Combust By Ben Newell

Hitchhikers gone

the way of the payphone, 

the way of the cigarette commercial,

the way of Farrah’s feathered hair—

CCTV cameras on every corner, 

potential victims wielding iPhones 

which might as well be tasers, 

overprotective helicopter parents 

hovering like Hueys on a strafing run—

Your serial killing heroes had it easy,

police badges and switchblade knives 

for sale between a grainy centerfold 

and Bukowski’s latest rape story  

because even the Ford Pinto seemed 

like a good idea before it exploded. 

Ben Newell lives in Mississippi where he works as a bookseller and freelance writer. His poems have appeared online and in print, most recently at Fixator Press and Cajun Mutt Press. He taught high school English for one day. 

Gentleman Caller By Jeff Weddle

I was young, so I drank three beers 

to get my courage up. 

It was ridiculous, of course, 

but I had been a guest 

in her apartment before, 

sadly innocent, 

and it was near. 

I walked the quiet,

nighttime streets 

practicing what I would say.

So, I arrived. I knocked. I waited.

She came to the door all undone

and, of course, was not alone. 

The walk home took a long time. 

In fact, I don’t think I’ve made it there yet. 

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

Christine By Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

Spending the morning 

with the ants and fallen

leaves in the parking lot

at the Parkway Plaza.

Drinking coffee and a

glazed old fashioned 

donut. It is probably 

not the wisest choice

for me, but I make flawed

choices many times.

Waiting for the second

battery charge from my

insurance in three hours.

I guess I gambled on

half an hour of running

the car would be enough.

In the meantime an ant

crawled up my neck and

another ran across my

cell phone screen. I pinched

one and flicked the other.

I became a killer and

committed an assault. 

The ants must have fell

on me from tree above,

kamikaze style. I feel bad

for what I did. Frustrated,

with this 2002 black 

El Dorado Cadillac, and

its back break lights that

stay on even when the 

engine is turned off. It

has been happening for

weeks. The mechanic 

kept it for days trying to

get a proper diagnostic 

check, or so he tells me.

It has to be a faulty part,

a switch. Many laypersons

have told me so. An extensive

Google search has told me

many things. I am thinking

of naming the car Christine.

It seems to have a mind of

its own. If it was running well,

this poem would not exist.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal was born in Mexico, lives in California, and

works in the mental health field in Los Angeles, CA. His poems have appeared

in Blue Collar Review, Crossroads, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, The Rye

Whiskey Review, Unlikely Stories, and Yellow Mama Webzine.

STUDIO 54 by Susan Isla Tepper

Behind the velvet ropes

we waited impatiently

freezing—

But that’s okay

‘cause once they finally

let us in (and we

were dressed for it, baby)

well half-dressed—

everyone else will already

be blotto

sex will perfume the air

and we will jump

into the mad fracas

forgetting about tomorrow altogether.

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

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

It Is What It Is By John Greiner

I’m on my deathbed

writing the end of the earth

while the usual all and sundry

are off to work.

Some genius is talking about

Rashomon and it’s not me

in spite of my St. John the Divine

 vanity.

Kurosawa is long dead,

but you already know that.

This deathbed isn’t worth much

because I’ll soon be late for clock in.

I want to go to Texas or Japan

for the apocalypse,

but who is to say that I’ll still be here

to see Texas or Japan go up in smoke?

I think that the Alamo would be a great

place to witness the finale of this world.

Davy Crockett was well aware of this. 

I’d love that my end would be 

with a Lawson’s egg salad sandwich

 in hand.

We’ve been down this path before.

It’s more horrific

than the sentiments of this poem.

Someone will say that

I am insensitive

and someone else will say that

I am impolite

and someone in the ascendancy

will just slit my throat.

It is what it is.

John Greiner is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer living in Queens, NY. He was educated at the New School for Social Research.  Greiner's work has appeared in Sand, Empty Mirror, Sensitive Skin, Unarmed, Street Valueand numerous other magazines. His chapbooks, broadsides and collections of poetry and short stories include  Turnstile Burlesque (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2017), The Laundrymen (Wandering Head Press, 2016), Bodega Roses (Good Cop/Bad Cop Press, 2014),Modulation Age (Wandering Head Press, 2012), Shooting Side Glances(ISMs Press, 2011) and Relics From a Hell’s Kitchen Pawn Shop (Ronin Press, 2010). 

Grass hopper on a steel table By Mike Zone

I never lost the dream of paranoid magic

Beefy dad fishing

Falling through this beautiful chaos

My dead lover writes to me on steam

covered bathroom mirrors as I wash my 

freshly shaved scalp with her favorite

beer

Mike Zone is the Editor in Chief of Dumpster Fire Press, the author of Fuck You: A Fucking Poetry Chap, Shedding Dark Places (almost), One Hell of a Muse , as well as coauthor of The Grind. A frequent contributor to Alien Buddha Press and Mad Swirl. His work has been featured in: Horror Sleaze Trash, Better Than Starbucks, Piker Press, Punk Noir Magazine, Synchronized Chaos, Outlaw Poetry and Cult Culture magazine.

Old Friends Meet for a Glass By Trish Saunders

After we praise our fish tacos, drain our margarita glasses, 

ask after each other’s jobs (oh, forgot you don’t have one)

find other ways to fill the silence—

Walk you to your car? The sidewalk

looks friendly for once. 

