(Un)formulaic Formula by Juliet Cook

(Un)formulaic Formula When you feel like you write a haiku in a dream, but do not transfer those words outside your brain’s portal. Can’t speak. Maybe you swallowed the page. Your own writing tastes better than a bottle of baby formula. Juliet Cook doesn’t fit inside an Easy-Bake Oven and rarely cooks. Her poetry has appeared in …

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Home Coming by Steven Meloan

Home Coming A homecoming… returning from whence you came a mother’s midwestern town a war-hero memorial Five states in three days at 90 MPH mile-after-mile past corn fields metal grain silos glistening in white-hot heartland sun It was… the land of Superman of the “decent people” Simple clapboard houses always set back nowhere to stop …

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THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER: I’m Pre-Emptively Tired of This Future Bullshit by Karl Koweski

I’m Pre-Emptively Tired of This Future Bullshit, or It’s That Roll Tide Time of Year, Again You can tell football season is upon us once again by the way the boys on the shop floor swagger back and forth between their machines. For the next several months, eighty-five percent of their collective self-worth is going …

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These Are the Times by Tim Frank

These Are the Times Feel the heavy pulse Of feet on glossy streets And the strained rotten breaths Eating up the sky. These are the times we live in— The slog of rapid tears With stretched vinyl flashbacks, Bell bottom jeans And perfumes, ‘79. So let your credit slump With solar powered androids And whores …

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The Kitchen, 2am Christmas Morning by Jim Murdoch

The Kitchen, 2am Christmas Morning There’s no poetry in this room           or very little, only what I brought with me, field rations if you will, nourishing but hardly filling. Poems are like ghosts,           the clingy kind,           the hungry kind, the kind that yearn to rest but don’t know how like me tonight in this kitchen …

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Food God by Zack Kopp

FOOD GOD It’s a great place to work, but everyjob that happens in the town centers around the bar and all the no-good shits who hang out there. Screech Owl, the Nightjob, Karate Dad, Barney Jenkins, Brain Cook, Wild-Haired Wally, Jarvis the Jester, and Rafe Dingus. This may sound like a gang of wild outlaws …

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The Numbers by Damon Hubbs

The Numbers Vivian, the psychic at the strip mall says I have multiple great loves. She says 2, 12 & 33 are my lucky numbers. Did you dream of weak fish or a fat tummy, a coffin denotes marriage, snow foretells a pleasant journey. Maybe I should get a dog or if not, how about …

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Richard Modiano reviews MISS EXPERIENCE WHITE by Milo Johnson, illustrated by John Seabury

Miss Experience White by Milo Johnson, illustrated by John Seabury Milo Johnson’s Miss Experience White: A Poem Cycle is a blistering, hallucinatory journey into the heart of whiteness, privilege, and the monstrous machinery of supremacy. Framed as an illustrated poetic cycle and disguised in the familiar wrapping of a children’s book, this radical autofiction detonates …

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Eraser by Eric Allen Yankee

Eraser in the earliest hours, i think of shrinking down to my smallest atom, and no longer needing to watch the world erase, no longer bearing witness to the wrecked houses and the thin wallets of the people who’ve worked hard to avoid being fed to the chattering golden teeth of Wall Street. But I …

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THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER: Praise Jesus and Pass the Lasagna by Karl Koweski

   Praise Jesus and Pass the Lasagna “Polish Hammer! How’s it going? Ain’t seen you in forever.” Ah, goddammit. This is the reason I try to stay out of the local Foodland. Being a carpet-bagging yankee since ’97, I know that if I’m called out in public, it’s by someone I currently or once worked …

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