they always want me by Scott Ferry

-after Lillian Necakov

to buy gold refinance my ulcers

keep a generator muttering new manifestos

in my basement keep cans of lima beans and cash

enough for 15 youtube craniotomies when the war or the riots

or the asteroids never hit

 

but what does come is this mayonnaise body travelling through lists

what does come is this not listening to my daughter as she tells

me about what the sky looks like underwater

what does come is the numbing of the nipples

dry of milk what does come is a long afternoon

trying not to sleep in a mannequin bath

what does come is coffee which doesn’t coffee

and liquor i can’t kiss

 

when the sun unzips i will be already shaved and copied

a rooted prop growing under the earth mirroring each

of my missteps but now the beetles have chewed off the warning

labels and the seeds have gone to seed and the maggots fly

unwinged in the broth but i have safety goggles

and i have all of you to hold from down here

still growing upward lifting with

these lilting prayers these

greenveined psalms

in my wrists

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN. He has recent work in the American Journal of Poetry, Misfit, and Spillway. His second book, Mr. Rogers kills fruit flies, is available from Main St. Rag. You can find more of his work @ ferrypoetry.com.

A Demon More Demanding by Dennis Moriarty

Between my damp lips a fat spliff glows,
A pin head of light
At the tip of darkness, the sweet and pungent
Smell of a peat fire burning slowly
In the winter hearth.

I saw such a fire once in a house in rural
Kerry
Where even the dead and the lonely danced.
I got wasted
On Guinness and Mountain Dew, high on
Irish rebel songs,
Stoned on the rich peaty smoke that cast
It’s dark shadow over my lungs,
Woke up two days later in an agony of contrition,
My body berating my head for it’s weakness.

Between my damp lips the fat spliff splutters
Extinguishing the light,
Abandoning me at the tip of darkness where
Abstinence lies in wait.
A demon more demanding than addiction.

Dennis Moriarty was born in London, England and now lives in Wales. Married with five grown up offspring Dennis likes walking the dog in the mountains, reading and writing.

In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and went to county Cork in Ireland to read his work at the international poetry festival. Dennis has had poems featured in many publications including Blue nib, Our poetry archive, Setu bilingual, The passage between and others.

Blindfold by Puma Perl

Vivid pinks
and yellows
slip in
between the slats

Half asleep,
I grab the phone
Raise the shade
Take pictures
of the rising sun

Thousands of mornings
Thousands of photographs

I no longer bother
to wear my glasses
Sometimes
I stick the camera
out the window
without looking,
sensing
the general direction

Hoping
that it doesn’t fall
as I move my thumb
away from the lens

You see
with your brain,
not your eyes

Maybe, 
if I wear
a blindfold
while I write,
poems,
astonishing as
sunrises,
will magically
appear.

Photo by Ellen Berman

Puma Perl is a poet and writer, with five solo collections in print. The most recent is Birthdays Before and After (Beyond Baroque Books, 2019.) She is the producer/creator of Puma’s  Pandemonium, which brings spoken word together with rock and roll, and she performs regularly with her band Puma Perl and Friends. She’s received three New York Press Association awards in recognition of her journalism, and is the recipient of the 2016 Acker Award in the category of writing.

Eye Of The Beholder by Brian Rihlmann

sitting in a strange bar
in a strange town
in Oregon someplace 
nicely buzzed 
my tongue loosened
and chatting it up
with the locals
and somehow the conversation turns
to nuclear weapons 
and I remark how beautiful 
a mushroom cloud 
truly is—
that glorious fireball
rising like a flaming erection 
into the atmosphere 
and boy—
does he take offense to that!
That’s fucked up, man...
you’re fucked up!
he’s drunk and so
it’s useless to explain 
I’m speaking in purely 
aesthetic terms
and that I’m well aware
of the horrors 
of the A-Bomb—
after all...
I DID read Hiroshima 
in Jr. High....
but he goes on 
berating me until finally
I say—Fuck you and fuck this
and I walk out into the night
and drunk drive
back to my campsite 
down an unmarked dirt road 
I start a fire and sit 
watching its beautiful flames dance 
as no mortal man or woman 
ever could 

 

Brian Rihlmann lives in Reno, Nevada. His work has appeared in many magazines, including The Rye Whiskey Review, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag, The American Journal Of Poetry, and New York Quarterly. He has authored three collections of poetry, most recently “A Screaming Place,” (2021) by Cajun Mutt Press.

Flat Life by Mickey J. Corrigan

The woman drags her shadow
around the room in circles
nothing stinks like a pile
of unwritten verse.
The man comes in late
to a violation
a black electricity that jolts
the kind of violence that destroys
their waxing future
launching the next phase 
a wafer thin moon
fated to blankness like paper.
A woman folding diapers
blood simmering to a furious boil
up to her bony neck in hate
words that ease into the hard saddle
of the wilderness horse
she will ride across rocky graves
soon, too soon.
But for now, incensed, inebriated
she drags one foot behind her
the other nailed tight
to the waxy floorboards 
of her doomed circumstance.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals and chapbooks. In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released Florida Man. Her novel The Physics of Grief puts the fun back in funerals while taking a serious look at the process of mourning (QuoScript, UK, 2021).

Burroughs in the Back by PW Covington

For a long, damned run there
I could have sworn
That it was Billy Burroughs- hitchhiker
Riding stoned in my backseat
A faint, rear-view, reflection
Of decades old cologne

But, when I looked again
It was just a grease stain
In my mirror 
And, I remembered

I now drive a pickup-truck
And haven't picked up a hitchhiker
In years...

:

   PW Covington is a Pushcart-nominated poet and writer. He writes in the Beat tradition of the North American highway.

   More at www.PWCovington.com

Along Time by John Greiner

Century shocked out
to here, another year,
    uneasy,
    uneven,
    rattling
along, time straining
for ever again
further along.
Come back
shrieking
I am naked
as the day
I was born.

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).