Al #010

Aberration Labyrinth Issue #010

ISSN 2179-8805

Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805

February 2014

Issue #010

A Note From The Editors: This is a really great issue. We’re proud of the work that you’ve been doing and we’re excited to share this issue with you, our readers. This is a stripped down version of AL. We’re going back to the 10-20 poem limit. We’ve had so many great submissions that our magazines have been getting very lengthy. So, we’re pairing things down a bit this time around. Keep the work coming, and send your best.

-AL

Silence Sy Roth I’ve dreamt often that she crept deep Into my cellular structure, Some time in the nightfall of my being And planted deeply into my mitochondrion, A magical silence pill, Drowning the kittens of speech Cloaking the vocal chords in invisibility.

TURNIP HEAD Sunya Chavi

Erased all thought of sharing things with others-Silenced me in rooms filled with people; Silenced me in rooms with only my self to bear witness; Silenced me in a world Where silence is intolerable noise.

I inherited her silence, Beet-cheeked princess of a dark world Where inhumanity ruled Like a thick quilt smothering breath, Where midnight flashlight reading Transported me to other worlds Where people speak volumes— Where men in prayer shawls do not beg Elohim to spare them, While they giddy yap on fictitious camels Carried along on whispered prayers In a hip bouncing fornication ride Wafting hollow messages To ears that cannot hear the din inside a parbroiled brain Where I drown in silence and isolation.

Your head is gladly a turnip Nestled in your perceptions Resting silent beneath the dirt Ignorant of Sky Knowing only the ground which surrounds You and Happy to stay there - disregarding all other life Denying the existence of anything outside of You and Happy to believe Fertilizer was made for You to enhance You Feeding your roots and yours alone Only interested in making You grow in listening to your words for your theories are facts and You refuse to accept any opposition because to You – change is terrible Truth is too difficult to grasp at so You remain with what You know because that’s safe and empowering to trust that You are the only turnip in the garden at least the only one that matters And you’re glad of it for You are far too important to share the soil Turnip Head Enjoy the mud

© This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805

February 2014

Issue #010

Dashed Off to the Toronto Star Benjamin Welton Young Ernie is in the other room, tie askew and a glass to the brim.

His Remington has been going all night, singing about tuna fishing in Spain and the guts of dead Greeks.

Too bad Toronto is a boring town, he thinks, it doesn't deserve such passion.

Still, a working man has to eat, especially considering the price of oysters on the Montparnasse or the wanton desires of a Midwestern woman.

He leans back, massaging his arthritic hands, and thinks about a train trip to Geneva.

He dashes off another bit of blood for the Toronto Star with whisky lips and an American heart.

God Was an Astronaut Kenny Wilson God was an astronaut, With oxygen tanks that last forever, And a jetpack that could only get him to earth.

Lonelier than all the ugly girls at the bar, he created us, in his image.

Š This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805

February 2014

Issue #010

Listen Danielle Brown

The Origin of the Disk Andrea Walker

Words drip from internal cavities.

Unspoken syllables turn to syrup seeping out of every pore, adhering itself to any smooth surface.

A molasses of brokenness tenses the atmosphere as silence suffocates the spirits who hear but do not listen.

Her sandal slices June like butter as her tectonic thigh slides over the other pulling her sundress up just enough to reveal a scarry fracture.

Doctor Doctored Leslie Harris My doctor doctored my maladies But left the unsaid hanging in the air First time burnings are worse than, Singed fingers on hot stoves They plague the mind longer Give one pause to never venture there again Pleasurable feelings are sometimes, A precursor to sensations that cause, Excruciating pains Experience teaches one to protect Instead of throwing caution to the wind, In favor of instantaneous gratification Shot in the examination room Left cheek of the buttocks Momentary pain brought, Soothing relief After effects of reckless sex, Began to wane.

Was the collagen universe born when matter from menarche slammed into mass of self-doubt and materialized with a cosmic knife severing the amniotics of time and kept going through the esophageal soft-spot which scattered hot lunch into proto-celestial landscapes?

Or perhaps, the dermic crystals were once a fixed piece in a snowflake machine formed in smog over a mid Michigan city whose screws shook loose when it collided with a hypodermic ghost and landed above her knee outside her mother’s house as the pyre for biology lost ran its manic course.

Still, the lonely beauty mark above it smiles for the victory of the other near sighted ones (who bedded her crew) and her, full of lotus—dreaming of promise away from Polyphemuses or other boys, with chests mistaken for the underbellies of trains.

Back in June, she opens like a autopsy when she inhales as if asking for me to place the obol mercifully, before the steel reaches her heart.

Š This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805

February 2014

Issue #010

Ante Meridiem Rush B.L. Edwards

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD Marc Carver

This morning, on the freeway, was unnerving.

Middle digits demanding passage and wandering head lamps always finding my eyes blinding.

I’m always the first to blink when spotted by truck loads of testosterone and shit filled southern conceit.

This day, on the freeway, was panicky.

The massive rattle of some rig exhaling diesel mucus and slowly rolling over to block my progress, just because.

I despise the AM rushing me!

A jagged edge of jank, branded with an “H”, wedged in line just behind brake lights crying for an immediate need of stopping, the kind that make me brake hard and hate hard this all too early herding of ignorance hurrying to be in places no one wants to be on this day, so very hysteric, on the freeway.

