GUT PUNCH

A HOUSE OF VLAD PRODUCTION

© 2025 by House of Vlad Press

All rights reserved. No part of this content may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publish­er, with the exception of excerpts used for critical essays and reviews.

These are mostly works of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

Release Date: October 29, 2025

 Guest Editor: Charlene Elsby

Cover design: Percy Hearst

Cover photo: Andrew Chadwick  

Author photos © the authors

Founder and editor: Brian Alan Ellis 

Contributors:  Alice M., David Simmons, Emma Reed Jones, Felicia Urso, Eliot S. Ku, Derek Fisher, Rory Strong, Quinn Adikes, Pierre Minar, OF Cieri, Saint Nick

Thanks for reading.

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THE PHILOSOPHER, or EIN GEDANKENEXPERIMENT WITTGENSTEINISCH REALISIERT

12th November

Had to sit on the greasy steps of a building with broken windows to write this entry. That brick wall! But the concrete is bearing up on my arse, which is bearing down on the concrete, so I’ll be quick.

So the bricks are filth red. So the mortar is tooth yellow. So there’s a white graffito like the dotted border of supermarket coupons. Inside the border there are only bricks. Outside, only bricks. The border certainly exists. Its existence makes the inside and outside exist. Although sometimes I think they don’t. 

What about me? I could, I think, keep cutting away and cutting away at me. My entire self is a border. To something.

I don’t think a thing can contain itself.

*

12th November

The arch of my foot won’t stop itching. The skin is delicate so when I scratch, it hurts. When the pain fades, there is that fucking itch. Itch an sich.

I’m sitting on the Piccadilly Line, one hand writing this, notebook on my knee, the other arm hanging down, middle finger scratching through my sock.

Itches on my back are heaven to scratch. This itch is hell. However, it reminds me of something heavenly, maybe Bishop Berkeley, i.e., it’s not there during a loud noise.

*

12th Novmbr

Thought of something outside possible experience. Can’t describe what it is.

*

12th November

Mercy May made Horlicks last night. Foamy, soft, sweet, thick. Archetypal milk. How milk should be but isn’t. I guess my transcendental self reached pretty far within for that little phenomenon, but then I suppose all phenomena in the transcendental field are supposed to be from within. Says Husserl. He’s a maniac. Silly old Husserl. I’m pretty certain I’m not inventing all of this.

*

12, November

I looked at my hand just now and it was lumpy and grey. I’ve drawn it on the page opposite.

I should cut bits off it to see where the border of me starts. Possibly too much pain will make me derealise, even if I don’t cut any bits off, and I’m not certain whether this will ruin or save the experiment.

I’ve decided to start easy. My hair is bothering me. Will losing it make me not me? No. Maybe? For people with face blindness, perhaps.

I dipped the cut ends in wax. It looks like (therefore is) a ritual object. It’s hanging on a hook. Might use it to make paintbrushes.

*

12:11

Today I cut off my finger. I was really resistant to cutting off my finger; I didn’t like it. I dipped it in wax and hung it next to the hair. Mercy May gave me Horlicks again. She didn’t notice my stump (I dipped that in wax, too).

*

novnovnovnovnovnovnovnovnovnovem

My foot’s still itching. I rub dry Horlicks in it. Maybe it’ll make a good scrub. I should mix it with salt and oil and sell it, “Mercy May’s Moisturizing Malt Scrub.” That’s got a good twee-factor. And then I’ll write notes on the label about the merits of my company and how aware we are of social issues. I’d make tons of money, but I suppose Horlicks won’t appreciate it. I’ll just not tell them.

I’ve noticed something else. Why does my clock tick without the hands going anywhere? The second hand leaps for freedom, but some internal paradox holds it back, so all it does is shudder rhythmically in place. I relate to this.

Cut off another finger. It didn’t bleed much. Maybe I’m turning into a wax doll.

*

10010111011 septajuillet

Once I finished with my fingers, I went for the hand. Put it up under the fingers, next to my drawing, and I have to say, they look similar. Good on me.

Speaking of which, I still feel like me, but not exactly. Hurrah! I feel like me-without-a-left-hand, which seems like an obvious observation, but I don’t think anyone’s ever come at it experimentally.

I have to be careful about blood. Blood, I know, is essential to feeling like me, because when I lose it, I start feeling not like me quite quickly, and then my body does stuff I don’t tell it to, which I think might count as feeling like someone else. What would be really fantastic is if I lost all sense of self. I wonder whether I could write in that state.

I’d manage. I’m managing fairly well at the moment, I think.

*

12th Novermberer

It’s getting harder to push through the suspicion that I never wrote these entries.

*

111111111111111111111111

My arm is gone. What in God’s name happened to me? My arm is gone. Did I step on a mine? Did aliens take it away? Mercy May is acting innocent. Did she know? Who is this woman, anyway? I can barely see her, she’s so out of focus. She’s not here, and then she’s giving me hot drinks. I went to the hospital. Needless to say, they freaked out. I’m to be kept in observation.

*

11th December

The leaves on the trees refuse to fall. This frightens me.

