Mausoleum Love

Part 1

Baby …how I can ever recover
From that day
Not very long ago
You squinted and drooled at me in that tawdry fashion with obvious lewd intention
Among that polyester set retinue
Hell, I knew … from across that grey linoleum floored room
That it wasn’t just the smell of
Fresh formaldehyde residue
Wafting in our eyes
It was like
We were the only two persons there with body heat in that joint
And maybe we were…
It seemed that steam started melting our corrected vision lenses to our respective uni- brows
And suddenly it couldn’t have been hotter in that viewing room if I had worn nothing else but lime Jell-O shot pasties and sat under my cast iron steam broiler gazing at erupting lava lamps hump
My secretion glands went into overdrive as you sidled up all raging bull
Nose and ear hair steaming
Bulging those plaid pants in swollen testicle deliciousness
Those giant glistening pink jowls wobbling like perfectly round cheeks on a newborn baby face all tit sucked out and sleepy
Resist!…hardly…I went all mad mad cow…brain holes and all
Oh baby, you were so already in like Flynn…come on big boy and milk me
You grabbed my sweaty hands
To dance
How unexpectedly romantic at a funeral but, I could hardly move
These veined legs weak like overcooked macaroni plus… a terrible urge to pee right there
You’ll never know what you do to a girl
My labia lips started singing really high kinda like a girly Italian counter-tenor about cigar factory workers in Toledo with the clap dancing the Bossa Nova or something
Then you whispered…
Your place or mine?

Part 2

Oh baby,
You don’t have to ask twice and don’t ever apologize
That ride on that urine soaked city bus was excruciatingly sexy
Every bump and jostle heightening what was on our minds
I hardly remember arriving
I Wiggling out of my widow weeds and girdle like a mad woman to take a seat and get ready to take in every second of you stripping-teasing
Seductively folding that corduroy suit into origami…baby, I like a man that’s tidy…and so so creative …and it was just plain amazing when you quickly knit that tweedy vest out of your own pubic hair
Then, in a blinding flash…there you were…all of you…. in the air…yet, so close to the floor
Your fine fine tool like a shiny white plastic immersion blender complete with attachments at the ready to whirl and, turn my insides into a deep vat of eggy mayonnaise
Oh, it was so on…you had me at puree
Like whirling dervishes we started to slam all over your ill-lit man cave
I your willing sex slave
In a blink you had me pinned up-side-down with fishing tackle on that strange extensive antler collection staring down from those creepy wallpapered walls
Then I gnawed myself down and grappled you into a clean one armed Admiral Nelson
You only chortled and nibbled my big toe clean off
Then I smiled coyly and fisted out some of your hair plugs to make myself a little hand tuft
You mustered on top and screamed out passages from Dante’s Inferno while strapping on spurs
I switched it up and rode you like a spitting ill tempered llama through the Andes as I got busy stuffing your mouth with used handi-wipes
You tried to rip my throat out with a router
I got out your fingernails with my pocket grouter
God! I love a man with power tools
You took me from behind, on top, the side, through broken teeth and then hanging from out past the window seat
I could only hear gurgling moans of pleasure as I fed you broken glass extracted from my diced up sinews of my mangled feet
Baby, we were like a Ferris wheel hurling out of control at a state fair
And, our juices were flowing like sick sick vomit from buttered corn on the cob eating slobs watching the prize winning pigs go at it
Then…. you warned me of an impending eruption and yelled
This is going to be a ten on the richer scale
And baby it was
I don’t need a seismograph to tell you
That the Earth moved that night
And although, I did notice you actually had a seismograph in the closet you were checking… honey, why were you hiding those heavy chains anyway?
Your landlady only confirmed our magnificent passion when she pounded on the door to see if there had been another cat brawl and warn you not to have pets tied up down in the basement here again to torture!

Part 3


After that was settled… I could hardly move
My loins were limp like overused Sham-wows…ah, afterglow!
But morning had to come
And you said adieu…or actually get out and tenderly gave me change for my dollar bill so I could catch a bus
Oh baby…is this love?
Or just a one nighter
I don’t think you have a phone
I think that’s what you said
And since I don’t usually take the bus
And I kinda forgot were you live
So I’ll just wait by the funeral home
And remember how you made me groan
And hope somebody you know dies
Real soon



Sate is the daughter of a Lutheran minister… And you know what they say about them.

