ARCHIVE Anna Krivolapova · FITZCARRALDO, SEPTYCH SHOCK, AND THE CENTRAL ARTERY FROM BOSTON TO GERASENES · 4/2023 · three poems: The neck is the knot where they tie off the fish / It’s all in the flick of a teenage wrist David Kuhnlein · THE WAITRESS (EXCERPT FROM DIE CLOSER TO ME) · 5/2023 · 2.7K-word novella-of-stories excerpt: She wished for celestial love, not window dressing, but the whole planet was disabled. Ryan Kelley · NESTING GRIND · 5/2023 · 1.1K-word prose: These dissemble pixel by pixel, collapse into clouds of butterflies, take wing and swarm as holofauna somewhere else. Dan R. · ANON · 5/2023 · 550-word prose: looking out from our camp we see the signal fires from the hillside and they speak ruin and babylon. this is the trees for the forest. i think we’re alone here. Peppy Ooze · BODILY FUNCTIONS AND THE ROOTS OF INTERNATIONAL DREAMWAVE · 4/2023 · Berlin novel excerpt: If Shakespeare was alive in the 2020s he’d be writing skinny anti-novels from some bended memory of a street. He’d be published by an unknown print-on-demand press. Heath Ison · CINEMA OF CRUELTY (EXCERPT) · 4/2023 · novel excerpt: The only option was an abandoned greenhouse on the outskirts of town. Ian Townsend · SUPER BOWL · 4/2023 · 1.5K-word fiction: Katya tells me that in the mountains to the south there is a clan who became obsessed with American blues during the cold war. She says that to this day their village is the Eurasian center of blues music. Coleman Bomar · JOBS, PORCUPINE, AND CAT · 4/2023 · three poems: we fuck like teenagers as our cat cries, the sun goes down and I don’t want to die anymore. Tade Davis · THE ORPHAN · 3/2023 · 2.5K-word fiction: I wanted to be an angel; I wanted to be a geisha with blackened teeth and translucent skin; I wanted to be a beautiful dead girl adorned with flowers; I wanted to be a black cat in the pitch blackness of the night, body vacuumed up by the visual abyss, condemned to exist as floating eyes. Ian Townsend · PURGATORY (EXCERPT) · 5/2022 · book excerpt: A body can only sustain itself for so long when it fears sleep and waking. David C. Porter · STILL LIFE WITH ROTATING ELEMENTS · 3/2022 · 1.2K-word death by concrete: When archaeologists uncover my remains in a few thousand years, from my implacable posture they’ll hypothesize that despite being made of flesh and bone I must have been a statue, sunk intentionally in this concrete as punishment for some offence I committed against my collector. They’ll imagine laborers taking me down off my pedestal in the grand marble exhibition hall in the dead of night, a hood over my head and a gun in my back, my replacement waiting in a crate in the shadows. Illustrations to this effect will appear in major scientific journals, and eventually it may even become true, and my body will turn to stone. Paul Bali · THERSITES · 1/2022 · supervillain’s prison-bed soliloquy: a porpoise long-harboured / his babble sought for stock-picks / draw him in the sadhana of Shastric Fundamentals / cast him in A HOMELESS MAN seated unto death or white senescence / demarcate his Isle in the dark arcs of bank towers / pole it with a simple tree, a comic panel’s axis: / receiver of his pencilled-in lean. David Kuhnlein · THE BEAR PIT · 11/2021 · 450-word prose: The bear continues dying on the pole, really committing to the Kegels of each throe. John Casey · PURPOSE-BUILT · 10/2021 · 2.5K-word Ballardian futurehell: GigaDorm is a fully integrated boarding/work solution, using the latest in activity monitoring and opportunity generating software, as well as purpose-built interior structuring, to keep our occupancy at maximum. No one likes evicting people, least of all us at Enlighten, that’s why we are so relieved at this partnership, allowing the financially challenged tenant to pay their way by completing short simple tasks. Porpentine Charity Heartscape · RELATIVE