In Conversation

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 …

—Pen in hand to trace the path. The sun shone through my window this morning, revealing a hidden map. Then, it was gone. For a moment in rejoice, I thought I’d found the way out. . . . Yet . . . Yesterday’s ghost lay boxed, forgotten in an empty room, and I heard memory …

Poet, Sleuth, and Scout: The Noir World of Clay Blackburn Owen Hill’s The Giveaway: The Clay Blackburn Story brings together three novels and a short story featuring the poet-sleuth-book scout Clay Blackburn—a singular character navigating the margins of Berkeley, California, where radical politics, literary ephemera, and existential mystery intertwine. This omnibus serves as both an …

   Thoughts on Prayers Milt, my eighty-year-old live-in father-in-law snoozes on his catnapper Laz-E-Boy. A half-gnawed Slim Jim droops from his clenched fist. His chin rests against his sternum. During fits of wakefulness, he boasts that he’s managed to hold on to his hair. You can almost see it in the afternoon light streaming through …