Sensitive Skin Best Of 2017
The Editors
Welcome! Time to ring in the old and ring
out the new. Or whatever. Here's the best of 2017 picks, from our editors and contributors. Remember, it didn't necessarily come out in 2017—it's just something we enjoyed in 201...
The Dark Side of the North Pole
Darius James
An excerpt from the novel, "Froggy Chocolates"
Froggie woke up curled upside down in a fetal-ball; pretzeled in a tangle of arms, legs, feet and elbows with his nose pinched between the split of another child’s bottom....
Stephen Shore – The Museum of Modern Art
Franklin Mount
A friend of mine once told me that his photography teacher admonished the class never to turn in a photograph of a sunset. Too obvious, too easy. How does one take a photograph that is beautiful, revelatory, and not repeat w...
Zombie Hef
Peter Marti
Zombie Hef from beyond the grave
grabs my old junk and yanks
Zombie Hef promises me nubile 20-year-old beauties but
one touch and they crumble into dust and gore
Zombie Hef points his dead pipe at me and leers over the...
6 PM ON THE BQE
Joel Allegretti
6 PM ON THE BQE
Waiting to exit,
a dozen cars deep,
I glance out
the driver-side
window and,
beyond six over-
worked lanes,
behold rolling
gray acres of
gravestones.
As the minutes
perish and blow
across ...
There is No Brooklyn Bound F Service
Jennifer Juneau
There is No Brooklyn Bound F Service
no F trains from this station, the sign says
at 42nd street & sixth avenue (where you spent your day)
to get to the lower east side (where you’ll spend your night)
you must take t...
The Opportunity of a Lifetime
Mike Hudson
The canyon was broken and hilly, with shallow arroyos cutting north to south and green agave plants and small stands of Joshua trees providing the only color there was against the relentless grey of the desert and the dirty ...
The Big Space Fuck
Kurt Vonnegut
The Big Space Fuck
KURT VONNEGUT / AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS, HARLAN ELLISON, ED., 1972
“What was the dirtiest story I ever wrote?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in Palm Sunday, his 1981 “autobiographical collage.” “Surel...
Confessions of a Wind-Up Doll (True Burlesque)
Peter Marra
Confessions of a Wind-Up Doll
(True Burlesque)
There is always beauty in the hissing sounds.
The alternating camera speeds reveal a long-lashed woman;
touching experimental films, she has a forceful birth
to destroy ...
Paris Scratch vs. NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor
bart plantenga
Introducing 6 new video snapshots, 3 each from Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor, which will hopefully illustrate the fortuitous strategy of the 2 books, a basic, not-well-thought-out premise of wandering & do...
Head Without a Body
Marc Olmsted
I can't remember when I first met Vinny but by first memory he was already using heroin, as was Mark F. and now Peter. It was basically an East Coast thing that was kept very on the D/L out in the Wild West, so I never saw ...
Why Sing?
John J. Trause
John J. Trause’s book of traditional and experimental poems, Why Sing?, presents a literary world ebbing between the call of the past and the allure of the future. Why Sing? seeks to create a new international and multicul...
The Trumpeters
Michael Rothenberg
The Trumpeters
Cowards in white sheets, the skinhead cops
and racists, the religious working men
and women who think a woman’s place is
in the kitchen and children are to be seen
and not heard, and believe people of...
Macy Dreams of Red and Blue
Mac Blauner
There is the whoop of a siren, and suddenly red and blue lights play over the backs of her closed eyelids. She lies in bed. She knows it’s the cops. This is always how she wakes when they come to her father’s house in th...
Pierced by Night-Colored Threads, by Dean Kostos, reviewed
Ron Kolm
Pierced by Night-Colored Threads by Dean Kostos, published by MadHat Press, (Asheville, North Carolina, 2017). Reviewed by Ron Kolm
I’ve read a fair amount of poetry; I was the editor of The Evergreen Review for thr...
