Renata St. Elmo 日 20/02/2026 · admin No comments

BRAIN DAMAGE

Sorry I can’t be friends with you anymore. I scanned your brain when you weren’t looking and it doesn’t have enough synaptic electricity. I’m trying to claw out of obscurity and I could snorkel in your dimness for centuries and never gain a thing beyond the odd sublime neurochemical lightning strike but mostly tons of brain damage. You need to work on yourself. I love you.

I’m only friends with people who emerge monkeylike from a clearing in the jungle, throw a coconut at my head, and, seeing me turn, retreat back through the vines.

Eric Angal 日 11/12/2025 · admin No comments

FREEZER AND HAUNT

But the worst part of that whole thing was the walk-in freezer. Going in there. Rutting with her in there. Fucking senselessly the way the young do. Noticing little things all the time to distract myself from, what—what I was doing? And why would I do that? Shame? I don’t know, I think about it sometimes and I don’t know. I don’t know myself well enough to be able to locate what compelled me to feel shame, or maybe it wasn’t shame. Maybe it was some sensation not unlike the knowledge of your own mortality, you know, when that knowledge, that little factoid I am going to die dawns on you in the shower, while you’re doing dishes, while you’re driving. It’s more likely to occur while you’re not even being confronted by death—I’m more likely to think about death while I’m ensnared in the mundane than I am when I hear about the passing of a relative. Is that just me? It hits like a cargo train. So maybe that’s what I was thinking about in that freezer ten-odd years ago. Not even consciously. Maybe it was in the back of my head somewhere, that I was going to die one day, rattling around under the hood in the ol’ brainerino while I was fucking my boss in the walk-in freezer at McPhaiden’s. Or maybe it was some other totally different and horrible thing I needed to distract myself from. Who can say?

David Kuhnlein 日 10/09/2025 · admin No comments

EZRA’S HEAD (EXCERPT)

Every day juxtaposed hot and cold. Facebook boomer selfies were posted in the snow. They commented: “April showers!” Furnaces and air conditioners alternated hourly. Redd hit remission with drink and drugs. He felt bellied by the night. A short waitress at the bar touched her tattoos. They couldn’t fuck unless she somehow hid those fingers. Each fat nail had been chewed to the blood-grooved cuticle and remained unwashed. Two-Beer Tommy, a ceramicist ten years sober, choked down a Guinness. The wooden table seemed handcrafted until an object was set on it.

“You’re more in your art now.” Redd pointed at Tommy’s stained clothing.

“People censor themselves by getting dressed.”

Zura Jishkariani 日 04/09/2025 · admin No comments

უნაზესმოსისხარი / GENTLENEMESIS

>>> Jumping into the heart of life is like forgetting; forgetting is like a dream: a philosopher killed in a drive-by shooting in the suburbs of Tbilisi. It’s banal, but the banal narrative is the best expression of the essence of our species. Have you ever held your favorite friend’s skull as a souvenir? Have you seen snow vaults? – my orderly asked, and showed me the hospitals of the sky. If anyone is reading these manifestations of my homesickness, fragile and cruel, like existence in foreign cities? Calling your mother – a lost paradise’s answering machine.

Rina Beaumont 日 01/09/2025 · admin No comments

DRIVE TIME, IN YOU, AND TRANCE MANUAL

in you is the arroyo in you is the bank of
dawn above the pool one motion overhead
at one time, always thinking of the guard-lines
making, sand come up to meet us thinking,
knelt down by my brother, think of attitudes,
think – this line this lap this lay this
tabletop this mesa, here for me.
a motion to articulate, a spread via the up-line
to the monuments beside which our people lay
in dirt. I lay a down-line here beside you, prayed out,
striking for the measures of water, laid out
in our laps, the way – this way points out to opal.
the forgotten serotonin, the inhibited removal,
someone by me laying out a place for me
in bed forms, this obstruction this ingratitude
think – the land the lay the linoleum,
streaming down the aisle to me.
flat laid is the vista of you crying out
above my hands at rest, effusive
over plains of sudden closeness.