1.
The internet flattened the earth for me, withdrew the moon landing, every artist a tabloid masquerade whose whore discourse ate them by the gerrymander, but my shoes still functioned, coolly worn to wood. The earth didn’t need to be round when everyone was standing at your bedside, snotting on your socks. Easy to avoid negativity if every step forward scooped you out less shallow a grave, I exclaimed, heel unmoored from sole. I’d been detached from cloud nine with a chainsaw and needed my tutorials optimized to keep so antisocially dreamy. Certain supreme autisms had been afforded the socially dislodged. My swag got discontinued. Humidity debonded Amazon epoxies. You used to be serviced for legal tender by category of emporium. Less than cornucopian reserves within an edifice, but quality craftsmanship could transpire during the delay between shipments. Cheap replacements became easier to order online, cargo arriving too expeditiously: van app serfdom. Hunting down a dying breed of expert was its own detective work. Cars were knockoff monoliths repaired by sleight of hand for the price of another car, bullied by the option over my frangible aerodynamic dildo.
One big cocksuck of American commerce was when someone hustled their ignorance for your own. They proved you stupid for information they didn’t know. I’d match eyes with the clerk and do a maneuver, trying to remotely view the interior of my pupils, voice a calamity of formal gestures. Such was the nociceptive sting of any potential human connection, scrutinized by kids who quit their job every schedule. They carried a riff as if their mothers would flush them alongside it, the rules of sewage I was blamed for breaking, a bevy of poor roasters on standby when you needed anything. If the slightest trifle registered: a misaligned stamp, a form misprint, any bungle at the Ice Capades—what petty glee guided their dog kennel acumen, nothing constructive, only performative schadenfreude, no tough love, no mutual improvement, not a back-and-forth ball-bust to gauge endurance—just making someone else the temporary function of their amusement, without purpose; then they’d cover it up by saying such treatment could affix you to its calling. I’d worked as a peasant under fluorescents in my youth, back when customers had the attitude, and you got fired if you returned it. They were looking for a Karen to film and I kept accepting punishment on her behalf, no manager needed. Degradation went up and down its castes, scrolled live on an egregore that docked in your pocket. Trial run ridicule to earn knowledge firsthand (wisdom trivialized, no trove of noesis) ended up ridicule without remuneration, hazing without the perks of membership, a female shit test after social media crippled any sense of play between the sexes, a whirlpool of intransigence placidly oared, the dregs of an observation told to you, about you, our flypaper labyrinth of bureaucracies epitomized in an ensemble, their anisotropy cachinnating pathogenic telemetry. I was raised working class and idolized none of my peers, proud scrapers-by, because they spoke anosognostically, breadwinners squabbling about their uber-taxed property, or lack thereof, soon heavyset and dead, biohazard remediation specimens bleached from a rug.
I had the privilege of groundskeeping a stuffy hovel, my Metamucil den, boomer vassalage, an uninterrupted chore, discretion a boutique reliquary—solitude still conversely ubiquitous. Self-employed as a detective investigating prior abodes, I organized a baked goods drive-by, pieing the homeland, entarteur of childhood lawns where community members once teased and beat me, pecan welded to the bushes of my first residence, Peanut Butter Crunch riddling the dilapidated grade school. They installed privacy fencing around a babysitter’s backyard because she had been sexually unreceptive in 1993 and the earth upon which she’d tread so undressed required key lime, even if her family white-flighted eons ago. Why turf the hearth with toppings? As a synoptic lèse-majesté against the yippie tricks that emasculated their scions in retrospect, to gloop my origins fromaged from any tribe, a muffin for the longhouse, disfigured insulin, twin inflammation. What I really hoped to accomplish was global thrombosis. I was a semblance of myself, perdurant with comorbidities, mast cell activator done in by carpeting too pluvial to complement the decor. Support was important to avoid a charley horse, and the sign said shoe repair.
No greeting inside, register unattended, shoddy wares remiss in a show window, ding like minced-up chicken nuggets in your palm when the desk bell plunger cricked sidelong. Arriving well within the retardedly abrupt hours Sharpie’d on the door—their one customer—I had nothing going on and was committed to losing an afternoon. An insouciant blonde lashed her perm over the partition.
Should I book an appointment with my phone? I tried.
We’re not that gay, she almost moaned. Yet.
