Two Poems by Rob Plath

flip your zippo, bitch & shut up

recently i read an article
about quitting smoking

one of the methods
they listed to combat
the habit
was to wear a rubberband
around your wrist
& snap it each time
you feel an urge to smoke

or

better yet--
slap your face
&
tell yourself:
'hang tough; don't puff'

how about continuing
smoking & when you get
paranoid about your health
& attempt abstaining
you snap a tourniquet
that's around your arm
& say "at least i'm not
shooting smack"

or better yet--
punch yourself in the face
& say: 'drag or no drag
one day you'll wear a toe tag'



quit graffiting tombstones w/bullshit

people aren't blank slates
when they're born
happily waiting to be filled up

rather they are wordless
tombstones pushed out of
the womb

mothers cradling
yet another grave-marker
in a birth blanket

not a chalkboard to be filled
w/formulas & philosophy
w/human horseshit

rather bloody
howling gravestones

& they spend their
lives slowly chiseling
their dumb names
into the slab

like they know
who they really are
what they really are

& maybe some etch
a cheap epitaph
a bald-face fabrication

HERE LIES SO & SO
& lies is fucking right
a rather appropriate verb

GONE W/THE ANGELS

row after row of
bullshit

nobody ever writes
the truth:

HERE ROTS A SACK
OF MEAT

ANOTHER FEAST FOR
CADAVER-EATING
BEETLES

& what will yrs say reader?

will you go down
into the ground
w/the rest
of the make-believe meat

a mute slab
of
LIES

Two Poems by Doug Draime

Dream From Motel 6

Drunk, and having no memory
how I got there:
the only passenger
in a front seat of an
out of control Greyhound bus

A 300 pound man suppose to be driving
black hair slicked back
dressed in an Elvis
blue sequined jumpsuit
and with white boots
slumped/ passed out
or dead
over the steering wheel
which was
bouncing in tiny zigzag patterns
pressed with the weight of his body
speeding down
Market street
headed pell mell
for the Wharf and
off and over the end
the Pacific devouring
me, the Elvis impersonator
and the 5 ton machine

When I woke up
I was drenched in sweat
and there were
skid marks
from my feet
deep into the mattress
but I was alive, and ravenously
hungry for deep fried shrimp,
cole slaw and several
ice cold beers



For All The Fakes, Flakes, Lairs, Betrayers,
And Ball-less Wonders Over The Last 40
Years In The Small Press

My heart
forgives you
but
my
middle
finger ( now
in
your
dead or
dying
faces)
I am
sorry
to say
has a
life
of its
own

Three Poems by Shannon Peil‏

'cramps'

rolled to the ceiling
my eyes locked up -- frozen
&
my head cramps up
it's hard to walk around
with so much bullshit
crammed in there
like
half-written poems
&
your birthday
it's a wonder
there's any room left
for anything else



'tuesday mornings'

my old neighbor
[60's, leather skinned]
lived in a house across
the way

he built himself
[on the side of his property]
a garage and filled it
with cars

he said, 'junior -'
[he always called me that]
'junior there's not much in life
besides contentment'

and he said this
[as an old bachelor]
after his kids and ex-wife left
years ago

'you can find a number in the paper,'
[the Westword, I think]
'and if you call on a work day
it's cheap'

their cars would park, Tuesday morning
[out front, facing my house]
and a little asian would go in
then leave

and he'd come out front
[Marlb red and a Coors in hand]
and smile across the way at me
just content.



'mudfish'

You letting me do it
wasn't actually as surprising
as how well it fit. It
was like your belly sucked
my hand up there, felt like
I was wrist-deep in a jelly
fish and it was grand. I
felt that hard ball of cervix
protesting my presence and
I wrapped my fingers around
it and tugged it out of
your hole to put it in a
jar in my fridge and you
asked for a glass of water
and told me to wash my
sheets tomorrow.

