Cher at the Casino By Paula Hayes

The sequins made her seventy year old something body look forty something. 

I am talking about Cher.

Yes, the Gypsies, Thieves and Tramps, Cher. 

Just walking through the casino like nothing. Displaced with a glass of something cool with a cherry swimming inside it.

Her hair, still an impossible black. Vampire maroon blush across impossibly high cheekbones constructing an architecture like a Klimt painting.

Absolutely no one is looking her way. She is pushing her tongue up against the back of her teeth.

A restless mass of worshippers are gathered just a few feet away with their phones lifted above their heads making an offering to their goddess. 

And at the center of it all is another Cher.

A drag queen in a sheer illusion of a gown, nothing but shimmering silver dripping. The wig is enormous, cascading, theatrical, and everything you would imagine it to be. Voice, a lower register. Eyeliner drawn more like Elizabath Taylor in Cleopatra than Sonny’s Cher. Bombastically she is calling out to the crowd: I got you, babe, as her false eyelashes snapped in a wink. 

A table covered in red linen. A Sharpie. Stacks of glossy photographs. The line coils. 

Someone squeals, “Oh my God, you look exactly like her.”

Someone else whispers, “This is better than the real thing.”

The drag queen signs the glossies with a flourish. There is a large gap in between her front teeth. 

“Oh girl, if you only knew how fucking hot it is underneath all this synthetic hair. I think the devil himself may be coming for me, or maybe I am just in menopause. It must be a hot flash!” The drag queen breathes in and tugs at her equally synthetic breasts. She lets out a husky giggle. 

A security guard walks straight past the real Cher never looking at her. A woman brushes against her shoulder and murmurs “sorry” without looking up. Perfume and liquor molecules stir throughout the room like awkward men at a mixer. Cher takes a step forward but just then the crowd surges and starts closing around the table where the drag queen is seated.

“Umm hmmm,” Cher clears her throat as she rattles the ice around in her glass watching the scene. Even her “Umm hmmm” was a perfect pitch. 

A sudden explosive applause breaks out. The drag queen flips her hair back and makes a raunchy joke about her breasts being bigger than the real Cher’s. 

As Cher looks down at her B cup sized breasts, her heel gets caught in a snag on the old casino carpet. Wham. Face plant. Prostrate before the drag queen. 

Someone shouts, “We love you, Cher!” The drag queen presses a hand to her chest in mock astonishment. 

“I love you more,” she says, in a voice rich and buttery this time. 

A hundred phones flash like fireflies on a summer night. 

The real Cher looks like a sequined mannequin crumpled onto the floor that someone forgot to undress. Her long black hair spills forward covering her face. One long, still rather toned, leg is folded under her. Her ass is sticking straight up in the air. The cherry has rolled out of the glass and onto the floor. 

A woman steps backward, nearly onto her hand, laughing, adjusting herself for a selfie. The corner of her shoe grazes Cher’s sleeve. She moves and squishes the cherry instead. 

The drag queen is posing now with her arms stretched out wide. 

“Am I Cher or Jesus? Who do you say I am?”

“We don’t care who you are!”

“Turn this way!”

“Do the hair flip!”

“Say it again—say I got you, babe!”

She does. They scream.

Cher pushes herself up and leans herself on one arm. Half-sitting her gaze moves across their faces, noticing their round eyes and their curved mouths. How open and hungry they all look.

Paula Hayes is a would-be-poet in Memphis where the ghost of Elvis still roams around at the Arcade. Whatever that feeling of existential aloneness is in the fiction of Raymond Carver and the paintings of Edward Hopper and the fascination with eccentrics found in Flannery O'Connor, that is the feeling she keeps trying to capture, but it is too damn elusive to be held down too long in words.

Exhausted Hotel Rooms By Trish Saunders

The sound of your shoes dropping, ​

thwack!​

                           and another thwack!

tells me our careful trestle has collapsed,

our lunchtime détente, over.

Never mind, this is the reason for a bag of books,

why I dump out Heaney, Hemingway, Joyce, Gluck,

and read madly under the monkeypod tree.

And still your silence stays with me; 

only thing to do is swim to the pier,

return to find a plover pecking 

at the flyleaf picture of

James Joyce.

We will learn to tolerate.

Become happy.

Eventually, news of each other’s deaths

will not trouble us.

But just now

you were watching from our hotel window,

I saw your muscled back

retreating.

Trish Saunders has poems published or forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, Gargoyle Magazine, Chiron Review, and Open Arts Forum, among other places. She lives in Seattle. 