Due to her beauty, it was difficult guessing if she was older than me, but the patois belonged to the mischievous frivolity of my immediate elders. Like many in her specific age range, she had not partied away her looks as millennials did well before their roly-poly thirties. Gen Xers understood bulimia, sinuate flexure atomized in a camisole, cropped hem tucked just above low-rise jeans. She was no employee.
What, she stated, scraping tar from her teeth.
Holding a pair of shoes in a shoe repair store, I detailed my business, patiently, resignedly, foreseeing a price fivefold the secondhand shoes. She said she’d need to ask someone for an estimate. I had to extract from her whether or not that someone was presently here. Could they be reached by text, perhaps? Could anything occur? I suggested the dark web might be necessary. She donated an eyebrow, fractionally risen, and—curls parted over an elvish ear—freed a Newport.
I’m actually from the dark web. I was born there—at its inception, she hummed, tattoo of a flayed kitten shoulder to wrist.
I knew her then: a senior my freshman year of high school. I had Koontz’s Intensity glued to my nose in a dim cafeteria. This blonde commandeered the neighboring stool, hungover from Gen X extravagance. She was giving me the gift of her presence, tartan splayed, navel ring rounding the unbuttoned shirt’s placket. I love that book, she pointed. It was the friendly suggestion of a test run, unfulfilled potential coached toward future pursuits, not as a vulgar display, like girls my age (I spent a year chatting up a classmate at her job after school. It was right next to the Blockbuster I frequented and we’d flirt, exchanging coy physical contact. I gave her a drawing of herself, weeks tribulated on the fidelity. We shared a Pepsi, ridged around her bottom lip. One day she appeared in my room, somehow having gained entry, the first girl to set a pretty foot there, like a living fantasy apparated before me, and, as I extended my arms… she told me she was gay. Her and her fat wife later adopted…) none of that malice—professional, casual altruism laconically performed, natural as a cat. I would be allowed to flagellate myself to her image and she loosely approved: impish but distant encouragement. Relax and talk to a girl, you’ll do okay—not with me, I’m blonde royalty, but more of my kind might be impending—she implied, hair tossed, my favorite framerate in an advertisement, close enough to touch.
In no world would she recall me, but even our high school’s pretentious episcopate was refuted. She had distilled a moment in my teen mind and I wanted to pay tribute before fucking off. I’d forked over the last benefit of the doubt, decorum adjourned, no fearing kinetic missteps of direct address. And I carried a gun. It was meant for my head but could be donated to others’.
Why don’t you tell me what this store is a front for over coffee? If your owner isn’t possessive, or busy shooting someone in the back of the skull.
My old man isn’t that connected.
How high up does the stink reach? What am I, a cop? Look at me.
There’s a coffee house next door. She positioned her face too close to mine. I say when I’m on break.
Conversation was usually just a meta-stumble of failed clarifications, but our forsaken slapstick had stature.
I only agreed to this cuz I thought you’d have the manners to walk me to the bathroom and rape me by now.
Gonna go in the corner and deracinate myself like the newspaper said I should. Blondie.
Prefer the antisocial catalogue online?
I do owe the internet what pussy I’ve taken. That’s why I’m reluctant to force out a sentence, if anything.
I won’t remember a guy if he tries to make love to me. Most assuredly I’d have thrown those flowers out and got dominated in a stall somewhere.
You been fucked enough. You’re interested in something else. And wouldn’t surrender under any tactic.
True. Anorexia runs in my family. It’s called ‘medicinal abortion’.
I’m sure they’re still grimacing back at their incalescent antechamber, princess.
Are you, like, psyching yourself up? Need a fluffer?
Life comes with quotes around it, and I forgot the source.
I could see her nipples and wasn’t sure if they’d been so pronounced since the last ten seconds I’d looked there.
We’re layers of infection pining for a pilot, I tried. She smoked in approval, ignoring the barista’s complaints. Were we lemmings at least there’d be the promise of a cliff… I said the Santa Claus fib revealed to adults, perhaps as a child’s revenge, how each belief sustaining you became a raggedy trade-in of the one that crumpled before it, and, once you were too incapacitated to better customize your lifespan, the cadaver of every ideal swung back around as a prop for the next procession of saps extolling their own planned obsolescence. Worse than a belief, your cells corroborated this deterioration to reflect the fact. Not that vanity mattered to a man if he could confirm a single kill before succumbing.
And most won’t, she added. Even if I ask politely.
I’ll kill whoever I’m paid to, if it’s enough for cigarettes in jail. Not that I smoke.