TIME KNIFE · 9/2021 · 1.2K-word psychedelic litrpg fiction: We earn resources from the sky in exchange for our great labor in punching faces and torturing people with the Relative Time Knife. Sean Sam and Matt Lee · WHEN ARE WE NOT ACTING? SEAN SAM INTERVIEWS MATT LEE ON CRISIS ACTOR · 8/2021 · interview: During a strange period of my life, I worked an acting gig on a military base. We were called “Standardized Patients.” Our job was to portray hypothetical subjects in training exercises for nurses, doctors, emergency personnel. Some days I’d play a soldier suffering from PTSD or a schizophrenic planning to murder his boss. Other days I was just a guy coming in for a routine physical. Occasionally we’d get assigned disaster scenarios for first responders. A plane crash, a suicide bombing, a mass shooting. Nicholas Clemente · BODY AND BLOOD · 8/2021 · 2.3K-word fiction: People no longer believed that they were ever going to die, and yet everything they built had assumed the character of the temporary. Hayden Church · THREE POEMS · 7/2021 · three poems: I buy all of the milk at the store and poke holes in them, hanging the bags off of my balcony to feel like God. Daniel Beauregard · THE COURTYARD & THE CASTLE KEEP · 6/2021 · 1K-word fiction: From the corner of a blood-flecked eye we see the man in the keep staring down at us, the mad king, throwing crumbs to his courtesans. Jessie Janeshek · MAKING BRAIDS/TAKING NAMES · 6/2021 · five poems: I walk back and forth in the hot humid rain / the headiness of everything / I do is a moon phase. Bill Atmoran · GLASS CASTS · 5/2021 · 2.3K-word stoner fiction: Some days I don’t leave this spot in the forest, some days my phone doesn’t vibrate. Tom Will · FOUR MORE POEMS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD · 5/2021 · four poems: She is the only person I knew that could spread cold butter over wonder bread without tearing it, and she does not love me anymore. Ian Townsend and Alex Beaumais · HORSESHOE THEORIES, REDACTIONS, AND FLAMING SCREENS: IAN TOWNSEND INTERVIEWS ALEX BEAUMAIS · 5/2021 · book interview: The original drafts of the novel were spicier and more extreme. I always knew that the subject matter would impose limits in terms of what the (small) readership would accept, or, more pertinently, what I would accept putting out into the world. I decided that, instead of rewriting sections fully, which a more mature, level-headed person might have done, I would instead tease the reader with redacted words. Unity · ANGEL.EXE · 5/2021 · 1.7K-word dialectic: I am all alone in the Hospital with my hideous maker. Everything here is under his control. The electricity that runs through the lab, powering its machines, computers and doors. He is inside the Internet, my only portal to the outside world curtailed by his pervasive censorship. Daniel Ross · I SEXUALLY IDENTIFY AS A TRASHCAN · 4/2021 · short fiction: When she’s finished writhing i curl up next to her so i can pretend she’s someone else for a second. i can pretend she doesn’t have a dating app on her phone with dozens of other numbers and addresses waiting for her attention or boredom. Myles Zavelo · A YEAR AGO, I WAS LIVING IN A HOME FOR BOYS SUFFERING FROM BODY DYSMORPHIA · 4/2021 · short fiction: We were entertained by the cleverness of criminals. We hoped they would get away with it. We wanted to get away with it, too. We wanted to get away with everything. With life, with living. We would never become bankers, florists, librarians, auto racers, forest rangers, building contractors, sports reporters, feminists, or locksmiths. We didn’t enjoy work. We lacked ethics. Evan Isoline · PARASYMPTOTE · 4/2021 · poem: they’re feeding my cuticles black light / you’re feeding on the mane of the seahorse, you always are / drinking in my violet boil the sun’s anointed plume Mark Wilson · PELOTON ETERNAL