In Conversation

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 …

How I Start My Day I piss but let’s not show that on the YouTube camera. I wake up hot because even though I’m naked beneath a fan I’m 52 and fat and female. I started bleeding when I was 14 and all these decades later I still identify as Sissy Spacek as Carrie. I …

Years ago I met Dan Denton. You can say sometimes things happen when they need to. We had seen each other at a couple different open mics in Toledo. If you had asked Dan what he was back then, he probably would have told you he was a factory worker. I guess Dan’s wife figured …

Admit It, Part Of You Wants To Live Forever No waiting. The E train pulled in as my feet hit the platform and I found an end seat, stretched out as it expressed its way through Queens to catch a Brooklyn bound G. Today, my hernia’s resting quietly and the AC’s a sea breeze. I’m …

Scapegoat One day, when I was 10 and out past dark but barely, I knew my father would be furious. My father worked all day in a machine shop. He came home evenings, his skin black with graphite, his mood molten steel. When my mother told my father to beat me for some infraction I’d …