Short, Fast, and Deadly

Short, Fast, and Deadly
Issue Four
Edited by Joseph A. W. Quintela
3 January 2010

Featuring:
Lena Judith Drake
Howie Good
Priyanka Joseph
Ken Pobo
Catherine Zickgraf

Copyright © 2010 by Individual Authors
All Rights Reserved

What I Should Do Next (Is Cry)

At the reunion someone said someone was dead. I look in the mirror. A stranger’s face, impassive and empty, looks back. I should turn up the Bach sonata. I should set fire to the prairie. Every night I should lie down and travel out along the black branches of the interstate and return to the same address - a room full of light, bread and knife on the table, and a weepy bride shrouded in the glare of a sunny window.

by Howie Good of Highland

Get Away Car

Smith & Wesson Smith & Wesson This Car Is Protected By Smith & Wesson. This car has a nice mom and an incontinent dad. Steaming valves of bliss hiss every two hours. A blanket rests on the back seat, mom’s soul. A pair of gloves lies on the passenger side of the front seat, incontinent dad’s soul. Smith & Wesson, in the trunk, screaming, the kidnapper driving away.

by Ken Pobo of Media

Modernization

Hair, skin flakes, gnat wings:
our kitchen shoots lysosomes from
floor vents to digest home impurities.
Though we still squat to empty colons.

by Catherine Zickgraf of Martinez

Lilith

She would often bare her teeth to warn him away. A frustrated animal, he would in turn pace the entire length of the garden. Sometimes he brought back a flower, a tamarind pod, a nest. Once a ripe chrysalis, which she had pried open, forcing a Monarch into life. At these moments she smiled her rare smile as he watched, wary: her muddy feet, thin tight breasts. So began the first attempts at negotiation in Eden.

by Priyanka Joseph of Ayer

Pannayur by the Sea

Days & nights here don't change anything. Sun & moon both light the same flat land, wind-torn casuarinas, boats pulled up to dry in driftwood lanes. Here on the coast, where crabs tip-toe around kerosene lamps lighting our fathers’ way home. Here where fish gasp out the sea’s secrets through jeweled gills, where coconuts travel to lands we only dream of. Which is why when the wave came, we never had a chance.

by Priyanka Joseph of Ayer

Yeast

What do you mean?
I will will will will provide.
Eat bread loafs, drink beer
out of my infected cunt. What's Jesus got
on that?

by Lena Judith Drake of Grand Rapids