees hitched up beneath her. Still unsure of her life-ness though. Still very little to suggest that she was in-fact animate and not the opposite. That she possessed faculties like I did and was not just a vision. But the skin I was looking at looked fleshy as I got closer. Hints of blue made her skin seem like that of a cave dweller. This was probably from the light. No natural movements from her collection of curved lines. A subtle pile of human embodiments composed in such a way as to look cold and smooth and timeless.
Then she did move. She moved slowly like the unwinding of a clock. She had, I presume, become aware of me in the emptiness of that chamber. Aware of my standing there next to her. She rolled over onto her back and sat up resting on one hand behind her. The other arm was extended in my direction and the elbow on top of the knee on one side of her. There she regarded me. Looked at me from out of the mass of silky black hair. A smouldering gaze and long willow-branch arms. The angles of her cut good shapes. Ones that were alluring. They had symmetry. They were minimalist. They were all I could make out in the sick-light. She rotated her wrist and curled a finger to beckon me.
This was not that unusual. There was quite a lot of this happening in these spaces. In fact, when we were not fighting on the surface above us. So I was not completely sceptical. This was why I moved forwards to her. This was why I dropped what I was wearing. This was why I climbed onto the slab with her. This was why I felt the desire run hot through me. This was why I felt all of the desires I had ever had well up inside of me. These things that were in my genetic programming. That stretched back to Earth. This was why this was happening.
She felt smooth but not completely cold. Faint glimmers of life within her long body. It wrapped around me. Felt me feeling it. Soft silky thickness of fine hair sashaying like water down over my back. Enveloping pillars of her tendril legs allowed for passage to her waist. Mounds of her breasts pressed against me pinned by her rib cage. She felt like marble.
Desire and heat is what I felt. Glossy finishing of images that spun the way double helixes do. Fantasies contained beyond vision. Marble patterns of cloud-stone. Dripping caramel poured into the naked vestiges of puffy white ice-cream. Fields sprinkled with crushed nuts. Smell of mildew from the cave. Velvety softness of her inner thigh. Slender branches and perfumed pages elicited in me proud engorging. Engorgings of a hard cock that was close to erupting. Salivating slightly I slid it in and out of her. She fucked into me with her hips, causing her to buck and gasp, snarl and bite at my shoulder through the silky shroud of black hair that tumbled down her face. The wet black pubic paint stroke. Our bones ground desperately into each other and I came gasping and felt something leave my body. Some scum. Some fluttering heartbeat that pulsed grotesquely out of the end of me.
And the marble sheen of her contours began immediately to whither. The lights I had perceived inside her eyes receded. Eyeballs shrivelled like old grapes. First the feeling of tree bark on her skin. Rippled and wrinkled. Then to the dry leaves of paper and layers flaking off. One after the other exfoliating in layers. Gooseberry sheaths tearing; and seams splitting. Discarded wings of flying ants. To reveal cracks and rips all over her body. Below this deteriorating skin were insects wriggling and she was coming apart. Folding downwards. Ripping away. Innards revealed only as a seething mass of bugs. Centipedes, worms and ants. Frantically crawling away and over me. They fled. Entropy forcing them into every direction. Until only I was left alone on the stone table. Spent, traded and quite horrified.
@Andy_S_Watson is a writer of short fiction and fragments living in Makhanda South Africa.
4 POEMS by John Grey
TO AN EX ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF OUR BREAKUP
I still can’t put a face,
a body,
to the sound.
It’s not like
the flapping wings,
the shrill cry
that go to make a seagull. .
Or the rumble.,
the loud rattle,
of which every passing
truck is constructed.
No clue .
as to who
ascends the stairs,
the sounds
as devoid of identity
as the breeze from the east.
It may not .even be a person.
Just the creaking of wood.
Or the random steps of my imagination.
I’m lying in bed.
It’s dark.
And someone may or may not be
ascending the stairs
to my room.
That’s how it is with me. ‘ .
How is it with you?
SIXTEEN
A blonde of fifty
subtracts her thirty-four-year-old daughter
from the weary face in the mirror
and comes up with a terrified girl of sixteen.
