catman by Steve Ely

i know this guy all his life he killed cats the first time he was eight years old

he dropped a litter of kittens into a half filled bucket and shoveled in dirt until the mix stopped quaking

there was one up a tree in his garden he got lucky with a halfbrick and watched it bounce off every branch before it hit the ground he finished it with the flat side of the shovel

he killed a tabby with a bat playing cricket on the street it just walked past and he slogged it in the head he said it was a six

his staffie roofed a tom on a shed up bull lane he knocked it down with a branch the dog crashed face first into the brambles swaggered out with it limp in its grinning jaws

he chased one tree to tree in the graveyard throwing sticks and stones until after minutes or hours it came tumbling down the dog ripped it apart or maybe that was a squirrel far as i know he had nothing against squirrels

this warehouse had a problem they were breeding among the pallet stacks he took a 4.10 terriers jawtraps poison he showed me a photo four cats six kittens lined up dead

a grey one crept in the bushes near his feeders leaping out at the robins and blue tits he took aim from the kitchen window and shot it through the eye with a .22 pellet gun

he drove his car off the road and dented the wing swerving to hit one on the a638 outside upton

a black one walked in through the open front door and curled up on his hearthrug he couldnt believe it he coaxed it into a sack and drove out to the reservoir

he never tied fireworks to them because that was just cruel and he didnt do it for the cruelty just to kill them

i asked him why do you hate cats so much and he said i dont know i just do dont you hate something if you had a rat in your house wouldnt you kill it or maybe its music bagpipes perhaps i cant give you a reason theyre sly i hate cats

are you answered

Extracts from Steve Ely's massive poem JerUSAlem, have been published in a range of litzines, including Beat the Dust, Laura Hird Showcase, Dogmatika, Black Mail Press & Paper Cut. Other poems and short stories by Ely have been published in Literary Chaos, Lit Up, Lilies & Cannonballs Review, the Savage Kick, The Slab of Fun, Magma and elsewhere.

Stalking Dana by Paul Corman-Roberts

With a bottle of pink hearts gripped firmly in my
right hand, quivering, like I was jerking off and…I
suppose I really am after all.

There must be a hundred of these little heart shaped
pills scored by my flaxen haired roommate from one of
the most “reputable” pharmaceutical firms in Tijuana.
She told me I could take a pill or two whenever I
wanted and since I’ll always be home before she is I’m
not seeing anything particularly wrong with a few
consecutive whenevers.

I swallow four, one right after the other, light a
clove cigarette and try to look innocuously through
the window of my innocuous ‘83 Nissan Sentra from my
innocuous parking stall, and into the storefront
window of the Al Phillips Dry Cleaners, only all too
conspicuous in my innocuousness.

She’s at the window. There’s no mistaking the
freckles, the all-American girl next door pony tail.
Kimberly Drummond: convicted of robbing a video store
six months ago. But I fell in love with her years ago;
endless masturbatory sessions in my grandma’s shitter.

It’s not like I don’t have business on this side of
town. My agent on a shoestring got me an audition
down the street forty five minutes from now and I have
uniforms that need to be pressed and creased. It’s not
easy holding down a bohemian lifestyle while passing
for a government employee.

The tell tale heartbeat and adrenal flow begin their
all too familiar buildup from my toenails all the way
up until they hit the top of my teeth which then begin
sliding across the surface of my bottom teeth with a
consistency known by Hell’s Angels and a long standing
ritual engaged in by many a pathetic lonely young man
since the advent of the industrial age.

Am I proud? No. I feel dirty. Would I rather be doing
anything else?

…

Hell no.

I hold the uniforms under my left arm, the clove in my
right as I make my way through the front door.

I’d found out she works here at my job, when a Tech
Sergeant said that washed up drug addict actress they
busted last year pressed his uniforms. How to break
the ice?

“Hey, I’m an actor too.” She doesn’t work the counter
though. I’m stuck with the homely woman who in turn
looks longingly at the slot machines being serviced by
a tech guy on the far side of the waiting room.

I place my order loudly. I want her to notice. Notice
my pungent clove cigarette, which always pisses off
the old Vegas service crowd. She looks right through
me though. My hair is too short. My face is too clean.
I get my suits pressed and creased. She wants a bad
boy. She wants long hair. She wants weed. She wants
blow. How do I tell her?

“Hey, I have weed. Hey, I can get blow from Evil
Knievel. Hey, I’m an actor too. Hey if you quit this
job, join my newly founded theater company and move
into my shared room apartment it’ll help out both of
our careers and you can have the pleasure of knowing
that I am your wonderful savior every time I crawl up
on top of you just to see that crease in your brow.”