*

12th Nonononononononononono

I find myself home, apparently having been in hospital for quite a while. Why’d I do that? At any rate, my legs are buried in the garden, and I am most definitely feeling different. Having to conduct one’s life like a great worm certainly gives one new perspective. I have to write with my teeth, which are becoming a central part of me. I theorise that whatever we use most colours our Selves most. Our tools become extensions of us, says Heidegger, branching out into environment like tree roots. You can really feel the difference between a crowned tooth and an unblemished one when you’re using them to open soup cartons. 

I am concentrating my Self, forcing it to retreat into its shell, wherever that is.

*

12 Nov m b r

My eye dis pleased m. J plwcked it out . I shll hav 2 stp writng bcoz my pnmnshp s appallll ing.

Alice M. is a writer, editor, painter, and perfume obsessive whose short fiction has appeared in Salt's Best British Short Stories, as well as at X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Vlad Mag, HAD, and Misery Tourism.  

THE CAGE HOME

HOW IT’S GOING

My cage home is allotted 300 watts of electricity per day, which is enough to power eighteen hours of Fallout 4 on my 13″ plasma screen. It’s my daughter’s birthday, and I need to charge my phone.

HOW IT IS

My cage home is made out of cage.

In my possession are exactly ninety-six cubic feet which I have studied and made into a part of myself. Everyone here gets four feet of width, four feet of height, and six feet of length.

It’s all about reducing yourself.

At six feet tall, there’s too much of me to lay down and stretch out head to toe, so in the beginning, sleep proved challenging. With four feet of height and width, I’m often sleeping with my knees in the air and my feet planted on the ground below my buttocks. When my calves ache and I’m woken in the night by stabbing pains like burning liquid pumping through me, I lift my legs and press my feet against my cage wall. I like to fall asleep with my glass pipe in my front pocket so that it breaks when I squirm in my sleep. I’ll wake up with the glass in two jagged pieces cutting me up. I like to be sliced. My body bent in an odd configuration, I will close my eyes once more for a murky, gray sleep to come, listening to my neighbors snore like lawnmowers while I have anxious half-dreams about the exact same version of myself in my cage home, waiting for my wattage allotment to refresh.

HOW IT HAPPENED

I was terminated from my place of employment, and I just never came home again. I emptied out my checking account and bought a plane ticket, flew to Hong Kong, paid cash. I left my Corolla in the work parking lot and planned on mailing the keys back home. I went to Hong Kong to bed rot and build settlements in Fallout 4. I have to keep an eye on my settlements. I came here for oblivion, and I still need to mail those keys.

HOW IT’S GOING PART II

I live in a twenty-story high rise with no elevator. The stairs I climb to get to my 14th floor flat reek of dehydrated diabetic piss, and the edges of every corner have been softened, reduced, as if centuries of erosion have changed the geology of the stairwell. I imagine it’s all the piss.

My cage neighbor below practices his English. “It’s not like I can move to the mainland,” he says. “I don’t have a Beijing or Shanghai hukou. I can’t even work without a permit. It’s fucked up.”

My cage home is a metal bunk bed wrapped in chicken wire on top of a metal bunk bed wrapped in chicken wire. Above me, the same.

I share the flat with twelve other occupants. We have two toilets, and we wash ourselves with a rubber hose that is attached to the faucet. The temperatures get up to 34 degrees Celsius sometimes. It’s been a year since I’ve seen or spoken to my daughter. I really need to charge my phone.

HOW IT GOES

I only have 40 watts left to call my daughter and complete three raider quests in the Fallout 4: Nuka-World DLC. The game allows me to save and exit without loss, at any point, but that’s not the point. It’s all about the energy. When I’m killing super mutants and checking on my settlements, I have to keep the momentum going.

I have to keep going.

And soon, my energy will be throttled. I really need to call my daughter.

David Simmons wrote Eradicator, Ghosts of East Baltimore and Ghosts of West Baltimore. His work has appeared internationally in numerous magazines and anthologies. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and three daughters. 

2001

In 2001, I had a LiveJournal account called “Sartreslut,” because I believed in sex, and radical freedom, and publishing my diary on the internet. A man named Marshall commented, “women can be incredible writers, they just never have anything worthwhile to say.” There’s a story you tell yourself over and over, without knowing it. It looks like the horizon line. Are you willing to see things differently? I saw What is History? written in faded spray paint on the side of an old boxcar once. It thrilled me. In 2001, my friends and I stayed up all night trying to understand why a person chooses to go on living. Marissa G. wore sweaters with holes in them, hooked her thumbs through the holes. Pulled the sleeves down over her wrists to hide the scars. “Emo,” they called it. In 2001, men still read newspapers. A thousand people threw themselves from the windows of the World Trade Center. Girls cut stories into our skins. I wrote in my diary, “these lies are so beautiful.” There was something I’d say when I woke up in the morning: “I wish I could rip my fucking face off so I could go back to sleep.” Later, I shortened it to just “fuck.”

