Dreaming of Perfection : a novel excerpt

Chapter 2

by Jonny kelly

The rain is pissing down in the wonderful Glasgow. I'm on a bus going
into town. I'm particularly annoyed as I can hear two fucking junkies
snorting cocaine on the back of the bus. I don't know if I want to
join them or kick them off the bus - I probably want to do both at the
moment. The driver is a tall, husky black fella, who seems oblivious
to Sid and Nancy snorting in the back seats. My mind seems to rest
slightly as I see my stop coming up. I stand up early, so I don't have
to hear the snorting pigs anymore. “Cheers driver,” I say extremely
politely, the driver looks at me with an awkward glare, as if I've
just raped his baby daughter with a chainsaw strapped to my dick. I
put a Metro newspaper over my head, because the rain seems to be
thumbing down nonstop. I'm not infuriating with annoyance though; I
know I've only got a two minute walk - the editor, my boss, is waiting
in a nice little café just around the corner from the bus stop.

I enter the café with a big smile on my face; there is a lovely smell
of fresh coffee, which makes me fell quite happy. I sit down on an
expensive looking black leather chair, at the table where my editor
(John) is sitting. “Have you read the Mirror today David?” John asks
me.

“No I've just read the Metro on the bus, why?”

"Well, David, there is an exclusive story in the Mirror about mass
deaths in the Orkneys."

“Mass deaths in the bloody Orkney Islands, are you having a fuckin'
laugh? Is there something in your coffee John?"

"There isn't much information in the paper, at the moment, all we
really know is that over 20 people in the Orkney islands have commited
suicide by forcing a 10 inch blade through their skull.”

"So I guess I have to go to the bloody Orkney Isles for this story
then. Scotland's answer to the fucking Wacko Disaster.”

"It might very well get bigger than that mate, who knows?"

"Fine I'll go as long as I don't end up in the Wicker man at the end.”
An oriental looking Asian girl walks over to me with a black coffee.
She has a cute little grin on her face, so I decide to grin back at
her, this makes her giggle.

I put the soaking Metro in to a bin which is at arms length from our table.
“So when will I start this investigation?”

John takes a sip of his coffee and then rests the cup on a napkin,
“hopefully you'll be able to start this weekend, we'll see what we can
do for your transportation."

I am now quite annoyed, I look at the ceiling of the café and notice
some chewing gum, this makes me even more annoyed, because it looks
like a nice little clean café.

A Headless Man Falls in Love with a Bowl of Rice

A Headless Man Falls in Love with a Bowl of Rice

by Bradley Sands



The headless man is eating dinner. He feels his life is incomplete. His tears dribble out of his neck wound and his major organs rain down on a bowl of rice. If any more organs rain down on the bowl of rice, the headless man will stop feeling that his life is incomplete. He does not want this. The only way to save himself is to make his life complete in a different way. He must use a method of hunting and trapping the missing piece rather than not feeling anything at all. The headless man has determined the missing piece is an emotion. An emotion that has been reserved for a person who is not the headless man. An emotion that will fit into his soft tissue. But where will he hunt and trap this emotion? Women are repulsed by his incompleteness, men are likely to react to it with violence. He contemplates this conundrum. He stops contemplating. He looks down at the bowl of rice with longing. He looks down at the bowl of rice, regretting all the pieces he has left behind.







Bio: Bradley Sands is the author of the novel, It Came from Below the Belt, and the editor of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. His work has appeared in The Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue), Lamination Colony, No Colony, Opium Magazine, Robot Melon, decomP, susurrus, Thieves Jargon, and elsewhere. Visit him at www.bradleysands.com.

Underneath, A Group of Catfish Discover Existentialism

Underneath, A Group of Catfish Discover Existentialism

by XtX

Paw Paw wakes up.

Paw Paw decides, ‘this is the day’.

Paw Paw still makes his breakfast, still turns the pictures facing the walls.

Paw Paw calls no one; he feels secure in this.

Paw Paw finishes his quilt made of horseshoes, hemming the sleeves with the remaining darkness from his past.

Paw Paw takes the rest of his arthritis medicine and a six pack of Coors.

Paw Paw saws off a shotgun, writes “FRIEND” in black Sharpie on the side.

Paw Paw heads out to the bridge at the mill pond.

Paw Paw thinks, this path is overgrown now.

Paw Paw remembers catching blue gill with his grandson which is a lie he tells himself

Paw Paw is terrified for a second, but the second passes and he cannot feel his hands

Paw Paw sits on the low wood railing of the bridge; he hears the rustling of birds in the brush.

Paw Paw thinks about it being his last day, for certain.

Paw Paw wraps himself in the horseshoe quilt, grabs his friend.

Paw Paw whispers please.

Paw Paw pulls the trigger.

Paw Paw falls and sinks and sinks.


https://www.amazon.com/Stygiophillia-Nathan-Tyree-ebook/dp/B001O5CG4I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487779093&sr=8-1&keywords=nathan+tyree

Breakfast at Sedlac

Breakfast at Sedlac.
By Jon Catron

Let me genuflect at your pelvis, kneeling on your spine. Venerated, your skull hangs high above, its stern, loving gaze crucifying me. Your rib cage closes about me, an iron maiden of calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, and heavy metals. I share the fate of your heart, bled out, desiccated, desecrated, consecrated in this pain. Our anatomies mingle; fluids everywhere. I drift asleep awaiting the salvation that never comes.