TOOTHACHE By Dan Flore III

I am

in agony

fumbling 

through tubes

in the bathroom

looking for

the topical pain killer

I can’t find

it

so I throw

wart cream against

the wall

and when it hits

so does another

sudden rush of pain

AAARGHHH!

I scream

and decide

to go get drunk

Dan Flore III’s writings have appeared in many publications. He is the author of several books, the latest being EVERYTHING MUST GO. (Cajun Mutt Press)

Then There Was the Bad Weather By Jeff Weddle

I was with Curtis at High on Rose

on a stormy afternoon.

We were on maybe our fourth pitcher,

maybe our fifth.

“Holy shit!” Curtis said,

pointing out the window.

“That car just fell through the road!”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Yes, but that car still fell through the road.”

I swiveled and saw a small foreign number

with its left front tire

swallowed by the street.

“Well, shit,” I said.

Of course we went outside.

Maybe we went to help, maybe to gawk,  

but there we were.

A woman sat behind the wheel.

She might have been thirty,

a little chubby, a lot pissed.

“My fucking car fell through the road,”

she said.

“That’s what I told my friend,”

Curtis answered.

“He didn’t believe me.”

“Well, let’s fix this.” I said,

embarrassed at being a nonbeliever.

We made the chubby woman

get out of the car.

She wore jeans and a white cotton shirt

that quickly became transparent

with the rain. Nothing underneath.

That didn’t bother her

and it didn’t bother us.

Curtis and I crouched down

and put our backs into it.

In no time at all, the car was free.

The chubby woman in the transparent shirt

said “Thanks” and drove away.

“That was a hell of a thing,” Curtis said.

“A hell of a thing,” I echoed.

We went back inside

and finished our fourth pitcher,

or maybe our fifth.

Then I guess we had one more.

Some days are for peaceful drinking

and some days are for cars

falling through the road

in front in the bar.

This was that first kind of day

until it became the second.

The hole is long since filled

and Curtis is recently dead.

That’s the whole story, but I wonder

sometimes if the woman told it

over the years, and if she did,

what she had to say about us,

her wet shirt,

and the providence of chance.

Maybe we became heroes

to people we never knew,

our story, a legend.

Maybe we were just

a couple of drunks

Jeff Weddle is the Alabama Beat Poet Laureate (2024-2026). His latest book is Letter to Xhevdet Bajraj (Uncollected Press, 2025). His work has appeared in Albanian and Spanish translation

Note to self don’t change for anyone By Alex Stolis

    (Note to self don’t die, Ryan Adams) 

I had a Zippo, your initials carved on the lid; smokes cost less than a buck a pack. We were two wannabe outlaws lambing our way to oblivion. Where do you keep your hope nowadays? Tethered to a bad joke? Do you bear the weight of belief in the faded tattoo ink over your heart? I could verb with the best of them but can’t adjective worth a good goddamn anymore. Can’t hold my liquor these days & cigarettes make me lonely for the happily-ever-afters we dreamt about that night at Aqua City Motel. Neighbors pounding on the wall for us to turn down the tinny radio blasting The Clash. You never know when your luck will run out. Can never tell when the sky will decide to fall. Keep your trigger finger warm baby; there’s a cold front moving in.

Alex Stolis has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Ekphrastic Review, Louisiana Literature Review, Burningwood Literary Journal, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower's Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024 by Bottlecap Press. He lives in upstate New York with his partner, poet Catherine Arra. 

Night Plight By Ashley Karlsson

 The clock is broken, as the people sharing the space.

As the world outside is more fractured than any poem

penned by some pretentious soul.

The best are read and never heard.

The lights are off as they should remain.

Extinguish the ego and give life to the page.

Your plight, is your burden alone.

Ashley Karlsson, is a North Carolina based writer who's work has been published in.The Dope Fiend Daily, Off The Coast, It Takes All Kinds Literary Zine, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Outer Banks Quarterly.

you can’t go home again By John Grochalski

they call the place

the harp & fiddle 

but i still call it rooney’s

though i haven’t been here in a decade

until i got the itch again

there’s a gloss on the bar now

and seats with cushions

a row of tvs above us

playing sports and the carnage of war

a beer garden for the summer

and a trivia night on tuesdays too

they’ve raised the beer prices

three-dollars

to keep the riff-raff out

and now the decent people sit here in quiet

with their heads buried in the phones

as pop music plays

trying to find a sign of life in here is impossible

there’s no mona fucking anyone 

on the bathroom sink

no benny to go mad

because the bitch cut him again

there’s just the bartender

updating her instagram account

showing everyone her vacation photos

as i sit here nursing a beer

hating that damned thomas wolfe

for being so right.

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where the garbage can smell like roses if you wish on it hard enough.