Thirty-four years ago,
she landed herself
with both disgrace and responsibility,
cut short the dreams
that she didn’t have anyhow.
Her body barely sculpted then,
and now, so scarred,
and so lived in,
not just by herself
but with so many other boarders
along the way.
The wrinkles arrive,
and the paint won’t cover them.
Joints ache and her lips
are as hard as the soles of her feet.
But it’s the numbers that haunt her.
Thirty-four is always tsking from fifty.
doesn’t stop until it comes up with sixteen.
Just a girl,
too young, too stupid, too trusting, too careless…
the math leaves nothing out.
THE BOXING GAME
So caught up
in the fight,
as two men pounded each other
in a frenzy
of violence and pain
that you,
among all of that crazed crowd,
spat lightning from your eyes
while your jaw
clapped thunder –
the game demands
everyone in the audience
be in that ring
in their own way –
and you were in there
swinging your arms
and slugging.
at first the boxers,
then strangers,
then everyone you knew.
BARELY
Barely out of bed
when the phone rings.
I’ve no idea how this person
got my number.
And barely remember the one
he’s telling me
has committed suicide.
But he felt it important
that I should hear it from him first.
“Thanks for letting me know,”
I say, then hang up.
The rest of my day
I’m struggling to recall the dead guy,
not just to try to understand
why he died but to establish that
he ever actually lived.
Yes, the name does
amount to something
in my memory banks.
But the face is foggy.
So how can I ever get to
what was eating his soul?
There are reasons enough
for a guy to end it all.
Damaged heart, skewed finances.
Maybe even something in the brain,
an interloper with a death wish
for the both of them.
And there’s billions of people
in the world.
I could line up each one
with a possible motive
if I had the time.
Or if I knew them well enough
to put the hopeless pieces together.
Meanwhile, a dead man
is out there somewhere.
That’s according to a guy
I barely knew was living.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.
HYPERFOCUS by R.G. Vasicek
Your contours of behavior are spiralling
out of control. We think you have
challenges with time perception. Spatial
organization. Your filing [pile] system is
a disaster. We recommend cranial
electromagnetic therapy.
There is a brain-machine in Astoria,
Queens, NYC. Report immediately to the
facility. Spaghetti nightmares in the
gulag archipelago will be alleviated.
Speak, as every speaker must: Open.
You intercepted cosmic noise as a child.
Do you remember?
Yes.
And what did you do with the memory?
I forget.
Are you addicted to excitement?
Yes.
Human consciousness is a sinkhole into a
netherworld. We talk to each other as if
we exist. Are you in control of… a
psychogeographic domain? Impulse control.
Perception. Sensing things… coming into
the nervous system.
We operate a submersible computer
interface to “speak” with squid-like
extraterrestrials under the icy crust of
Ganymede.
Your Volkswagen Beetle is a brokedown
palace.
At age 84 or 94 you are just trying to do
the right thing. Eat. Survive. 24 or 44.
People make noise.
Your coördinates, please.
Are you here/there/now?
Hyperfocus.
And you achieve clarity.
Blur the edges.
Focus on the [hyper]active personality.
Make art.
Fuck.
We are algebraic structures. Exponents of
each Other. I am already/not yet. You are
a remote possibility. I am radical
Uncertainty.
Prometheus steals fire from Olympus.
Burn the Forest.
Wilderness.
Experimental Station # 2 in a flat
wilderness in 1907.
Are you satisfied with your image feedback
system?
Experimental TV.
You turn [on] Television
Television turns you
[on].
The consumers of reality are hungry again.
Are you going to feed them?
delete
return
shift
Primordial loneliness.
Image-text bombardments from the ether.
She speaks of Neolithic Britain & stone
rings functioning as panopticons.
Tape recorder experiments.
You cannot hold on to any of it. The flux.
The flicker.
Sippers of coffee, unite.
We are temporal beings.
Spaghetti nightmares in Astoria, Queens.
Eat the orchiette.
Eat.
