Poison By Joe Couture

I’m a dive-bartender, in a town

tourists might call Butt-fuck 

Nowhere. Visitors to my workplace

sometimes look (or listen) around, saying, 

“Man, I don’t know how you do it.”

I always smile, “What do you mean?”

Is it the people shitting themselves,

paying no mind to dripping jeans—

too tuned to their VLT?

Ten-dollar blowjobs by the sea-can out back?

Surely, not the 1100-year-old regular

from BX-19?

A former coworker overhearing 

one of these conversations

once piped up, smiling,

“To work at this place, you gotta be

fuckin’ poison.”

We laughed.

Except, now I think it’s

harm reduction.

No one’s wife is beaten 

while he’s with me. Besides,

in here, the liquor is never

stretched with anti-freeze.

Joe Couture is a writer living in rural Nova Scotia. His most recent work is featured, or forthcoming, in Dark Winter Lit, Rusty Truck, ExPat Press, and SHINE Quarterly. If you want to connect with him, try here: @rjcouture.bsky.social

Wasted Your Life, Now What? By Chad Parenteau

You can’t take anymore.

This taffy pull of a 

cocktease, a cyclical 

jerk that can never end

happily. So you’re a 

hitchhiker now, realizing 

that a house only exists 

to keep you from going 

home. All you can hope 

for from people face to 

face is mutually assured 

distraction. You search

in all directions for the 

center. That can’t be right,

can it? It’s time to explore

now that your leaders 

have gotten what they 

wanted. You won’t be 

killed for looking up from

those performative hand 

motions you no longer 

understand. There’s got 

to be more than the eulogy

others wrote for you when

you were twenty years 

stupider and only wanted

a warm body to wake up 

to without being insulted. 

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives in Boston.

Beside the Unfinished Glass By Paul Moore

The half-empty glass,

red stain clinging,

a smear of laughter

on the rim.

And beside it,

your ring.

Gold,

still warm, maybe,

from your finger.

A tiny lighthouse,

a silent code.

Don't forget me.

Come back soon.

I am thinking of you.

Or maybe just

a habit.

But I prefer

the secret message.

Paul Moore is a North Carolina–based Black poet who channels family, ancestry, and memory into reflective verse, honoring resilience, lineage, and the shared journeys that shape identity and strength.

 

Forget It By Jeff Weddle

I’m writing this more or less for you. 

I’m writing this for slipping on ice 

and beer drunk afternoons, 

long, aimless drives, 

slow walks at night, 

strange neighborhoods, 

cotton candy carnivals, 

folding knives in back pockets, 

easy reach. 

I’m writing this for the years 

we imagined one another. 

More or less all the years. 

I’m writing this for the hours we have 

forgotten 

and no one will ever suspect. 

I’m writing for the years still to come

with everything broken. 

I hope you are well 

and would tell you I am fine 

but you are too smart 

for that. 

I’m writing this to be rid of it.

You with your delicate gaze

fixed away from me. 

I’m writing this now

because I am lost.

And now, at last, it is gone. 

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

the push is on By Stephen Ground

but unbeknownst to the public,

success isn’t a waving checkered

flag or freshly-painted picket fence

but the sense, at five twenty six a.m.

on a Wednesday, that this flesh is

set to squirm free from my bones

if I choke down one more smoky

sip from a grimy cup that’s gone

unrinsed since last month’s name

screamed from a twice-expired

calendar of motivational quotes.

Stephen Ground is a writer, filmmaker, and picture-taker based in Treaty Six Territory [Edmonton, Canada].

Kilcock : Mid-Winter, 4:48pm By John Doyle

Guess what; Clarabelle’s right : there was a telegraph pole still standing -

it sneaks beside a shotgun rider freewheeling that bridge

I can't say much about for now, 

for my poem may not be as careless with its decisions as this guy reversing his tail into me, 

town holding me like a babe smeared by grey, dark already I see, 

train lights brighter than a blizzard mooching the breeze.

If I was someone else I'd hate them even more, 

that's just how logic works. 

Failure's overrated. 

Archimedes knew, a summer night's worth more with skulls scattered in the bush, 

than that sweaty boy who tugged at my hand saying let's go bitch.

War's part of our landscape now, the new breed of policeman's coming. 

My coffee had been cold about a year if I’d learned to count in old money,

and my florins fell harder to the taboo-shattered floor - than her heels 

had screeched across my chrome-mothered desert,

oh boy, nothing’s big in the cinemas no more, 

the hospitals are begging the dead to set their electricians free and when they do 

I'll arrive, egg down a shirt I've hardly worn more than twice,

my briefcase carrying absolution 

for those wicked dreams of Manhattan.

They say the collar matches the cuffs if the boy taunts his saviours with Sagittarius, 

it didn't please me to say I'd hated him so much murder would've been a breach of contract.

I'll say this much, Key Largo's real beautiful when its weather's playing dumb,

the raining shines on two-lane black tops, yellows and reds smudged through

a home in a dark Pollock, Picasso may turn less feral for;

I guess my left hook’s as weary as the jab from my right, nothing much was there to begin with, 

to drag my shadow home to what the wolves knew as the day and the night, 

Sonny Liston weeping down the wires, 

turpentine puddles -

those soot-breathing sisters of the apocalypse, so many, sadly so few -

gathering their pearls they hum eerie melodies, 

white light grabbing dresses they fill intentions with;

for when I see them I'll sing a sweet adieu, to a sailor who warned me about the evils of happiness, 

for a strand of hair I tugged from a muddy dirt-road, I'd intended to rebuild all again from, 

moon shining slippery smiles of soot-breathing sisters, hunting in packs of elsewhere's sorrow.

Daddy eats his gravy, got his shotgun by his knee, 

grabbing chunks of darkness with his fists, 

he begs Muddy Waters not to die -

hearing Belton Sutherland pure as the rust on the river, 

think I'll stop my wheels and listen, start a conversation with the moon,

the Devil is lonelier than the shit on my shoe

I hear almighty Jesus holler through the delta, the devil is lonelier than the shit on my shoe…

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.

First Class By Jake St. John

I signed my latest book

with pride 

and slid it in the envelope. 

I grabbed my keys 

and headed out 

to get some stamps

and make the drop. 

I pulled in, 

grabbed the mail 

from the passenger seat, 

and sauntered up

to the counter

waiting to be noticed.

She came out of the backroom

and greeted me.

The usual? She asked,

and handed me

my favorite beer

in a near frozen mug.

I had every intention 

of making it to the post office today,

but sometimes 

when passing your favorite dive bar

just like an expected delivery, 

there's a delay in transit.

Jake St. John has been referred to as “a neo-beat adventurer” who spends his time scratching down poems from aloft barstools and tree stumps scattered around New England. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including his latest, The 13th Round (Six Foot Swells Press, 2025). He is the editor of Elephant and is considered an original member of the New London School of Poets. His poems have appeared in print and online journals around the world.

His current book, The 13th Round is published through Six Ft. Swells Press and is available everywhere please pick yourself up a copy today.

https://www.amazon.com/13th-Round-Jake-St-John/dp/B0F2KBGR8M