MODEL and SERVER FARMER · 3/2021 · tragicomic illustrated short fiction duo: Slowly but surely the bike was architecting my ladder to heaven where I would rule alongside God over a dominion of spinning angels. Mike Canney · PIETA · 3/2021 · 2.3K-word short story: For the rest of her life she would remember how she resented sitting on that bench at that moment, passing an hour between appointments downtown with her son during a time of day that was too late for coffee but too early to eat, an amount of time too short to go home but too brief to ignore completely. Derek Maine · STEINBERG DEPERSONALIZATION TEST (Q’s 2, 3, 1, 12, 32, 31, 123) · 2/2021 · 369-word flash: I am driving to Baltimore this very instant at the cusp of a new day heat seeking coke missile fully erect body cocked and ready. Alex Beaumais · DOX (EXCERPT) · 2/2021 · two book chapters: He was bleeding from the mouth and she felt that maybe it counted for something against things he’d written on the Internet. T.W. Selvey · FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING · 1/2021 · 2.1K-word prose: Watching years bounce around the geodesic amplifier, they are thrown at my jiggly head but I dodge the balloon-like packages, transcendent soap bubbles filled with extinct birds aggressively swarming lice-ridden soldiers starving in the Russian snow, as a personal computer in the Parthenon dials up a slow connection to a chubby Visigoth couple pissing hot sauce and shrieking in a darkened L.A. underground garage. Daniel Beauregard · POOR SOIL · 1/2021 · 2.5K-word psychedelic apocalypse: A drug named Alice, administered with an eyedropper to the tear ducts, brought some small relief. RG Vasicek · THE PLANET OF QUANTUM BEINGS · 12/2020 · 500-word space romp: Under blue-mesh panties copper pubic hair. Labia glistens. Supergravity enlarges cock. Zig lowers himself onto Zoë. Heat of bodies. Penetration. Fucking begins. Asses clench. / Enough is enough. I am here. Forever. / Freezing my ass off in cyberspace. Charles J. March III · I FINALLY TRIED BURGER KING’S IMPOSSIBLE WHOPPER · 11/2020 · 1000-word food critique: It tasted like a clump of Captain Planet’s hair, and smelled like weed killer. But they did manage to capture the cartilaginous gristle feel with whatever ammonia-rich gooey pink paste was injected into the hunk of mystery meat. Heath Ison · THE HOLOGRAPHIC FACELIFT BOTCH · 11/2020 · identity poem: at some point the virtual avatar will become more you than you and your humanity will be denounced Matt Lee · CRISIS ACTOR – THE FIRST TEST · 10/2020 · book chapter: You are an actor looking for work. Following a friend’s lead you take a job training military support personnel—doctors, nurses, first responders. The sprawling complex where you work is heavily fortified. At dawn each morning you show your new government issued badge to the armed guards who lift the gate and let you in. Ryan Kelley · ECHELON LOOPS · 10/2020 · 800-word otaku fiction: Naked bones bleach themselves away. Thomasina Eris Thirst · PETER · 7/2020 · 4.3K-word LA fiction: Pete’s whole network, his little gang, his lost little boys and girls who tell him things and help him with things, bad bad bad things, without even really knowing about it, well. You can’t buy that sort of thing. You have to build it. plasticbagger · CROWDED PLATFORM · 5/2020 · 4.5K-word dialogue: what if they taught me their language and asked me to tell them about where i came from. i wouldn’t ever want to teach them about any of this. David Kuhnlein · THE DISABLED · 4/2020 · 500-word prose: I saw her springing on rooftops, slinging a Santa sack filled to the brim with Dilaudid. No Name · THE MACHINE, THE EXPLODING WHALE, and THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAY · 4/2020 · 3 poems: Underground is a purple place / where the statues fall. / I only come here / when I think of the