Zillow image of our old home in Berkeley after the flippers remodeled it and put it back on the market.
I'm super happy to have another story published, this time in
@godscrueljokelp.bsky.social . Also horror, it's called "Wants," and it's about what your presale home pest inspection might discover. www.godscrueljokelit.com/behm-steinbe...
Very short story today from Hugh Behm-Steinberg: 'Wants'
"We saw its eye, and even though we knew it was impossible, we also knew that it was looking at us, right through the monitor. That it was awake, finally awake, and that it knew what we wanted."
www.godscrueljokelit.com/behm-steinbe...
"It's not enough that we remember. It's that we remember in the correct way, without pain and without confusion."
Dig Kurt Newton's latest contribution to GCJ: 'Redefine Life with Dimensia'.
godscrueljokelit.com/kurt-newton-dimensia
"the hourglass with mocking locusts / brimming wild erotic time, / blooms the breasts of lovers / in moon dusk tomorrow. / sever tantric Venus from resurrection as / seahorses cut darkness / in maelstroms of / the melting child dawn." - Night Swimming
godscrueljokelit.com/rj-butler-3-poems
Jenna McClain's Float is the new release by @godscrueljokelp.bsky.social and it's weirdly intimate and disturbingly desperate at the same time. Because the will to live can be twisted when the water keep rising and the whole world's disappearing.
You can read it for free beneath the koi fish:
Today we have 'Float' from Jenna McClain!
"I wonder if there’s anyone else in this city, in any city, also waiting for the rate of structural collapse to decide when it’s their time to go. Perhaps we’re especially lucky."
www.godscrueljokelit.com/j-mcclain-fl...
Really good really short story today from Sarah Zell: 'Look at Me'
"The Earth is hell. The evil piles within me, building around my organs like sludge. I have to be vigilant: it might have sneaked into the assembly of my baby’s flesh."
www.godscrueljokelit.com/sarah-zell-l...
"Clicking in and out of different pages, he scrolled through hundreds of pictures, photographic evidence attesting to the depth of the problem, hundreds of different faces distorted almost out of all human recognition."
- Mirror, Mirror by Neil Randall
www.godscrueljokelit.com/neil-randall...
Ken Anderson has returned to GCJ with a pair of heavy hitters.
“They’re hard / to love,” a universal nighthawk broods, / his brown wings folded, faded, tucked. He doesn’t understand / just how he wound up here— his coffee bitter / as his sharp despair.
godscrueljokelit.com/ken-anderson-2-poems
Spend your evening with Camden Hunt.
"anyway. in the early part of the twentieth century this guy fucks a chimp. he contracts hiv. he fucks more people. they contract hiv. his hiv becomes aids. he dies. everyone he fucked fucks more people."
godscrueljokelit.com/camden-hunt-monologue
"Somehow, there was 2%. We didn’t know what we had done to deserve it or if we had even done anything at all and there was no accounting for it and we said as much to the journalist. We said it was shameful and embarrassing."
- 2% by David C. Porter
www.godscrueljokelit.com/david-c-port...
We're kicking off the year right with a great review of Joe West's 'Tears Into Wine' from Hugh Blanton: 'Booky Books'.
www.godscrueljokelit.com/booky-books-...
Tears Into Wine is well worth the read, the novel is a trip to say the very least: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKX7N43F
"So on I went, making a hole through designer-wrapped gifts as I low-crawled. On the other side I met a curious cat sitting upright, her head cocked sideways, lightly boxing at a tinsel-tangled bough my motion had jiggled."
godscrueljokelit.com/geier-bass-line
Alan Crowther continues this month's long story trend with a dense literary nasty: Pig Dog
"Not merely disgusting, I felt condemned and all shapes of fears and anxieties germinated inside of me, the most agonising of which was that I would die a virgin."
godscrueljokelit.com/crowther-pig-dog
Read 'Nothing?' by @ewenglass.bsky.social
This time with a link that actually works: www.godscrueljokelit.com/ewen-glass-n...
New poem from @ewenglass.bsky.social !
"Morning, afternoon, evening nothing, / nothing in details, nothing in pose or / great big lamentations on the internet / and rending of garments in T.J.Maxx, / nothing responses all to the tremendous / all of nothing."
godscrueljoke.com/ewen-glass-nothing
Ben Allee's Guest Complex is a long slow burn oozing with dread.
"At one point in this blurry cycle, I try to leave the apartment. I can’t. Like with grocery shopping, I put the keys in my pocket and go to leave and feel like I’ve left but I haven’t."
godscrueljokelit.com/allee-guest-complex
In case you missed it the other day, a poem. I really like it, and you might like it too (if you're a freak like me). 🫀
My second ever poetry publication is out today from my dearly beloved God's Cruel Joke if you want something to chew on today that might just chew you back.
Chewy new poem today from @probablyharmless.bsky.social!
"If my form / Were as massive as my hunger / And my mouth as colossal as my want / I would crush your beautiful body / Upon the thirty-two jagged peaks that line my jaws"
godscrueljokelit.com/theodore-hill-more-famished
Fresh weirdness from Jacob Austin today
"His disgust bumps into another breed of thought up in the tangled wires of his mind. Maybe they want to use my seed to impregnate their own women. To bolster their stock. Could use some of my genetic material."
godscrueljokelit.com/j-austin-officer-ogen
"I have never felt the love one is inscribed with having to feel. I think movies have ruined that prospect for most. The Lady In The Tramp style of love. The type where if you don’t offer me any of your food, I’ll think something is wrong with this love."
www.godscrueljokelit.com/franceschi-3...
5 new poems today from Rus Khomutoff's forthcoming chapbook, Kaos Karma
www.godscrueljokelit.com/khomutoff-po...
"For the eight quiet and progressive years that Hog Hollow had been in operation, Darrel had been instructing the herd in simple English. The pigs caught on quickly and were soon able to recognize many verbal and written commands."
www.godscrueljokelit.com/seefahrt-the...
"What we’re talking here like to come from a Mary Poppins portmanteau: Romantasy! Bodice-rippers with pixie dust! And this john-ray’s got it all: Werewolf- and vampire-adjacent princesses languishing in Tudorbethan castles from structural gaslighting"
www.godscrueljokelit.com/peter-geier-...
Read Boy/Girl by Tommy Cheis in GCJ5—about a Palestinian sleeper agent in the earliest phases of schizophrenia who, on discovering that a female member of his terrorist cell is an undercover FBI agent, must decide what to do about her.
godscrueljokelit.com/5-speculative-erotics
"All those precious secrets
in that closet in that pocket
in the back of that head.
Not so long ago I was in
need of a sign but I have
stripped all surplus pain
of attention so now it only
shrieks if I glance that way
with my sunbuttoned eyes."
www.godscrueljokelit.com/lindsay-mcle...
Gregory Wallace is wrapping our October up with some fun ones.
"The happy peacock's cool comments/ red breasted feather girl at my tables / carpeted butter of the sun countries / long crepe of phantom sphinx / east of cracking ember / the gas immolated you"
www.godscrueljokelit.com/greg-wallace...
"Lunacy served as our sextant beneath a low, dead sky. When night fell, the grim crusaders howled like wolves. They pounded their fists against the ground and danced, beating themselves as if trying to exorcise a deeper pain harbored beneath their skin."
godscrueljokelit.com/copal-stephen-myer
2 new poems from Nicholas Grooms!
"All of the people who are underneath my skin / like the tumor I try and avoid touching / while petting the belly of my elderly beagle / Knowing her time is nearing end / sick with the thought of holding her limp body"
godscrueljokelit.com/2-poems-nicholas-grooms
