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/

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

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.

LITTLE GIRL STARES by J. Bradley

at herself in the mirror. Little girl asks, pleads, demand I show myself, to come out. I whisper to her bones if I walk outside of her skin, the air untwine me until I am molecule, then atom, then memory. Little girl asks what is a molecule. I remind her skin, nerves, bones how the only science she understands is the science of want, how she constantly confuses it for need.

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J. Bradley is the author of the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books), with art by Adam Scott Mazer. He lives at iheartfailure.net.

SQUALOR by Kevin M. Hibshman

Dirty pier.
Someone carved an image into the rotting planks.
The patron saint of damned waitresses and drunk surfers?
The awful smell of poisoned ocean.
They all roll back on the foam.

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Kevin M. Hibshman has had poems, collages and reviews published in numerous journals and magazines world wide since 1990. In addition to editing his own poetry magazine, Fearless, both online and in print for nearly twenty years, he has authored fourteen chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Incessant Shining available from Propaganda Press. He received his BA in Liberal Arts form Union institute and University/Vermont College in 2010.

TINY DEVASTATIONS by Alyssa Yankwitt

The hour rises
and there are things I don’t understand

for instance, why you
are always saving me in dreams

carrying my limbs
through circus tents

gently placing each fallen extremity
into a plastic, cracked blue bucket.

You say      it’s ok love,
                  I’m protecting them

                  in case they don’t grow back again
                  I will sew them onto your body.

And I believe you

know this is the truth
because like each dream before

you promise me      love, I will teach you to fly
and do

only after confessing
                  we are both casualties of the same war.

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Alyssa Yankwitt received an MFA from The City College of New York, where she teaches in the English department. She is a Staff Developer for Poetry Outreach, an organization bringing poetry into NYC schools. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Lake, Sein und Werden, Cloud City Press, Stone Highway Review, and are forthcoming in Houston & Nomadic Voices. Alyssa has incurable wanderlust, enjoys drinking whiskey, hates writing about herself in third person, and loves a good disaster.

SCRUPULOUS TEMPTATIONS by Pam Benjamin

Infuse joy and Lent
Christ in the desert

Large quantities of
shock and chemical mercy.

Biologically there is no God and
telepathic insight resembles schizophrenia.

Conditioned to mystical surgery.
A decomposing visionary sits troubled in the corner.

The party continues:
                              Did you try the wine?
                              She burned down the house to roast that pig.
                              Don't pigeonhole the Mexican peasant.
Nothing is Eden.

The world sits directly behind these voices.
Intolerable surroundings and moral infections,

comfortable intellect and spiritual fashion
create religious overtones

and the party continues.

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Pam Benjamin is a poet turned stand-up comic. She is also the Program Director of www.mutinyradio.fm. Listen to "Pamtastic's Comedy Clubhouse" every Fri 8-11pm pac. Oh, and buy her novella "Voices" on Kindle here:http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Pam-Benjamin-ebook/dp/B005L3RQQW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1386192534&sr=8-2&keywords=voices+pam+benjamin

FEMDOM by Craig Podmore

Bankers are antichrists that devour the weak.

Nuclear trigger-happy.
Decrease the populous with
Impoverishment, enforced cannibalism
And scheduled executions.

The gluttonous perils
That are their very nature.
Used condoms and
Hypodermic baby deaths.

Satanic economy.
Wretched methods of killing.
Selling news.
The soulless poke at the bodies with sticks.
The stasis of a pallid face filmed on mobile phones.

Add the make-up.
Add the tagline.
Add the smile.
Add the naked model.
Add the airbrush.
Add the stoic nature that bemuses us
Which then goes on to making us all forget
About our real problems like diseases,
Revolutions and school hall massacres.

Perfection is a form of apathy.
Beauty is an anaesthetic.
A clinical sodomy of your own realisation;
Forget about the guns and the carnage and
The suicides and the general waste.

It is evident, that on your credit card receipt,
It reveals that you are a method of killing.

Selling souls like Oedipus in a dirty movie.

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www.ammosexbarbiturates.com

NOTHING IS KNOWN OF HIS PERSONALITY, OR HIS THOUGHTS, OR THE MEANING OF HIS ART by John Sweet

let the dead be the dead and let the
living feast on their bones

let money be the law of the land

sons & daughters of the poor good for
fucking good for sending off to war and
there is humor to be found in religion if
you can kill before being killed

there is the ghost of bosch in
every prayer you choke on

there is the sound of his laughter as
the bullet finds your skull

compassion is too precious to
be wasted on just anyone

GRATEFUL I SUPPOSE by Rob Plath

on fire
up to my
fucking neck

while at
the center
of a
frozen lake

i still have
my sight
to foolishly
gaze at
the stars

LOVE HURTS by Michael Grover

Love can hurt sometimes
Not necessarily
Even romantic love
Love hurts
Friends grow apart
          die
          fuck each other over
Being human is hard work
Love hurts
Everybody dies alone
Yet we die together
Love hurts
Most people are
Just in it for themselves
Love hurts
When you're trying to be
Something bigger than self
Love hurts

WHAT HAPPENS by David McLean

sex is what happens on piles of naked skeletons
stripped of the senseless insensible
flesh,

it is all the terrible under every memory,
the proximate painless
and never parties yet,

like William Burroughs climbing out of a car
so old it is permanently history
and has always been rusty freedom

to dream in, empty boys, suicide
the cruel exigencies of non-being;
what happens is flesh and skeletons,

the banality of good and evil

WHY AM I RED? by mpcAstro

Because your peek
a-boo
elicits crime
and punishment.