My breast is in her mouth. She is tonguing
my nipple & palming my right buttock.
I should keep talking talking talking… and
then nobody gets in the way. Am I
right?… or am I right?
Physical bodies in space & time.
Our bodies are floating over/under each
other.
We are on a lost highway.
People “fluctuate” before your eyes.
Also means you.
Come. Please come. She whispers.
I feel unsettled.
Like maybe… what?
The musicality of your existence… the
silence… the calm.
She feels my cock coming to life.
I kiss your Apocalypse.
…
I am sending you a “wire-photo.” Can you
see it? Dots on a page. Points. Pixels.
I remember your bottom lip catching on the
dome of my cock. The upper lip soon
followed. And the blowjob commenced.
I lay there in absolute disbelief.
Me.
Of all people.
…
She says she can feel the pulse in my cock
when I come.
Squirt squirt squirt.
We are everyday people, all of us. Digging
into the every day. Digging into
existence. Trying to make it squirt.
Keep punching the keys.
Keep… believing.
R.G. Vasicek is a lo-fi novelist in NYC. Vasicek’s books include THE DEFECTORS, MACHINE, CYBORG, & the forthcoming anti-novella JÖRGENSEN AND THE MACHINE. Website: www.rgvasicek.com
THE SECRET OF THE NAKED MAN by Kristin Garth
They do not find the naked man. Police
and neighbors patrol in unmarked vans. The
eye-witness sightings will decrease not cease.
No photographic clues released. He
does not appear on Ring doorbell videos —
by iPhone no nudity disclosed. Runs
serene on suburban streets. His show
is fleeting, if indiscrete and when it’s done
there are only words, no physical
evidence it occurred. Does his old-
fashioned streak seek to revive the mythical
power of perversion live — to be bold
in January cold, no device in hand?
It is the secret of the naked man.
Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Rhysling nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna and more. She is the author of many books of poetry including The Stakes (Really Serious Literature) and a short story collection You Don’t Want This. She is the editor of seven anthologies and the founder of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal and co-founder of Performance Anxiety, an online poetry reading series. Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website kristingarth.com
GRSTALT FICTIONS by GRSTALT COMMS
2 Genuine Networking Possibilities
4 5 Happy Friends
6 S-C-R-A-T-C-H-A-T-T-H-A-T
7 The Spree
9 the stack
He buys the burner, with cash, and goes
to the usual spot in the park, by the pond,
to make the call. He tries to disguise his
voice, making it deeper and gruffer, then
he goes to the clearing and buries the
phone with his hands, flattens the earth
with his feet, drops the SIM in the pond,
bends down to wash his hands.
He is waiting up the road. He is wearing
a suit that is too big for him and makes
him look like a child. His beard is
trimmed to an uneven curve. He puts on
an orange lanyard and positions it under
his jacket so it is visible around his neck.
People start coming out of the building
and bunching together in the square up
the road where they eat their lunches on
dry days. He’s seen them there all the
time, wearing their colour-coded
lanyards. They are separated by
department.
He moves into the crowd and starts
watching how they move their arms,
copying how they stand, then positions
himself on the edge of a group.
He does something with his mouth, an
exasperated sound, like one of them had
just done. The man in front of him - grey
eyes and razor burn - turns and nods with
pursed lips, and asks him how he’s
dealing with the Glitch. He tells the man
he’s had some success with it. The man
purses his lips and nods again, then asks
him if he’d take a look at their setup
when he’s got a minute. He nods and
says: ‘sure.’
They were told it was safe to go back
inside. The building had been checked
completely. It was a false alarm.
He follows them down the street and
talks with the man about how the Project
is being mismanaged by pricks like
Sullivan, who’s only where he is because
his uncle’s on the board of the parent
company. He nods and says: ‘totally.’
As they cluster by the entrance, he breaks
from the crowd and runs without looking
back. He goes to his position up the road
and bends to catch his breath.
He watches them all go back inside.
On the way home he buys another burner.