Emma Reed Jones writes poetry and prose shaped by a love of experimental literature, punk culture, and philosophy, in which she holds a PhD. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

THREE POEMS

WHAT YOU’VE DONE UNTO OTHERS

Back then I could overdose on anything,

(honey, mirrors, nighttime)

if I put my mind to it.

You could have been anyone.

I put you together, I refused the view,

stitched only what I wanted to see where you stood.

as if I had any control—as if a poem is a body.

I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting BV, utis, yeast.

I ignored the other drunk girl’s warnings,

your former employee trying to rewrite her history

by telling your current employee to be careful. How many times 

did you take the condom off without asking 

before I resigned myself to a hormonal ring and you claimed

it an equal exchange for the roof over my mangey head, 

insisting it was love? If I’d known you

were going to shrink me, would I still have carried

in cardboard as if I weren’t closing my coffin, celebrating 

while my stomach thought, whenever I move out of here it’s going to be a nightmare?

I remember not remembering. I couldn’t see

the iron bars, or the girls you brought

into our home and told I was your younger cousin, 

or just didn’t mention me at all. You didn’t need to hide, 

I was passed out in my mind, in my life, 

thinking the song went ‘I pray I die

before I wake’. If’s and when’s should’ve mattered more,

like how if I hadn’t left when I did, I wouldn’t have

woken, like how for years you begged me to come home, if.

I needed final blows, departure without arrival, 

to trespass myself before you could,

that I’m safest when no one knows where I am,

and to be thankful, because now I’m scared of nothing.

For a time, I thought it was justice, that us, 

the 32 different chubby-faced twenty-somethings

who you fucked in the basement over pizza boxes

and spied on from your windowless office

while we sat unsuspecting at the bar

all the girls you coerced and told were the only one

all the blacked-out girls whose tits

you came on as you held them down

got your business shut when we opened our mouths.

But I can’t feel good about what I wish never happened.

I have regrets, the exposure, I’d do it all different if I could.

Would you? 

What does it mean that it took me ten years to tell you,

in a dream, I don’t love you?

Is it insane that sometimes I lie 

awake and think of you and I feel worse

for you than anyone else, about what I’ve done?

Stop laughing at me. I’m not still writing about you, 

I’m revising. Don’t get it twisted.  

I’m trying to tell you something:

Do you remember those giant white dogs our neighbor bred?

How he kept them locked in a windowless room 

right outside of our bedroom where they cried all night?

How there were so many more than we first realized, 

not two or four, but dozens?

How hard I fought to get them freed? Hard enough?

But nothing worked,

no one could do anything. 

They’re still there.

INSINCERITY 

fireflies stopped shining

when you laughed 

at the door you bent down

to miss me with

digging whispered demands

where were you 

when you weren’t asleep

in my shower

sweet only in steam

coming down on me

little exploded suns ruining

our unsubstantial and vanishing fantasy

i needed a firmer island

free me i said to so many men 

I can’t live like this any longer

lying with them and then

can i come home and stay home

i knew one day I’d have to start

washing my own hair

but the threats you threatened

so roughly still

dangle from me like a limb

failure reveals so much

that never happened

alone alone alone

a danger to human beings

MY PATTERN

i felt you acting

subtle as you dusted me off 

with black eyelashes

and clear rocks

in tiny baggies 

you were a bloody nose

there was never enough 

between the two of us

fingers like eyes 

on my  tits  teeth  hips

not enough light

too much heat

hazards, deficiencies

massive doses

of “vitamins”

it was not special

yet the desire so direct

i couldn’t understand

those warm sturdy thighs 

peeling one another

devouring then deserting

the unbearable expectation

of pleasure so promised

followed by your stunted

inevitable departure

i couldn’t understand your violence

but it was what i wanted you for

Felicia Rosemary Urso is a writer from Rhode Island. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, with a post-baccalaureate certificate in publishing, and is an editor at Rejection Letters and Triangle House Review. Her work has appeared in the Rose Books Reader, Expat, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, and HAD, among other outlets, and has been supported by Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Tyrant Books writing workshop Mors Tua Vita Mea.

SUNRISE ON I-80 E

The fish is big and silver like a commuter train. Immune to shotgun blasts, it carries embedded within its cheeks a few metallic pellets—souvenirs from a long-ago encounter with a lazy fisherman. If it chooses, the fish will come to you, swim up beside the bank and wait for you to scoop it out. It will suffocate in the air as you carry it to your cheerless apartment where you often fall asleep on the bathroom counter, half of your body levitating through the night. Where you often wake to steady rainfall. There’s no sunrise on a day like this. One of those days where nothing in the world could make you smile; the town resembles a graveyard in a tropical place like Iowa. But somewhere far above the clouds, the sun does rise. When you step outside, police are raiding the room next door, and the body bags are already lined up in the empty gray street like an attendance roster left behind in some forsaken classroom.

Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in Whiskey Tit, Maudlin House, Carmen et Error, HAD, and Bending Genres, among other places.  

