“At the Other End of the Hall” by Kevin Pilkington

She was staring the way a novel does that no one will ever open…. I learned a lot about hunger early on. It was the way cancer ate, always starving, feeding on my grandmother in the bedroom down the hall from mine. It was the last month and the only time she lived with us. […]

“Geek” by Matthew Sorrento

The pit of fire in me was right there with death…. Carnival train rolled to a stop at our camp. The big boss came right out, had me running from the Model T wreck over our fire. After a few words he returned with an armful of bottles, one for all. We’ll be here, just […]

“Gray” by Gerald So

Fading bleakly, / truer to life…. Noir’s original palette projects no choice for all in the frame, their desperate acts fading bleakly, truer to life than we care to say. Gerald So edits The Five-Two weekly crime poetry site. Previously he served as an officer of The Short Mystery Fiction Society and fiction editor for Kevin Burton Smith’s www.thrillingdetective.com.

“Wikipedian Was” by Joseph Hirsch

But I needed the teen to be alive…. Why, then, was this balm for my soul’s remainder? By which I mean, to watch a movie from 1957 on a computer screen at 3 a.m.? The shaggy monster creeping like a dirty Labrador draped in a pile of shag carpets making slow progress toward the chrome […]

“My Father Met Jayne Mansfield” by Joseph Hirsch

He must have sensed her blonde came from a bottle…. and that his parents were liars, too. He met her as a child which somehow seems a waste, a thwarted prepubescent prank played by a horndog demigod. His head only came up to the curve of her oft-measured breasts, and when he peeked, he was […]

“Training” by Charles Rammelkamp

She gave into temptation…. It was difficult for me to breath. The guy I bought my dope from when I was in grad school in Boston lived on the fourth floor of the brownstone where my Notes-from-Underground basement studio was. Ralph owned a Doberman Pinscher named Mahogany, a sleek, athletic-looking animal, always at Ralph’s heel, […]

“Winter’s Perdition” by Mark Krajnak

I got a rocks glass of rye, and some cold hash to finish, as snow starts to fly.No carols being sung around these parts. Will find it hard to sleep tonight. Winter’s perdition is here. Tough to sleep when you don’t know who’s going to come through the door with a gat in hand. Just […]

“The Girlfriend Problem” by Matthew Sorrento

And I would kill for him, still would, ever since we met. Do it or I’ll kill you, he told me. Times like this he’d turn on me, hit me. Didn’t matter what we’re doing, getting smokes, or dope, or him smashing me in bed. With him, it’s always there. You’re going in with me,he said, […]

“The Dump Truck of Self” by Mitchell Grabois

“My body is a situation, a dilemma. I haul it from place to place in this wheelchair. I am a dump truck of self.” 1. Back in the day, I heard that Mama Cass had died choking on a ham-and-cheese sandwich. In reality, eighty pounds lighter than she’d ever been, after two weeks of standing […]

“At the Junctions of Epiphany” by Les Wicks

The train of thought, my tickets of insight a quiet of the sleepers the tranquillity of this nothing. Then the carriage breaks out I sit inside a chaos, we commuters right alongside a somewhat crazy Absolute Disaster who is interested his own opinion. I experience true peace Not apart, nor together. Signals are red but […]