Jul 15
Living Ain’t For Everybody I emerge from my study for two goddam minutes, just trying to grab a cherry limeade Frostie out of the kitchen when I hear a raspy voice pronounce ominously. “119.” I don’t have to ask what the number signifies; it’s all the old bastard has been talking about since the first …
Jul 14
ON BOB KAUFMAN’S 100th BIRTHDAY Gray skies on Good Friday over a nameless super tramp, thumbing my way up north until I’m at the cross streets where I was born to become a ghost in between the lines and in between the pauses where the music fades beautifully— a pain worth sticking around for, wisdom …
Jul 13
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 …
Jul 12
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 …
Jul 11
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 …
Jul 10
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 …
Jul 09
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 …
Jul 08
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 …
Jul 07
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 …
Jul 06
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 …