Transaction ends. I’m going back to the Sentra. I look
back hoping to find her staring out the window after
me. Too late; she’s at the counter talking to a guy
with a pony tail. Is it…? Goddammit, yes, it’s the
service tech guy. He’s got a pony tail.

Years later of course, I find out what Dana really
wants is something neither myself nor the pony tail
has. Years later I find out she turned down the role
of Regan in The Exorcist and the role of Violet in
Pretty Baby; years later when she overdoses in her
in-law’s bathroom. I still like to think I could have
been all those things to her, a way for opportunity to
translate into, if not happiness, at least a
manageable contentment; a warm body that makes you
laugh & can be counted on to be there.

If only it were that easy.

For now; brain bubbling in a primal cauldron and eyes
exploding, I head to the auditorium at the Summerlin
Public Library for the most prestigious community
theater organization in Las Vegas, which is the
artistic status equivalent of the most prestigious
pantomime troupe in Los Angeles. In front of an
audience of two dozen competitors, a girl younger and
more beautiful than Dana, which is to say less
experienced, melts down completely at the beginning of
her improv assignment and stalks off the stage “I
can’t I can’t I just can’t do this & I guess I’ll see
you guys down at the mall or something.”

I nail my improv. I get the spot in the prestigious
workshop. I know now what I’ll say to Dana. I come
back the next night to pick up my uniforms from the Al
Phillips Cleaners with my rap and my approach down
pat.

Dana’s not working that night, something about a hot
date. Heading back to the Sentra it seems to me this
particular dry-cleaning shop does an incredibly lousy
job of pressing and creasing my uniforms and I swear I
will never return to this place for my business again.
I try to convince myself that I am somehow different,
that I am somehow better than the meltdown girl at the
audition sure to be hanging out at the mall I am now
headed towards with a handful of Pink Hearts.

Paul Corman-Roberts toils in a boiler room next
to the edge of a major-interstate highway. "At least
it's job security!" Shoot him if you get a chance. Or
check out his site & stuff at
www.paulcormanroberts.com.

Abacus: A Love Story; Or, the Concept of Zero by Donna D. Vitucci

She thought about the way water shapes stone. Face it, stones take a battering over time. She wanted to put the stone on his tongue, but instead she put it in her mouth and sucked on it. It tasted of the sea and every element of the sea—-grit and rain and brine and live creature, fish, cousins to fish, snails, kelp, microbes, algae, a living universe that swims to reach light.

“Why have you so many ideas of violence?”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. When an expectation is created your head, you prepare yourself for assault, blood, mayhem. When really, all that’s around the corner is disappointment, is love.”

“You make it sound like those are the same thing.”

She raised her eyebrow, held her tongue, bit down on her next words to keep them hid.

“Maybe it’s my career in law enforcement,” he said.

“Maybe you don’t want to be happy.”

“No, I do want happiness.”

“You seem to avoid it.”

“I do not.”

She let him hear himself.

He paused, and said, “You don’t know me like you think.”

“This could be true. I can admit that. So inform me.”

She motioned him toward her but he knew it was a gesture meant to go with her next words.

“Give over something important. Something I can begin building you on in my unconscious. A base, a foundation, a pedestal, something you-true that won’t erode.”

“Now that sounds esoteric.”

“You think so?”

The way he cut a glance to her and away, the thrust of his profile insisted, “You know it does.”

She guessed it implied “Quit harassing me,” but she wasn’t about to quit. She was just getting started. And she wouldn’t call it harassment anyway. Again, she’d call it love.

She even spoke this aloud: “I call it love.”

“What?” The very word flailed. She’d pitched him into the middle of a sea, water over his head, choking salt and gulping for air. She did that, she stole his share of breath.

She’d been talking around the stone in her mouth, a pretty neat trick. She had an adept tongue and good concentration. Thoughts didn’t sidetrack her, but emotions might. The stone was to help her focus. The stone was enduring.

She took it out of her mouth and closed it in her fist. She tugged his arm to make him stop walking this beach, to stand still with her. With her hand at the back of his neck she drew his face down to hers and kissed him. When they stopped kissing to breathe she again reached to his face, the back of his jaw. She ran her fingers along the line to his chin, pulled his chin down. She curled her fingers over his bottom teeth and pressured him.

His slackened jaw felt like it might widen and engulf the sea. He would not resist the need to lick her knuckles.

She set the stone in his mouth, on his tongue, a squid-like sea creature as it appeared to her. She closed his mouth, that gaping trap.

In the stone, he tasted her, he tasted the first earth, the first waters, the angels and hell. He tasted what was cast out, what was cast away, what was saved; the violence she abolished in him, her salt, his own blood. He tasted the New World and the seas that spanned her globe.

This was only their first day on the beach. There would be more. They tallied blocks of language and suffering and desire, not numbers, and so they abandoned the tools like calendars and diaries, that documented gain and loss. They counted on nothing. They had one stone between them.