The Fucker Inside

The Fucker Inside by S.A. Griffin
Tainted Coffee Press
ISBN 978-0-9814685-1-8



S.A. Griffin claims to not be an erotic poet. He even goes so far as to include a poem in this slim collection explaining just that point. Despite that, most of the poems in the book deal, in some way, with sex.

The opening poem "I Ate Fig Newtons Until I Puked" uses the act of gorging on a food until you can no longer stand it as metaphor for obsessive relationships and the intense sexual passion that normally occurs at the beginning of an affair. He does this with language that is often rough, and line breaks that seem almost jarring. This is strangely effective. He evokes the disjointed quality of love and sex wonderfully.

All of the poems in this slender volume are well realized, and complete. Standing above the rest though, is a piece that seems to be the center of the work, the core: "How Many Times". This poem, though short, carries real weight. I'm not one to reproduce a poem in its entirety in the context of a review, and this poem is too short to excerpt easily. It is about (on the surface) watching a woman undress, and then seeing her as the empty clothes.

Much of Griffin's work is reminiscent of Bukowski at his best. This is powerful stuff. Griffin manages well formed, insightful, intelligent poetry dealing with sexual themes, which may be the most difficult subject for the poet to face.

The Fucker Inside is a fine book.

I SAW A MAN WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME AT THE STORE AND I FELT BAD by Sam Pink

I SAW A MAN WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME AT THE STORE AND I FELT BAD

by Sam Pink



Time is recurring terror.



There is no night and day there are only small naps.



There is no way to understand anything there are only nods.



There is no holding hands there is only making sure the other one doesn’t run.



There is no idea there is only saying something one of us already said but forgot about.



There are no naps there are only blinks.



There are no blinks there are only small rips in sight.



There is no fun there is only me not saying anything.



There is no floor there is only feeling like you can’t go below where you’re at.



There is no washer and dryer in my apartment building and that sucks fucking balls.



There are no fingers there are only smaller pieces of your arm.



There are no arms there is only your body trying to expand without your permission.



Being dead will be the easiest thing I do. I am not accomplishing anything; my feet are shovels.





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Couch Thing

Review: Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland by Howie Good
Achilles Chapbook Series
www.dogzplot.com


I received Howie Good's chapbook Tomorrowland in the mail just a few days after my mother died in a car crash. Initially I ignored it because it did not contain any alcohol and I had no time for any object that lacked the ability to numb or kill. Eventually I picked it up thinking that it would distract me from my melancholy for a bit. After reading the first poem, "Love, Death, Etc." I flung the wee book across the room and curled myself into a ball on my couch. I was angry at Mr. Good. Solipsistically, I wanted to be the only person capable of understanding my level of pain and he had cleanly disproved that theory in a single page. Some time later I returned to the slim volume and finished it. I am glad that I did.

Good weaves poems into prose (or perhaps it is the other way around) and bends beauty until it breaks. His words describe and elicit agony and love and death (and etc.). He has captured the burning heart of god on the page.

He illuminates the human condition with simple lines like:


“Where we sleep, you know, it isn’t necessarily where we wake up, it all depends on what we dream, my dead mother for example, crisscrossed by the fence, fingers hooked through the diamond shaped links.”

or:

“Quick, send the extruded plastic moon to this address and because the ambulance driver will get lost in the maze of small, unlighted streets, send the moon out for an encore.”

or:

“not knowing what I’ll remember one day or that no one escapes the fire.”

Good plays with words the way a virtuoso plays the strings of some obscure, forgotten instrument. He understands grief and pain and how to express them fully in ways that most poets could only dream.

This is a wonderful and marvelous and painful book.


-Nathan Tyree

Sam Pink

Nathan Tyree has interviewed Sam Pink for Bookmunch. Pink is the author of I'm Going to Clone Myself then Kill the Clone and Eat it.

Over and Out

4 Poems by Z. Lustig

Four Poems by:

Z. Lustig


Dog Fathers

I ate her face
it tasted like
frozen peas
but I seemed
to enjoy it
anyway



Love Story

If I chew enough gum
then the bitch wont be\
able to catch me when
I run out back of the
shed
and fuck her sister
before she starts
to rot.


The Fight

She's dead now



The headhunter's hair

My last breath is taken by
a headhunter with the dread
gum disease known as
gingivitis. He has
golden feathers in
his redolent hair

Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

by

Herman Bloom

She turns in time to see him looking at the woman sitting sideways at the end of the bar. The woman is long, too thin, too tanned and clouded by a haze of cigarette smoke that suggests a scene from some late nineteen-forties movie where a femme fatale coaxes some slow witted man in a fedora into murdering her husband, and then leaves him to rot in prison. For his part, he is busy trying to appear as though the only interesting thing in the entire room is floating just below the surface of the scotch in his glass. He badly wants to hide the fact that he was looking at the woman perched at the end of the bar. In the last few months he has found himself looking at other women more and more; wanting them more and more; needing her less and less.