Three Poems by Donal Mahoney

A Southern Girl’s, Uncoiling

Whenever I mention you,
the doctor always asks
what do I see,

now that you’re gone,
when I think of you.
I say I see thighs,

tanned and gleaming,
kissed by the proper
Bonwit skirt, rising

through the terminal
toward me and above
your thighs

that smile,
a Southern girl’s,
uncoiling.



Harvesting Pumpkins

From villages in Iowa,
Indiana, Minnesota and Nebraska
and from towns in the Dakotas,
Wisconsin and Michigan,
there stream to Chicago in spring
parades of lithe girls
looking for boys
who will look at them.

But they find instead
men who will wine them
through summer,
who will wait until fall
to thresh in the fields
one summer can ripen,

men who will watch
till a pumpkin falls from the vine.
This is the courtship
village girls dream about,
laugh about, hope for.
Come fall, these are the men

who will fill the silos of girls
from Elkhart and Davenport.
Ely and other small places,
lithe girls who in spring
come to Chicago looking for boys
who will look at them
but who find instead
the reapers, the men.



Women Who Walk Like Men

They seem to be everywhere now,
women who walk like men.
With hair cropped in a paint brush,
bullets for eyes and knives for noses,
they walk long halls, hips so still
they can have no pelvis.
Then one day you meet one
and become her friend.
A week later you still wonder:
Are all the women who walk like men
wildflowers, really,
locked in a hothouse, craving the sun?

Two Poems by Joseph Hargraves

Hair

unfortunately
I was not
ordinary enough
for him
to love

is there
consolation
in that?

yes

he said
"you're immature
and afraid
of intimacy"

agreed

I told him
of Browning's
elective affinities

"not to love
is to condemn
ourselves"
I said

he understood
Elizabeth 's laudanum
habit
but not
Robert's theory

I suppose
he wanted
the art
student type:

rebellion
in
hairdos

someone
he could
comprehend
and comb



yesterday

yesterday
among a crowd of tourists
in a basement
I looked at
Monet's "Water Lilies"

fluorescent light
reflected
yellow whispering faces

I wondered
what was wrong
with me:

if anyone else
thought
the paintings resembled wallpaper

this morning
eating breakfast
in the hotel dining room

a young woman asked
my opinion
of the "Monet Salle"

I told her about
a prettily papered crypt

"it was just your mood"
she said
leaving the table

isn't it always?

Three Poems by Justin Hyde

the ex shylock for the hells angels

shows me a ring
special made
in the black hills:

two oak leaves
represent he and his wife
three acorns
their children
(two they had together)
the oldest
was hers
from a previous marriage
but he raised him
as his own
from the age of three.

says the oldest
stopped talking to him
after he went to prison.

"told his mom
he didn't want to chance
getting abandoned by me again
guess i understand
but it hurts,"
he says
and tells me
he sends him letters
that go unreturned.

"he's got a house
on the east side
i walk up
put the letters
in the mailbox
but don't have the balls
to knock on his door,
imagine that
grown man
afraid to knock
on a door."

i tell him
it cuts
both ways

how i haven't spoken
to my father
in over a year

that
sometimes
i dial the number

but always
chicken out
after the
first ring.



smoke break at the work release facility

she uses me
i know it
she knows it too
usually comes around
when her latest boyfriend
runs out of dope
or kicks her out
we got a daughter together
guess that's what
keeps her in my heart
some stupid hope
we'll both turn a corner
have something like
little house on the prairie
you know?
he says
lighting another
cigarette.



drinking in my father's bar

i knew
you was joe's son
way you
hold that beer bottle
like you're
making love to it,
says ron
a thin red head
with a toucan
nose.

shoot pool
like your old man
too?

nobody
shoots pool
like my dad.

yea
he's the
best stick around. where
is the old buzzard
tonight?

don't know
haven't spoken to him
in over a year.
forever really.

well
he was always
bragin on you
about that bike racing
he was awful
proud.

yea
i suppose.

suppose nothing,
he says
and buys us
a shot of black velvet.

then another.

then he
turns around
whistles through his fingers
and bellows:

we got
family tonight
this here's
joe's son.