What’s the word for a belief that proves you wrong, that you cling to as it leaves? She demurely asserted, a phylum of girl always well informed of everything she’d pretend to ask. The mystery of life, she sighed, is how we condone our reflections in the mirror as they sequentially turn to shit.
Men and women boil down to ‘come here’ versus ‘no’, then the guy gets old enough, or wise enough, to say ‘fine, stay there.’ We’re a conspectus of trained phrases curated to expediate parturition with someone ‘foine’ as yourself, I reminded her. Before the demon, sickness, takes possession of us all.
She wanted her old man followed, not assassinated. Yet—as she might’ve purred. He was a factory worker addicted to nitrous and ladies of the night. She was jealous because he didn’t care. If he cared, she’d have been the one screwing around. Adhering to this principle, so broke no sum would amortize, for payment I asked her to enter the library on my arm, pretending to like me in front of the mousy clerk I obsessed over. She was a great actress, but I sensed physical disgust in proximity. My gamine used the dainty little hands in question to check us out, without flinching, an acedia that continued into the vestibule after this crazy bitch licked my beard, subsequently spitting and smoking.
Her old man helped plant her ass as a phantom employee in a zoning placeholder. His cut was skimmed off whatever drugs they trafficked elsewhere and laundered there. It being impossible to tail someone in a car by oneself without gleaning manifold traffic violations, I pieced him together between work and home, no women anywhere, undocumented roadhead. A security guard demoralized me after I systematically circled his lot. I had to go launch strudels at the secular artifact for diversity where a cross once stood while passing the formerly papist high school my boss and I attended.
Nothing’s open twenty-four hours anymore. We’ve been denied that Hopper painting lifestyle, to our detriment. The problem is we had a taste of it and the loss stings more than life’s worth living, I told her.
Bored with my classroom jabber, she spirantized into a phone, discerning dames behind her old man’s voice.
The other person in your life will only ever need you when they’re bored. The trick is not having other people in your life.
His baby-mamma resides in a trailer park. She’s one of these rural, feral, skinny squirters with implants that also squirt because they haven’t been replaced since her twenties. Stake them out.
Alright. I’d like to touch your face in an intimate way for a few excruciating seconds. You can use a wet wipe when I’m done, and I’ll wet wipe myself beforehand. Is the baby- mamma in on the racket? I couldn’t hear her over my hand.
The scenic trailer park was tucked next to a river. Her prefab had every light on at 4 a.m., windows without curtains, meth shadows eyeballing the street, ossified by disinfectants. A truck pulled up, tailgating me down a dead-end. I drove over lawns to avoid an incursion, zooming through one-way loops and over viaducts that convulsed dust. Another ingress halted my speed, a phalanx of goobers uncoupling their clerestories to shout and stare. I awkwardly backed up while people exited the truck. A rag fulgurated my face.
Having failed at podcasting as either guest or host, having paid needless attention to detail on a page till income amscrayed, I excelled at hectoring my captors to kill me with celerity, not out of fear of torture, but as an actualized goal. The only passivity these types displayed was stupid amusement about their predicament, so I already knew them.
He’s not even a threat worth defusing. Waking to their poorly ventilated three-way, I heard Newport girl barter with her man. My bindings were industrially secured. She was in his t-shirt. The other girl stayed recumbent. He weighed my gun and a beer.
Sorry… we made up, she little-girl’d.
All the plaque I brushed off is kept in a locket and I score the clasp over my gums to make sure I got everything in one beautiful picture of meals past.
Should I hit him? Don’t really need information.
Hush, you doofus. And, yes, rid me of my teeth, please. Braces were a deciduous reconditioning anyway. Even braces were a lie, you guys… I have an autism theory. Best case scenario, a girl can love you fifty-one percent. Often felt like zero to me because I loved, dumbly, at ninety-nine percent—not one hundred, because I’m willing to take the hint and leave if cops are called—but it was a love, I insist, when I had it, that could only be forced to go dormant. Puberty began and I inducted a friend’s sister into my campaign to lay her. She meted out profuse maybes that meant no—to tautologize the dismissal. Come to find out, she wasn’t coy, just a vindictive little dingbat who filed her nails while the brother goodhumoredly chambered a double barrel shotgun oriented at either crotch, our solitary wedlock. A girl adjusts her situation to carry on elsewhere, perforce unphased, while I enshrine them, but now… mine is an apathy I had to mimic in that gaped forty-ninth percentile. I wasn’t taught how to treat twat punitively, how they need it, or to submit to an arrangement in the meanwhile. End my life.
