Two Crumpet Poems

Crumpet

by Alexis Faulkner

Cranny cranny 

Cranny cranny cranny

Cranny cranny

Butter

Hat
by Chri S. Alarie

What is a crumpet?
What am I even doing here?
What a weird headline
Don't post this
thanks

Alexis Faulkner is Unicorn Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine. 

Top Ten Reasons 2016 Won't Be 'Your Year'

by Douglas Slayton    

   

Every year you tell yourself, your friends, and family that “things are going to turn around this year for me. I know I had a rough go of it last year, but this time things are going to go my way.”

Truth is: It isn’t. Here’s why

1. Those shitty things that happened in 2015? They still happened. 2016 doesn’t make the past go away, it just means that the sun circled the Earth and you didn’t die yet.
2. “I am going to turn myself around in 2016, I did some shit I am not proud of in 2015 but the past is the past.” Guess what? If you were a shitty person in 2015 you will be a shitty person in 2016. Getting a new calendar with cats on it doesn’t change what you did or that after the first week of January your resolution to be nicer to people will start to crack and you will fuck someone and not call them again, because that is who you are. You are a bad person, just fucking accept it.
3. Those people who you fucked over in 2015? They are making the same promises to themselves to “move on” or “forgive” or “this is going to be my year” but they aren’t going to either and when you see them at a bar or some mutual friends birthday party they will still want you to die and tell everyone there that you fucked them over last year and you won’t get to tell “your side of the story that will totally clear up this simple understanding” because that is a lie, you fucking liar.
4. You might promise everyone that you are going to finish that big creative endeavor like write that novel or record or run a marathon or call your mom more or whatever thing it is that you think is holding you back. You won’t and no one will be disappointed because they know you are a piece of shit who can’t follow through on anything but still pretend to like you because you have the best television and Game of Thrones is coming back in a few months and they want to get fucked up and ruin your house when Jon Snow dies (FUCKING SPOILERS ASSHOLE) because they won’t feel bad about it because it was you and you are shitty and slept with their sibling and never called them or copped up to the STI you left in your shitty, shitty wake.
5. That job you have that you hate? You are comfortable there and you won’t ever update your resume because it is so much work and the reason you have that job you hate is because you don’t want to do anything uncomfortable or that will actually change your life or require a risk of being hurt. It is way easier to just eat your shitty Subway sandwich everyday for lunch while the secretaries laugh and trade stories about the passes you made at them at the holiday party and how you are so sad and they get why your ex left you.
6. You aren’t going to eat better, because fuck you, that’s why! You are a drunk and you always will be a drunk because you can’t even look yourself in the mirror most days and admitting you have a problem would hurt too much so you will just drink cheap scotch and whiskies on the rocks till one day you forget all that shit you did and didn’t do because you poisoned your body to the point of forgetting because you are comatose.
7. You aren’t going to meet anyone new. You are going to stroll dive bars filled with people half your age who are just as lost as you but make ten times as much money as you do because life is fucked and you made some really shitty decisions in college or didn’t finish that last credit you need to get your BA in English so you could get your MFA in creative writing like you always said you would when you were in high school and jerked it to Kerouac.
8. You have a 77.5% chance of dying this year. Whether it be from natural causes (read: being a shitty unhealthy person) or gun violence, terrorism, climate change or other uncontrollable act, you might die and there is nothing you can do about it because that is the way it works.
9. If you do die it won’t matter, people might grieve for a few months but by the end of the year they will probably have moved on and told themselves that “2017 will be my year!” and they will be wrong but you won’t care because you had a meaningless life that ended with a meaningless death.
10. Your death, or any death, won’t matter because life is meaningless and you didn’t change shit or record that hit record or write that novel that changed some kids life. No one will remember you and you won’t care because you will be dead and death is the end. When you die there is nothing because the universe is cruel and there is no god and no one liked you to begin with so fuck you.

Happy fucking New Year asshole. No one really loves you anyway.

Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

Two Trumpet Poems

Sounding From the Trumpets of Heaven

by Alexis Faulkner

Blonde rascal provokes louder horns

Sounding towards skyways

Hiding

Certain shrouded

Mystery only for

Speckled so many humans across global

Awareness spreading

You know, like the fire spreading

Possess heart, do you?

Possess fear, do you?

Hunger for wealth

Depth

Earth’s center

Sinking center depth

Holds a lot, parking lot of ammunition

Blonde rascal

Sounding off the trumpet of heaven

Golden horns

Light enough brightens

Instruments speak for

Who

Power corrupting nearest stars

From

Angels

Black angels

Angels holy to

Harness magical projection

Of what a blessing looks like on your mind

winter
by Douglas Slayton

sad songs
squealed across the highway
flowers on either side of a tunnel
a weekend every year

i am still picking pieces
of you out of my clothes
so it never really ends

Alexis Faulkner is Unicorn Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine. 

Doug Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

A Walk From Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Long Island City, Queens

by Alexis Faulkner

This day, this day that I walked from Greenpoint, a lovely neighborhood in Brooklyn, to Long Island City in Queens, was a smoggy day. It was sunny and partly clear and not too cold, even when walking over a bridge. I took some casual shots on my walk between the boroughs, so you can get a sense of what it's like to go for a stroll here in New York City as winter approaches. 