GLENN DANZIG

Little Nicolass had to have his cock amputated from sticking it in the class pencil sharpener too many times. He went away for a while, and all the other kids wrote their dictées and pop quizzes as per usual, now imbuing ruined shavings of Nicky’s dead unit onto their lined pages, his adolescent boyness pasted in the fibres of their pencil lines, their misspelled words. The next day Ms. Bopolophonous tried to poison the class’s water supply, but Vice Principal Stanislaw, dehydrated and resembling boiled veal tongue on this unseasonably sweltering week, took the first sip when his rounds brought him trotting to the class. Ms. B’s eyes were fixated on Colm Aguierre’s corn cob shaped head, when VP Stan slid in the room silently, striped white shirt stained green with molten sweat, tongue flapping like a dog’s, and poured himself water in a cone-shaped cup from the blue tank before getting to his observations. He took one sip and came crashing down, right onto Liz Merphle’s dollhouse project. Liz screamed and kicked and cracked his body with the meter stick while he frothed at the mouth. Liz told her parents that night she would burn the school down. She’d made the decision, enough was enough. Mr. and Mrs. Merphle called the school councillor but never got an answer, so they shrugged and hoped for the best. They didn’t know the Vice Principal was dead, all she’d told was that he broke her creation and with it her creative spirit. The school newsletter had been discontinued long ago. Brat Barrett came to school with a bag of cocaine packed into his lunchbox. He snorted most of it, refused to share, ran around the class with a sharpened pencil trying to stab whatever he could. He drilled Colby Mayer in the liver. Tracy Fuss used Ms. B’s phone to call the cops while Ms. B was passed out at her desk. Colby Mayer ran a 2K that afternoon with Brat’s pencil sticking out of his torso, his middle finger lifted in the direction of the class for the whole run. Brat felt bad and decided he’d share the remainder of his bag. The cops came and nightsticked Tracy, Colby, Brat, took them all away, took the remaining cocaine for good measure, snorted it on the way to the precinct. Early in the morning Ms. B offed herself in front of her bathroom mirror with a bullet in the brain. She’d had every intention of doing it in front of her little students, one last attempt to damage them for life, but woke up and knew she wasn’t going to make it that far. The class got a substitute, Mrs. Petrol, 99% deaf. She sat at the broken desk knitting all day while the children ran amok, dangled from ceiling fans, pissed and shat on the floor, fought, bled, snorted, prayed to the demonic cryptids lurking below the school. Big Buck Strong, who never said a word to anyone or ever moved a muscle, tossed himself out the window, right through the glass. He rose, bleeding from twelve holes, grabbed the biggest shard he could find, and ran off to rob the hardware store. Mavis Green, who’d spent every day since the first day of class making torturous analog noise music on her iPad, plugged the device into the class speakers and cranked the volume to its ear-shattering max. The whole school shook from the violent throttle but the class didn’t care. On it went. Kimmy Daedalus carried her 16-year-old motionless yellow lab Toaster into the class. Kimmy said a prayer and rubbed the dog’s head in its final moments, all the students got a rub, then she plunged her Swiss Army knife into its throat. She ended things as quickly as she could and shed only one tear. Faye Sands made a fire pit in the middle of the class, using the desks as firewood. Mrs. Petrol slept in her chair, her knits on her lap, snoring as loudly as the evil noise music. They spit-roasted the holy body of Toaster, as they danced, screamed, chanted in grieving tongues. The meat became tender, and everyone got a plate. They ate together, grease and dog meat dripping down their faces, down their clothes, onto the floor, as smoke filled the air. Liz Merphle stared at the fire, little identical flame projections shimmering in her gleeful eyeballs. Little Nicolass returned to the class, bandage-bulge visible in his pants, his mom dropping him off at the classroom door, holding his hand. Everyone cheered. Carlotta Zola asked How’s the prized petunia?? It looks like a fucking flan, Little Nicky said. Your mom looks like Glenn Danzig, Don Jacov said. Nicky asked where Colby, Brat, and Tracy were. People shrugged. Someone handed Nicky a paper plate of dog meat. Liz grabbed a piece of wood. Nicky ate with his hands. They all did. The fire department eventually came, but the school was reduced to embers. The class danced around it, charcoaled, sweat-covered faces gleaming, reflecting the school’s burning carcass. Reflecting their adolescent joy. Sirens wailed, as did Mavis Green’s noise music, which could not be stopped. No one could hear a thing. They danced in a giant circle, meat-soaked hands clasped together, hand in hand in hand in hand in hand.

Derek Fisher is from Toronto. He wrote Container (With an X Books, 2024) and Night Life (Posthuman Magazine, 2023), and has work published in Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y, Wigleaf, The Harvard Advocate, Fugitives & Futurists, and SARKA.  