Homegirl vs. the Shadow

Homegirl woke up early; Punkboy was snoring snoring next to her and she just didn’t have the patience to keep laying next to him pretending to be sleeping until his tatted fingers started moving all over her, looking for her clit, looking to see if she was wet. Punkboy almost always woke up hard; Homegirl usually liked that about him. She usually went along with the pretend that he was the initiator, the hunter, the predator, that he was the one looking for sex, looking to see if she was ready or, better yet, if he could make her ready.

This morning, tho, she was feeling out of sorts and rolled quietly off her side of the bed. Punkboy snored still and she padded barefoot to her pile of clothing on the floor. Of course, they’d fucked again after coming home from the dive bar. When together she and Punkboy were like two virgin teenagers set loose in a Texas cathouse. Or some other weird simile about sex and virgins and teenagers and Texan whores, but that’s the best I can come up with right now.

Homegirl had to work that night, but Punkboy had off. Maybe that was contributing to her offness. She didn’t know. She put on her miniskirt and her kneehigh boots and her bra and her shirt and couldn’t find her panties, but didn’t care. Punkboy’d take care of them; he’d probably clean and hand them back to her all folded nicely the next time they worked together. Surreptitiously, of course, so no one would know.

She didn’t know if he just pretended to her that none of the boys knew or if he hadn’t told them. She hadn’t told the girls yet cos the last time she’d told one of the café bitches about having something with one of their co-workers, some kind of feeling for him, the bitch’d waited until she took her vacation to Montreal and when she’d come back, the two were a couple and in love and making out in the small back room that served as both supply/mop room and employee changing/time card room. She had to push past them to punch in; what she’d really wanted to do was punch the bitch out cold and suck face with dude over, maybe even on, the passed out body.

Those café bitches were always all around stealing your love.
That may be my insight, tho. It’s already hard to tell.

She did care that she and Punkboy almost always had different nights off; she was always worried he was meeting up with other girls on those night; she was always worried he’d fall in love on one of those nights off and come into work the next night with hickeys and rope burns and even a new tattoo.

She’d never inspired that kind of love; she’d never caused a guy to get a new tatt ever.

That she knew. & it probably didn’t count if you didn’t. In fact, I’d like to say it’s hella creepy if you don’t. That’s like pure stalking territory. Not like I’d know.

She grabbed her purse from the doorknob; she didn’t remember leaving it there, but that didn’t bother her.

There were a lot of worse things not to remember.

Homegirl left Punkboy’s bedroom quietly. Punkboy was almost thirty, but he had a roommate, some big shadowy guy who smoked a lot of pot and didn’t hang with any scenes. Punkboy’s roommate gave Homegirl the creeps. She called him Shadow, except to his face. To his face all she said was, Hi, if she had to. She was always always hoping not to run into him on her naked way to the bathroom after she and Punkboy’d fucked for hours.

She knew he listened to them doing it and jerked off. She knew he thought about her cunt and she knew, somehow, he thought of it as glistening.

That really creeped her out. Anyone who daydreamed about a glistening cunt creeped her out. Cunts don’t glisten. They get moist; they get wet; they make inappropriate sucking sounds, they quiver and fasten around cock shafts, they’ve got fucking minds of their own, but they don’t glisten and they don’t sparkle unless you’re a stripper and douched with glitter. Yeah, there were pretty cunts just like there were pretty cocks. Punkboy liked to look at her cunt a lot, so hers must have been a-ight. His cock was nicey-nice to look at, too. He’d sent her a jpeg of it via his cell phone. She’d look at it when she was having a bad day, when Richboy didn’t call, when her two roommates, both guys cos there was no way in hell Homegirl was gonna put up with bitch roommates macking on her mens, were pissing her off, or when she had to work counter at the café.

She hated working counter; she hated being fake nice and usually couldn’t be bothered. Usually she said, Can I help you? & then rang up the order & then said, (whatever the total was), please. All without smiling or inflection.

There’d been a really cute boy that’d starting coming in every night at the café; she and her friends called him Prettyboy. The second week she’d waited on Prettyboy she’d knocked over his pint of coffee on the counter, which was conveniently crotch level on a lot of guys.

She said, I’m so sorry.

She said, Here’s my rag. And tossed him a damp towel to wipe himself down with. At least she knew better than to wipe his crotch down herself. That would have been pure Hollywood bullshit and would’ve freaked Prettyboy out even more.

He was already freaked out; she could tell.

