Electric ManDragon

Elihu Mondragon
by Ned Dougherty

he had a st- st- st- stupid hard time saying words and tripped over them like he had tight cords across his mouth. from his teeth to tongue the way king kong was tied down. his tongue just never co- co- co- cooperated when he spoke in gargantuan str-st-str-uggle.

nobody really appreciated his art work. he was a man at home with clay. his hands were agile and delicate. op- op- opposite of his language. he communicated with the world through his creations. but no one every saw them unless th- th- th- they stumbled around his yard looking for signs of life.

inevitably he was always alive and well tinkering in the silent sepia lit foyer forging beings out mud and water. he wa- wa- wa- wanted to be alone because was so f- f- f- fortunate to have the time to make people and s- sh- st- stuff from nothing. he had all the friends he needed three-d around his wool socken feet.

on his last day his house which had been forsaken and crumbled slowly from the outside in came to swallow him up. he avoided the collapsing eastern wall and the mold spores and dust kicked up but his wiring became finicky and loose ends were everywhere. oddly enough that day he played with play dough. his last creation before electrocution.

forevermore he would not be known but something more. immortal. something exciting. something electric. f- f- f- f- fuck yeah.

Untitled
by Robin Powlesland

there is a hidden

compartment

traversing

and the skin seems

multi-faceted, non-organic

I have different voices

different forms

and he grows frightened

as the glass steams empty

Germ Putty

by Charles Clayton

I used to be a hippy. Kinda dirty. Not as many showers as I should have had. I figured we evolved from dirt and bacteria so why bother scrubbing away all the dirt and bacteria? But now that I'm a schoolteacher and a parent, I've changed my ways. I shower daily, wear clean underwear, and keep my hands clean.

Why the shift? Because I now spend my days watching little kids sneeze and cough on an institutional scale, and it puts the invisible microbial thing into perspective. A hundred fingers in noses and wiped on walls and doorknobs. A hundred poorly wiped asses followed by a couple hundred poorly washed hands trying to shower you with hugs.Throw in some good old fashioned New Mexico poverty and neglect and you've got yourself a germ factory.

They walk down the hallways and run their hands along the walls, and swear I can track their path by the trail of streptococcus they smeared along the way. They borrow a pencil and I let them keep it. They use my computer and I wish I had some Lysol. I just keep washing my hands, every chance I get, with plenty of commercial grade school supply soap and lukewarm water. This is especially true when they use my clay to sculpt some letters, or the week's spelling words, followed by some free time. Germ fingers kneading that clay, mixing in the air and the oils and the boogers and bacteria, creating a microbial garden deep within the purple and green dragon.

Haiku
by Eric Mack

Obscene they call it,
God's plan has no Dragon-men
This clay is all sin.

Bob’s Long Strange Trip

by Gary Feuerman

Gumby and Pokey. Mr. Bill and his magic dragon. Squeezable. Crushable. There was this man who rode in on a horse, right into the living room of the fiddler in green. He’d been following her north for two years, relentlessly north. His name was Bob and he stole sheep from the ranches dotting the high deserts and foothills. He ate heartily in the dark, under the moon, feeling warm in the hard snow. The fiddler was never far away, but she danced faster than he could run, an optical delusion that made it all seem like a dream. Bob didn’t care, he could smell her, and that was enough to keep him going, that and the mutton (which also smelled pretty damn good on the skewer). In the summers, he clambered up into the pinnacles above treeline, and wished he had an alpenhorn to accompany her plaintive fiddle, although, on second thought, probably not a good combination. And her fiddle playing was far from plaintive although he always wanted to use that word to describe it, apropos or no. He caught glimpses of her shooting into the trees, and knew her to be round in all the right ways. Seriously, you know, round. He thought his pupils would dilate more than ever if he could just get within say 20 feet of her, but, as always, she skip-danced and twirled like a Deadhead, somehow passing through dimensions, and trailing the scent of vanilla (which always threw Bob off, Deadhead and vanilla not making sense, but it wasn’t bad…not bad at all). Mostly he caught shoulders and back, and thought he could see tattoos, of a squishy, electric colored clay dragon and a man who had a remote control pointed at the dragon. And, strangely, they were in a clay raft of the same colors all of this sitting on a wooden table, the grain of which, Bob thought, must be really hard to get on a person’s skin. Like how do you depict wood on a person’s skin? Bob’s mind rebelled against the tattoos, but he did think of them often. He thought maybe just a dragon tattoo, like the ones everyone thinks about would have been sexier, although suddenly, sadly cliché because of that other girl with the dragon tattoo that everybody now talks about. Then again, an electric man dragon in a raft on a wood table – who would have thought about that? So, with this in his mind, Bob, after two years heading north, rode into the fiddler’s living room and found her wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a magenta butterfly pavilion t-shirt, eating a bowl of pasta and watching American Idol. She didn’t notice him and, strangely, his next thought was that he should just leave her like this, and beat it south before disappointment set in.

Birth of the Electric ManDragon

by Johanna DeBiase

Before words, time, or bodies,

a burning birth canal pushes him

into this light. There is only glare

and glimmer before first sight washes in –

the horizon line meeting earth and sky, sky

like spirit- untouchable, necessary breath.

A heavy pulling force, fastens him

tightly to earth. He digs in his heels and

discovers the rise of pulse, the stretch

of fiber, the release of numbness,

the pain of – click, tick, twist –

toward the bending of cooperative joints.

Sounds echo in the caverns of his head –

vibrations humming, the pitch of moving

back and forth, the song of heartstrings.

Scents of salt and feces, mud and ash,

go unnamed as a wild history grows in his body,

memories that fill the empty spaces between

particles of form.

All of this creating

an encompassing bliss

overshadowed by a precarious void.