Breadcrumb #438

MICHELLE WHITTAKER

Down-and-Out sleepwalk
hand-in-hand like two lone star ticks
found buried above the sternum.

Watch them trance.
Watch them yawn
wilderness into a nighttide.

Often, Down-and-Out transmit
their anesthetic touch to the other, although
they decided not to conceive children.

But how might they continue
traveling turpentine bloodlines
in this bog-iron island?

Watch them headtrip.
Watch them overthink as a single them,
strobing through the pinelands

while gorging into the sand gully
of pine tar and vanishing foxes.
Watch them no longer concerned

they might split as they release
care about the rocky beaches
former self. The glacial physique.

When Down-and-Out exchanged vows
sub-secretly just like the late-stage
of Lyme disease, who also understood

what it means
on trying to stay together
in sickness and in helpless,

even when 12,000 years tried
putting in a bright repeat
of parental advice about sustainable living,

perhaps from the supervening
or superstitions, they woke their wishes
to un-hear the veracious warnings.

• • •

Breadcrumb #437

BILL LESSARD

blue tartan kilt Sylvia wore to her first suicide;
sold for $14,000

spectacle the sizzle
brand against flesh against flesh 

story about Hollywood about Buddhists
suing each other
for 100 million  

Dalí walking pet anteater in Paris (1969)

—the new flâneur journeying by thumb
glass perambulations  

miracle that requires two (2) forms of ID 

New York the crime drama
filmed in Pittsburgh 

single fleck of glitter found at tip of penis
provenance unknown 

on the 90th day of January,
ice cream as sympathetic magic  

Sontag making Mailer’s exposed chest hair wilt

a penetrative agent
that colorizes
the fabric

meant to be sipped from a shell with pickled flowers dotting the lip 

neurocuration
the artist
living on
as rogue AI 

—to own the painting
and the hatred that made it 

gaze making U-turn
into
oncoming hermeneutic 

the world’s oldest spider that died in a burrow pursed with silk

wrong
to date someone
from
a different algorithm? (Y/N) 

99 cents in the app store

yoni,
a Sanskrit word
conflating
vagina
and
sacred space

Liz Taylor asking why she was only queen in Technicolor

triptych,
for when we paint our sin

drips missing the canvas,
true confession  

wonder if Louise’s spiders
were based on anyone she knew  

wrapping your body in wool on the last day of April

KIT KAT®
for dinner
as way
of staying
young  

the German word
for “man who eats dinner
in a hole he pretends
he is unable
to climb out of”

Asgard AmEx

Miles thinking of someone he hates, extinguishes cigarette with sole of his Italian loafer

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every time the screen darkens,
the slate Malevich gave us

the last human sound
passed
between teeth 

the air inside Miles’ trumpet no longer human breath

• • •

Breadcrumb #436

COLIN JAMES

                   I'm way in the back
                   can just make out forms.
                   A definite sound delay.
                   Pithy like goose honks
                   coming at you unnaturally.
                   Witch could mean any number of things.
                   I hope they don't land.
                   Their fur is feather fucked
                   with a whole bunch of cruelty
                   and a creative amount
                   of self importance.

• • •

Breadcrumb #435

ASHLEY BULLEN-CUTTING

Ivan, though he retained no olfactory unit in the slightest, could smell a rat. It was one thing Woodworth choosing to take his first vacation in two decades of Outer Galaxies employment, but another entirely that he chose the morning of Yrpa Minor Day as the moment in which to shuttle off into the cosmos. Frankly, it was enough to make his ocular feeds jitter and his PG.firewall to weather curses even 19th Century shellbacks would have thought twice about muttering. Nobody heard him, mind, he had switched to Silent.

That was the trouble with micro-managing a hit with a baker’s dozen of partially-conscious-entities, you never knew who paid for their batteries. That’s not to mention the admin involved in such an exploit. Everyone’s schedule ran concurrently, with no leeway to put down a grav-weld and take a minute to plan out the low-key murder of a lowly OG clerk who’d found himself on the wrong end of a spark-plug one evening. Quotas ad infinitum.

Ivan had been over at Umpteen Appliances, talking nice to a renal unit by the name of Testing-1-2-3. He was fairly certain he had pulled her matrix, when there was a scuffle just on the edges of his periphery.

A sizzle, a spark and a sprint.

Immediately intrigued, Ivan tweaked his vision, something about the gait of the man had struck familiar even at this distance. A bar of white suddenly appeared where teeth would have appeared on a flesh-bag; Ivan’s version of a grin. A quick Movement Pattern Scan proved his theory correct. It was his paymaster, Phineas Emeritus Woodworth. Fancy that.

Ivan found the Homindroid heaving and sputtering its last, eye-shutters morsing a description of its attacker. It was keeled over by the trash, its wires dangling in oil puddles. It had puncture wounds in its neck and torso. Ivan had taken a step back at that, no need to be overly helpful. He’d only just had an overhaul himself a month back.

“It was keeled over by the trash, its wires dangling in oil puddles.”

So he lingered just out of arm’s reach, submitting his warbling compatriot to a full diagnostic. It was a Newark B7 with only 9,456 days on the clock. Practically fresh off the factory floor. He twinged with jealousy.

“Friend of yours?” Ivan asked, pointing a thumb in the direction of Phineas’ escape. Any stick, no matter how inconsequential, thrown then and he’d have tracked it like a bloodhound. This is what servitude did to a robot, drove him to extremes such as this to get one over on a Squidgy.

The Hominidroid coughed sparks. “Friends do-do-do-do-do thisssss?” His head began to judder and shake uncontrollably, his vocalizer locked in a feedback loop.

Ivan was practically giddy. He’d been looking for the right amount of dirt to take Phineas to the cleaners for the better part of twelve years. He could nigh on taste success. “What did he do? Gosh, please tell me it was fraud?”

It hadn’t been, but it had been just as juicy. Ivan had followed it up like the diligent droid he was, crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s on the kill contract he’d brokered with a particularly rude man by the name of Finkelbottom. Edmere Finkelbottom III. His only preference: that Ivan do him like he’d done his daughter, by taking away everything she owned in the most demoralizing of manners. So, just what he’d been planning since the day they had met, then.

• • •

Breadcrumb #434

MONICA LEWIS

i will die like this,
tongue struck stuck against the sky
and your name marked
somewhere along my skin.

but the wolves won't turn,
snout up against the moon to
howl at any atrocity,

there is no atrocity
other than my whimpering,
too fleshy, too blushed,
pink, orgasmic heart, but

blue blood black is the color of my true love's hair,

and the wolves know the women who
run with the wolves, the ones with the
shaggy hearts,
the never splayed,
ventricle veins, plump
and pursing, ever the pucker.

• • •