from Issue #2

Spyre Redman

from THE PINKERTON QUANDARY

 

PINKERTON’S FRAILTY
 
 Fucking dead detectives
 don’t know nothing.
 all your solved mysteries are ours
 

 

 PINKERTON’S DEMISE
 
 Go to hell with your big coats
 paid for by steak-nibbling
 corporation bitches
 get out of here you rat-fink
 without friends, what
 you want some money, fuck you
 

 

 PINKERTON’S PINKY TOE
 
 Every pinkerton
 has a pinky toe
 the whole time they’re doing
 their stupid shit.  
 Inside their stupid shoes
 pinky toes, pinky toes
 so many pinky toes
 I think that all their toes are pinky toes 









Amelia Shriek

STUPIDITY

 Stabbed me with lips
 with its clouds who
 knife-lip stab-kiss
 
 But that was a long time ago
 That was the past
 whose kisses are the knives
 that invented gray 











Casper Moravec

THE CANAL

 Morning I crested the beaten hill blinking at
 the sun’s detonations sunk in the reeds
 at the clangs and rattles the birdcalls 
 the gyrating lamps of police officers I
 proudly with firewood approached my house
 
 pausing to admire it, becoming 
 beautiful and the garden:  good.
 The agent then appeared and pleased to see 
 the advancements evicted me.
 
 I quit the grounds and with the others got going.  
 Seeing then into the other houses
 other things:  bare walls, a small fire dim 
 between the stones.  I discovered in the lane 
 nearly finished by the rodents.
 At the coast people known in 
 smoldering boats, ghastly conditions … And by that 
 we stop the Press, with annoyance, to announce 
 
 that I’m terrible company.  The black trees 
 took the neighbors, some to the seas; hundreds
 like me, tossed over the mountains 
 into graves though I’d promised, in this life, not
 
 to have any.  It’s clear as I sit whistling 
 on a bale of hay almost weeping that 
 a person piles mud in front of their house 
 to hinder the ingress of dogs and swine 
 then drops in the vault saying goodnight but

 it is daytime.  So, good luck to these people 
 and their sailing.  Pills are recommended:  A silence 
 lay humping all the nature, joy feasting 
 on the groves and hedges, the birds interrupted, 
 
 the earth seemed blotted, as well as those things which 
 have been felt already.  To fell a tree, throwing 
 ropes over the upper branches, and dragged 
 it.  The stumps out the ground and ripped.  This 
 religion gave rise to suspicion
 and many laborers have suffered by it.  This canal
 on a tough wintry inky morning in 
 January when the marshes cemented
 
 with the snows they fell where they worked 
 and typically were left (or 
 pushed to the side) there or in 
 the roadway whispering
 
 Today, on a rickety wooden stool burning 
 slowly I am craved by the Lord, much
 blasted with black powder scattered since
 the workers have their mishaps, often falling
 like rocks onto the homes nearby.
 Watching the barrows, the earth and turf 
 
 on their backs, breaking stones around 
 the bits of light that swept the land.
 In my memory it loiters as a single night 
 in which they are pilfering, and even ripping
 the hair off sheep, and I go to the delightful 
 valley.  Day, buried in its own clothes

 and when it died there rose six inches of water; 
 the furniture tossed by the storm; the roofs caving 
 and the thatch on fire; very surprising … I tried 
 to count the houses, like sheep on a mountain
 from the cold ground placed in a sack then
 put in a cart and conveyed to the warehouse.  
 The cart rumbled.  Through the land the swamp 
 raged to the booming town, the curtains 
 hovered overhead.  We lived in the snow