The next night he didn’t even say hi when he ordered his pint and he wouldn’t look her in the eye. She’d decided there went her chances with Prettyboy, which was probably okay, in hindsight, cos who wants to date a guy who’s prettier than them?
That crotch fiasco was only one of the reasons she liked to work kitchen instead. She never had to worry about what people thought about her when she cooked. She could talk the dirty talks or not talk at all. She could be hungover and run to the bathroom and vomit and then come right back and continue making sandwiches like the professional she wanted to be.

Secretly she wasn’t a professional cos her Catholic mother’d instilled in her one mother of a superego. That bitch was always and forever trying to repress her impulses. It’s why she wanted to be a professional but couldn’t; it was one fuck of a never-ending cycle.

Homegirl even felt a little guilty about being creeped out by Shadow. She’d made it to the stairs this morning without seeing him. Shadow and Punkboy rented an entire house instead of a flat like most of the people she knew, herself included; it was a small house, but still, Homegirl kinda wondered how they could afford it.

But she only kinda wondered. She didn’t want to know that much about Shadow.
She was at the bottom of the stairs and then there was Shadow. He was going to walk past her going up it looked like. He was gonna squeeze past her and “accidentally” brush her side, her hip, her breast, some of the places she knew he wanted to molest. He was a big bald guy with neck rolls and as he approached her he seemed to make himself bigger.

Hey, he said as he brushed past her. She smelled onion stank breath; she tried to make herself smaller but she was a tall hippy Midwest thing.

She wanted to say, Hey, you fuck. I know what you’re doing.
She wanted to say, You’re such a fucking Chester.
She wanted to say, Touch me again and I’ll cut your nuts off in your sleep.
What she said was, Hey, and then she shot the fuck out of there like that loose canon she wanted to be.


Ryder Collins went looking for love, and it started raining bullets.

the tv's up against the wall like a painting while everybody here in the museum's fainting-richard hell/ the pistol and the sneaker

the tv's up against the wall like a painting while everybody here in the museum's fainting-richard hell
by: marko x

[for mikey welsh]

to say that america has no culture, only smiling song & dance
men, is ragging on the obvious, is like picking on a cripple.
all about schmoozing & banal sex appeal. sadistic pedophiles
& masochistic star-fuckers. occasionally the poor tortured artist
which they know they'll make a neat profit on when he or she
takes their last bang, hit, slice or fall. truly great artists are
ignored for the most part. gallery owners say they can sell your
work if you agree to let them manage you. i dump an entire can
of yellow paint over their head. i tell them it was van gogh's
favorite color. a poor saint of a man who sold one painting in
his lifetime. i scatter sunflower seeds over them to see if they
stick. i ask them what's their asking price. publishers say they'll
print your book if you can send a list of at least a thousand
people you know who will snatch it up. worse, they'll publish
if you agree to take any unsold copies off their hands. i don't
know a hundred people. worse than that, are strictly vanity
publishers making money off frustrated, desperate writers,
who could do the same themselves for a fraction of the cost.
i write art-hater all over their whoring body handcuffed to
a bed in crack motel. record companies sign naive kids to no-win
contracts, which unless they're one in a million & catch the
popular imagination (shudder at the thought) will never make
the band or the songwriter a cent because they must pay back
recording expenses, video expenses, clear channel payola before
they see any profit. i've read an indie label must lay out half
a million before clear channel who has a monopoly on fm radio,
will even start talking. i plant a megaphone in their tin ear
& scream philistine motherfucker. i write a thousand page
suicide note which nobody will touch. what do i care. is that
that a statement or question? let me pretend to touch it up
a little.

Marko X is a reclusive poetry and prose writer from Oregon, or outer space, motherfucker. Don't fuck with his spaceship man. Seriously. He has some of the koolest fuckin' titles this humanoid has ever seen!

The Pistol and the Sneaker
by: Rob Plath

My father held the pistol up to the screen and through the mesh he whispered,

"I’m going to blow your motherfucking head off."

My older brother was asleep right in the bed next to the window. The kid, Al, my brother’s friend, spun around and ran down the lawn in the dark. My brother kept sleeping. My brother’s friends often pulled their car up on the curbside a house down and one of them crawled up to his window to get him to sneak out. My father shut my brother’s door and put the pistol back in the drawer in the master bedroom. The pistol he used to carry when he collected money from the ’bums’ that didn’t pay back the loanshark on time. He had a large bayonet in the drawer as well. Then he went to bed.