Limited psychosis in most cases | little dissembling or doubt
| doctrinal contingency | horizontal posture | mostly mimetic
| SUBJECT #1 says I can hear singing coming through the wall,
hymns | SUBJECT #2 tells me at length about United Fruit and
how the war never ended | SUBJECT #3 claims I saw the vans
lined up and the bricks being unloaded there | SUBJECT #4 says
that nothing gets changed without an eruption | SUBJECT #5
lays out detailed plans he made with handles and AVIs of
statues and cathedrals | SUBJECT #1 says I’m done serving |
SUBJECT #2 says we dress like that to throw people off, says
soy armour with a laugh | SUBJECT #3 asks me what my uniform
means, and smirks | SUBJECT #4 says jokes get serious quick
when there’s no other alternative, and that’s when the serious
men come out | SUBJECT #5 says we’re tired of acting alone |
SUBJECT #1 tells me it’s inevitable, we’re just helping it
along | SUBJECT #2 says we’ll gate-crash anybody’s party,
because the streets are everyone’s, right? | SUBJECT #3 says I
was there in a purely protective capacity, I can only account
for myself | SUBJECT #4 says force was met with force |
SUBJECT #5 says you taught us to be methodical and focused on
foreign streets | SUBJECT #1 says we wanted to make it clear
to them that their numbers mean nothing | SUBJECT #2 says we
can’t be tied down to any ideas or goals, we reject the old
binaries | SUBJECT #3 says ALL free people need protection |
SUBJECT #4 admits he’s been in jail three or four times, but
won’t specify the crime | SUBJECT #5 says we want both sides
to collapse, we make no distinction, they belong to the same
compromise | SUBJECT #1 says the boomers were trying to push
us out | SUBJECT #2 says they’ve had their time, they’re worn
out | SUBJECT #3 says they were holding us back | SUBJECT #4
says things get confused and people get hurt | SUBJECT #5 says
their wars weren’t our wars | SUBJECT #1 says we just chanted
along with everyone else | SUBJECT #2 says it’s when it gets
dark that the hardware comes out | SUBJECT #3 says I’m sad it
will kick off without us now, but it WILL kick off |SUBJECT #4
says we came back fucked to a fucked country | SUBJECT #5 says
blood makes good paint | SUBJECT #1 says the crowd made the
move, I don’t know who provided the cocktails | SUBJECT #2
says we all tried to hold SUBJECT #5 back but he was too
strong for us | SUBJECT #3 says SUBJECT #5 never got over the
loss of his daughter while he was overseas | SUBJECT #4 says
SUBJECT #5 said he knew she’d come back to him | SUBJECT #5
says I knew I would see her again, I saw her in the fire and I
went towards her | SUBJECT #1 says they ban you and narrow you
down to no other option | SUBJECT #2 says shills are
everywhere, that’s what we learnt, we were swimming in
alphabet soup the whole time | SUBJECT #3 says we got
smothered by our own blanket | SUBJECT #4 says I took SUBJECT
#5 down before he went in the building | SUBJECT #5 begins to
break down – session suspended | Doomed to be lionized |
haunting the condemned logs | 5 happy friends who did better |
retrofitting pain into plausible orthodoxies |
he shivered and felt the skin on his arms get
tighter inside the found jacket that was
stained and damp he thought it might be best
to walk for a while so he could make the time
he needed on the schedule he had set but that
had lapsed into a series of grubby interludes
and captured seconds of intimacy under
hesitant lights and abandoned heralds it was
like being trapped inside a grey bulge that
was leaking into the bloodstream of every
complacent eater ordering treats behind glass
under the pretext of preserving the integrity
of the averred purpose to persist on roads
that swerve without a threat manifesting he
had been on the waiting list for the trials
and he had made the trip knowing that this
would be the motion which secured his
designation as the bearer of the most advanced
stage of deterioration of all the potential
subjects he bore the most prominent distention
his swelling inspired the light to fly from
his face so that it was refracted and the skin
was always rippling with what was underneath
the constant industry of producing the bulging
pockets that slapped with every footstep he
could feel them doing their work and he knew
they would break through before he made it
there
I
Repeat after me: As a worshipper of The Spree, I give thanks to The Shooter for
their clear-eyed comprehension of the necessity to arrest the motions of endless reproduction.
