Aberration Labyrinth September 2012 Issue #002

A Note From The Editors:

We hope that you enjoyed Issue #001, and we feel that Issue #002 really helps to solidify the image that we want our publication to have. Keep up the excellent writing and keep submitting! We love you and your creativity! All artwork for this issue was provided by Eleanor Bennett. Write On!

Forced Nostalgia Jason Lundell I want the 90’s back That age of great denial A place where comforts come like Brick walls in front of hotel windows Give me wealth I mean post Dallas That place where even JR Has been laid to rest I want baggy pants With designer hate crimes And a sly slogan Those ones you find on picket signs Give me the birth of Cali That slutty dystopia outlined in dusk I want Heather Locklear before Charlie Sheen I want to remember not remembering that I want new age vintage

Dream Catcher Brendan Sullivan I covet your nightmares. I want to inch them apart, wire bright and brittle from under your skin, split them down the middle and crawl deep inside. I want to wrap them in yellow newspapers and tatter your skin right between your shoulder blades with their bleak words. I want to see them glisten bone shard white and blistered, the pucker of your flesh stopping up my thoughts in the lost vacuum of you. I want to own them and watch your mouth run dry the buckle of your body scraping up against the sky, savoring the taste of cheap.

Jolt Brendan Sullivan You got left on a metal table under a white sheet strung out on red and blue bottles while they tried to jump start your heart. I saw the sparks flick off your skin like the bright scorch of summer where prayers smell like burnt paper and the heat keeps you running. I saw them tape those white nodes to your head the bald skin glistening innocent and pull the switch in a room behind a curtain the hot bitch of white jolt fever blistering your thoughts singeing the palms of your hands filling the room I sit in with the impossible stench of hope.

SCHADENFREUDE Gregory D. Jaw our connections are tenuous, our friendships are built to topple one another so that we may feel better about the lions who lurk near the garage door, maws splayed, hands reaching out from their throats, viscous slop dripping slow motion tumble terror of fur muted screams hushed by wild hunger, hiding out near the swimming pool near the VCR tossed into the widening shit heap of discarded items, hiding near the area where the shopping carts go to die, and we make these connections with other people so as to raze them, so as to sate the horrible hunger in our filthy animal hearts, with the hope that the lions will wait in line a little longer as we pile our banalities onto the conveyor belt, and we tear each others’ throats out.

(Charles Bukowski would’ve been proud) Michael Estabrook She continues, “And if it weren’t for me you’d be a damn drunk out on the street someplace living one of those lost lives” and stomps out of the room. I follow right along behind her indignant as hell. “What are you talking about I don’t drink that much, a little wine, a few bottles of beer now and then. I’m not as bad as you like to think. You women always want to believe you’re saving our fucking souls.” So then a week later my brother Todd comes to town for the first time in five years and we (Charles Bukowski would’ve been proud) stop at all the package stores and bars along the route home from the airport, and over the next two days even take bottles of beer with us on our walks around the block and through the park and along the railroad tracks. I hate it, don’t you just hate it, that our wives are always right.

©2012 This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth September 2012 Issue #002

Punching Catholics in a Dark Room Jason Lundell There’s tons of ‘em Limp wristed Child molesters Grabbing and twisting my sack When I’m not looking Who are these Consolers of the deep These serpents made saints Throw up your alarms Jericho Shit is a foot A mob scene Misfits in the rec basement To them its all in good fun All have red hair Everyone enjoys the sacrament Malicious Massacre Billy Harfosh Crazed and rioted Pleasure revoked Rumblings of new visions Versions perversions to limit a thought Struck down Struck out on a pitch of malice Malicious massacre The Chelsea would be proud Proven distractions talk to wooden seesaw horses heartless Invigorate promise of a river swirling Raging with no end in sight Collapse of truth and happiness and folklore of freedom speakers and lurkers of the night Trade you for you Trade accidents Trade fake facades Trade positions of power for a small room of rage and a pencil and a radio and Dylan and Bukowski and a fan and a pillow and a drink and a clear conscious and a prescription to wonder

A Relationship in Review Hanna Reehl your lips were zippers undone in the heat and your heart keeps beating on its humdrum drum I’m busy searching for the something in nothing anxiously awaiting the day when my teeth will be ground smooth. THE PREACHER Gregory D. Jaw I will, for a time, undertake to relate my very own tale of a Santa-Clausian mower-man, with jiggly consumptive belly-pouch home to many a shiny can of fine golden ales (respect afforded for my undeniable comprehension of taste), a dark breathing stranger hopped up on paint fumes and Tussed up on generic mind-destabilizing remedy, he came a'callin' the other mornin'', swearin' jesus up and down, a leather maniac of motorbike sermonin', a strangin' his way up to my front door portal, a wanderin' and a'swaggerin', a whistlin' and a pantin', until he found his solid footin' propped here, before my old front door. He ran forward in the temporal places of his enfeebled mind, and tried to find a straight line to disseminate his addled information regardin' the new jesus and his tribe a heathenin', sinnin', full-time blasphemers. He related his hoozy tale of endtimes, a cloud of poisonin' debris, fillin' our sinnin' lungs, an accursed tome taken from us as false mandate, bringin' down the wrath of the true sculptor, a ragged inventor of shiny things, His cough was a'heavin' and he was a wheezin' when he concluded his porchstop diatribe of disasterin' and despairin'. I rightly proferred my own edict of sculptation. one where the omnipresent, Mouldy One dreams too shallow to have any real feelin' here on this dusty rock of dirt and decay. I told him 'bout the darkenin', a time when his kind would go to a flourishin' and go to a spreadin' their holy unholy wings, a rapin' and a takin', a preachin' and a stealin', growlin' on about some half-kooked sky-slob, and pressin' all kindsa panic-buttons, whiles they screams 'bout endtimes, and unearth us all. Then I went and caused him to hurt his sniffer, as I slammed my threshold up and upon his dusky countenance.

