WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT IN THE ROOM BEFORE THE ROOM WHERE THEY WILL ANAESTHETIZE YOU by Tim Dicks

The blade they will use to remove your face
it can never be sharp enough it will be so sharp
that it’s drawn from a specialized case or drawer
but still they should use lasers for this, blazing

tools from the future. They will cut off your face
only if their tools jam in your sinuses or vessels
burst chaotic but you feel sure they will cut
and toss your face like a slice of fresh pizza

onto a far instrument cart or flatten your face
onto sterilized steel or hang it from a blunt
hook on the table or pile it into a nurse’s close
hands or drape it loose over a green shoulder.

Really if they have to cut and peel your face
they will leave a strip of flesh and will flap
the skin back over your brow to be reattached
later and it will stare eyeless up at the lights.

You will be somewhere far below your face
and you will have it there with you or really
more honestly you will have nothing there
with you. For a short time or a very long time

you will be and feel and fear and know nothing.
Your children will drink coffee in the lounge
while the surgeons work but throughout it you
will be nothing. Everything will be nothing.

TIM DICKS‘s writing appeared most recently in Dark Sky Magazine and matchbook. He contributes to the Uncanny Valley Magazine blog and recently finished a novel featuring a monster that lives on the Moon.

A REAL MAN by Ryan Ritchie

he didn’t even care that his gray sweater had a cross-stitched
picture of two cats playing with yarn.
nor did he care that the “a” in cats was a heart.
all he was concerned with was smelling the begonias
and making chit chat with the filipino proprietor at
the farmers market.

the 30-something knucklehead with visible tattoos and
a social distortion t-shirt who kept bumping into him
and all those in their vicinity
could have learned a thing or two.

RYAN RITCHIE is a 31-year-old writer who will owe someone a lot of money when he finished his MFA at UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center. His work has been published in Haggard & Halloo, Burning Shore Review, Modern Drunkard, Dogmatika and the Freefall Review.

HOME MOVIES by Adam Gianforcaro

The clicking of the Super 8 film,
grainy on screen.
My mother pregnant and then a mother
for the first time.
My brother splashed naked
in an inflatable pool on their tiny city porch
off of Simpson Street.
My dad said he has class then:
low class. 1982 and smiling.

ADAM GIANFORCARO is the Social Media Director of Philadelphia Stories literary magazine and has been published or been accepted for publication in 50-Word Stories, Battered Suitcase and The Stray Branch.