And I am ashamed of
my platitudes
because

that’s all that
I have.

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mpcAstro is the "user name" for Mike Castro, publisher of OpPRESS. His poem, "Why Am I red?," was written in his head to keep himself awake while driving home alone 3 AM from the downtown Tampa Hilton's opening night of FetishCon, which coincided with the hotel's separate event opening, Art of Kink, where he was showing his art prints with catalog, Spider's Nest, promoted by Oneiros Books with iambic footnotes, Nidus Plexus. Both sections are scheduled for reprint as two books by Spring 2014 under the Oneiros imprint.

The poem is a red-faced cocktail of grief from love of the poet's life lost (only weeks prior), mixed with a pinch of shame and a dash of frustrated excitement for concocting all night into the wee hours (undelivered) lines to a bevy of fetishettes. The heart is a deep well.

https://www.facebook.com/OpPLEXUS
http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/oneirosbooks/spiders-nest/
http://issuu.com/oppoet/docs/nidus_plexus_with_iambus_10-23-13

As a first amends, the above issuu link's 20-page (107 thru 127) finalé dives into the ART Of KINK show while at the same time saving his love from drowning.

WILLIE JOE FROM COCOMO by Catfish McDaris

While washing windows with
a rag on an old rake handle &
a long wide squeegee, I could
not help but think of wild Willie

The cat that taught me plenty,
the correct mixture of vinegar
& ammonia to add to the water

Which rags were best, how to
choose & slice the right rubber
for a worn out squeegee edge

How to do the maximum amount
of work in the minimum of time,
how & where to hide from the boss

Willie always had a pint of rotgut
& a dime bag of good weed, he
never learned to roll a joint, so I
put together our cowboy cigarettes

After a doobie & half a pint, out
would come the Polaroids of his
new chick, all naked spread out
on a bed, smiling like B.B. King

Shots of him grinning, holding
what looked like a huge black
banana with lips all puckered up

I’d make an ugly face & pretend to
gag, he’d crack up laughing hard &
we’d smoke again & finish the booze

Then climb the ladders three stories
up & make the windows so clean, the
birds would commit suicide like in
an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

DROWN by Melanie Whithaus

Only a baby
when birthed from an egg
in a nest perked over salty water.

She came from deep inside—
vomit.
I pushed her out of my throat,
unhatched and stillborn.

Come now, my child;
Let the blood soak
through her
shell.

Wake up—
suffocate—

die again.

BURST by Zarina Zabrisky

my breasts burst backwards:
armored artichoke bullets from the inside,
jigsaw puzzle petals from the outside.

they strip
blue lingerie lace—
its sick transparency—
layer by layer

they rip my skin
viscera
the silky insides of blood vessels
the gentle velvet of capillaries

they split my ribs
bone splinters sticking out
marrow blows up
into inky splatters of
Japanese scrolls

and my shoulder blades
morph into blazing birds behind me

tails of dark liquid fire,
wings alarming and striking,

and naked
clad in flight

i am free of the chains of the skyway

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Zarina Zabrisky is the author of short story collections Iron and A Cute Tombstone (Epic Rites Press), and a novel We, Monsters (Numina Press). Zabrisky's work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Nepal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award. Visit Zabrisky at www.zarinazabrisky.com.

MEETING RIC by Puma Perl

I pulled the rental over,
a 4 cylinder pussy car
reeking of stale Marlboros.
Ric was waiting in the lobby.

Hadn’t seen him in a while.
He looked bigger than I remembered,
tried to figure out if his size
made my ass look smaller
but couldn’t get the right angle,
and then the elevator came,
the doors shut, and he pulled
up my skirt and shoved his hands
down my pants, a signature move,
if I remember correctly, but hot
just the same. Smoothly, he slid
the hotel key into the slot,
as he has done in every state
and several countries, unzipped
his pants and waited. He didn’t
have long to wait, but he never
did, not for anything he wanted.

When were finished, he followed me
to the Dollar Rental, I dumped
the jalopy, jumped into his old Cougar,
and we looked for a place to eat,
finally wound up in a steakhouse
with an old-fashioned jukebox
and beer on tap. We played the old
ones – Stones, Neil Young, even
a little bit of Bruce – the window
looked out on the empty main street
of another nameless town, I guess
everyone was home watching TV
or fucking or playing with their kids.
We were passing through, as usual,
planes leaving that night, he’d drive
south, I’d fly west, or maybe
the other way round, never mattered.

Said good-bye at the terminal,
pretended I didn’t care, he drew
shades down over his eyes, a hug,
a moment, gone till next summer
or next year, we always turn up
some place, ride an elevator,
eat a steak, kill a night, always
on our way somewhere else,

never much matters where.