Behind Historic Lines By Merritt Waldon

Deep a.m. six day old coffee

Rationed cigarettes & forbidden dreams

Skipping down rainy midwestern

Streets w broken down poets

Lost behind the times

Behind historic lines

Left forlorn against mom & pop

Storefronts

Serenading un-seeable futures

Feathered like crows

Like heckle and jeckle

Like a life remembered

In old cartoons

Merritt Waldon is Southern Indiana poet who has been published in Road Dawgz, Sun Poetic Times,

The Brooklyn Rail, Be About It Zine, River Dog #1, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Americans & others anthology fourth edition, Crisis Chronicles, Cajun Mutt Press, Thye Rye Whiskey Review, and Fearless!.

At midnight Christmas night 2020, cajun mutt press released Oracles from a Strange Fire by Ron Whitehead & Merritt. He lives in Austin, Indiana.

In the Meantime By Gabriel Bates

Drinking espresso

and smoking too many cigarettes,

I sit and think about

the end of the world.

Will it be with a whimper,

like Eliot said?

Or will it be like

one of those post-apocalyptic movies,

everyone scraping by to survive?

I'm not sure.

But until then,

I'll light another cigarette

and wait.

Gabriel Bates is a poet living in Pittsburg, Kansas. His work has appeared in many different publications. Keep up with him on Facebook.

337 St Jeremiah's By John Doyle

Where that actor hid from photography's blitz and sank all that vodka, 

not a dribble belonged to him,

barefoot and sudden near pulled-up cars,

it had been 24 years since he'd experienced those out of body blues,

straight-up rye has that kind of zen

at three three seven St Jeremiah's,

where I believe I found a poison to eliminate the cure

a spider spent a sparkled penny singing though his blood

hanging on the alibis of his Communion wafer moon,

that photograph of Dennis Wilson, backstage at Fleetwood Mac, 1981

came to frame me in another soldier's war, lost between two hurricanes

I chose a typhoon for my symphony,

closing three three seven St Jermiah's behind me 

I turned to watch sunset

telling lies to a moon not yet consecrated, 

realized no-one has these kinds of dreams

unless they've slept for longer than they tried not to be awake,

who amongst them dared to breathe the dangerous hours of twilight?

bones behind a miracle first to sweat 

when the chirping crickets warned the devil 

to bow down his head - he knew he'd lost it all that day 

he'd left behind his door to door sales position.

Three three seven St. Jeremiah's would never be condemed,

no-one in a face without any sideburns could ever find it on their maps

Half man, half creature of very odd habit, John Doyle dabbles in poetry when other forms of alchemy and whatnot just don't meet his creative needs. From County Kildare in Ireland, he is (let's just politely say) closer to 50 than 21.

A Night Well Spent By Dan Holt

My hands

are cracked and bruised

and there are

cuts on my arms

that I don't know

the origin of

In the mirror

my eyes are puffy

and my lips

are slightly swollen

I vomit

for the third time

since I woke up

rinsing my mouth

in the sink

and wondering

what the fuck

went on last night

Sometimes

the morning

is an empty shadow

of an evening lost

and a night

well spent

Dan Holt is a singer/songwriter/recording artist, poet and fiction author from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. He has produced 11 albums of original music along with various singles and eps. His poetry has been published widely in the online and print small press and he is the author of "Blank Canvas On Bloody Pavement" and "Motel" (both from Alien Buddha press and available on Amazon). He was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2021.

That Time Someone Called Me Brigitte Bardot By Shannon O’Connor

 I’ve been thinking about Brigitte Bardot since she died, and a memory popped in my mind. 

When I went to Russia, when I was sixteen, in a hotel room on a school trip, Brigitte Bardot appeared to me.

We had just arrived, and I was sitting in the room, and we thought we locked the door, but we didn’t realize we had to lock it from the inside and the outside. A guy walked in, and looked at me and pointed and said “Brigitte Bardot!”

We shooed him out of the room. I didn’t know what Brigitte Bardot looked like, and those were the days when nobody had cell phones, or even the Internet, so we couldn’t pull up a picture of her or a bio or anything.

The floor my friend and I were on in the hotel was the one where the prostitutes worked. We saw them hanging out in the hall with their puffy hair and their desperate faces, laughing at us when we walked by. I called the it the whore floor, and it wasn’t funny because horrible things could have happened to us, but nothing did.

I eventually found out what Brigitte Bardot looked like; she looked nothing like me at sixteen. I had short puffy dark hair and freckles. 

I had no resemblance to the blonde bombshell Brigitte Bardot. I eventually watched movies of hers from the Sixties, Contempt, A Very Private Affair. She was the French Marilyn Munroe, only she never died and become immortal, she lived and became a fascist racist against Muslims and the LGBTQ community.

I came to the conclusion that the guy who broke into our hotel room that day called me Brigitte Bardot because that was the pickup line he used for the women, or prostitutes, to get them excited. All women would want to look like Brigitte Bardot, especially Russian prostitutes in a dreary Moscow hotel at the end of the reign of the Soviet Union, their country not knowing what the future would hold, hoping things would get better, just a breath away from the edge of a cliff.

I wasn’t a Russian prostitute, and his outburst just confused me until this realization just now. 

Now that Brigitte Bardot is dead, I can say that someone called me by her name once a long time ago in a Russian hotel, even thought he was probably a pervert, I never forgot this, because I don’t forget things that are quirky and weird, and will one day make a good story.

Shannon O'Connor holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. She has been previously published in The Rye Whiskey Review, as well as Oddball Magazine, 365 Tomorrows, The Ginosko Literary Review, and others. She is the chairperson of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union. She lives in the Boston area, and has a large collection of berets.

River Floating Harbor By Michael Lee Johnson

You are in my heart, the beat of my dreams.

The fellowship of love.

Up the river, down the river,

unfortunately gone.

Let’s dance gently through the memories.

River floats, a safe harbor into the sea.

Legionary singers are our memories.

My true love.

Michael Lee Johnson, a renowned poet from Downer Grove, IL, has gained international recognition for his work, which has been published in 46 countries or republics. His several published poems have been nominated for 8 Pushcart and 7 Best of the Net nominations. Join his journey. Michael has over 371 poetry videos on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/@poetrymanusa. He spent 10 years in exile in Canada during the Vietnam War era. He is a member of Illinois State Poetry Society, http://www.illinoispoets.org/, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/, & Poets & Writers, https://www.pw.org/.

Hunched By Susan Isla Tepper

None of them takes off a jacket.

Hunched around the horseshoe bar

on West 14th

knocking them back; silent.

No snippets of conversation.

Strictly to drink until closing. 

Bartender knows by a nod

what and when to pour. 

Place must be a hundred by now

still smoky after decades

of non-smoking laws.

Ashtrays on the bar overflow.

They brought in a band

that’s why I’m here.

To try and sing through the haze.

Susan Isla Tepper is a twenty year writer in all genres. Her most recent book, a Novel titled Hair Of A Fallen Angel, came out in the fall from Spuyten Duyvil Books, NYC. Tepper has also written 7 stage plays. Her third play titled EVA & ADAMO will present at The Tank, NYC, early fall. www.susantepper.com