In Conversation

The Last Time They say there’s a first time for everything but it’s really the last times that matter your last kiss your last sunset your last time making love all of them gathering conspiring unnoticed unremarkable until their true meaning emerges and then at the final moment when some longed-for truth comes rushing in …

You Are Infinite, Baby, Infinite Fox News and Tik Tok will tell you different but you are money you are bars of gold you are a billion times better than that you are energy you are surplus you are thrum you are purpose you are shiny new truck that never breaks down on the way …

Cracker McCracken, Cryptid Hunter I’d taken great pains where I work to ensure everyone was aware of the prodigious ability I possessed as a writer though I often neglected to mention my absolute dearth of readership. It seemed imperative the boys at the factory understood that I wasn’t just some dumb Polack slinging metal tubes …

The Last Supper You don’t understand: you cannot spend the evening lying down between the legs of the storm, the night howling with her wolves, and in the morning just wake up and ask her why she still hasn’t cooked you an omelet. Tsvetelina Manova (Lena Mante) was born in 1985 in Varna, Bulgaria. She …

A Toast to Charles Bukowski Andy from the café lent me your books. we discussed the way you found the spiritual in the mundane, in beer, whiskey. Andy brawled with my roommate over turning Bowie down and someone yelled “I’ll call the cops!” so Andy and I split and fucked at his stepdad’s house. men …

Saturday Morning Cartoons What ever happened to those Saturday morning cartoons? And eating a bowl of cereal while sitting in front of the TV? Scooby Doo, where the hell are you? Grape Ape. Grape Ape. So many things have changed.   Loneliness Is a Bird Sitting in a Tree this morning I woke up to …

Two Mouths The list and the refrain in Limerick, Maine is as good a way as any to begin a poem. Courting difficulty for difficulty’s sake is frowned upon. Oh what a world and you in that rotten dress. It was Bar Harbor, actually where you walked away, giving a list of reasons none which …

Rapture Us The Rapture finally came and all the assholes went away. What were they expecting? A paradise consisting of lots of space, plenty of guns and no “swarthy types” to be found. Sort of like a rent-free Colorado. What they actually got? I couldn’t say for sure. But the last time I saw Buddha …

Fatherless Children by Michael D. Grover, Roadside Press Michael D. Grover’s Fatherless Children reads like a long, ragged hymn to absence — to fathers who didn’t teach, to a country that promises and extracts, to poetry itself as both refuge and condemnation. Structured as numbered vignettes rather than conventional poems, the chapbook forms a single sprawling …

Big Angry Cocks 1. “Hey, Jesse. Uhm… What about it?” I was taking a chance leading with Jesse Stocstill’s usual southern greeting. Jesse leaned against the roll-around cart piled high with metal glands I intended to inertia weld to a rack of hydraulic cylinders. By the look of his glassy eyes and the set of …