Your Dark Traveler By Heath Brougher

Your shadow doesn't have any hands. 

Something seems to have bitten them off

in the blaring daylight. You felt it eek down

your back for the briefest of seconds

and painlessly yet perniciously sink 

its razor teeth into the pitchy depth of your 

sunless spot laid out on the asphalt. 

Your pile of lightlessness seemingly conjured 

something incorporeal to attain livelihood 

and attack the black stain eternally 

attached to your feet. 

Heath Brougher is the editor-in-chief of Concrete Mist Press and former poetry editor for Into the Void Magazine, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards. He is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Nominee, he was awarded the 2018 Poet of the Year Award from Taj Mahal Review. He is the author of 12 books and has a new book forthcoming titled "Beware the Bourgeois Doomsday Fantasy." He has spent the last few years editing the work of others but is officially ready to get back into the creative driver seat. 

Kneeling To Resuscitate Freedom by Kevin M. Hibshman and Merritt Waldon

 

Blind man wallow
Glory dreams rocket
Skull will flower with proper irrigation
Alluring beauty
Mortality's kingdom of silence
Here is the truth
Don't breathe a word of it
Many factions underground
Molding future days like auto parts in vast valleys of the dead
We dissent, quite uninterested in tactless reason
The medic arrives
It's a seventeen year old girl wearing a hippie dress and no undergarments
Kneeling to resuscitate freedom
Manufactured underground

Kevin M. Hibshman has had poems published in many journals and magazines world wide.In addition, he has edited his poetry zine, Fearless, since 1990 and is the author of sixteen chapbooks including Love Sex Death Dreams (Green Bean Press, 2000) and Incessant Shining (Alternating Current, 2011).

His current book Cease To Destroy from Whiskey City Press is currently available on Amazon.

Merritt Waldon is Southern Indiana poet who has been published in Road Dawgz, Sun Poetic Times,

The Brooklyn Rail, Be About It Zine, River Dog #1, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Americans & others anthology fourth edition, Crisis Chronicles, Cajun Mutt Press, Thye Rye Whiskey Review, and Fearless!.

At midnight Christmas night 2020, cajun mutt press released Oracles from a Strange Fire by Ron Whitehead & Merritt. He lives in Austin, Indiana.

We Are Gregor: The Gregoring By Alex S. Johnson

with a tip of the hat to Jeffrey Thomas

I am Gregor's lost suns sinking below the infernal Urizen
I am the Lord of Hades stuck to Gregor's back in place of the wings she lost
I am the temperamental siren Gregoria Batshit Myhellya Jaxon here to raise some furries and furies
I am sex starved galactic oversoul Queen Gregorina the accordion-hearted with bosoms to bury ya
I am the carrion thousand yard flash flesh feast of Gregors scraped off a liminal portal adjacent to Punktown
I am the spectral crypt of Gregor the Unsound
I am dearly and deeply departed King Gregorassa the Bold, drove armies over a cliff rather than commit more war on innocents
I am a fresh minted microchip implanted in the All-Gregor brain
I am the high sustain of Gregor amplifiers make Murder One sound more like a whimper than a bang
I am the beginning of the first microzonal instantiation of the Gregor 1 Project in a pocket dimension
I am the shades of Gregor driven far from Newton's tree
I am time elapsed Gregor descending a staircase in outer space with minutes to go
I am Hollywood Gregor tending his throne on the seat of cold eternities
I am the bees stung kisses tasted reluctantly then fiercely then nevermore
I am the Gate, the Portal, the Tomb and the Maternity Planet Pope Gregor the Dead
I am the bread of Jesus Gregor died and resurrected on the Tree of Life
I am the Qlippoth art-realistic atomistic hell roots of Gregor never a beggar always a wealthy man
I am providential Gregor unsealing the lost art of sunshine
I am Uncle Sam's plan of assembly line Gregors
I am the slaughtered plants of Gregors in biopunk rhizomes
I am Gnome Gregor hunched over a map to Never.
I am forever.

Alex S. Johnson is the author of the acclaimed horror and Bizarro short fiction collection The Doom Hippies and the creator of numerous anthologies including Axes of Evil: A Heavy Metal Horror Anthology. A rock journalist and former college English professor, Johnson currently resides in Sacramento, California, where he runs Darkest Wine Media. He expects great things from his forthcoming ultimate haunted house novella, La Maison Infernale aka Last House by the River Styx, written in collaboration with JC Macek III. 

Something Fresh by Lee Andrew Forman

The dawn of hunger, a rising sun of pain and despair—I watch as it crests the horizon. It lazily casts its light upon the morning sky, and those still living beneath it. It is a reminder. That we’re still alive, still at war with the ravenous pains in our bellies. It is also a reminder that we are not dead, equally dire in its effect on the heart, mind, and soul.

We crave the reaper, plead that we may be taken, but instinct forces us to go on. To try. To feed on rot and share it with the flies and their tiny white young. They dance the ballad of birth, death, and the in between all at once. I envy their candor.