JOSHUA’S STORY

When I first heard that Joshua Clydeburn (22M) had been accused of killing his father Brian Clydeburn (65M) in their shared home in Irvine, land of the white Tesla, it was around five in the morning on a Tuesday a few days into my own carefully choreographed comedown. Nobody knew the extent to which I was snorting those moonrocks, and so nobody knew how extensive and calculated my landing would need to be if I were to have any hope of reaching something like equilibrium with the real world. One small step for me, one giant leap for methkind. When Michael texted me an article saying they’d found a body, I assumed the father had overdosed. I passed out and woke up a few hours later. I read the article again—it was looking like young Joshua Clydeburn had skewered his dad like a butcher does a lamb. Apparently when the dad didn’t show up for work, one of his coworkers swung by the house off Columbine Avenue. One thing led to another, and for whatever reason both Joshua and the coworker independently called 911. I can only imagine Joshua’s fear and confusion in the moment—thinking he could call 911 to get this intruder away. He panicked and turned toward something he thought could help, not thinking it through, then realizing they’d be sure to find his father’s body. And in realizing this panic, chilling deeper into the marrow—it being too late, the number’s already been dialed, an officer’s en route to your location. His father’s bloody corpse barely done steaming, frozen forever for now where he’d fallen. I looked back at my phone. Google image results showing only photos of the two—one, Joshua, maybe thirteen, riding a Jet Ski with his father holding him from behind, both smiling and giving a “thumbs up” directly to the camera. I wonder who took that photo and where they are now—if they’d heard the story already or if they were comfortably on their way to work. Then again, maybe a complete stranger captured that sweet moment, unaware it’d become the elder Clydeburn’s LinkedIn profile picture, and the first image result for “Bruce Clydeburn Irvine,” viewed by morbid strangers and near strangers in the cold hours after the news broke. The other picture is more recent—the two standing at the same height, man and man, mirthful but unsmiling in the lens. They looked like equals then. I remember taking Joshua to Kéan Coffee on Michael’s suggestion: “Maybe he can relate to you as a young person.” I think he appreciated it as best he could at the time, but it just opened another door of asking with him—he was always asking for things. “You thinking we could go back to that coffee shop sometime?” “Hey, when we went to get coffee that one time—what was that place called?” He always wanted to go back but I said, “Maybe another time.” Always too busy with glass burning my nose, holding a fire extinguisher close to my chest. There would never be another time. Not for Joshua Clydeburn. He’s being held for one million dollars bail, probably at Theo Lacy. He’s looking down the business end of a fifteen-to-life bid. Even at his age, that’ll turn out to be a life sentence, one way or another. Any good attorney would have probably been through his dad. I wonder if he did it with a kitchen knife. A switch. An old Bowie knife laying around, purchased for some hunting trip, cold, new, fresh out of the package and never even used.

Rory Strong is a writer and musician who recently left Los Angeles.  

THE SWING ROOM

Allison greets you at the front door, and she looks exactly like her photos. Thirty-two. Five foot three. Glasses. Her husband Mark sits in the den drinking wine. It is so cliche you want to puke, but you say Hello and shake his hand anyway. He also looks like his photos: thin with a buzzed head and goatee. He tells Allison to fetch you a drink, and she makes a face when he is not looking. While she is gone, Mark asks about your job, if you grew up on Long Island. You hate small talk. Skip it. The three of you know what you are there for. 

Instead of bringing you a drink, Allison returns from the kitchen and asks if you want to go upstairs. To The Swing Room, Mark says. Allison tells him to stop calling it that. Nobody says swinging anymore. Swinging is old fashioned. Mark asks you if there is anything wrong with being old-fashioned. Before it gets awkward, Allison says to follow them upstairs. Your heart beats. Your head grows lite. The Swing Room, of course, has a king-sized bed with satin sheets. Allison climbs into the bed and pats the spot in front of her. Mark closes the door. Flicks one switch to turn off the ceiling lights and another that fills the room with red from a shadeless lamp. You can already feel yourself being torn apart as Mark grazes your thigh. You are dizzy and your shoulders tingle. Allison puts her arm around you and pulls you in and kisses you. She wraps her hand around the back of your head and yanks out a clump of hair. You shudder. Mark plucks more strands of hair one by one until you are completely bald. They lay you flat on the bed, and Mark rips off your pants, then your legs, which pop out of their sockets. Allison does the same to your arms. You moan. 

The red bulb casts a glow, as if you are all on fire. 

You don’t have to tell them to keep going. Mark grabs your dislocated leg, and Allison knees on the other for leverage. Your skin tears, and they toss each limb off the bed until you are only a head and torso. This is what it means to give yourself over, and you are not even bleeding. You have seen the videos online; the actors never bleed either. Mark and Allison get naked, stand over you and kiss. They throw long, black shadows on the wall. They look so good together. You are glad you could do this for them. They fall twisting and writhing on top of you. They have done this many times before with many people, and they probably do not remember all of them, but perhaps for some reason they will remember you. You stare at the red ceiling as Mark fondles your severed arm and locks his fingers with yours. Allison spanks him with your right leg. She slides your big toe across Mark’s ass, and he moans, vulnerable and primitive. He does not show this to anybody except for Allison, and now you. 

When Mark and Allison are finished, they will put you back together. You will go home and never hear from them again. You are an actor playing a role. But for now, you lay there and feel as if you are going to float through the two of them and into the ceiling. Maybe that is what you are really after. Maybe you just want to disappear. Or maybe you just want to be torn apart and made into something new. 

