Always Crashing

@alwayscrashing.bsky.social

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A magazine of fiction, poetry, & nameless things around and in-between. // alwayscrashing.com // https://alwayscrashingmagazine.substack.com/

The first recorded poodle death related to aberrant behavior was noted as early as 9:30 p.m. (GMT), with the so-called Kikipoo Incident. According to reports, a toy poodle on a personal jet flight from Miami, Florida, to Atlanta, Georgia, became quite agitated. The owner, a middle-aged American woman, is quoted as saying: “Kikipoo spilled my martini, lapped it up and began running in circles.”[2] Kikipoo’s frenetic barking (described by the sole crew member working in the cabin as “loathsome, something between a growl and a prolonged bark”) led the pilot to make an emergency landing in Tallahassee, where, witnesses say, the poodle escaped the confines of her owner’s arms and ran on the tarmac directly under the wheels of a luggage carrier. The event concluded by 10:30 p.m. (GMT), when the worldwide poodle decimation is generally acknowledged to have begun.
Text: "Template You Can Use" - Kristin Lueke Sound: "Blue Light Memory" - Erica Miller
It’s Thursday. The day we see each other. Our ritual began in August. With a postcard from Spain. On one side of the postcard, people in bathing suits running toward the ocean. On the other, looping green script, it said we should get together for coffee. Big moments are preceded by small moments. Often the small moments are so small we can’t see them. When she asked for my address; was one. When we she took a step close to me during an oral exam, that was another. In the theater, between kisses in the last row, words slide from her tongue to mine. “When I heard your voice that day on the phone, that’s when I knew.” She’s older, older by a decade and a half. And married. Last week, she kept brushing against me as we walked along the river. First her arm. Then her hip. Then her breast. Her breast arrived in a slow swipe.
Tautology It is possible to see another, not the body of another as a field, a wilderness upon which any breach might come to define what is flesh and what is not flesh. This flesh, and that: a vacancy
Always Crashing is open for submissions of fiction, poetry, collage text, visual collage, video, labyrinths, manifestos, the generically transgressive, and nonfiction (though we prefer not to be told if it’s nonfiction) alwayscrashing.com/submissions
Still from Parking Lot #3
His teeth are too wet. His teeth are too sharp. Autumn is a carcass, rotting. And with one sudden twist, you jerk out of his grasp, barge open the gate and sprint down the path into the house. Mum won’t be home for another two hours. You lock the front door and cower in the bathroom.
Man with mohawk singing into microphone, another man playing keyboard, picture of woman's face on a projector screen behind them
Samuel M. Moss
Glenn Shaheen
Seated person playing electronic instruments, mysterious glowing green box in background
Gina Abelkop
John Trefry
Flyer for the AC Reading and Performance Series, Online Edition, May 6 - Details in post
Flyer for the AC Reading and Performance Series, Online Edition, May 6
Keep going? Yes, please Oh god no. I couldn't write another sentence. Please let this stop.
The stain made me feel uneasy, it made me feel chased. I saw faces in there I thought I’d forgotten. My heart flipped like a shuffle of poker cards. I took out my cellphone and took shots of the stain. I put it on the tabletop, against the glass of the coffee table. I switched angles snapping shots and I documented it. I posted it live to watch on the stream of media, I wrote in the caption, The Stain. The next night I posted The Devil. In a few minutes someone commented, It looks like you. How so, I typed back in the chat. You wrote them. Are you kidding me??! I replied. Only the devil can write his own name… Lol!
The film is 176 minutes long. The subject, her name known world wide, and the filmmaker, anonymous.
AC editor Meghan Lamb standing behind the Always Crashing AWP table
A man wearing a long sleeved black shirt. On the back is a large white wall of text
'Poem in the shape of a wresting ring. In the center, the words: "the bell rings & echoes throughout the crowd. everyone counts: once, ten times--all of it sounds like the beginning & the end."'
