Oct 10
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 …
Oct 09
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 …
Oct 08
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 …
Oct 07
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 …
Oct 06
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 …
Oct 05
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 …
Oct 04
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 …
Oct 03
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 …
Oct 02
—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 …
Oct 01
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 …