The next day after school my brother came home and asked my father if he had pulled a gun on his friend Al.

"You bet your fucking ass I did," he said

"My friends were afraid to come around now," my brother lamented

"That's how I want them to feel," my father shot back.

"Do you have Al’s sneaker," my brother asked.

"Yes," he said, smiling. "You should've saw him run," he laughed.

"Can I have it to give to Al?" my brother asked. "It's his only pair."

"Tell him to come get it," my father growled.

"He's afraid," he told my father.

"If he wants it he has to fucking come get it. I tied it to the garage door handle," my father snickered.

My brother shook his head and went to his room.

Later, John approached the house. John was my brother’s closest friend and one of the guys in the car that night Al lost his sneaker. John was the only one not afraid to the house. John’s father knew my father from Brooklyn. He was in hiding for years ever since he was wanted for murder during a truck hijacking. John laughed when he saw the sneaker dangling from the garage door.

"Your old man is a fucking rip," he said to my brother.

My brother began to laugh along with John. Just then my father came out.

"Hello," John said and then pointed to the sneaker.

"Only Al can untie that sneaker," my father growled.

John laughed loudly. My brother laughed then.

"You kidding," John asked, laughing.

"Tell that motherfucker if he wants his sneaker come get it," my father repeated.

"You weren’t really going to shoot him?" John asked my father.

"I almost did," my father said.

John laughed. My father liked John although he wouldn’t show it. He knew John had balls like his father. My father went back inside the house and my brother and John left. The sneaker still dangled.

An hour later John’s car pulled up and my brother, John, and Al got out and walked up
the driveway. Al a few steps behind. My father immediately came out on the porch. My brother and John laughing pushed Al towards the dangling sneaker.

"You ever come to the window at night again and I will blow your fucking brains out you fucking little punk," my father said.

And he waited with his hands on his hips for Al to untie the sneaker.

"Go ahead, you cunt, take your sneaker," my father said.

Al, his hands shaking, untied my father’s knot. John and my brother were standing there dead serious. Al finally got the sneaker and walked to the car. My brother and John said goodbye to my father.

"Don’t ever fuck with me," my father told them, "or I’ll put a bullet into each one of you," he warned.

He let the screen door slam and disappeared inside the house.

It's Rob Plath. Nuff Said. He is featured in Tree Killer Ink issue #4 from Epic Rites Press as well as any other small publication you can probably wrap yr little head around.

Read both of these guys, or be swaLLowed up by the jowls of Cerebus drunk on three-day old blood.

Anal Sex/ Fuckin' for Money and Blowing Weed in Babies' Faces

Anal Sex

Your hard cock
Drills into my anus like
A nail into a wall

Pounding into me
With each bit of steel
My ass is your sheet rock

Your head’s lubrication is the putty
so you could enter my anus
Hear me let out screams of Owhhhhhhhs and
Ahhhhhhs

Hands with callouses
gripped to my hips
Balls slapping and echoing throughout the air
Ass in the air to your face
Breasts bouncing like boxers boxing.

Anal Sex, Ashly Salmon 8/23/09

Ashly is ON THE ROAD, man, writing for an upcoming poetry anthology.

Catch her here if you can.

*Anal Sex is also published @ Modus Operandi



fuckin' for money and blowing weed in babies' faces

this is the beginning of a short story i'll probably never write

“That’s just a bond I share with my son. We roll a blunt and we smokes it. It’s the only time that little asshole calms the fuck down,” my neighbor says in reference to her four year old. Her five month old is haphazardly splayed across her lap. She snorts thick smoke out of her nose in a slacked attempt to keep the thc from escaping her lungs too soon. She hacks a blast of fog into her babies face. You could smell the dirty diaper from across the room. You could see the remnants of last nights crack binge on the mothers face.
.. ..
My roommate is parked in intrigue, intently following the do’s and don’t of the pimp-ho industry as being explained by another neighbor. He’s on and on about how he be rollin’ hard and livin’ large, ain’t never been caught and how he’s just born into business, got a sense about how things go, and she’s buying every word that falls from his broke ass mouf. He’s hustlin’ and she’s grappling with the idea of selling more than just the idea of sex. You can see the excitement rise as she bites her boudoir lips at the prospect of the only thing she loves. Money.


Brave Evolver will kick yr ass at fake Sumo Wrestling. And possibly write a poem about it. She currently rules New Mexico. With an iron fist.


you can find her here.