SUBLIMINAL SYNTAX by Wayne Mason

       Query=
     Singularity > Hope

     Networks with melancholy computers
       or
            other machines w/biological
   intentions
     (outsource government conspiracy);

               Is it your
               technological
               blood visions?

Invisible utopias

  Users wield
     metaphysical hardware
               open yet, age was insatiable
               some technology
            sentient
       pessimistic

Imagining flesh
               & digital bondage

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Wayne Mason is a writer and sound artist from Central Florida. His words have appeared across the small press in magazines both print and online. He is the author of six chapbooks. and is the former poetry editor for Side Of Grits, and The Tampa Bay Muse. Wayne Mason has also been active in experimental music for nearly twenty years. He records ambient, experimental and noise sounds, both solo and as one half of the electronic project Blk/Mas. http://brokenzen.wordpress.com/

TOO GODDAMN CUTE by Misti Rainwater-Lites

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Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of Bullshit Rodeo and other works of fiction. She writes her ass off at Chupacabra Disco. When she isn't writing her ass off she's frying chicken for her man and playing Dillinger with her son.

BREAKFAST by Misti Rainwater-Lites

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Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of Bullshit Rodeo and other works of fiction. She writes her ass off at Chupacabra Disco. When she isn't writing her ass off she's frying chicken for her man and playing Dillinger with her son.

HIS PSYCHO EX by Misti Rainwater-Lites

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Misti Rainwater-Lites is the author of Bullshit Rodeo and other works of fiction. She writes her ass off at Chupacabra Disco. When she isn't writing her ass off she's frying chicken for her man and playing Dillinger with her son.

SLUT by Stephen Weighill

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Stephen Weighill is a comedian from the Bay Area. His YouTube channel is WeighAwesome.

A TALE OF SEVERAL BEAUTIFULS by Aimee Herman

Blame it on symmetry.

     How near are her eyes to carefully constructed bridge of nose. Does she starve. Are her hips like the horizon, without fault or curve. Is her skin more mocha than medium rare. What blooms in the months outside of spring or autumn and when the leaves go away, how sturdy are the branches. Does your grass wilt or does it arrive like green erections plunged out of earth’s pores.

Blame it on what distracts us. Call it brushed air. Call it removed particles of mistake.

     Her smile is white and heterosexual. His hair is without recede. That home is window’d and gorgeous due to its skylights and built-in 401K plan. Does her cellulite show. Does your health plan cover the creams you will need to rub it away. What is your routine. How many chemicals have attempted to peel away your skin; I think you might be beautiful under that fifth layer. Keep ripping at yourself. Scoop out and where there is tunnel, there is possibility for better.

Blame it on tents and drawers and the tenacity of lies. Collocate implant with imbalance.

     Remove your girdle now. Help the redheaded dancer with her zipper and linger your looks at the way she folds like love letters. Quietly ask if you can dance your language into the cleavage of her mind. And the other one with painted eyebrows, thicker than the remorse from your 20s. She is beautiful too. And that graffiti’d church that might be a bank now or was but has become a collaborative celebration of dripped paint now. And her nipples. And that cloud that kind of looks like your best friend from tenth grade. And that fence, painted turquoise. And your neck. And that meal you fed me when my palms were too tired to lift and curl. And that Wednesday you fell asleep inside me. And that rooftop garden. And the smell of patchouli you snuck inside magazine. And your sodium. And my blood. And that too.

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http://aimeeherman.wordpress.com/

BIDDING ADIEU by Aparna Pathak

He puffed every breath
To paint a dream with smoke
But with every exhalation
He could see colors
Bidding adieu to life