Two Poems by Steve Calamars

from his poetry chapbook, American Violence, available at New Polish Beat.

death is harmless

it’s life you
have to watch

it’ll creep up
behind you and
slip a job around
your neck
like a noose

it’ll pull your
youth out from
under you
like a trap door

and leave you swinging
in a slow suburban strangle

by the time
you’re aware
of what’s happened

you’ll be too old
to give a shit



truth is

i’m a criminal
at heart

trapped in a
working-man’s
world

clip-boards and
blue-suits are
unnatural things

i’d feel more
comfortable with
a ski-mask
and 9mm

tossing bullets
like baseballs

instead of dodging
pot-shots from
time-clocks and
middle-management

Days After The Game by David S. Pointer

-For The Post Katrina
Folks in New Orleans

I pass a
prosthetics clinic-
later high kickers
caught on a dance
stage not leading
to Hollywood, I
think about an
elderly printer
proud of his policy
of not printing any
political poetry for
nearly 40 years
while Eli, Indy's
MVP Peyton and
The New Orleans
Saints all have
Super Bowl rings
as proud papa/ex-
quarterback Archie
Manning inherits
the earth under
NFL football

I'll Be Honest With You Simon by Mike Fitzgerald

I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND
I WANT TO SEE YOU SMILE
LAUGH
BUT YOU WONT LET ME IN
WHY
YOU NEVER GIVE EYE CONTACT
WHY
WHAT ARE YOU HIDING
WHATS HAPPENED TO YOU
OPEN UP
TALK TO ME
PROPERLY
NEVER EYE CONTACT
always to the side
NEVER EYE CONTACT
YOU WONT LET ANYONE GET CLOSE
I DONT UNDERSTAND
I WANT TO UNDERSTAND
I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND
I THINK YOU WANT TO BE MINE
BUT YOU WONT LET ME IN
WHY
WHAT ARE YOU HIDING
WHATS HAPPENED TO YOU

Limboed by Joanna Valente

His wife didn't like to go out on Friday nights,
It made things awkward between them.
She would paint her face on, her face older
than her body, swaying sometimes, her head.
There was a goodness

in her hair still. He would tell her to put it up,
like an upside down root praying to go back
home beneath the earth. She preferred Saturdays,
sometimes Sunday afternoons looking at pictures
of her father, hundreds dying before

him and after him. She touches her stingy belly, with its
stretch marks running untamed. She is disgusted, outwitted
by them and almost remembers what it was like in
the womb. Before she was a girl, she remembers when
yearning wasn't the only way.

Ten Tip Top Tips to Becoming a Writer by Joseph Ridgwell

1. Do not, under any circumstances, attend a creative
writing course, retreat, or evening class. These are for
mentally disturbed people, whose close proximity may
cause you to become depressed.

2. Read like a mother-fucker. Anything from advanced
Arithmetic to Astrophysics. Read all the greats of literature
as they will teach you a good deal. Do not read any current
bestsellers. This type of book can do serious damage to the
creative soul of any budding artist.

3. Do not listen to the opinions of anyone who works in the
publishing industry. These freaks don’t know what the fuck
they are doing. They must be ignored at all times and often
derided for their stunning ignorance of what constitutes a
writer. This includes all editors, literary agents, slush-pile
flunkies, and the PA girl whose father is rich and her
mother good-looking, but is as thick as two short planks.

4. Never ever plagiarise, but do steal. Theft in literature is
a virtue.

5. Write every single day for a solid ten years. After that do
what the fuck you like.

6. Do not expect to earn any money whatsoever.
Harbouring such a delusion can only end in tears.

7. Do not be overly influenced by any writer you may or
may not admire, including me, in fact especially me. This
will lead to imitation, which is to be avoided at all costs.

8. Be afraid, very afraid of academics and academia. This is
a one way route to complete and utter failure as an
artist. Thou hast been warned.