Okay, he sighed, aiming.
Wait, said Newport girl.
Ugh, you do it, then. He set the gun on the counter and got back in bed.
I love you Gen X fuckers. You never returned the love, but giving me a cool, benumbed, fuck-it-all death is appreciative enough. You owe me a big gesture, lady. One lap sitting.
Gimmie change. She picked up the gun, flinging her wrist around, and sat on my lap. Wouldn’t it be uproarious if we had sex? She was leaking him on my pants.
An abomination, I said. She pressed the muzzle to my temple, rocking with glee. I forgot to try grinding against her to loosen the bonds and was getting close instead, despite hygiene. I still had moiré patterns over my sight but was flattered to notice those nipples sticking up again.
You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but our touch-bartering is as close as I’ve come to prostitution… Hey, why’s that making you harder?
The excitement wore me into unconsciousness before any sexual objective. Unsheathe your phone and show me a tutorial on how to die, I mumbled, passing back out. The most hateful libretto I could think to recite for them was selections from the very memoir before you, MK-Ultra’d by a handler of mine, who sprayed me awake.
We like you for a murder.
Just one? The trailer was vacant.
Go off script on your own recognizance. Need a rebate for them seventy-two virgins, homie? Five would be wearisome. My wars are too handheld, quiet scrimmages, like the street synthetics this rube moves for me. I miss shipping old school opiates. Now my freaks come preconditioned by an app. Are all our candidates volunteers? Every bit of neuroplasticity is stimuli to your gay generation, a rigged life of call signs and flip codes. There’s cobwebs in my fucking food.
Point me at my victim. I said the morphemes I was bound for.
Ruminating on who you are should be motivation enough.
2.
Our Rome sacked itself—a deterritorialized feng shui of repentance, venerean in scope. Even serial killers were demoted by cybernetic vogue into apostles of contrition, depreciating their trading cards. The renown of simmering into a mass shooter crisscrossed monotonic production entropy with heavy medication, forcing me to continue aging, catastrophically, against my will. Murder, classic abreaction, had been denigrated into minimum wage firing squads, memed into pawnage, an embarrassing, estrogenic outburst reviled by the rest of the class, the few twitter heroes who survived. Congruently, transgressive art, my mentor in eremitism, got cloned into a safe representation, a homuncular reboot trepidatious of the counterfeiters who commodified it. Thus, the world I grew up in was an effigy of itself.
AI was an infernal goulash of proclivities that answered nothing and everything, a retarded thesaurus, apophenic malware, the bounty placed on taste, my chthonic brethren in rhetoric. Why was I a tipsy non-drinker with troubled motor skills? How could this be undetectable by doctors who prescribed diuretics, a tachycardiac waterloo? The bastion in my gizmo said ingest salt. Everything relapsed. More shit than wipes, more snot than head—why were my nasal passages rhinitic for months, histamines avoided? Why could I only fuck a girl three times instead of ten anymore? Why was my house staked out after the police detained me for drinking coconut water? Were people a herd that treated any anomaly as a misconceived threat to justify their own threats, a bully democracy perming me from its fur because… bad vibes? An epistemic bagged lunch holiday in hand, parent technology out of a tranq injection site, I navigated dummy missions to health stores, parked in lots, revving the engine at a cat.
In grade school, a snarky kid with a lisp and a bowl cut deconstructed my every movement. His faggotry wasn’t quite codified. I doubted he had any physical interest beyond talking me into violence, per diem, against him or myself. Over a misapprehended debt about codes for the game Doom, he pummeled me with a packed bookbag while black onlookers hooted. Unruffled, influenced by thug life, predisposed to their methods, I dispensed a beatdown and had to be decoupled from him, railing blood. We were forced to shake hands—like holding a post-aerobic sock. No remedies manifested. Stoicism perpetuated defamation. More pertinent charges of battery had been warranted. In high school, another kid with a bowl cut was a desk behind mine, class after class, making me the onus of his crowd work. Never allowed to bow out, the lisp lived on. I stopped at his locker, hunting knife inside my bag, and granted the relationship clemency, rescuing our futures. At open mic readings, a kid with a petulant stride debuccalized at me. Fortuitously, his girlfriend introduced him to scag and he had a shrill overdose, proposing doggerel for authorial luminaries in hell. Dildo auctions were held in his honor. A rabbit did its saltation on a leash, flaneur through the crowd, skinned to the ears. I was pursued by cattiness, scolded by boys with an adjacence to gayness, yet homosexuality would have been too easy an explanation. They were women by extension, not transvestic, but reformative intrigants haughtily bullying. Gangs weren’t accommodating normalcy with a curb-stomp, and stealing milk money seemed unbecoming, but who cared to defend a pariah from further pejoration. I was a civic soft target worth any contumacious reproval because the only ramification would be if I might snap and kill you. No advocacy would elsewise interfere, a minor steppingstone for upward social mobility. Writers continued this tradition. I became adept at identifying the type and pilloried myself by publishing a catabolic rummage sale of language, phonaesthetic arabesques and Asiatic polysyndeton abused from thesauri, self-bloviations maundering between euphony and cacophony, the echoic phoneme pararhymed by a pizzicato of hate. This paradiastole alerted two lispers a decade online—poor readership. The cacoethes of literature had denatured from asteismus to the tapinosis of a twitter dunk, litotes told by the tell-all. After triaging colleges to find the last silent generation professors impetuous enough to explore prosody, or to flip a desk, I was lost in a potpourri of degrees, my glorified typos edited to death.
