Poem
Suspect Device
Michael Carter
for Seamus Heaney
In a cold stone cabin
In a deserted Cill Rialaig solstice-tide,
West wind wailing through drafty rafters,
Enounced aloud “Hrothgar Skyldinga”
& your Beowulf by turf-light,
Huddled in checkered ...
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Poem
Flack from Taylor
Taylor Mead
A President who makes war
Against and on Behalf of the
Worst of the Arab world.
Who sells the country to the
Japanese government and its subsidized
corporations.
Who is a mealy-mouthed lying bastard
Banker.
W...
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Poem
I’ve Got My Shiny Kitten
Sharon Mesmer
— for Yun Peng
Hell yeah I’m skinny.
My body is COVERED in skin!
But I’ve got my shiny kitten
and I am not the same person I used to be.
Shopping naked with my shiny kitten
is like finding out that Beyonc�...
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Art
off on grand boulevard
Norman Douglas
1.
fuck you fuck you fuck
you scribbled the self-
proclaimed, officially
acclaimed, pharmaceutically
addle-brained bourgeois
poet in morning electric’s light.
okay, i added the burgher bit
because i’m talking cit...
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Poem
The Viewing
David Rattray
The wife spoke to me
by name:
“Thanks so much for coming,
David.” Some didn’t
want to see him. One
wouldn’t even go in. I did.
I touched his hand.
It was as if he were only
sleeping, soft and warm.
I never ...
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Poem
Call Up
John Farris
Today the world is wet & white: everybody tries
to throw the snow back (a girl, determined, handles a shovel
gingerly, sends a pile of it scattering; it flies
to the court below, exposing a red-stained Kreolite
stair, ...
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Poem
Kiss of Kind
Carl Watson
Virtue and Fear
Stare at each other in the mirror,
They feed upon & tease each other
Until neither one remembers what it used to be.
That mirror’s name is Vanity,
It can make a body live in harmony ...
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Art
Last Supper in an Airport
Ronald B. Richardson
Dawdle. Doodle. What to do?
Spill an alphabet, spill a stew.
Fire the cauldron, eat the bread,
soon those waiting will be dead.
Down the supper, drink the curse;
no matter how dull, death is worse.
--Ron Richar...
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Poem
Landscape with a Bear in It Somewhere
Rebecca Weiner Tompkins
The limber late light
travels across the ridge
where the bear climbed.
Even with my head thrown back
I still can’t take in the tops
of the tall pointed trees
up there. A friend’s death
is flickering in and out
of...
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Poem
For an Infant in the Throes of a Fatal Condition
Robert C. Hardin
Cirrhosis isn’t half as bad
As maladies you might have had.
A failing liver strains the muscles
But liberates the red corpuscles.
When voided kidneys soak one’s dollies,
Relief, like spasms, comes in volleys.
Rope-...
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Art
Erasure, The Lotus Eaters, Ulysses*
Larissa Shmailo
BY LORRIES ALONG SIR JOHN ROGERSON’S QUAY
past Nichols’ the undertaker’s. Eleven, daresay.
Sent his right hand with slow grace over his hair:
Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere?
Ah, in the dead s...
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Poem
Some of My Friends
Max Blagg
“Some of my friends don’t know who they belong to.”
Dipsomanic daytrippers kicking it
in small motels on desert mornings
dancing a june bug sonata
percussive staccato legato
flowing smooth and certain as a rive...
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Poem
Linda
Eddie Woods
LINDA
“songs like a practiced whore
who turns away from no one
but the one who loves her.”
--Djuna Barnes
How deathly strange it all seems—
especially here on the thin edge of passion,
...
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Poem
Swallow the Evidence
Wanda Phipps
Inspired by The Limits of Control, a film by Jim Jarmusch
my mind hops back
to the century trees
of Cabo de Gata
a woman in platinum wig
white cowboy hat
white trench coat
and cowboy boots
covered in leopard’s ...
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Poem
the perfect child
steve dalachinsky
i am a descendant of those that have survived for centuries
& my mother wanted me to be the perfect child
i am still amazed that people know how to make doors
their ingenuity baffles me
way beyond that of a beaver & its...
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