©2012 This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth September, 2012 Issue #002

Callie At the Miracle of Science Marianne Szlyk At The Miracle of Science, the bartender mixes a fizzy green cocktail. Callie sips from the beaker, but it’s the punning name of the drink, not its taste, that makes her wince. Is ketchup a vegetable in this world? The blonde in the House of Pain t-shirt, the one who may say “warsh” for wash, the one with a calico tattoo, she grimaces. She wants a bacon martini, not spiked diet soda. She wants to jump around. She wants shamrocks and shenanigans. She wants. She yawns. This joke has gone on too long. Love on the Answering Machine Louie Crew Yes, this is just your spouse calling. Don't cook anything. I'm going to make my chicken dish for that recipe contest I'm going to enter. So I'll see you this afternoon about sick, 'six!'--can't even talk, I'm so groggy. And I'll bring the chicken with me.

Goodbye. MORNING ABLUTIONS Jeffrey Park Our morning ablutions – I in the master bathroom she in the small one upstairs. She flushes. The water in my toilet bowl ripples so slightly. The connectedness of it all.

An Incident Louie Crew Walking alone to beat the heat of the humid night, I chanced into a spider's web, set at eye level between two low trees. Making the sound of a thousand harp strings, off key and turned down low, the maze broke in a crazed pattern across my forehead, down my hair, in curious, myriad channels from nose to ear, and back to eye and down to lips. With an instant arc, my finger tips clawed the threads--more from discomfort than from dread--until I felt they touched the monster (for he seemed at least the size of shrunken head or bloated thumb). Then they couldn't find him again, and I had to walk the mile back home without a comb to assure that my constant scratching was in vain. Clearly my confusion there obscured my seeing that it is rare to be caught in someone else's trap at the time it has so little power to do me harm.

WHEN YOU KISSED ME Jeffrey Park When you kissed me on the mouth walked me down and pressed yourself up against my flinching body put your rubbery lips hard to my mouth I felt it, a white hot jolt of pain like biting down on aluminum foil with a mouth full of amalgam fillings and chewing it and the sweet agony shot through me searing my neural pathways and ultimately coming to rest somewhere behind my quivering eyeballs. I saw you through flames your whisper stabbed my inner ear – You’re my zombie slave boy now – and I gave in then and there and let the spirits have a ride at my expense.

©2012 This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth September, 2012 Issue #002

HESS: 6:33 AM Gregory D. Jaw The flannels and vests mill about by the deli-dog machine chatting about weather systems, lottery prizes they cannot ever possibly win, and television shows they missed due to long hours. Solitary men, they enter alone, but lazily explore each others' hovering personas, which drift cumulonimbusly around the mart. Men who share tales of nothing, merrily, summoning castrated archetypes of half-assed Viking warlords while pinching semi-repressed fizzle-farts, sneaking carelessly out of fat asses to surrender to the fluorescent air floating impotently towards unconcerned, hair harangued nostrils. Marlboros, Newports, Skoal, and PICK 6: The closeted checkout man knows them all by name.

Disassembling Required Eric Dittmar

When Van Gogh cut off his ear

It was for reassurance that the rest of him could disappear

That illusion of ownership that nerves create Should have faded with each baby tooth I lost

It didn't though, contrariwise I worried I would extend Into roads or trees and then feel the tire's friction or the elm's blight

Empathy is a bitch of its own

I pray I never wake up with a Siamese twin I'd have to care, lest we lapse into mutual sadomasochism

That hilarious territory of bored lovers

The Thalidomide kids might get a kick out of feeling new arms attached to other people

but that's the exception that proves the rule

After the Vietnam war, some men believed Agent Orange Had followed them home, alive in newly discovered nerves

Now what odd god must be behind that shit!