Death was condensed to a valediction from some DMV clinician who wouldn’t spare the morphine to let you asphyxiate comfortably and you still had to thank them for not teabagging you when the CCTV knockout games entered primetime. They’d bathe you and change your diaper on a payment plan, once a week the cheapest. Devoid of piss, a pickled residual adnate with your nappy, God wicked you in ceruse, his leaden fard, and you managed a discomfort turned all the worse because it could be managed. Marriage remained just as gutted in its structure and visitors that bothered were erased from your brain anyway. The cincture of stenosis—your ineluctable reins closing prodromal, then cachexic, insides pinioned by sarcopenia, every thought and memory unraveled at the cap of a telomere—modularly acceded you to oblivion, endeared to each idea as it elapsed.
There was an obscure subdivision of metrosexual to exscind, and, by the rules of literature, whatever beards they had in tow would belong to me. A cognate sissy, vulnerable staggering from car to house, suffered a paroxysm as I ran up, weapon side gripped. Rounds tumbled—armpit, hip, tire—vulcanizing the soundtrack of his blowout. I steel-toed him so he’d convolve while being shot and imbrue the street. Loved ones would have to scrub up a roadside shrine, condole their Descanso with thoughts of diarrhea—the Bristol Stool Chart gestalt—and a closed coffin. His bitch came searching, phone raised for defense. Mauled in broad daylight, shredded garbs assuring disarmament, she was knocked unconscious against the trunk and stored in it, a tympany of keys on concrete when the purse capsized.
The apartment trap-housed others like them, invidious posters conferred between edicts, diminishing whoever they’d nominate as a cognoscente because all operosities and verbosities were boorish, ten thousand likes per takedown. Their fans weren’t stupid, there just wasn’t a reason to bother with prolixity anymore: my condign derision. A LARP sword for renaissance festivals stood in the corner. I drove it, plenarily, between a poster’s headset, rivens of feebly tempered steel snapping cord from larynx, cartilage banked in foveae, bones exposed with each reach inside to drag another splinter down further. Correct my science, I told his jetsam. I could see the neck in operation and sensed a perspicacious reply. His method of attack had been to hyperinflate the significance of a typo.
Thumbing blood off the screen, I asked AI how to kick out a lock: tread parallel to knob, shear wood from latch. A mesomorphic blonde guarded her infant. I ejected the clip from my weapon. Sententious girl boss, grandstanding martinet, Panglossian nag of the net, mountebank oracle whose rhapsodies desecrate art, thirst-trapped rage bait slut lionized into maturation for her agent’s spank bank, skewered over the page by Christ’s antlers, anyone kedged to the limerick of your orgasm. Let’s test years of lady gym membership against a moderate dude in medical distress.
She fired a small caliber pistol in a tight grouping around the plate on my chest. I unbuckled and wedged an end across her jaw. She set her son down before fainting. The condyle was subluxated, a ceramic crunching under the rubber punched into it, fucking her symmetry up. Glove stuck in the cuts on her face, I palmed vellus, mom and babe reconciled, the shriek a cavitation pressed against ichor, almost able to drown in that shallow a pool, fontanelle pulsatile by compression, eyes and mouth hydraulic spew.
