Proud Dripping Citizen
By Brian Johnson

Sing Christmas chimes in fourth of Julys

PACE, PACE, PACE

Down one aisle,

Up the next

You’re getting groceries,

You’re looking for an automotive part,

You’re mixing the alphabet with paper cuts

Your sacrifice is never belittled by the lack of brains it takes to do your job.

No.

Your happiness is just dripping-

As you shop for Christmas presents in summer

Hail to the chief proud dripping citizen!

Ride your shopping cart to heaven,

Where Santa lives

The store will be closing in 10 minutes.

Body Without Organs 
By Michael Hessel-Mial

drinks can hisses brown
like snake

in a rattling tank in the desert

hot slick body cold sweat
flimsy stomach pounding
out chest pumping fluid
to the brain

strained heart, chained horizon
sweating over boiling syrup

aluminum lungs,
sky rotting meat colored

scream-boned back stretched

over white cliffs,
sun over face

entrails hung over
the bowl of fire

“Dust, mud,
rust,
death,
cola.”

Ocriliim Annwn
By Deniz Rudin

The climber reached up to find his next handhold and instead of hard wind-whipped stone he felt warmth and grass and flat land. Pulling himself up, he found himself on a plain, and when he looked back down along the rockface he saw that he had cleared the clouds.

He could barely remember a time before the mountain. With great concentration he could summon a small memory of the beginning, years past, when the mountain stood in front of him, uncountably tall, stretching up and up and up and up into blue and then into white. The climber hadn’t seen then how the slopes became steep and then steeper until they seemed as sheer as walls, or if he did see he didn’t understand; he was staring instead at his feet, at the gentle beginnings of the mountain, barely an incline yet, longing to earn his name like an itch in his blood, and he began to walk, fourteen years behind him and the rest ahead.

The climber walked the sun down that first day on the plateau, breathing deep lungfulls of thin chill air, dust bursting up from his footfalls, sky blue and square luridly-painted tumbleweeds tumbling. That night the climber lay on his back, dirt and grass stretching out miles in all directions, looking up at the sky, and what he saw was dazzling. Against the black night sky were hundreds of thin glowing line segments, white and red and purple and green and yellow, and they swarmed around each other, assembling into twisted shapes, pulsating spheres, elongating and contracting with some indiscernible rhythm and order until he drifted off to sleep.

For months the climber walked across the flat plain and slept under the visualizer sky, until he came to the wall. It was an unmarred and unmarked silver metal, and it shot sheerly up seemingly for miles into the sky. After a moment of thought, the climber sat cross-legged on the ground in front of it and stared wide-eyed at it for one hour, nineteen minutes, and thirty-seven seconds, my eyes closed lying on my back, ears muffed with sound, fingers exploring the lattice supporting the mattress of the bunk above mine. And then he lifted himself to his feet and began to climb.