Mengele often awoke from dreams sweating and sure That his patients would learn a trick to generate biological anesthetics

He needed the feedback of sound to really understand the human body “Prayer or pleading” he used to say with a wink to his bartender after work

Sometimes I worry that my nervous system Might have a Mengelian agenda of its own

That I am woven into a potential torture chamber seems clear

but then I remember that I can always pull the tooth or cut off the ear

Wild Man Eric Dittmar

I played jock jams and watched the kill cams

Without any doubt about dying A waltzing Victorian casually avoiding IEDs

Bombs without brand names

My eyes grew sleek my fingers black There was so much in my peripheral vision

That I hardly cared to look ahead Bright dust motes in swarms of sun and color

My internal temperature dropped, my teeth grew

At night I slept in a hammock With a cat at my feet

If there was a war like the looky-loos say

It never felt that way Though I'm sure I did my share

My low chuckling at the sight of blood

Even from my child's knee Assures me that I did my share.

Smoking Fucking Junk Michael Estabrook Phil flew medical evac choppers for a year in NAM. And three times enemy fire brought him down crashing to the ground. But he gets such a laugh out of it today such a roaring head back mouth wide open laugh every time he explains how these beautiful monster machines became 6 million dollar piles of smoking fucking junk. He laughs, he says, because the government lost all that money but we know he laughs because he cheated death and because the damn things were empty at the time.

©2012 This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth September, 2012 Issue #002

The Writing Club Thomas Pitre Eight of us sat around the card table covered with a stained bedspread baring our souls changing our lives at the end of each line we cautiously share. For eight weeks drinking green tea and snacking on nuts and homemade puddings, we took our turns growing bolder and bolder. (1) The owner of the meeting house, (2) a skittish housewife with a runny nose, (3) a quiet caretaker, (4) a retired Wall Street broker, (5) a large framed man wearing a suit fashioned from sweat pants, (6) his thin, nervous wife filled with the spirit of the Lord; (7) the grim, suspicious moderator with no sense of humor, (8) and me – a middle-aged man with an attitude and a loathing for rules of grammar and authority. Broken Roads Gordon Purkis Broken roads are a dismal appetite where you can’t imagine going anywhere even if where you are is not particularly pretty. The bounty appears invisible, our wrists look bound and our homes are sadly clapboarded. Our screams too distant from the hero’s ears.

In The Pink Thomas Pitre Mr. Benjamin Sutton, p-h-d, was in the pink. At the pinnacle of his career a consultant, married into a rich family, and blessed with a generous spouse, living in a liberal ghetto in Maryland, by choice, as his wife says. Their large, paneled, oak, front door framed by two brass lamps, polished weekly by the handy man. The round heavy steps of used, red brick and hand-cut granite. A fat Australian Shepard always on the step by the door, appears in all the Christmas photos, his blue eyes reflecting the Brinks security sign on the lawn nearby. His wife, a thin, delicate and exacting intellectual took videos of the new snow on their deck and sent them to their friends and the kids in Florida. He, odd looking since his teens, due to his intensity, used his heavy, ivory comb to fit, calibrate, a lock of hair carefully across his forehead, each morning, polished his gold, rimless glasses and pulled on his brown, corduroy pants squeaking as he walked stiffly in cordovan loafers. Mrs. Sutton has problems with her menstrual cycle, making her life and those around her, miserable on tippy toes as she lay in the living room, her eyes covered with a wet, linen cloth – two, maybe three days each month.

Still Life in Schadenfreude Andrew J. Stone his blood boils into our cheshire lips & the aroma of happiness saunters towards the ticking of our timeless clock

©2012 This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth September, 2012 Issue #002

Sacred vessel

Gordon Purkis

The body is sacred so I give it candy, beef,

smoke.

The mind is a minefield so I give it want, fear,

worry.

*

I am devoutly non-secular and adamantly peculiar—

If my soul were a country I wouldn’t know whether

to lead it or leave it

alone.

Fuct Karley de la Filth Me, at thirty-four, new to fucking And being fucked over You, eight years younger, Experienced at both Not that you ever impressed me enough To make me cum I gave you my heart anyway Me, fucked over Never properly fucked. And yet When the phone rings After 8 And no one responds to my hello I like to think That it’s you Missing my voice.

OF CUPS OF TEA Gautam Sen Sometimes it so happens That you get a cup of tea That isn’t quite Your cup of tea: Maybe there’s more sugar in it Than you’d like, Or maybe there’s too little; Maybe the leaves are not The kind you yourself Would have ordered; Maybe the tea’s been served with milk, And you prefer it black; Or granting that milk Is acceptable to you, Maybe it has a smell to it That turns your stomach … There are many possible reasons Why the cup of tea you’re offered May not be Your cup of tea at all; And yet you take it - You take it without A second thought, Or maybe you wince, You grimace a bit As you take it, But you take it all the same: You realize there are times There’s more to a cup of tea Than just its taste.

The Chamber of the True Earth Jude Cowan Those who drove us below are doomed in minutes as this directorate meets. We jot down our grievance in worm-riddled rooms, rustle fresh strategies out of defeat. Hunched in weak light over mildewed plans, supers sketch battle lines, draining felt pens. The arms of our agents are bled for more ink. Every small boy fills the pot of revenge.

©2012 This work is the property of the individual authors within.