There’s your trad baptism’s direly needed character limit! She’s tweeting with the pharisees now. Dust bunny Eucharist slat in the hardwood, breastfed her medallion, Unio Mystica. My avant motivational speaker procreates a floorboard. The derivations of vendetta cloyed from these decoy razzings online are your best and only craft, I fumed, smiting their rostrocaudal medley with ampoules of splooge, wank rabies fresco, our diptych too pugnacious for the matron’s Lithium.
The flabby, hircine abstractionist in the final room was hiding under his futon. I pulled him out by a slipper and pocked the face and neck with an X-acto knife. Disjunctive composition by field.
The only pinko petit maître! Hebephrenic pedant, who you gonna report this to?
Used baby wipe lathering perforations, shit through beard, bristling meconium applied by diaper, I aliquoted drain cleaner, hairline down. Proteolysis saponified, scalding a tracheotomy from chemical burns, fat and tissue an eschar of pablum, wan boardy leather screeched there, carbonating, until even the breath cicatrized.
My childhood home had what was known in the seventies as a freedom flyer eagle cantilevered below the roof. It meant whoever owned the house damn-well finished his interest on the mortgage. Few could accomplish such a task, longitudinally. After our 90s wayfaring rental attempt at a family, before the market fell, someone gussied up the hut and made a killing. But a decade later, it was a fallow husk. I’d round the ghost town hood, watch crackheads strip copper wire. The eagle remained because it was fixed high and consisted of cheap cast-aluminum. Aluminum didn’t corrode like everything else. I bought a twenty-dollar replica on eBay and parked in front, canting the wings side-to-side, a poor substitute. I needed the eagle that bore witness. Before dawn, I used standoff stabilizers to extend a ladder over the lean-to without skirring planar. LED headlamp guiding me up the stringer, childhood bullet holes brindling porch light out the awning, I rested, sweating, on my eagle’s dark crest—no corrosion, a swift kiss, our passivation smooched beak to beak—and unbracketed it from the cladding. Every move felt stentorian, but I escaped with the boodle.
Their ringleader, OnlyFans Maecenas, awoke blinded by brush, mask glued on. I could tell her respiration had changed because she was naked. Hyperadrenergic lallation began from the latex.
We’re in the alley behind my childhood home. And this is the eagle that used to beckon me from its topmast. Every day, another gibe. If you could guess that tarred and feathered presence beneath your hood… convocation in a mirror. Good carousel post for Instagram. Especially if the trash fire ever dies down.
I stomped the wing upslope. Fumes let bugs avoid her.
Not that they collect any. Pruned us a swath in the overgrowth so we could talk. It’s not that no one can hear you scream, it’s that they’ll be as aroused as I am… by all the desexed expectations before you; where in your cycle we’ll find the pill, unbred generation infantilized by our syndromes, miss immolated totem…
A match on the mask’s pyrolysis bridled me to her, effluent abluted from pugilistic decerebration. We hypoxiated through our Frenching like doggies manacled by a tacky strand. I readied the eagle, its come-hither quills crewing up her.
I opt to die before my sentencing. Or did life already litigate that for me?
The chief sprig of wing teased in past her knees, biffing them cataplectic, a scotoma of bowels announced with flaccidity, aluminum corner of plumage knocked on majora, GI dysmotility leaching forth to tamponade a thicket of blood and shit forced back in by cunt, miniatous for the LEDs barbed about the object, wingtip subcutaneous, bullae fluting spot to abdomen, herniating belly button, acrid myofibril waft, rib returned—with feathers. More womb gathered at my blackened hands as the tine fucked home, peritoneum and beyond.
Sean Kilpatrick is published or forthcoming in: Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, evergreen review, NERVE, FENCE, LIT, VICE, BOMB, DIAGRAM, New York Tyrant, Sleepingfish, Obsidian, berfrois, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Quietus, New English Review, Hobart, young mag, forever mag, The Collidescope, La Petite Zine, Pindeldyboz, Expat Press, tragickal, fluland, Terror House, NOÖ Journal, Jacket2, Spectra Poets, Exquisite Corpse, MiPoesias, Tarpaulin Sky, Forklift Ohio, Arsenic Lobster, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Sixth Finch, Epicenter, Skidrow Penthouse, The Lifted Brow, Black Sun Lit, maximus mag, elimae, The Malahat Review, Alpha Beat Soup, Safety Propaganda, Misery Tourism, Animal Blood Magazine, Apocalypse Confidential, Countere, Dreginald, Michigan City Review. His collected Prose, Scripts, Poetry, and Criticism are now available in paperback.