My Last Thanksgiving by Catfish McDaris

My lady was withdrawing
$60 from the drive up ATM
I was tuning in Steely Dan

A Nixon masked person
with a revved chainsaw
cut off her extended arm
& grabbed it & the money

Ripping my belt from my
trousers, I made a tourniquet
next thing I knew I was on
the floor in a store

A circle of frozen turkeys
were shooting dice with tiny
hands, several had cigars
puffing from their neck hole

They were cursing in Turkish,
sounding pissed off & flipping
each other the bird, looking
around I noticed I was naked

I had a cell phone, I dialed 911
the operator asked, "What is
your emergency?" all I said
was gobble gobble gobble

Waking in a pool of sweat
I saw a full bottle of 101
proof whiskey, reaching

To scratch my testicles
I trotted for the bathroom
to discover two tiny plucked
butter balls, I thought this
is worse than Naked Lunch.

these thick girls by Steve Calamars

have me sleep walking
across tight ropes and
base jumping from their
high expectations
without a parachute

their plunging necklines
and cartoon cleavage
leave me feeling
light headed and animated

to the point where i'm
making assumptions and
drawing conclusions
without a trace of evidence

believing they'll find their
way to my bedroom and lose
their panties beneath
my sheets

only to discover later
that i had their signals crossed
and i'm bound to end up alone
for the night

with my mind in knots
and my heart hanging
in my chest like a
fleshy chandelier . . .

50/50 SPLIT by John Tustin

Your words grind me down
the anabolic sameness of them,
like tires slowly
continually
decimating the street.

You are disappointing
daily
like the blackheads on my nose
in every morning mirror.

And now you are nothing more
than mosquitoes in the night
that are not worth
turning on the light
and searching for
to kill.

But you wrote this
poem
and many others
with your filthy mouth
and abhorrent actions –
I just put them down –
so I guess I owe you something.

Just not half.

Two Poems by David McLean

thought gets tainted

thought gets tainted by the darkness,
like Pearl Jam say, and what you see
is determined by your capacity
for seeing, what lives free in front of us
and each shard of shattered nothing
that is there for us to touch;

and i would rather die than be a dead man
living his weakness, his pride and his stupid
weak children

thought gets tainted easily, except
where whales swim in us fragments
of nature, something at any rate
untouched, some body better
than man to love



a gross bundle

life in the too filthy flesh
is a gross bundle of rags
and stupid illusions,

a lump of psychic ugly,
a hairy monkey gibbering
under a dead man's bed

and up the staircase goes love
a reluctant foot, broken bones
and radical homelessness

wherever we are, lumpy
little bundles of fat flesh, death,
whitening scars,

life has wandered much too far

Going Dutch by Catfish McDaris

Her loved waned,
like snow on a
warm winter day

I didn't know
what to do,
so I went to
a whorehouse

A young woman
led me to her room

She removed her
clothes & I started
crying, she took a
knife & cut off my ear

I felt a sudden urge
to paint sunflowers.

Followers

About Me

Black-Listed Magazine is an online literary magazine. We publish on a rolling basis: weekly, daily, sometimes hourly. Send submissions here: blacklistedmagazine@hotmail.com