And as soon as I get back to Manhattan...

Alexis Faulkner is Unicorn Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

An Article: UFO Sandwiches: the How, Why, What & How of UFO Sandwiches: the Article

by Chris Alarie

Illustration by Alexis Faulkner

Having moved to Brooklyn last year, I've spent a good chunk of the last few months learning the ins and outs of this little city called New York City or sometimes just the Big City or mostly just New York. Among those ins—or maybe it's an out; I'm not really sure—is this surprising tidbit about sandwiches (which I will present in the form of a rhetorical question): did you know that in NYC¹ sandwiches cost exactly $50.55? It's true. And the price is the same at every deli. The price is highly regulated and any vendor/restaurateur/deli-atician/sanwicherist who does not comply with that price is heavily fined and beaten.

Now you may be asking yourself,² "Why would anybody pay that much for a sandwich? That seems like a ridiculously high price to pay for such a basic item." Well, first of all, fuck you. Who do you think you are? Some fancy bastard who's too good for our weird, expensive New York sandwiches? Go fuck yourself. Second: it actually isn't as expensive as it seems because New York sandwiches can regenerate themselves. All you have to do is take a piece of the sandwich and place it in the sunlight and it will grow into an entire new sandwich. Of course, there is a limit to how many new sandwiches can be generated from a single sandwich. Usually, the upper limit is somewhere around 14 new sandwiches—which makes for an incredible return on the initial $50.55 investment. Unfortunately, the lower limit is five sandwiches. While there is a fair bit of randomness involved in any New York sandwich transaction, certain types of sandwiches have particular tendencies. Hey, let's go through them together now.

Turkey sandwich: eight to 12 regenerations. Turkey sandwiches are generally one of the best values in all of New York the City.³
Salami sandwich: six to ten regenerations. While not as valuable as turkey, salami sandwiches are usually a good investment.
Ham sandwich: 5 to eight regenerations. Ham sandwiches are bad investments. Do not order a ham sandwich.
Tuna salad sandwich: seven to 14 regenerations. Tuna sandwiches have one of the widest range of possible results.
Chicken salad sandwich: five to 12 regenerations. As always, chicken salad sandwiches are just a lesser version of tuna salad sandwiches. Also, sometimes chicken salad sandwiches inexplicably regenerate as reuben sandwiches.
Reuben sandwich: ten to 14 regenerations. Oddly enough, reubens sometimes regenerate as ham sandwiches.
Po boy: seven to ten regenerations. I don't know what this is. I guess it's some kind of sandwich.
Gyro: sorry, gyros aren't sandwiches. They don't have anything to do with this.
Burrito: also not a sandwich. Also, I'm pretty sure that there are no burritos anywhere in the five boroughs.⁴
BLT: I don't know. I've never actually ordered a BLT.

Now you might be wondering how all of this came about. Unfortunately, it is far too complicated for me to explain or even comprehend. But the initial technology allowing for sandwich regeneration was originally developed by extra terrestrials. A cabal of shadowy figures operating in secret deep within the federal government learned these techniques and, in turn, taught them to sandwich industrialists throughout the Big Cheesy Apple Potato.⁵ In order to preserve the illusion of a free market economy, these alien-technology-informed sandwiches are set at the carefully determined price of $50.55. And now you know the whole story—like a real goddamn New Yorker! Fuck you.

Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

---

1 NYC is another name for New York City. It's an acronym but nobody knows what it stands for. It dates back to the 17th century, when all New Yorkers spoke an ancient, untranslatable dead language known as Dutch.^↩
2 Yeah, it's another rhetorical question. Fuck you if that's a problem, hey.^↩
3 I'm pretty sure this is another name for New York City. But there is at least a small chance that I came up with this one myself when I hit my head on the toilet really hard the other day.^↩
4 This is yet another nickname for New York City. It is an anglicization of the Spanish term "cinco burros", which means "five donkeys". This is because New York City was originally founded in the 14th century by five super-intelligent donkeys who had sailed over from Spain.^↩
5 That's right, another fucking nickname!^↩

Two Rock and Roll Poems

Rock n Roll

by Alexis Faulkner

Plane down

Wings ripped apart

Strewn

Not staged, not on a stage

This is not a test

Let us examine the interior of the rock n’ roll suicide

Flesh guts wound round wires neon

Spiral center tight bound toward the brain

Electric spark shoots also up, comes and goes

Rock n roll is not really a go with the flow art

Follow the unprotected surge too

High demons with razor claws sewn in and with gravity, stuck

Sparklers once more up the center

Fluid inside dripping rainbow tears psychedelic from goddess tending towards ornamental elaboration from, say, Hendrix

There were notes in the suicide and then there were addresses

Structures inside they have furniture composed in waves of tension

I mean, you can still sit on the sofa

Dance uneven jerk work can wash right off skin

Death inside downed plane

Takes psychic vision

For internal view and dissection

Maybe this is a test

Maybe

On a stage


surfing
by Douglas Slayton

pressing down
navigating dim lit nights
three times a month
i catch myself smiling

Alexis Faulkner is Unicorn Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
Douglas Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

December 2015 Cover

by Chris Alarie

Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.