II
The Shooter summons the fortitude to make a small dent in the wall of human
profusion and illusion I set out to dismantle. Each shooter is a tribune of a world
finally arranged in silent balance. They reclaim the space for the inheritors.
III
Every shot is a question, puncturing a dense layer of refuse accreted in adipose
channels to create a fatberg of such grotesque proportions that judgement chokes. Every shot penetrates the narrowing channels of progress congealed by generations of profligacy. All will be equal in the decisive flash.
IV
It is the ultimate act of kindness. The bearing of an onerous burden. The shouldering of opprobrium. They may choose their own course, but each Shooter is bound by the ineluctable knowledge of their final purpose.
V
The Shooter limits their sights to the immediate needs: the elimination of wildlife, the determination of surplus, and the eradication of the polity. The Shooter acts in the interest of preserving a base-level of habitability.
VI
Those Shooters who forestall the future, as it is currently conceived, take their place at the apex. So young, yet grasping the urgency. They saw before us all that this is untenable, that a radical realignment is in order.
VII
I cherish their sacrifice. So that I may purge the body of psychic toxins and cultivate a new empathy. So that I may clear the ground to bring into being a new landscape of abundance and perfect alignment with my technology.
VIII
I will dedicate myself to preserving their memory. I will wait for the day when I have earned my bump stock, and can embark into the mediated spaces of this collapsing order, with the knowledge that a broad expanse can be salvaged from its decay and dehumanising duplication.
IX
In the face of this, The Spree is the purest assertion of humanity. I no longer need to be scared. I no longer need to feel powerless. Everything for which they terrorized me is now the key to my release. I see beyond their small concerns. I am a pioneer, carving out a fresh territory, where they are the outsiders, where they must tremble.
X
All hail The Spree. All hail The Shooter. Long may they be active.
“we go to the
stack so we can
find out”
“the third day
always ends with
us at the stack
everything else
shuts down”
“we get in front
of the stack all
inside the shadow
of it”
“nobody knows
what the stack is
going to give us”
“the stack goes
all the way
across”
“nobody remembers
who built the
stack”
“the stack came
from the sea like
everything”
“the stack is too
high to climb
someone tried”
“things get
pushed through
cracks in the
stack”
“things that we
need like
medicine and
blankets”
“the children get
pushed to the
front so they can
look through the
cracks”
“we need to teach
them where they
could go if they
make bad on us”
“we know the hand
is coming when
the birds start”
“the birds scream
and the ground
rumbles and the
stack shivers”
“the noise the
hand makes as it
comes up is like
rocks breaking
off the hills”
“we wait to see
the hand come
over the stack”
“only the hand
gets up there the
birds fly off”
“the children
cover their ears”
“the hand is grey
and dripping with
green strings”
“the hand opens
and drops them”
“we bunch up to
catch swimmers”
“someone cries
out when they
recognise”
“we carry them up
the hill”
“daddy came back
that way he made
bad on us so they
sent him to the
rig i see small
in the cracks”
About GRSTALT:
GRSTALT is a kind of artistic clearinghouse.
GRSTALT is a means of circumventing the construct of ‘the author’.
GRSTALT is a consciously nebulous entity. By reducing oneself to a string of letters, the writer is no longer confined by the old expectations of biography and personality.
Twitter: @grstaltcomms
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/grstalt
4 POEMS by Lori A Minor
corpse flower
I try to forget
I’m going to Hell
*****
spearflower—
I learn not to give
any more fucks
*****
gnats until christ comes back
*****
the pain of it all morphine moon
Lori A Minor is an award-winning poet and editor (#FemkuMag) living in Ohio. She/They has/have been featured in: A New Resonance 12, Haiku 2021, Impspired, and as a presenter for Haiku North America (2019, 2021). Lori’s sixth book, Hot Girl Haiku, is a 2021 Touchstone Award nominee.