Deep Moaning Blues

They’re traveling incognito, George Washington with a moustache and Abe Lincoln without a beard. Time is like a river that has jumped its banks and carved a brazen new course through the ruins of fabled industries. They follow its many twists and turns, only to find themselves weeks later cold, ragged, and hungry, and under perpetual ban. Meanwhile, killers walk around free if they’re white and have a badge. It’s as though the laws have been rewritten by malignant algorithms. A night of solid sleep is impossible. The moans that keep waking me up, I finally realize, come from me.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

Survivors

They live presently. Now they tear the soft meat from the bone, now they hear the twang of resistant tendons. The vibration of it. A chorus of crows. Scudding wings of moths that search for the darkness just beyond. In the pit is hunger. We exist, hands pasted to rifle stocks, glimmering gunmetal eyes, rattle-boned. They know family born of teeth, defined by the low moans of their communes. Their tongues hang together. Our hands hang separately, our nails scratching our own stomachs, our thighs, our faces. But we are all hungry. We will all ooze the same black ichor.From Guest Contributor Carrie Cook

Carrie received her MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and is currently living in Colorado. Her work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Midwestern Gothic, Menacing Hedge, and Bartleby Snopes.

A Ravenous Canvas

Walking forever through corridors of art, that's the fate I sought. If I were doomed to resurrect, as everyone was, why not wander eternally around beauty?

But when I tried to reach The Metropolitan Museum, the apocalypse stopped me. Manhattan's zombies swarmed my car, buried it in dead flesh. I'm trapped.

Now they're a ravenous canvas, pressed against my windshield. Their faces are yellow papyrus; their spoiling blood and bile are rancid inks and pigments, their viscera are rotting oils. This is their dead aesthetic; their moans exhort me to join it.

I'll starve.

I'll rise.

I'll create art too.

From Guest Contributor Eric Robert Nolan

The Artist

I was smitten with her, and the pretty photos she mailed me.

I told her I'd plunder her supple body; that I imagined her rolling, like liquid, beneath me.She loved when I said her moans would ricochet off every surface of her lovely bedroom, glazing it in sinfulness.

I told her everything she wanted to hear.

Anticipating our first meeting, I created a collage of her photos: my vision of our tryst.

I savored each slice of my scissors as I dismembered her perfect limbs, her naïve, breathtaking head, rearranging each fragment of her like a scrambled jigsaw puzzle.From Guest Contributor L. Michelle Corp