9. Live a little. Travel the world, get out of the comfort
zone, take a trip to the edge, shoot a man in reno,
consume a mountain of drugs, get boozy all the time, as
drink brings luck to a writer, take part in an orgy, fuck both
sexes in the arse, howl at the moon, one arm waving free,
the other holding a bottle of wine, swim naked in the
ocean, go dancing, sleep out under the stars, go a
wandering, climb a volcano, sing rebel songs into the long-
lost night, watch a sunrise, sunset, cloud view… Get the
freaking idea, fuckers?

10. Last, but not least. Don’t try.

Joseph Ridgwell can be found here: http://insearchofthelostelation.wordpress.com/

ASTROLOGY by Russell Streur

The moon is new
In the house of a blind woman
Lisa says in soft lament
gazing at the sky tonight
There’s no hiding

The bottom of the world
Is abandoned to eclipse
The Hour of Judgment
Passes into Saturn’s cusp
Planets are colliding

It all means trouble
Corpses in the forest
Trucks of kerosene exploding
Riots in Cathedral Square
Bangkoks of calamity

We’re in for sorrow
Equatorial dislocation
Days of fasting
Spiders at the bottom of the cup
And general anxiety

Rasputins guide these stars
The roof is caving in
The fallout in the fans
Is one part fire
One part flood

Listen
Lisa says
It’s a lousy time to make vacation plans—
On this road to Armageddon
The tollbooth is expecting blood.

Two Poems by Ross Vassilev

a friend of the poor

Frankie Yale was
the biggest mobster
in New York in the 1920s
made a fortune from
Prohibition

he was old school:
bootlegging
protection
gambling, etc.

he wasn't no pimp
or drug pusher

he gave food
and money
to the poor when
they needed it

he wasn't like all those
bankers
businessmen
and patriots
who think the poor
are lazy and
stupid

you needed help--
he gave it

and when his old friend
Al Capone had him
gunned down
and the car crashed
some family's Bar Mitzvah

he got one of the biggest
funerals in New York's
history

all the poor came out
and there was a million
dollars worth of
flowery wreaths

they don't make 'em like that
anymore.



no shit

I have dreams like
being in Russia
amid all the poverty that
Gorby and Yeltsin and
the rest of the asshole
traitorous Right created
it's often so realistic
I wake up feeling sick

or I dream that I'm
wandering in some strange
place and there's other
people there but they
ignore me and I ignore
them (dreams imitating life)

or this town is a raging
inferno and the flames are
kissing the night sky
and when all the white trash
have been burned alive
and there's nothing left
of the this shitty little town
Satan puts out the flames
by pissing on them.

I guess I must be crazy.

Mytholmroyd Haikus by Adelle Stripe

from her collection "Cigarettes In Bed" available from Blackheath Books.

1.

this is my cradle;
asleep in your warm chest hair
your heartbeat a lullaby


2.

the sun hides behind
st.john in the wilderness
our lips taste the hot raindrops


3.

the fading confetti sticks
to the wet stone walls
like fallen apple blossom


4.

palms sticky from pine resin
the transparent moon
sucks the light from my fingers


5.

cycling in the morning sun
the sweet smell of popping plants
hang in the june air

ON THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET by M.P. Powers

nick from the lawnmower shop
is always cheerful
behind the counter

whistling, trilling
singing old songs

(usually tony bennett songs)

"i left my heart
in san francisco..."

and when he talks
to the customers, there's a pleasant lilt
in his voice

a rolling beautiful
sing-song
wave of vowels

i have never known him
to be in anything but his normal
jolly
mood

"it don't mean a thing if you ain't got that
swing..."

it doesn't seem to bother nick
that he has to listen to the same
chainsaw
infomercial
being played on an endless loop
all day long

or that he hasn't gotten a raise in three years

or that half his customers
are liars, cheats, swindlers, cheapskates...

he treats them all equally
and with a smile

and goes on singing

"grab your coat
and get your hat... leave your
worries on the
doorstep..."

"the best is yet to come and, babe, won't
it be fine..."

i asked one of nick's regular
customers
johnnyboy
what he thought of it all
though
and he may have been right

"don't worry," he said, "everyone's got a dark
side.
nick probably goes home to his apartment
every night
and wears woman's underwear
and a hat
made
of human
skin..."

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