In Conversation

Oscillating Godhead Catastrophe Now we are obsolete just as the dolphins bid us welcome home Not one or two but infinitely containable If you can hear this portrait of destruction I made the frame thudding like distance crack like sting We don’t have enough water food blood bags waves power clean needles instead the empty …

Polaroid of My Parents, Christmas, 1978 Could they ever have been that young— my father 37, my mother 35—posing in that low saturation of pinks & blues, the mist haloing them like a specter? Yet at that moment, as my seven-year-old hands fumbled with my father’s camera, they appeared happy, or so I believed. Though …

In This Place Beer comes in a can      and they’ve got Old Crow      in the well and      everyone knows not to      play A17 when Knucklehead      Dave’s had more than four beers, The pool table has quarters      laid down the rail      and no one jumps their      turn to slam that 8-ball,      unless that 8-ball happens      to …

JEHOVAH JUKEBOX by Joan Jobe Smith A review by Zack Kopp In these poems, plastic surgeons make a thousand a week per customer as Sinatra gets sent back to heaven and Bukowski chugs cheap beer at the No-No a Go-Go, one night finally telling the author, “’You gotta write about that madness, kid.’ So I …

brute she stared me directly in the eyes ‘you’re not a man, you’re a brute’ a smile crossed my lips ‘i’m no doorknob either, lady’ still staring at me her lip now curled ‘i’d smack you but i don’t want to get shit on my palm’ even i must admit that was a good one …

You Gonna Bark All Day Little Doggie, Or Are You Gonna Mourn The Passing of an American Legend I always take off work the week of the fourth of July. I never actually celebrate the holiday. I dislike the government, got too much cool shit to embrace anarchy, so my politics are complicated, but more …

The One in Which Jane Fonda Falls in Love with a Horse Gina’s apartment, 36 Grove. Matter eaten by black holes. O but Lance is here and the poets and provocateurs. I’m juggling a lot en route to beautiful plans. We’re talking beer matches and book clubs river dips in Berlin, why straight guys are …

The Dogs Were Good (Again) As if they had a choice, chained to the backyard fence, whimpering in the freeze like the weaklings you said they’d be. I threw some dry ham bones and snouted one, remembering to laugh as you’d said to. None of them ever barked, which made me wonder what good they …

Lemon Tree Sweat of the beach on your neck, the sea perfumes the rain plants, the sky clears, the sky bruises purple with lightning. The fruit of a lemon tree moon shades towering over the dune sand, and then descent, a rush of wind down the branches, down the sand on wooden planks, we run …

DEATH BY DISTRACTION People fly out of car windshields in collisions because they can’t pull their eyes away from their phones— they forgot how dangerous it was to pursue dopamine boosts, cheap thrills that can kill them like their votes killed this country, people dragged from their homes, people and their rights erased by self-serving …