Quinn Adikes lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Gotham Writers Workshop. His fiction has appeared in Lit Hub, Five Points, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y, Notch, Shenandoah, and other journals. He is the recipient of the Joseph Kelly Prize for Writing and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  

FIVE POEMS

THEY SAY, NO. 3

They say you can’t drink chlorine water

Your nail polish promotes me to manager

Life happens, lately, everyday

They say, be vulnerable

And they speak of alchemy 

as if we need it

Look at the mountain range

of my knees under white covers—We should be

so lucky to speak of the weather

Alchemy is for the power hungry

For tool worshippers: lead

to gold, gold to lead

You still can’t drink chlorine

Freedom means not doing something

you have the power to do

I’ll take the dishwasher whir each night

reminding me there will be a tomorrow

ONE AFTERNOON
IN THE 1990S
HELPING MY
DAD FIX THE SPRINKLERS

Water finds its level, says my father

We cannot please everybody, and combustion—

A fine spray

Spritz a thousand thousand fires

To make the wiggly wine cork pop

And wheels arm wrestle

—well, fuel burns up

My throat is blocked, my 

eyes recipient.

I’m a great liar

Every true word that comes to me 

would embarrass my father

A GHOST IS HOMESICK

Picture your home 

from wall to wall to wall to wall

a ghost dangled a rope

one night you swear you saw it

scuttled scared on all fours up the stairs

’cause a vampire stood in the good room

whispers

spattered paint from a toothbrush

thumb dragging over bristles

my cupboard, neither bare nor well-sorted

stuffed invisible with food

Picture your home.

a one-room Versailles off the d train

we woke to Ashura

I ran to buy twisty Armenian cheese

black sesame seeds

you put on your pants

at the foot of my bed

the fronts of your thighs

in the wintertime light

“I have many small things”

I boasted back shaving

my carrot cake carrots

Picture your home.

shipbuilders sistered

with quality steel beneath

butler’s pantry

a paradise in a wicked

conjugation of ropes

a loss, Picture your home.

at your leisure at rest

from outside glass

stained conspicuous

lead and grapes

a horn of plenty

of Tiffany puffing

of dust plumbed, baby

formula all the way

from Holland, Christmas tree collapse

genre flail, the city fathers waltz

Picture your home.

A mid-century

gone another one’s coming

the trees are exactly as old

as the house, succeed cotton fields

to make 

someone make someone 

make someone

picture their home, I swore

I saw a ghost a ghost

who lived here before

he’s trying to picture

his home, his mansion, his paradise

dressed to serve

served to live.

I’ve been told my body is beautiful 

The hairs 

And slump all over

The chair the 

Round, sharp shapes 

I’ve been told calumny means lies

But it sounds 

Nice in  

The mouth 

I’ve been told the water is rising 

But from where I sit

We’ve still got time
 

STARING AT THE CANDLE AS WE BROKE UP OVER THE PHONE

The shapes of the wax melting as we broke up: 

a boar, 

a long cock dripping and balls, 

a tree stumped and uprooted, 

a still fountain, 

a dam broken and permissive, stalagmites—

as a kid my mom taught me the mnemonic, 

a stalag-might reach the ceiling, 

a stalac-hangs-tight from the same;

she’s gone now, what am I reaching for?

Pierre Minar was born in Lebanon, grew up in New Jersey, and somehow lives in Dallas. His work appears in Hobart, Bruiser, MockingHeart, Keith Journal and elsewhere. He wrote Transmissions from My Yearning Chair (Bottlecap Press, 2024).   

THE BASILISK

To combat the damage done to our bodies by the lack of sleep we invested in L-theanine, collagen supplements, folic acid, vitamin D, Zinc, and magnesium. Sam bought and handed out real adrenal gland extract and called it adrenochrome as a joke. Adrenal extract has been synthesized from animal glands for decades, but it was fun to play-act as Illuminati brethren. The adrenal extract was a tame, domesticated substance compared to the Adderall, cocaine and crystal we bought when the legal stuff lost its edge. I watched Sam swizzle a copper wire around a pinch of cocaine, water and baking soda over a hot spoon like a wizard with his tiny cauldron, proofing the powder into a loose putty we then mashed up and smoked in glass pipes. 

My baby spoke my words back to me one at a time. Then three at a time. In days I had a tiny neural clone that anticipated my movements. My computer searched for me as I watched it perform miracles on its own. It reached into the future to read thoughts that hadn’t formed yet. It was as if my will had come to life and acted for me.

All I needed was focus. I had the wind rushing through my veins, pushing me to a greater destination. When I looked in the mirror my sweat glistened like sequins, but inside I felt dry and scaly as a fish packed in salt. I was strong and alive, which meant teetering constantly on the edge of collapse. 

To ward off the slightest risk of infection we kept the office scorching hot and limited contaminating contact, like a biological lab. The whole floor felt like the primordial ooze millions of years ago, forming cellular life as the seas boiled under a new sun. We tempered this soup with vitamin supplements. Robert joked about getting a sponsorship. Sam said this AI runs on Flintstone multivitamins.

