Michele McDannold
Author's posts
May 17
Cigarettes by Kurt Nimmo
Cigarettes It is like this: I go outside to throw a plastic bag of garbage in the bin. I see the neighbors across the street. They are older than me, maybe younger. It is difficult to tell these days. She has short purple hair and he is obese in a misshapen LONGHORNS t-shirt. Both lean …
May 17
Soul Auger by Brian Mosher
Soul Auger The poet had written, “kneel to auger the soil,” but misspoke, and so, I auger my soul, drilling towards the core, hoping to find some essential, unique thing, all the while fearing what might emerge. Ghosts long buried might arise to haunt the peace of this new life, or a subterranean chain reaction …
May 16
No One Here Gets Out Alive by Johnny Cordova
No One Here Gets Out Alive I must have been sixteen when I took down the posters above my bed of Cheryl Ladd and Jaclyn Smith in beach bikinis with contoured stomachs and lipstick smiles – Charlie’s sexiest angels – and replaced them with a leather-collared close-up of Jim Morrison. When my father ripped Morrison …
May 15
2 poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan
What’s In Your Coffee? (for Brian Fugett) The Ohio River is bursting at the banks. Joe Burrow hits a streaking barn burner across the middle. I pass this woman drinking in a parking lot, dressing down a happy face painted on a building across the street. And the question arises, as if from the cackling …
May 14
I WISH TO ACHIEVE THE CONFIDENCE OF A MAN WHO UPLOADS THE SAME FACEBOOK PROFILE PICTURE 10-15 TIMES, EACH VERSION MORE ZOOMED-IN AND PIXELATED THAN THE LAST by Brandon Diehl
I WISH TO ACHIEVE THE CONFIDENCE OF A MAN WHO UPLOADS THE SAME FACEBOOK PROFILE PICTURE 10-15 TIMES, EACH VERSION MORE ZOOMED-IN AND PIXELATED THAN THE LAST I’m killing ants on the kitchen counter. I can hear them crunching beneath my finger like Oreo crumbs. “Sorry,” I say, flicking another mangled corpse into a graveyard …
May 13
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER: You’ve Been Milted by Karl Koweski
You’ve Been Milted I’ve managed to escape the factory for two whole days and I’m intent on wiling the hours away in as lazy a manner as I can muster, sitting beside my wife on the front porch, watching the world pass by. For this brief moment, I experience the closest sensation to contentment the …
May 12
2 poems by Rhea Melina
The days are packed not like sardines. Like pennies rolled tight. Ends folded precise, insides adding up to what? I wish for you a more simple life. For the necessity of washing fruit to be all you need to radicalize you. I’ve straddled the threshold my whole life and I suppose I’m lucky to never …
May 11
2 poems by Dario Cvencek
Book Warm shelling a city library during a war and burning all the books in it you could call that a crime because books hold the stories of the people who wrote them and by destroying the books you are erasing the history of those people but the real crime is to keep the war …
May 10
Hospice by Jason Fisk
Hospice Hospice has a pamphlet that maps out the end-of-life stages where the pathway to death can be followed like a roadmap That both fascinated me and brought me comfort but I could never figure out why It had a community feel to it Something we all do in the same way but I couldn’t …
May 10
Your Pale Gray Eyes by Litsa Dremousis
Your Pale Gray Eyes On this awful, bathrobe morning, I wonder what you look like now. Could your ashes fit into my coffee mug? How about our bowl on the dish rack? The one I bogarted the popcorn from curled up watching “Mad Men” when you got pissed I listed all the ways I’d fuck …