Seeing how quickly your car passes

mine heading for the onramp, tell myself

I feel nothing but relief, another 

obligatory visit finished, not

minding any more than a bus shelter

cares about cars whizzing past,

though that might be a slight 

exaggeration on my end. 

Trish Saunders has poems published or forthcoming in The Chiron Review, The Rye Whiskey Review, Main Street Rag, Book of Matches, The Galway Review, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. She lives in Seattle, formerly Honolulu. 

Forever Your Maddest Of Editors By John Patrick Robbins

A lost little writer summoned me not so long ago, sending me an instant message.

"Greetings, John. My name is who gives a fuck, because it's four in the goddamn morning.

I was wondering how one does submit to your lovely publication?

I'm a huge fan and have been reading it for a while."

I typed back.

"Yes, and apparently you failed to notice in all your awe of reading this monstrosity that has become the bane of my existence.

On the fucking annoying ass zines home page, there is a little section that reads submissions.

That describes this intricate process that involves you leaving me the fuck alone because when the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four and my hands are on the gun.

It is probably best to leave me the fuck alone you stupid bitch.... okay!"

There was a pause, as first, like any true modern idiot, there was a wow emoji. Followed by a profound message as you would expect from any lit person who apparently forgot to take their meds or had consumed too much paste and crayons as a child.

"You know you don't have to be so rude, I mean your magazine really published some low-class work like that piece yesterday from that pervert, I can't remember his name."

"Oh, that would be me, and thank you. I really think my ode to fine asses and unionized hookers is really refined. 

No?"

"You're a dick."

I felt myself stiffen slightly as once again I did love a woman handing me such deeply engaging compliments."

After a moment, I hearted her comment and sent her the zines email along with some basic guidelines and a poo emoji because I wasn't sure if it was shit or ice cream, and after smoking my prescription crack, I was really getting the munchies.

And like any self-respecting writer would do, who I had deeply offended.

She sent me her submissions in a matter of seconds.

And that, children, is how poetry zines work in a nutshell.

As I promptly published that crap because the magazine was really an ancient demon that demanded work every day, or it would never free my soul from eternal damnation.

I'm kidding, it's because she has a fantastic rack, and it was after all sexual harassment  Saturday, and although I wore my finest mini skirt and heels, still the editor of my magazine didn't pay any attention to me.

Ugh, men, they're all a bunch of piggish bastards!

No wonder I was still a lesbian after all these years....

Poetry, yeah, I could have taken a different route,  maybe landed a real job.

To have the extravagant things like a home that wasn't a cardboard box behind the Walmart so I could steal their Wi-Fi, but I had Poetry.

Fucking poetry and goddamed poets asking stupid fucking questions I exploit to pen poems to post and fellow editors to snicker at and question if I really am the devil.

Dear Santa, please give me a pistol for Christmas so I can shoot the outside speaker that won't stop playing that fucking Christmas music.

Or do I have to pose as a sick man  once again to have the Make-A-Wish Foundation tell me that dealing with poets who drain your very life force didn't make me eligible for their services.

And even if it did, they really couldn't arrange Sabrina Carpenter to have sex with me.

Oh the tyranny, memories all alone in the moonlight.

Cheers, children, stay crazy.

Sincerely,

The Mad Editor.

John Patrick Robbins, hates humanity yet enjoys long conversations with himself and his beloved house plant Mitch.

He drinks only the the finest of whiskeys and smokes the highest quality crack that his next door dealer does supply.

He pens Gothic stories and poems when not dealing with life force draining writers constantly asking him stupid questions like.

"Hey John, I know your busy but would you mind reading my 5,00000 page poetry manuscript its a book inspired by the voices in my head and dedicated to my  AI girlfriend whom is currently not talking to me because even she thinks my poetry sucks."

When not trying to find a suitable liver donor he enjoys sleeping endless hours due to severe depression and lack of a suitable light fixture to hang his fat ass from.

He pens deep works of art but still must pen these idiotic poop,poop, fart writes to amuse his audience of stoners and burnouts who believe while he is a total recluse and borderline serial killer of course he hates everyone but them.

He currently is on vacation at the Shady Pines mental health facility where he specializes in fingerprinting and plotting a riot to escape.

He likes boobies and fine art created by even finer asses.

He loves you all minus the love.

You got to the end of this which means you deserve a reward so please take a clock radio into the shower because it's a hell of a buzz.

Cheers and the voices are correct everyone is out to get you.

Skál.

even now By Keith Pearson

she flickers

thru my mind 

a drive-in movie

from 1975.

 

remembering her voice

like an am radio

sweet soul music

glowing in the dark.

 

bare summer skin

warm as cake

water dripping down

like diamonds.

 

everything was borrowed

except what i kept.

keith pearson was born and raised in new hampshire and works at a local high school in the math department.

 

New Year By Jake St. John

I'm at the pool hall

and just finished prepping 

for the inclement weather. 

I’m reading some poems 

while the bikers 

hit on the barely legal bartender.

I got the last beer 

from the keg 

before it kicked.

It appears 

I’m starting the year

getting lucky.

Jake St. John lives in the woods on the edge of the Salmon River. He is the author of several collections of poetry including Lips Leave Scars (with Jenn Knickerbocker, Whiskey City Press, 2023) Ring of Fog (Holy and Intoxicated Publications, 2022), Night Full of Diamonds (Whiskey City Press, 2021), and Lost City Highway (A Jabber Publication, 2019). He is the editor of Elephant and is considered an original member of the New London School of poetry. 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