The Dead Are Ghosts

Every time Marvin rode the subway, he thought of Sarah. It got to the point he wondered if she was haunting him. For more than a decade they'd ridden the train together every morning, her to the high school where she taught, him to the warehouse that he managed. When he closed his eyes, he felt Sarah sitting next to him. Sometimes she'd even lay her head on his shoulder like she used to. He didn't want to look for fear of what he would see.

The dead ARE ghosts, but not in the world around us. They live inside.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

You hear the thin cries of a drowning man. You notice that seemingly innocent words like “today,” “yesterday,” and “tomorrow” have been censored. You pick quarrels with the baggers at grocery stores. You try but fail to ignore the prevalence of right-wing militias, foreign movies dubbed in English, shark sightings. You prefer baseball to football and a medically induced coma to either. You wonder what it’d be like to suffer a gunshot. You have a recurrent dream you’re lost in an old abandoned warehouse, usually with a friend you had growing up whose brother played Russian roulette once too often.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Lunch With Maurice

I was doing time at another warehouse.Another W2 in a factotum year.Maurice, pudding formed with a handlebar mustache, sat across from me.He liked security. “I keep a weapon in every room. I don’t even lock my door. I have got a shotgun on the wall, a handgun in each room unregistered. I got a bat in the bathroom and a sword under my bed with a knife between my pillows.”“Expecting trouble?”“My dad was in the navy. Antiwar activists target the relatives of veterans.”Maurice was found dead in his apartment.Stabbed in the eye.From Guest Contributor Michael Zone

Michael is the author of Fellow Passengers: Pubic Transit Poetry, Meditations & Musings and Better than the Movies: 4 Screenplays. His work has been featured in Because Eileen, Dead Snakes, Horror Trash Sleaze, In Between Hangovers, Three Line Poetry, Triadae, and The Voices Project. He scrapes by in Grand Rapids, MI

Billboards

The headlights shine into the speckled misty darkness and my tires shoosh me along the Interstate, still late and many miles from the warehouse. How many hours have I been on this road?

I roar past the billboard that urges me to arrive safely, before I pass one that tells me to drink and drive. Then comes my favourite: the cute white Nivea girl, her frilly chest lit up like cat's eyes. I would love to think about that chest as I close my eyes and drift to sleep, but this vague honking will not let me sleep, just sleep

From Guest Contributor, Garreth Keating