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

BONE DOG by Rob Plath

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