Portion of a collage; text beginning: Cyclops: 1.0.1 To miss. Or. Or. Or. Or. Or. Or. Or. 111111.111.0000.00.0.00.0000.111.111111 Stapes. Steppe (Or. Or. Or.) - ...23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34... 44.4.1.4.0.4.1.4.44 Window (Or.) 1.1.1.1.1.0.1.1.1.1.1 Next (36) and three steps. Mill. Injector. Miller. 6 more colors. Next (35). On relinquishing his August’s rest, he makes me, after everyone else. I’m used as his substitute for someone else. He doesn’t think about me in particular
When’s the mail coming? He’s expecting a thousand model ICBM missiles. He’s expecting his nephew taped into a shoebox. He’s expecting a coffee table edition of a book they assembled from someone’s tweets. He’s expecting an IPV-themed concept album made using Gameboy sounds. He’s expecting a mail order autistic woman. Where’s the sound coming from? Next, the sea of showers, the sea of cold, the sea of serenity, the sea of islands, the sea of moisture, the sea of clouds, the sea of Muscovy, the sea that has become known. Next, the return of the sitcom, like the resuscitation of a dead language. Next, the commercial, like the talk show monologue, gets its due, freezing the devil into frame like a jet of arctic spit, and I, too, have my man.
a de-exposed photograph of a wall, an image of a woman bathing in blood, an art nouveau brocade, and three pigs
I saw it happen. I knew right away. They just kept coming at him time and time again. It seemed to go on and on. It just ended up in a terrible frenzy. * She pulled it out of a bag. She was screaming and she was waving something in her right hand. I don’t know why, but I thought that it was a wig. She was waving this. It was as if she was drawing wild shapes in the air with it. As she passed us, I could see that it wasn’t a wig.
Image from AWP Conference site, showing Always Crashing's table number, T869
sunday_afternoon() ["Or was it braver to?", [ "Whenever I’m deeply uncomfortable, I smile uncontrollably.", "Truly off-putting shit." ], ["Know what I did when I saw that man again?", "I fucking smiled.", "Walked up,", "gave him a hug,", "said ‘good to see you.’", "He looked gobsmacked.", "I'm still ashamed of that." ],
Vibe: Top-tier stuff. Not Paris Review, but close enough
Anne K. Yoder
Moni Garcia
Benjamin Niespodziany
Screenshot from the Fish List (?), showing us absolutely murking the Christian Science Monitor. Not shown: We are also straight up destroying the Saturday Evening Post. Eat it, Norman Rockwell
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Missouri Pastoral 05: Minibar I show up already stoned in my unstimulated plaid dress. I come draped in the scarf I just finished knitting; alpaca, lilac, soft, my ends, unweaved, swinging as I slide into the booth. My momentum only feels stifled by my husband and his refusal to let me ride in the bed of his truck. I had tightly fantasized my entrance into the bar as I knit the last stitches: purl, I would wear my plaid dress, knit, cotton with the drop waist, purl, navy and lilac, knit, spread and battered by highway speed, purl, tossed in the cold metal of his red truck, knit, smoking a joint, purl, mystically touched by midwest wind, knit, perfectly tousled and spat before people I wanted to impress, purl, knit, purl, knit, purl.
Flyer for Always Crashing Reading and Performance Series at Comfort Station, 2579 N Milwaukee Ave. Event on 12/13/25, 7-9 PM. Readers: Moni Garcia, Anne K. Yoder, Benjamin Niespodziany. Performers: Twilight Furniture, Jacob Stovall, Wolf3000. Free, all ages.
Stack of papers in front of a window
Dogs and cats seeing things their owners cannot. A ghost whose thermal energy is captured on Xbox Kinect. A shopping cart drifting in the parking lot as if in the pull of an invisible force. Every day for two weeks, from four-thirty to ten a.m., one video after another. cc: (soft mysterious music)
Flyer for Always Crashing Reading and Performance Series at Comfort Station, 2579 N Milwaukee Ave. Event on 12/13/25, 7-9 PM. Readers: Moni Garcia, Anne K. Yoder, Benjamin Niespodziany. Performers: Twilight Furniture, Jacob Stovall, Wolf3000. Free, all ages.
italicized text in four columns asking a series of questions
GENIUS NIGHT: A Night for Geniuses, on Monday, September 29th at 7pm at Cafe Mustache / TOM McHENRY SARA McHENRY MIKE MIGDALL DEVON PRICE erica dreisbach JOSH WATKINS and KEVIN JOHNSON doing the news quiz from the Skewer
Lyko likes to fool her mother—tonight, on her way home, she will recapture the pardoned frog at the base of the lake, cut through her iliac arteries, the crooks of the thigh. While Dela and the mother sleep, Lyko skulks through the kitchen and smuggles the girl in with the rest. Tomorrow, she will watch her mother gnaw at every anonymous thigh, even the frog that lived but died anyway. Before Dela, Lyko and her mother practiced monkey-see monkey-do: the mother eases the stone out of a plum with a fruit knife and younger Lyko mimics the cupping of the plum empty handed. Lyko laces up one boot and her mother its twin. But the game has finished. When Lyko leaves the house some nights she can sense her mother’s peevish ear on the other side of a wall. The mother refuses to monkey-do. She is brazen, industrious in this refusal. The older woman sits on a rickety swing chair chewing her lower lip. Spare strands of hair go into their quilt for winter. One hand pierces the ventilating needle through the lace cap, the other pulls the hair taut. Pierce, pull, pierce, pull.