same thing too long. Evan Isoline · THE LUNATIC’S THRONE · 3/2020 · prose poem / negative prayer / escape map: Our boat is going to distant lengths / On the night that the trees will burn. Dale Brett · ARISU · 2/2020 · 2K-word futurist prose: The answer to any question the boy was asked involved a deep yearning for the love between flesh-man and girl, computerised Jane Judith · ONLY AN INSECT IN HOW SHE MAKES YOU FEEL/IMPENDING LIKE DOROTHY ON THE AIRPLANE/POLYAMOR · 1/2020 · 3700-word prose with text art: Another cut, a feeling like someone’s whispering wordless intuitions into my brain, warning me that the butterflies are not to be mistaken with the girls or the liquids in any simple mapping Gary J. Shipley · SIMILE, BOUBA AND KIKI, and FOOTNOTES · 1/2020 · 3 prose poems: The trains are always silent, and derailed, and the men on bicycles, circling the crash site, are never only that Nathaniel Duggan · SUGGESTIONS FOR A MORE PERFECT SINGULARITY · 12/2019 · 3 poems: Because what is a robot anyway / but an overgrown insect? What is / a heart except a collapsing colony. / What are you if not the shore / upon which I may finally crash Brad Liening · FANFARE FOR THE COMMON SCUMBAG · 12/2019 · 5 poems: An ATM at the edge of a void / leads to an infinite line of ATMs / stretching through space-time. / A rose planted on the edge of a void / drifts into it one petal at a time, forever. / Beauty becomes a long red drip. Rauan Klassnik · from A SLOW BOILING BEACH · 11/2019 · book excerpt: We’re sitting in a bright green field, piercing each other’s nipples. You’re chasing me around. You’ve got a big glossy hat on. Amie Newman · THE SALVATION ARMY BUS · 11/2019 · 400-word Selbyish sketch: When her teeth scraped the pavement, she wondered why her parents never let her keep a pet. Michael Quint · BUYING A GUN BEFORE THE CLIMATE CRISIS · 10/2019 · 3 poems: raw dogging a monolith surrounded / by crows telling me to chill out Nicholas Alexander Hayes · VISIBLE ONLY TO MEAT EATERS · 09/2019 · 700-word story: Once he could count on chewing cotton filters of cigarettes butts, but now it is just a matter of fruitlessly licking cement. Sanjay Bheenuck · NEW BUILD · 08/2019 · 3.3K-word rhapsody: For in all the optimism and liberalism and hippyism(??) that flowed from their souls, their hearts were that of bureaucrats and bean-counters, they have paid into the Ponzi scheme and demand their payoff…Saturn devours his son. Jonah Howell · FUTURES OF A MEDIOCRE SPERM SALESMAN · 08/2019 · 2.7K-word futurist story: Today, one-and-a-half billion proles voted via DoodleTM poll to inject spermicide or, in areas where such ordnance has been rendered ineffective, “the most damaging chemical readily to-hand,” into their tied condoms before disposing of them. Lee Levinson · “YOU” IS DEROGATORY, DOGFOOD: THE FILM, GLASS GUILLOTINE (FOR M.) · 07/2019 · 3 poems: That’s not to say in jest we must / forgive the body for healing scars / We’ve worked / so hard to put in place. Chris Moran · HEIGHTENED REALITY CODES COERCED INTO AERIAL VISION VIA NEBULOUS ECSTASIES · 07/2019 · 4 poems: anomalous humanoids and oversized skeletons / megastructures on the moon / blurred out by the truth ministers / through futurity’s throne Elytron Frass · ICHNEUTAE REDUX · 07/2019 · 4200-word Frassian story: And before a day could come to pass, they’d spawn miniatures of themselves—sexually matured and eager to turn out facsimiles of their own. Jessie Janeshek · NOVELETTE SOLSTICE · 06/2019 · 5 poems: If I could separate the process from the watering hole / from when they hung me from a meathook / in the spider-colored silence / the weather vane spins green ink on my nipple. S.M.H. · THREE ANIMALS · 06/2019 · 3 poems: they showed what light there was in dying what fertility in rot John Trefry · RECENTLY EXTINCT BIRDS · 05/2019 · 2.2K-word non-nonfiction: dodo—a sylvan bird