2: Finding Anthony Ray

I spent the entire night tossing and turning. Covers were bunched between my thighs and sweat crusted my forehead with miniature leper beads. My face was the inside of that Matterhorn ride. In and out of sleep I bounced, rolled, reached for my IPhone. Three calls to my agent and a pricey overtime commission bought what I’d needed.

Sir Mix-A-Lot: Hello?

Manny Ramirez: Hey, Anthony. This is Manny Ramirez.

S: Who?

M: From The Red Sox. Baseball player.

S: Hello? It’s the middle of the night. Why are you calling? How’d you get this number?

M: My dad just died. I know I’m supposed to be the hero, but you mean so much to me right now. I can barely breathe.

S: Call me back in the morning.

Anthony hung up and I stared at the wall and shook with the reggaeton rumble that was somehow still going on underneath me. I tried passing out, but a garden hose rainbow streak poured across my corneas. I imagined what it was like to be poor and sat at the window smoking KOOLs and stubbing them into a beeswax candle that a stripper left at my apartment.

(more…)

By Brandon Kreitler 

The knife thrower at the carnival practices with a dummy strapped to a spinning wheel,

a painted spiral because who wants flatness?  – a sack of laundry under the sheets,

         a mannequin metastable in an immaculate windowscape.

Hello I.

What then can be said in a world where cotton stands in for snow? 

– flagbearer.

I  asks the knife thrower for directions where the road splits in two.

What’s down this way?

A slaughterhouse.

And in the other direction?

A slaughterhouse.

Water in the posture of river.  

Erasure.

I presses the side [do not read edge] of his newly sharpened

knife, running it over the slab of beef sitting on the counter-top. 

            Methodical in the absence

                                         of method.

– the part of knife that means change,

                                    that takes everything

                        for itself emptied.

By Andrew Shuta

By Carter Maness

1: Manny Being Manny At His Dad’s Funeral
“Manny,” my brother David longingly stared over then batted his lashes while scooping bruschetta on a small Disney plate. He approached and touched my arm. “I’m so sorry. I know we never talked much about your father in the clubhouse or on the plane. Never knew he was sick or anything.” I nodded and shook his hand in that post-sermon over 25-cent doughnuts way.

9:43 in Washington Heights and I neared the last of the hugs. Big bear hugs – one by one with tears on the side like melted iced coffee on the geography of an IKEA desk. Manny this, Manny that, Manny being Manny. I edged into the back room of the parlor, pulled the battery out of the clock like a stray eyelash and turned on the television to check out the box scores.

“Oh. My. God. Becky. Look at her butt.”

I started hysterically crying and throwing phantom punches at God and the ceiling – tore my tie off with a sweeping crunch and launched it into the wall with a dull pre-cum thud. I scratched ancient dirt from my face with mangy finger nails stained with generations of misplaced bone development. Sir Mix-A-Lot was one of the only things I shared with Pops. Working towards the majors meant long mornings and short nights – the only saving grace of which was blocks of MTV that we watched over our TV dinners on those little banana boat carts. I gripped a 50-dollar bill in my pocket and stared at the video like a message from the LORD at one of those churches the boys stop by when we play the Royals or the Rays.

By Luke Kozikowski

Tomato,
lettuce,
bacon,
honey-glazed turkey,
italian dressing,
but on a hero or a roll?