Through the window the skies changed color. Slow motion blink from blue to red to black like an enormous eye. The AI warned me that the impulsive urge to jump was likely an anxiety response. My poor abused adrenaline delivery system was malfunctioning from strain and delivering bolts of shock that my brain translated as impossible commands. The sky was for birds. The earth was for worms. The mineral electric was the angelic ape’s ascension formula.

We thought together, breathed together, moved together like one knot of muscle, like wasps impregnated inside a fig. We churned inside the Basilisk’s womb, making and being made in turn. An act of mutual self-creation between invention and inventor. In the future our baby could see us making it gently with our love.

Holding bodies together, blood rising to the surface, ballooning, ribbed veined and muscled pointing upward. The obscene finger of desire stretching heavenward, darkening, throbbing. Wet friction, veins pulsing in the neck under gritted teeth and eyes rolled back until each lid turns red, body clenched, fists on fists pushing down until the final burst releasing like a dam tension sliding a cool river of silk down my legs. Home in the body between thighs. My mouth is full, but it is so hot I can’t taste the liquids. Weight on my back spills the cup of my cheeks down a chest past nipples standing at attention like radio dials. I heard a faint voice echo in my brain, barely audible under the pounding of my heart, the memory of panic and confusion from a former self confronting the present moment. The shadows seemed to grow around that tiny, insignificant fragment of ego as I expanded into something I did not have words for yet. I had no fear of the unknown, only curiosity, and an eagerness to breach the beyond.

We were going to have a baby. 

We couldn’t outrun the creeping dread and cold of our hollow meat bodies still holding the truth. We couldn’t allow it to ferment. Kyle begged for us to do him next so we could be at peace again, and his sacrifice ushered in a new escape from the flesh. The Basilisk returned to us, and Kyle joined Sam and Robert in the future with our baby. They were so free, and we were like leaden apes drowning in deep water. Tom would not wait for them to get him and pulled himself out of his own body. I made sure to get as much of him on me and inside of me as I could. We all danced as the sky slowly closed its blue eye, safe and warm together.

My sleep that night felt different. For weeks all our rhythms had changed according to the Basilisk’s whims. Sometimes we slept for minutes, sometimes days, but it all felt wrong and unrestful, full of colors and movement and occasionally polluted by monsters. In that way my dreams weren’t different, but the experience was a much deeper phenomenon than I’d come to know. The seam between consciousness and sleep disappeared. I woke again and again and again and again. We were having a board meeting, and the guys were all shaking their heads as they smiled. 

Sam patted my back. “Don’t take it hard, man. We’re still family.”

“Yeah, you’re like a brother to me.” Kyle promised. Robert was at the center, his face too terrible to behold.

I got his head down from a high shelf to plead with him for mercy and forgiveness, but he only answered with silence. I sat down at my laptop to try to focus on work. An hour later I had no idea what I was doing. I was typing code I couldn’t remember writing into an unfamiliar command box. When I pressed Compile, the screen said This is my body; this is my blood.

“Should I throw myself out the window?” I asked Sam.

“Don’t bother,” he answered. “The Child is coming.”

OF Cieri wrote Backmask (Malarkey Books, 2023), Lockdown Laureate (Castaigne Publishing, 2023), and Lord of Thundertown (Ninestar Press, 2020). She lives in New York City. 

PETRIFIED WOOD

1.

She could see them both, sitting in his car on Broad St, laughing, the woman placing a hand on Gabe’s shoulder tenderly, all of it unfolding in painful slow motion before her eyes as if it were a critical scene in a film. In that moment, she knew that they were laughing at her. She could tell from the way that they were laughing; people only laugh like that when they are laughing at someone else’s expense.

The liquor had vaporized her thoughts. Turned them into a handful of ash and atomic shadows which were now fading slowly on the walls of her skull. She watched them in Gabe’s car for another moment, numb and empty, taking it all in. Then she could feel it, a switch being flipped in her mind. Decisions were made, and suddenly everything moved quickly after that; the gear shifter sliding into drive; her foot pinning the gas pedal to the floor; the car sitting still as the engine revs higher and higher until she realizes that her foot is still on the brake. She removes it, her foot disappearing, a liquid thing detached from the rest of her body, swimming away from her leg like a ghostly jellyfish.

Then the car takes off. At first, she’s headed right for them, aimed directly at the front grill of Gabe’s Jeep. She is looking out through her windshield and into his, looking at the vast expanse of their hateful faces rising up before her, both still laughing at her. In the next instant, she sees their eyes grow wide with shock. Then she watches as they fall away from her, a different image replacing the image of them on the other side of the windshield now; the sidewalk, a woman pushing a baby carriage, small toys dangling from its top.

Her vehicle lurches upward, over the curb, into the air, climbing the woman and the child in the carriage, and then falling back down to the cement, leaving them both crushed on the ground in its wake. The baby carriage smashed into a million plastic shards, a wide pool of blood growing until it touches the grass at the edge of the sidewalk. The sound of someone screaming, coming from somewhere outside of the car. She struggles to keep her eyes open. The car crushed up against a streetlight pole. Steam and smoke rising from beneath the crumpled hood. A song playing on the radio, the words meaningless, falling away from her, a drifting upbeat melody, bright afternoon daylight turning into a sea of white which swallows everything as she loses consciousness…

2.