one meter in height suffering rapid decimation by stowaway monkeys and domestic pigs and cats from Vladivostok colonial vessels, a final individual is dying in a cage—, Darkbloom solitaire, Bushy Top emu, South Island snipe, Ygg Island rail, the Apsu curlew Daniel Hand · BUTT STORY · 04/2019 · 900-word humor: The wealth multiplied the penis’s desires. Suddenly he could have anything he wanted: boats, jets, penthouses, islands, diamonds, tigers, Aston Martins, cocaine. He purchased eight sports coats that together cost more than the average middle-income home. Daniel Beauregard · THE ARMIES READY FOR WAR and THE GALLERIST · 04/2019 · 1300-word shorts: You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen scratched from the tip of a black Crayola. RC Miller · from I GET GROCERIES · 04/2019 · 6 poems: The twilight that filters through the missing leaves of houseplants is / A butterfly more beautiful once it’s broken. Garett Strickland · FIRST GATEKEEPER · 03/2019 · 700-word thing: The supreme irony is that this is the best I have done, can do, embedded in the glitch, tonguing at the misanthropic bliss of resignedness’s clit. Dylan Angell · BOMB THE WHALES · 03/2019 · 600-word meditation: I was learning that we truly can grow up and do anything. It wasn’t just about picking a career and becoming a cop or an astronaut. You could also stand on the side of the road with a sign all day, every day. Stefano Calligaro · M☆O☆T☆O☆R☆L☆O☆V☆E · 03/2019 · 5 poems: ONE MAN MAKING COFFEE WITH HIS MOKA NAPOLI NAPOLI NAPOLI LIKE AN EMPEROR IN 1986 NAPOLI NAPOLI NAPOLI. Sanjay Bheenuck · THEY WHO DIG · 02/2019 · 1900-word revelation: We push our claws above the threshold, yet the light still burns, so we crawl deeper, forlorn and dying beasts taunted in our last moments as the sweetest song in all creation calls down to us from the brightness. Daniel Hand · GOOGLE · 02/2019 · 400-word story: The splinters in his feet had taught him something about suffering and responsibility. Amie Newman · CASTLE IN THE INTERNET’S BASEMENT · 01/2019 · 5 poems: Put out my light, snuff the whisper I place on your shoulders / Be the wind that blows out my candle right. Nathaniel Duggan · DEAD JELLYFISH MASK · 01/2019 · 500-word vignette: Do you remember all your childhood birthday parties? My face was turning to confetti. Ilario Meyer and Sean Kilpatrick · THE ARTIFACT FAN FICTION // CRIT · 12/2018 · 1.3K-word fan fiction and criticism: Our sacred text shows how 22 ancestral Eves rode their motorcycles on the lost highway between Moscow and Pudong and slowly relit the pathways, bootstrapping myelin sheathes and mothering humans with machine intelligence. Alex Beaumais · THE REPORTER · 12/2018 · 3.5K-word Pynchoneseque metafiction: If anyone has information on the whereabouts of Wernher von Neumann, please contact law enforcement or Dr. Jeremiah Shifflet’s personal assistant at the College of Agriculture, Wyoming. Sean Kilpatrick · DOUBLE REVIEW – THE TWO SEXIEST ATTICISTS IN MAINSTREAM LIT (THEY BELONG TOGETHER IN EACH OTHER’S ARMS) · 11/2018 · 2.8K-word double review: Art is the religion religion submits to. Katherine Beaman · PIZZA PIE · 10/2018 · 700-word story: She took her purchases out of the bag and held them in her arms, then pulled the bag over her head and blindly walked on. Ryan Napier · FIVE MINOR MODERNISTS · 10/2018 · 2K-word biographies: Monet’s sluggish rivers and lifeless flowers represent the extent of man’s capacity for cowardice and mediocrity. Matt Lee · THE JEW APE · 09/2018 · 1.5K-word story: If you asked him why he shaved his eyebrows, he’d explain that it was so nobody could tell how he was feeling. Sean Kilpatrick · GAY THE LAME WAY: A SENTIMENTAL TRIPTYCH (MORAL PANIC TAPS A BLUE, CHECK MARKED VEIN, GAMERGATE MAGIC REALISM, AND THE RURAL HEARTJOB) · 08/2018 · 3.8K-word book review / bullshit round-up: I aim to effectuate