RAINY DAY COLLAGE by Ira Joel Haber

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Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer, and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one-man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 140 online and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, DeComp, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, The DMQ Review, Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Coupremine, Cerebration,Chick Flicks, Softblow, Eclectica Magazine, Backwards City Review, Right Hand Pointing, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Brew City Magazine, Superstition Review, Fiction Attic, Mastodon Dentist, Blue Print Review, Ellipsis, The Indelible Kitchen, Cricket, Entelechy, So To Speak, Taj Mahal Review, The Fifteen Project, The Externalist, Why Vandalism, Mungbeing Magazine, Lamination Colony, Paradigm, Lily, Literary Fever, Glassfire Magaine, The Houston Literary Review, Lilies and Cannonballs, Wheelhouse Magazine, Terra Incognita, Qarrtsiluni, The Tusculum Review, Multidementional, 34th Parallel, Wood Coin, Sacramento Poetry, Art & Music, Anti-Poetry, Divine Dirt Quarterly, The Mom Egg, Disenthralled, Etcetera,Sea Stories , Bicycle Review, , Down In The Dirt, Psychic Meatloaf, Diverse Voices, Blue Lotus, Forge, The Front Porch Review,The Blotter, Breadcrumb Scabs, Guerilla Pamphlets, Imitation Fruit, Front Range, Convergence, Meat For Tea, Grey Sparrow Press, A Handful Of Dust, Ink Filled Page,The Journal Of Unlikely Entomology, Frequencies, Orion headless, Missive, Lit n Image, Media Virus, Spudgun, Bare Hands, Up The Staircase Quarterly, Maintenant 6, Glass Coin, Off The Rocks, Sliver of Stone , Blue Five Notebook, Map Literary, Literary Ophans, Pinyon Review, Decades Review, Monongahela Review,Amethyst Arsenic, Blue Five Notebook,Tenement Block Review, Cleaver Magazine,The McNeese Review,Storm Cellar,The Original Van Gogh's Ear Anthology, Red Fez, New York Dreaming, Slippage Literary Magazine,Madhat Lit, Olentangy Review,The Writing Disorder, Symmetry Pebbles, Petrichor Review, Cigale Literary Magazine, Episodic Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Four Ties Lit Review, Decades Review, Crack The Spine, Elohi Gadugi Journal, American Athenaeum,Fiction Fix,The Squalor Review, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review,The Open Road Review,he Meadowland Review,Thrice Fiction, Banango,Sassafras,The Germ, Synaesthesia Magazine,Santa Clara Review, inkblot,Vagabond City, Compose Journal,The Indian River Review, Ricohet, Oddball Magazine,Verse Junkies, Superstition Review, The Black Light Engine Room,Watershed Review & The NewerYork. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists' Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at The United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.

ABSURDITY BECOMES HER TASTE CURVE by Mark Sebastian Jordan

It wasn’t the army helmet bra
nor the hat with hummingbird feeders.

It wasn’t the clear bubble-wrap dress
nor the organic eggplant shoes.

It wasn’t even the smartphone earrings
nor the corrugated cardboard corduroys.

It was the elusive slip made of Higgs bosons
that made us all sit up and take notice.

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Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, Mysteries at the Museum, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International. His humorous satire 1776 & All That is available from XOXOX Press. Jordan's poetry chapbook The Book of Jobs was published by Pudding House Press, and his next chapbook, Murder Ballads, will be published by Poets Haven Press in 2014.

Mark lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accommodations to travelers of all ages, promoting the idea of world peace through culturally diverse travel.

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT by Cassandra Dallett

even the trees look tired
the sad brown grass about to combust
the Low Rider Oldies are singing smoothly for the cool of dusk
It’s tempting to start the drink now
but with the sun this high
I’d be laid out with the dogs
panting
a gin and tonic sweating a glass with lime
reminds me of last night
how the boy was lapping me
how he grinds into me
my hips a bowl of oatmeal
butter melting the middle
how he always finds a deeper spot
then my phone rings
and I need to go home
make up stories
explain the stoned look
in my eye.

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Cassandra Dallett occupies Oakland, CA. Cassandra writes of a counter culture childhood in Vermont and her ongoing adolescence in San Francisco Bay Area. She has published in Slip Stream, Sparkle and Blink, Out Of Our, Up The River, Hip Mama, and The Criminal Class Review, among many others. A full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless will be released from Manic D Press in the spring of 2014.