They don’t mind being served. If they do, we wouldn’t care enough to disallow them from tickling our throats on the way down. And I suppose you could say we don’t mind being served in the same sense. Our gluttonous predators certainly have no concern. And if they do, just like the maggots, we will never know.

Clever they are, these beasts who climbed the chain all the way to the top. They maintain our numbers. They know not to exhaust their source. Sometimes they let one or two out of a group live. But it doesn’t matter. They’re sure to be consumed. It’s nothing but inevitable.

They prowl the remnants of this once-great city, mostly beneath the light of the moon. We hide in ruined buildings, under crumbling brick and mortar. Like rats. And like rats we’ve become.

That’s why I help people.

I invite them in. Offer whatever food I can spare. Give them a place to rest their head for a night. It’s always been my way, even before the world crumbled into an endless cycle of torment. I may not be a hero, but I ease the suffering of those who cross my threshold. I enjoy watching the slight decrease of tension in their face. They don’t quite smile, but there’s a hint of relief behind their lips. Even their eyes change. The hard, blank stare dulls, their eyelids relax, pupils expand. That’s my favorite moment. Each and every time, I get the same thrill, knowing I’ve eased the pain of a fellow human being.

Once they lay their head to rest, I watch as their chest rises with each breath. I watch. And I wait. I know their agony is over; they feel no more pain, no famine, no fear. They’ve gone to sleep, as peaceful as one can be in a world where all but one thing is on the bottom of the feeding pool. Where hope is a dying star, dimming in a bleak and empty universe. Where survival is a near-futile effort.

That’s why I help people. Not only is it in my nature, but it is also in itself, a strategy. A way to prolong the poor excuse for an existence any of us might have. To watch one more sunrise, to reveal yet another day upon this Earth, and whatever scraps it might bring. Those horrid things may be clever, but so am I.

There used to be a saying about safety in numbers. But I don’t get by on luck. I play with hidden cards. There’s no shame in cheating anymore. And there’s no one to slap my wrist if I get caught. So I do what that which needs to be done.

Once my guest is in a deep sleep, trapped in whatever paradisical dream or dread nightmare they may be having, I go to work. My blade is sharpened, ready and waiting. It serves well, this tool of compassion. It cuts deep, smooth, with ease. There’s no struggle. No screams. The throat is always best. Just a gurgle of blood entering the lungs as their breaths shallow with each inhale. The sedatives in the food they accepted keep them nice and unaware. This kindness must be performed in the utmost humane manner. Anything else would be cruel.

I only want to help my fellow brothers and sisters meet the ghost they so wish would take them with his scythe. Death is not unkind, it is only neutral in its final nature. As am I, his merchant among the people. I do this with no malice or joy. I only desire to eat something fresh from time to time…

Lee Andrew Forman is a publisher and author from the Hudson Valley region in New York. His fascination with the macabre began in childhood, watching old movies and reading everything he could get his hands on. His love of horror spans three generations, starting with his grandfather who was a fan of the classic Hollywood Monsters.

Lee has published three books to date, The Bury Box, Zero Perspective, and Fragments of a Damned Mind, along with numerous short stories in multiple anthologies. He is a co-owner of Sirens Call Publications, a regular contributor to The Lift, and writes non-fiction pieces for various periodicals. Lee is also an administrator and member of the horror writer’s group Pen of the Damned, where you can find a new piece of fiction each week. Website: Lee Andrew Forman Blog: Pen of the Damned Facebook: Lee A. Forman Instagram: @leeandrewforman

Twitter: @leeandrewforman

Under Glass By John Patrick Robbins

Much like an insect, I will keep you.

A pin through the heart agonies not counted.

The message is not fully encrypted; it is just ignored.

The wounds healed, yet untreated, the poison has infected the blood.

Cold is the vessel left to its own vices; it becomes something far worse.

One too many shots taken to the head, you appear complete and perfectly fragmented within.

I recall things that erode my emotions yet lose everything that I once did cherish.

Like worn photographs lost to a fire.

I am kept here a prisoner in the trappings of a position, esteemed and tormented to a slow death.

I hold what others desire as I would happily abandon within a moment's notice.

All roads intersect eventually as the intelligent question while the narcissist keep running until the moment they drop dead.

I do not seek sympathy or the understanding in the arms of some tormented idiot equally  fucked as myself.

I just wish to know what's beyond a two-way mirrors view beyond eyes that judge what they themselves cannot do yet are ever so eager to watch self-destruct.

Remote living is a mutually viewed joy in an ever-so-twisted undiagnosed disease.

For all those that fly are not birds, more so insects dissected and viewed underneath the microscope's glass.

Prisoners of other's hate masked in pathetic ego.

Pinned in agony for others to study what should be only admired from a distance or simply left the fuck alone.

There is no escape.

JPR, is a southern gothic writer his work has been published in Lothlorien Journal Of Poetry, Horror Sleaze Trash, Spill The Words Press, Impspired Magazine, Fixator Press, Disturb The Universe, The Dope Fiend Daily and Piker Press.

His newest book is Midnight Masochism from Black Circle Publishing. 

His work is often dark and always unfiltered.