I wake up wanting to write of the dead but know that i shouldn't so i don't after all it is only the living i have a problem with and that is mostly my own making.

Swollen Andrea Walker

I never told you that your kiss made my nerves sever like a sneeze–– from which, I fused the shreds into a net to catch the electric in your extremities.

Black Top Hat JD DeHart Figure from comic book Nightmare Images: Black fingers, tattered hat Long bird legs With his smile He suggests chaos.

PLAGUE Melanie Hanson I have run through cornfields at the climax of summer.

The sharp leaves tore skin from my lips, cheeks, and eyelids.

I left shocks of my hair in the corn, Torn from my head as if by an angry fist.

I have emerged from the fields tasting copper, My mouth warm and sticky with blood, And then I run again.

I feel a plague.

I feel a bloated rat made sick by my own insides, And the small disasters with me: Engine, wheel, machine, Tailpipes mired in fallow fields with old, brown, stiff stalks, Steel and then limbs sinking into mud, cow shit, and brown, broken stalks.

I am eating and shitting and mating in wreckage.

You will not be touched, just as you will never grow old, never die, Never be made sick, You will never be touched by that evil decay, That ancient disease that reaches across time, Passes you at a respectable distance, And humbly disappears at the apex of the earth.

Please remain standing but don't look, As I stare up and my mouth is filled with that dark mud, That saturated topsoil with splinters of stalk, With shit and the bodies of mud-drowned vermin, With twisted metal and boiling gasoline, As I choke on that rat's carcass, I will imagine that this has all been a grand sacrifice. © This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805

February 2014

Issue #010

The Telling Joseph Sailing

I Want the Toilet Paper Roll to Dance with Me Walter Ruhlmann

Stooped at the kitchen table, he seems too small.

His face hangs heavy on his neck, and he holds his hands as if in prayer, so when he asks, I sit. One more story he needs to tell, although he knows damn well I’ve heard them all before.

In this cabinet of horror where the smell of urine mixes with rice powder, midwives were giving birth to fleas and the fantastic fanatics fled from the acrid smell of rot.

When your brother was ten, one night the police came to the door and asked if I’d killed a man or nearly killed a man or perhaps my son had nearly killed a man. Someone, they said, had seen our car, saw me and the boy drive off.

I kept mooning over the gregariousness we often suffered when the giant bean bent over the house of the dwarves.

Snow White got laid by the most clever of them all unable to hide more than necessary her furry hole.

Each time I've heard him tell it, he’s laughed at that.

But not this time. He looks at me and says, Ten? They thought he might have killed someone?

We’d stopped for milk, just stopped for milk, and saw the man with a gun running from the store. He looked right at us. I had the boy so I knew what I had to do. We came home and called the police from here.

Before I hung up, the cops were at our door asking to see your brother. I told them what we'd seen, and then like that they turned and left.

They didn’t tell us anything, just turned and left. Sometimes I think life laughs at us.

It doesn’t matter how many times we repeat what we’ve seen or where we’ve gone or what we’ve done, it’s all just one big mystery.

In twenty years, he’s never gone this far.

They didn’t say who died. I didn’t ask.

It wasn’t on the news, and I still don’t know.

A customer? A clerk?

He shrugs.

Why does it matter now? It didn’t matter then.

Anyway always chanting Morgan Le Fay's fate, the medieval tune buzzes in my ears and as I expel a fat pooh, I look at the toilet paper roll and invite its whiteness, freshness, softness to wipe my bum.

Sat on the throne, the siege of my conquest, the field of my harvest, the chair where my thighs and my calves rest, I wrap myself up in the stripes of clean, feathery sheets like a Mummy coming straight from its tomb, scaring people, explorers and their girls whose wombs might be the cathedrals where gore faeces and light angels mate.

Whisky Demigod Kenny Wilson I created my own God because I needed something to live for.

He lives in a bottle of whisky and watches me from inside, but the whisky is weak, and so is his wisdom.

I like to shake the bottle, after a drink or two and watch the half-drunk bastard spit at me.

© This work is the property of the individual authors within.

Aberration Labyrinth ISSN 2179-8805

February 2014

Issue #010

Alternative History at the Piscean Bar and Grill, Detroit Marianne Szlyk The Englishman with his guitar picks his way down the uneven sidewalk at night, so far from the Cavern Club, so far from England, so far from Hare Krishna.

The palest Funk Brother enters the room.

Like a slim fish through weeds, he slithers past the black and white flickering television at the bar, past the young actor Taurean Blaque with the latest Supreme.

Tonight and every Tuesday night the Funk Brother from England takes the stage.

So Graceful Melissa Knox She’s sent a photo of herself Colonizing the Arc de Triomphe One hand clutching the lamppost That says Place de Charles de Gaulle As if anyone could doubt she owns the place Leaning against that lamppost Looking the other way Eyebrows posed: “Do You Like Me?” She can’t fool me My mother could take over Hitler “Am I in the way?”

(Move Out Of My Way Now) “Would it be okay if . . .?”

(If It Isn’t I’ll Drain You Dry) The worst is the giggle The cute titter Before the kill © This work is the property of the individual authors within.

All artwork for this issue has been provided by Ben Mohr.