by Deron Eckert

“Charlie drank so much he was honored / with the nickname “The Red Stripe Demon.” / When Charlie wasn’t at the bar serving Red Stripe, / he drank Bud Heavy, and when he didn’t drink, / he drank Coca Cola. Something about red and white...”

by Tempest Miller

“My name is Lou Reed and in 1968 the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague gives me a new / empathy for Andy Warhol’s genital herpes / when he feigns virginity.”

by Árón Ó Maolagáin

“Juno-faced prudes who, in Lou Reed costume, / lobby for laws to put Venus in chains. / Pretenders, proud, abstain the touch of fur.”

by Vikki C.

“Original factory settings filtered with glam, / the camera lapping up our gypsum auras.”

by Crys Silden

“fear has a smell / like withdrawal / no color / intangible / like a wood worm / drilling into your brain…”

by Erich von Neff

“Debbie Harry^*/ Debbie Harry / Thrill me / With your music / Hunt me with your eyes / Lacerate me with your claws / Devour me / With your lips of fire…”

by Ivan A. Salazar

“The man with the sunglasses, / a black hole in the shape of a face, / walks down the street that isn’t a street, / but a wound that hums.”

by Marty Shambles

“…the room had a single / bulb hanging from the / ceiling, a dirty / mattress on the floor– / like a depressing movie.”

by Mark Parsons

“…the thousand bulging eyelids / that cover the thousand eyes of night inside my body, / that pulse and flicker in deep sleep / just under the skin / as the mind…”

by Richard Cabut

“Play the same song endlessly – a spectral lounge tune with a neon crawl – under hot velvet dabs of light that don’t quite refuse to vanish.”

by Ryan Hooper

“Such detuned disorder / laughing annihilation down at the 7-Heaven. /When I first heard them, the earth turned; I was hooked…”

by Maxwell Bauman

“Wake up the dragon. / Pandemonium slumbers below the waves, / eating its own tail for breakfast, / consuming stars for dinner.”

by Natalye Childress

“you were raised in the first, by the lakes of tuileries, among the lilies in l’orangerie.”

by Clara Sarett

“Andy’s doing soup cans / because why not…/...& I don’t know why I’m / exploding over Nico’s / forlorn Factory Euro- / glamor…”

by JD Clapp

“…One night Carlo bragged how / Much cooler we were / Than those crackheads / Behind the office.”

by Tim Frank

“When we were sixteen / We listened to The Velvets / While smoking scraps of weed / Among plastic ghosts / And corrupted hauls of ash.”