“The Ad-Man” by Brad K. Hawley
POETRY: “When I got there, my hands were empty…. with one detective who believed in me, I might have surrendered….”
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“Peacemaker” by Gary D. Rhodes
POETRY: “My arm of fire…low and mournful….”
Read More “Peacemaker” by Gary D. Rhodes“She Walks” by Matthew Sorrento
POETRY: “She’ll keep things swift, dialed up…as they want it….”
Read More “She Walks” by Matthew Sorrento“Eldritch” by Gary D. Rhodes
POETRY: “Nobody laughed when everybody laughed….”
Read More “Eldritch” by Gary D. Rhodes“Death and Gingerbread” by Joseph Hirsch
The sergeant of the watch…stumbled onto the once-enchanted house…. We pulled up at the oxbow bend in the driveway paved with crushed sugar shards. The officers secured the crime scene, unspooling yellow tape between candy canes large as lamp standards. I lit a cigar to cover the smell of death and gingerbread. “What do we […]
Read More “Death and Gingerbread” by Joseph Hirsch“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. […]
Read More “At the Other End of the Hall” by Kevin Pilkington“Geek” by Matthew Sorrento
POETRY: “The pit of fire in me was right there with death….”
Read More “Geek” by Matthew Sorrento“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.
Read More “Gray” by Gerald So“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 […]
Read More “Wikipedian Was” by Joseph Hirsch“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 […]
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