Jason’s tiny bones are splintering and cracking under Chad’s jaw; Jason obviously doesn’t get enough calcium. Jason should go on a calcium bulk. Strengthen up these weak, effeminate bones. Chad’s bones are strong, they’re like metal. How else could Chad be biting down on so many things and making them die. Chad releases Jason’s arm and turns to look at the woman. Maybe she’ll have Chad now. No, she definitely will. She needs a strong man to protect her. She’s probably turned on by all this. But Chad thinks she looks… scared, maybe? She’s screaming and cowering on the floor, with her arms up over her face. Women are so hard to read. So maybe she’s horny. Or on her period. Or a lesbian. It’s hard for Chad to tell.
"The last rose is presented to Chris. Chad has never seen this man before in Chad’s life. He slaps Chad a few times on the back, immediately pulling his hand away from Chad’s slowly spreading sweat. “Better luck next time, champ.” Chad lunges at Chris, locking Chad’s jaws around his throat, feeling Chris’ jugular slide around beneath them. Chris is screaming, the contestants are screaming. Chad is unaware of everything. Chad is living in the body. Chad feels so right. This is the way they should have settled everything from the beginning. Chad releases Chris, who drops to the ground, convulsing and bleeding out in an extremely beta way. Chad immediately sets Chad’s sights on Jason, who lifts his arm to cover his face like some kind of milk boy. Like some kind of coward. Chad opens Chad’s jaw wide enough to completely encase Jason’s intimidatingly wide forearm. Chad also makes a note to focus on forearms more next time Chad is at the gym. Why the hell hasn’t Chad been doing forearm day?"
You’re getting impatient. You hate the way AI is being shoved into everything, you hate the undead and undying venture capitalists who tried to shove crypto into everything and then tried to convince you NFTs were anything other than dumb .gifs and who are now trying to convince you AI can somehow think for you. You hate the fact that Microsoft is trying to upcharge you for an even more annoying Clippy.1 Fair enough. Me too. I’ll get to the point: there is something in language itself that thinks. There is something in the structure of language itself which contains a representation of the world, independent of our own understanding of the world.
"observation. Typing. The sentience of the interface. Thinking annotated critical editions. Outside, smoke from afar, granular detail from which to glean distantly subsequent monographs, wildly speculative articles with quotations as titles, climate chronicles. We’ll see. The speakers, like the athlete and sculptor and everyone else, are workers. And are not themselves. But you: the addressee. The visible spectrum at once desires judgment, value, rank. The black t-shirts of the senior lecturer crew certainly do. To rebrand the avant-garde. A shelf with every style guide ordered by some unintelligible provision. Your complete works. We’re getting closer to the register’s exhaustion. Surely some lachesism approaches on the other side of this or that particular act of totalization. We should check the interview’s transcription. The split EPs. Cormorants of aftersome light. The putting together of questions about forms and idylls attempts to resist all these linguistic compulsions. Donate. The inescapability of influence, the first space in which you saw something, read something, listened to caterwauling immediacy unimaginable before breaking across the action lines of your brow. Remixes might sound exactly like the original. To review each individual issue in a journal’s run. To keep going, to let the discography accumulate with purpose, a catalogue someone might put in a box and ship for a reasonable price and finally experience fulfillment. But is this not a question asked in the style of certain thinkers about how things are in fact precisely the opposite of the "
A sort of reptile guy in front of seahorses, text reads: "Joy Williams / 4 Ever"
Call Sign Logic (V2) To come across as call sign logic, as the measure of the star Wound up in the adumbrate, carceral atmosphere Whisper on the regent’s choice and keep irregular No, you know the way know the keel and crest The owlist versions wide omened, oh Mary, oh many If ever I might lay on the ground, splay myself atop a rock Then laugh, I suppose It never comes out right, can’t you see? The vision the flanking, the titan, the iris, an aggregate
"To come across another language caught within its own lease an outrage of the mathless class a keening bough grabbed toward that grassy spot a dust less traveled by"
Dark suited figure, holding a fruit, a shape like a lampshade around his (?) head, text: "Your number said if I want to leave this one"