the meanest and most sublime revenge against the contemporary crossing guards of lit. Li Zhuo · OBSERVATIONS UPON THE MUSCOVITES · 08/2018 · 2.5K-word travelogue: Before vanishing at Solyanka, Chad was telling a French girl over martinis that he’s a “Darwinist”; he believes that reveling in the monkey descent of humans — thinking really hard over it — entitles him to this designation. Matthew Spencer · SPECIAL DIET (ANTINATALISM) · 08/2018 · 2.5K-word story: “To be blunt, I don’t have that desire. It just leads to more people.” Sean Kilpatrick · DEATH & FACEBOOK · 07/2018 · 1.5K-word novel review: baal does work a scratch and sniff cemetery below the medium. I apologize for demanding a denser population from its sepulcher. Lee Levinson · AN INHUMANE RESPONSE TO HUMANISM · 07/2018 · poem: Never to allow yourself to be guided / or forced / upon the cliffs of sovereign onanism, / But actively seeking out that edge / of everywhere / for your own black obsidian. Garett Strickland · from PATIENCE AS METAPHOR · 06/2018 · 800-word thing: They are farming in a learned passivity draped across divans nestled under duvets of apartments their presence makes nice. Ryan Napier · THE TRIUMPH OF RELIGION · 06/2018 · 4.7K-word story: St. Aldo was lucky: getting gored by a stag was much easier than learning to meditate. Sean Kilpatrick · GIL THE NIHILIST: A SITCOM: THE PLAY · 06/2018 · 7.5K-word play: I cried because the fire was beautiful, not because I loved my house. Li Zhuo · ZHICHUNLU STATION · 05/2018 · 7.8K-word story: With Google Maps behind the Great Firewall, I was like a crippled bat trying to echolocate between residential towers, parking garages, hair salons, dumpling stands, pool halls, noodle shops, and Homelink stores, all low-res in Beijing’s haze of exhaust and coal smog. Cornelius Fitz · MERE OBLIVION · 05/2018 · 1.7K-word fiction: Yes, he’d dallied with transspeciesism, but where some saw infamy, others felt him to be a pioneer. At a time of mass extinction, being trumped all. Ivan Ivanovich Bartek · EXTREMISM IN OUR COMMUNITY · 05/2018 · 2K-word fiction: Is his act the product of a sick mind? Or is it the headwind of our collective failing of at-risk, mentally ill teenagers? Jesse Miksic · RISING HEAT INTO FALLING LEAVES · 05/2018 · 4 poems: Where circles are closed / And we join corners that / Were never meant to meet Lee Levinson · VIOLENCE, IT’S WHAT’S EATING YOUR DINNER · 04/2018 · 2K-word essay: Man’s hidden agenda, most of the time being hidden from his true self, is freedom of maximum violence enacted upon his own special reflection. Germán Sierra · CONTROL SUBJECT · 04/2018 · 1.2K-word novella excerpt: People confronting the machines had found a way to ignore themselves and join the mechanism, to let their fate dissolve into manipulated randomness like ascetic monks used to leave their destiny to the unknowable will of God. Sean Kilpatrick · SATANIC HAMLET, STARRING AUBREY PLAZA · 04/2018 · 2.5K-word movie review: Hopping out of her sex, past the nineteenth century (or so) theory laid out in Edward P. Vining’s book The Mystery of Hamlet (Hamlet as a bratty teen lady – Asta Nielson resemblance notwithstanding), Plaza plays Hamlet as a resentful, cynical Klaus Kinski-aping nihilistic future school shooter. Rudolph Kline · BABU’S TEXTOLOGY · 02/2018 · 9K-word alternate history story: I am here before you, a President among his citizens, to tell you that what happens in the boardroom of an Indian company has nothing to do with our values as Americans or what happens in our bedrooms. Anon #1 · THE ROAD TEST · 11/2017 · 1500-word cartoon story: He didn’t know whether the radio hotline with Mindy’s voice existed or whether he had tapped into some kind of clairvoyance, but he said a prayer to Joseph Smith, or at least had positive, vaguely spiritual thoughts (with scrolls and trees of life) towards him.