Donna D. Vitucci lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio, helping raise funds for local nonprofits. Since 1990 her stories have appeared in dozens of print and online journals. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Front Porch Journal, Juked, Night Train, Ginosko, Insolent Rudder, Smokelong Quarterly, mourningsilence and Another Chicago Magazine. Abacus was written after walking the shore of Lake Michigan during a very special artists’ retreat this past September.

by Seth Trimble

(Click image to enlarge)

100% spray paint

The Look of Love, Take Two by Ben Tanzer

It is late. The sky is meringue. The dress is retro. The hair which is sometimes highlighted, and sometimes shaggy, is without bangs, and there are little pigtails bleached at the tips, wildly jutting out from each ear. She has a crooked nose and a crooked smile and she makes it work. She listens to The Sadies and reads George Eliot.

You warily move around each other at the office, almost stalking one another. Or do you? Maybe it’s all in your head.

Still, there are times when she looks right at you, through you, with longing and desire, both humored and intrigued.

Tonight she sits there on the bumper of a van outside some club where a work event has just gone down. Her eyes are half-open. Coin slots on the uneven plain of her face. She’s been drinking again.

“Sit down,” she says patting the spot on the bumper next to her.

“How’s it going?” you say as you take a seat.

“I need to stop,” she says laying her head on your shoulder.

“Why?” you say feeling the heat from her cheek burning a hole through your shirtsleeve.

“I have a problem.”

“Do you?”

“My husband says I do.”

“But do you think there’s a problem?”

“Yes, and I need to stop if I want to save the marriage.”

“And do you want to save it?”

“Yes, no, I don’t know,” she says briefly looking up at you.


Is that an invitation, or is that just defeat? Her head drops to her chest. It looks like defeat.

Ben Tanzer is the author of the novels Lucky Man (Manx Media, 2007) and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine (Orange Alert Press, 2008) and the short story collection Repetition Patterns (CCLaP, 2008). He also blogs at This Blog Will Change Your Life, which is the centerpiece of his vast, albeit faux, media empire, and edits This Zine Will Change Your Life, which you should totally submit to. Cool?

Resurgence by Charles Brooks III

Taking turns guessing where songs start,

Hank Mobley records get shuffled with Led Zeppelin

while window fans scatter acrid smoke.

LP's deliver Kerouac's drunken haikus

and Nat King Cole's Unforgettable.



Discolored cardboard, unsellable in back rooms

a decade ago, two decades,

now vinyl redeems itself.

Real disciples always keep a table

spinning for Saturday afternoons,

or a Wednesday night.

You can turn it on and dance alone,

realizing Ray LaMontagne sounds like winter.


Charles Clifford Brooks III is a poet and freelance writer living in Georgia USA. He was inducted into the National Creative Society his senior year at Shorter College where he also obtained a BS in History\Political Science with a minor in English Literature. Along with his creative endeavors, he also contributes articles to several magazines and a newspaper. He was recently brought on as Poetry Editor for Literary Magic Magazine. In August of 2008, Ghost Shadow Press picked up his first book of poetry “Whirling Metaphysics” to publish in 2009.

Casaubon and Amparo by Aleathia Drehmer

One day, she plants a great tree

in the image of man, culled

tiny brown seeds taken from cored bounties

leftover, pies baked and eaten warm.

She moves fingers through rich soil,

spayed earth moist and gathering

under nails; places each polished hope, gingerly.

Nestled in the corner, guarded by old

weathered legs, crossed keepers of the rains

and snows and sun-dappled summers.

Starling's golden tritons between blacktop brambles

all gorging till beaks come away

berry-stained and full.

She waters his roots with her purple can,

speaks to him in kind

while trimming long blades with shears,

laughing at herself, to him,

and blushes cheeks into apples.

She drips ruby nectar down his throat

stolen from the hummer's bell feeder

when his branches begin, buds curling out,

and iridescent bodies swirl around her,

new northern lights.

When he comes to her strong and constant,

she lies beneath him, rusty fingers reach

to touch her face, gold tears floating

in the brush of reality.

And she reads him volumes of Poe and Pound,

questions the universe and space, knowing

he won't ever answer her the truth,

but attempt every time.

He is there when seasons turn,

their heart growing, in him and he never

pushes her back or away,

and she will smile,

one day.

Aleathia Drehmer 2008

Aleathia Drehmer is currently trying to hibernate for the winter, but not having much success. She is an active staff member for The Guild of the Outsider Writers. She lives with her darling daughter and crazy cat, Carrot, in rural Painted Post, NY. She has been lucky enough to be published in many online and print journals over the last few years. She is even luckier to have great friends and one damned patient boyfriend.