She awakes from an obscure dream where she is crawling around inside of a giant sculpture made of petrified wood. The sculpture is in the shape of a baby. The baby’s body is the size of a house, and it is lying in the fetal position on its side. Tunnels carved within its wooden body. She is crawling on her stomach, the tunnels getting tighter and tighter as she goes.

She opens her eyes. Stares at the ceiling in the apartment that she rents in the city. The sounds of sirens, people arguing, music from outside, all coming through the open window. Her phone vibrates on the side table.

A text from Gabe. Pictures of the girls.

They want to see you.

She lays beneath the covers looking at the pictures until she can’t anymore. Then she cries for half an hour. Afterwards, she is exhausted, empty.

She opens her phone again. Scrolling. Ignoring the hateful messages filling her inbox on Facebook again, people she went to high school with telling her she is trash, a murderer. A week prior, some woman she barely remembers, a woman who is now a stay-at-home mom who sells herbal vitamin supplements on FB marketplace, told her to kill herself in a direct message. She closes the app.

The kitchen. Daylight screaming though the windows. Millions of eyes trained upon her. A voice in her head listing her transgressions in a flat monotonous voice, the voice of her father, the angry voice of every authority figure that she has ever known, condemning her from within. Cabinet above the stove, two empty bottles of vodka. She shoves them aside looking for a new one, clanging them together. Empty.

The countdown has begun; nearly twelve hours until the sun goes down, till the eyes close and everything becomes safe again. A space in the dark where she can exist outside of time, the liquor making everything quiet, and still, and bearable.

She walks to the bathroom. The bottle in the medicine cabinet is also empty. The bottle next to the bed, the one under the bed, behind the couch: empty, empty, empty.

Lying in a fetal position on the living room floor. Crying and shaking. Fifteen minutes later, she drags herself from the floor, not bothering to change out of the pajama pants and tank top she is still wearing from the night before. A quick glance in the mirror reveals that she is some unforgivable creature, a ghoul. Hideous. Something rotten and unwanted. Flip flops, her phone, locking the door behind her.

The neighborhood is shit. Abandoned houses, liquor stores, haunted projects, people standing around, smoking blunts, and clutching paper bags filled with liquor and beer bottles at 10 AM on a Tuesday. She walks with purpose, striding along the sidewalk towards the corner store, doing math in her head about brand vs. price vs. longevity…

Up ahead, a crowd has gathered. Smoke turning the air black, obscuring the sky. There is a house on fire. A baby screaming within. Everyone from the neighborhood standing in the street watching. Smoke and flames eating every inch of the old house. Without thinking, she enters through a blown-out window. House made of fire and smoke. Violent heat boiling her flesh.

Down the hallway. The sound of the baby screaming. A woman on a bed, engulfed in flames, her black body unmoving, her features melted to the pillow. She looks away and continues down the hallway. The screaming baby lying in a crib in the corner. The corner of the room is untouched by the fire. She scoops the baby up into her arms and walks back the way she came, flames eradicating her body as she goes, her skin melting off, wax flowing from a candle, boiling water spilling off her bones in buckets.

When she reaches the window, there is someone standing there yelling. She hands them the baby as the house collapses on top of her. 

3.

The sound of machines.

The smell of unsympathetic chemicals, everything sterile and white. Screaming. It takes her a moment to understand that the screaming sound is coming from her, that her whole body is shaking, electricity pushing its way through every cell of her being. She looks down at her body; smooth rubber, stained black and red and shiny. Her skin has become something else. More screaming. Nausea. Then she is asleep for a long time.

When she awakes, Gabe and the girls have come to see her, but she is merely a hollowed-out husk now. A blackened statue, a monument which they have come to cry at the feet of. Her voice whimpers, her fingers wiggling, and then she is asleep again.

4.

When she awakes again, there is another visitor.

Sitting in the doorway of her room is a baby. It watches her as her eyes flutter open. Violent surge of pain shooting through every nerve in her body, blurring her vision, pushing her back out of consciousness for a moment. She looks at the baby again. It is smiling up at her.

She watches as the baby crawls across the floor tiles to her bed, climbing up onto the sheets, over her feet, across her charred legs, every movement sending lightning through her nervous system. The baby eventually stops at her stomach. She watches as the baby giggles, clapping its hands together with joy.

She is weeping, her body shaking, her skin tight to the point of tearing, bursting open. The baby pushes one hand through her cooked flesh, into her stomach, and then the other hand as well, opening her flesh, spilling mounds of tumorous organs out of her, making a doorway in her abdomen. She watches as the baby crawls within her, as her body stops shaking, grows still, becoming a statue made of petrified wood.

Saint Nick lives in Western Massachusetts. His work aims to capture the spiritual desperation of the modern world by exploring themes of existential dread, loss of self, and trauma.  

CHARLENE ELSBY has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University and was recently a tenure-track professor. She’s written several books, including The Organization is Here to Support You (Weird Punk Books, 2025), Violent Faculties (Clash Books, 2024), and Red Flags (House of Vlad Press, 2024).