Post-Logic (The Neopraxis) by Natalie Terezi Rei Watts
Bodies creep up the walls like radio signals. Limbs are coaxial transmitter-tendons that plug into the apartment ports and upload their regurgitating thoughts as packets of dying breath. The skyline is the harvester network where broadcast pylons intersect solid wavelength steel into the heads of people who haven’t removed their cerebrums entirely for printed flex-circuit social media analytic cyclers. Everything is branded by Gucci.
Because moonlight became corrupted by the Calvin Klein Lunar Reactor meltdown the night sky has been deplicated to expose the subcutaneous LEDs under its flesh (Chanel built them inside the sky’s body centuries ago, in the off chance our universe chose to hate us). Instead of projecting images these LEDs project new thoughts that mimic what it is like to stand in a forest and suffocate in the Milky Way radiance. Every thought can then be recycled to form new words (as lexemes are a non-renewable resource speech needs to be processed through IEEE-Supreme defanger servos that remove the teeth and let the gums bleed until you can’t eat without a drip feed of congealed morphophonemic stimulants; controlled language in place of the unpredictable). The energy for the LEDs is leeched directly from the sky’s nerves.
(None of these words have any meaning for you because you digested the meaning. You crawled into the recycling plant pipes to suckle on the flow yourself. You had no other choice but to starve. I don’t blame you.)
Real Housewives by David Kuhnlein
KELLY
Kelly’s smile is lashed to her lips. She’s backed herself into every possible corner. Appearing like a shredded element on camera, leaked on lens, gravity has manhandled her. Nevertheless, she eroticizes the distance between her and things, existing better at one end of a phone. Distal as a talking cashew, she remembers Vicky’s challenge: “All this tomboy talk seems fishy.” Everyone else’s kids are gay. There are wilder ways to be robbed of an obsession than marrying your beard. Kelly wants to do an exercise montage on Vicky’s piggy face. Picking up her child-shaped court date, eyeing the teacher through a cracked window, Kelly instills the pins and needles gathered in her somewhere beyond temperature. She’s scratching out the ruins of another season with nail polish. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go within a mile of my lips.”
Five Poems by Austin Miles
Futures Insectoid + Worm-like
the insects cannot cash
as long as my screen is cracked
+ my battery is so trash
hellgrammites cannot either
in this water
w/ tire + television
rusted
Chapter X by John T. Fowler
THE THREE GLASSES.
Was looking over a rubbish heap near a hotel. Saw three tumblers of dark-colored bottle-glass. Seeing they were not cracked, I thought they might be worth taking care of. As I was about to pick them up I was noticed by the landlord, who called to me that I had better not meddle with those three glasses; they had been used by a party of very dirty people and were more irredeemably befouled than I knew.
THE UNDERTAKER.
Was living in village, and in passing out of the door onto the sidewalk, stumbled against a neighbor who was passing. Knew him as an undertaker, Joseph Smith by name. Went into the back yard and had some talk with my mother about undertakers –– objected to being buried by a man named Joe Smith. Expected to need services of the kind in a few days. As I talked, I stood and combed down the nap of a shaggy cloak I had on with a coarse comb.