CONTROLLING THE ATMOSHPERE by Jason Hardung

For Steve Paul

Today the sky-
stretched like a human body
in a mid-evil torture device.
I walk and wonder who I will be
I wonder who you would’ve been
I smoke my cigarettes
I watch porn
I envy the passion of the murderer.
I can barely get out of bed.
I have learned criminals
believe in karma more than anyone
they just try to out run it.

And still I slowed down just enough
to carry your casket
out the church doors
into the rain.
They said that rain was something
you did for a laugh
but I wasn’t sure if
you are allowed to control the weather
so soon after death.
Manipulating the atmosphere is like a ten year anniversary
it’s like a watch with your name inscribed
or a gift certificate to Applebees.
The atmosphere takes time.

Being the addict I am
I thought it was God punishing me
for bringing my heroin heart
to a holy place but
I couldn’t say goodbye to you
without it.

Some day
I will do it right
no god no drugs
just you and me
I promise.

WHAT WOULD RUMI DO? by Alan Britt

Friend, I wish you wouldn’t do that.

Friend, and I speak from experience,
you need to warn me
before arriving at my doorstep.

Perhaps it’s better this way,
no festering neglects,
those dreaded sick roses.

And, perhaps, finally I’ll ride
that beautiful black and white pinto
I’ve been dreaming about
these past six months.

Perhaps I’ll even squeeze
all eight silk legs, friend, through the neck
of your favorite perfume bottle
then squirt my defensive ink
from a purple felt-tip pen.

Yeah, sure,
and perhaps someday Jesus,
mistaken for a homeless man gripping a blue snow cone,
will share his holy melancholy
with the thirsty masses.

before the murders by Ross Vassilev

he was born
a bastard.

his mother
sold him to
a waitress
for the price
of a beer.

then she
got sent off
to prison.

him too
for armed
robbery and
car theft.

held a razor
to another
boy’s throat
while he
raped him.

in California
some hippie
told him
about peace
and love

and Manson
told the bum
that he was
full of shit.

he was right.

Two Poems by A.D. Winans

POEM FOR AN OLD LOVER

She started off front-page news
Became a crossword puzzle
And then the obituary column until
IOU’s became her calling card
And debts accumulated like autumn leaves
Buried in the bones of mutilated lovers
A frail starving vampire searching
For an open wound
Leaving behind wolf tracks
That courted the face of dawn
An angry cat with arched back
Hissing at that which she never knew

HAIKU

Blues song inside my head
Ambulance siren screams into the distant night
Umpire sweeps off home plate

Santa Fix by John Hartness

This ain’t no Bedford Falls
and I’m nobody’s Jimmy Stewart.
Nothing happens when a bell rings,
except another nickel in a red bucket
outside a Wal-Mart while some fat bitch
pushing a groaning shopping cart with one busted wheel
tosses change so she doesn’t have to really change.
Capra’s vaselined lens doesn’t stand a chance
in the sharp-edged daylight we’re stuck in,
and you’re no tramp-stamped Donna Reed
shaking on a bare mattress
with a trail of snot and tears
puddling on your pillow
while I go out looking for Santa Fix
and an icicle of a very certain flavor.
There are no wise men living at The Lake apartments,
and the guiding lights on Rosehaven flash blue and red.
My mistletoe hangs in the mission tonight
but tomorrow is another day
as another bad old movie used to say.
The kind I watched with my grandma
when I was a kid
when I still dreamed
when I still hoped
that tomorrow wasn’t just another today.

THE BLACK CAT by F.N. Wright

there is a black cat
she’s a feral that has
taken up residence
outside my bathroom window

suns herself on a long
unused work out bench
rusting away like an
abandoned pickup truck
in some farmer’s back forty

low crawls her sway-back ass
when on the prowl
green eyes as sexy as any
woman’s I’ve ever known

trusts me up to a point
but keeps her distance
if I come too close to her

I rigged her up a dry spot
between the two sheds
behind the bench
lined it with some old clothes
put a porch of of sorts on it
to keep the milk I set out
for her every afternoon
from the rain

one day she will disappear
like all the women in my
life have done or crawl off & die
without me knowing it
instead of dying in my arms
like dogs I’ve loved have

I will miss her & continue
to pour her afternoon milk
out of habit when that
day comes

but there will be one thing
different than losing a woman
you love or a dog who
curled up in your heart one day
made it his or her home
then died or was killed by one
of life’s bad hands she deals
on a daily basis

no heartache or tears
just a lonesome feeling
that will fade as the milk
sours.

found poem, TIME, 2/1/10

Long Gay Line

The Port-au-Prince
cemetery has no
more room, but the
dead keep coming.
Chickens flap free
among the graves
& in the city
scavenging
what they can

Flash Fiction by M.P. Powers

The Drunken Submission Process

It was burning in my hands – my salvation – a poem I’d written after drinking much beer and several glasses of Spanish wine. I shoved it in an envelope with four other poems and tried to print legibly the P.O. Box of the magazine that was going to save me. I kept screwing up the numbers. The four kept looking like a nine and the seven a one, and there was something unbecoming about the blue cat’s paw sitting on the flap, so I trashed the envelope and began again. This time I spilled the Spanish over the whole thing and had to reprint all my poems. Then, scrawling the numbers – the seven, the five, remembering my fourth grade teacher singling me out in class and telling me she was denying me the privilege of using a number two pencil. She said I pressed down on it too hard, my handwriting was too bold; that you weren’t supposed to be able to see the engravings of the words on the underside of the paper. She subjected me to this fairy number twopointfive pencil that was made of a harder lead so the print was lighter and the letters pranced across the page faintly, like little dismembered insect legs. I didn’t like it at all. I remember crying about the whole degrading scenario at least once (I was always crying in class), but eventually I just adapted to it. My spiritual shortcoming. It was there on the envelope as I stuffed the poems in. My fingers, my nerves, nostrils and skin. It was all a part of me – my liver, my hair. I rushed down to the post office, fed the box and felt much better. Just getting it out and into the night made me feel like something was going on, but when I read the poem over the next day, sober, I saw it for what it was – a pisspoor error in judgment – pathetic!

I deleted about a third of it, gutted the rest, and after about an hour of sweating over it, a little hope leaked in. I spent some more time on it, changed the shape. Finally I printed it out, held it there in the light, and my hands started to feel the flame again.

I had to get it out there… My salvation. I folded it three times, slid it in a business-sized envelope and then the letters, the M-P-P-o-w-e-r-s, the boldprint psychoscript, my fourth grade teacher rearing her awful head high up in my imagination.

I mailed the poem along with a small throatclearing apology stating I’d somehow sent the “wrong version.” Somehow it got mixed in with the others, and somehow, someway, this change would make a difference.

a letter to the cougar in the grocery store by Steve Calamars

You were wearing a pair of red heels, blue jeans, a low-cut red shirt and a black sweater tied around your waist.
The sweater tied around your waist is what caused me to take notice as you walked towards me.  I could see that you had a flat stomach and a slim waist.  I could see that you had thick thighs and full calves.
I knew instantly that the sweater was being used as a device to conceal something that you were ashamed of.
When you past me, I stopped and pretended to look at the cantaloupes.  I adjusted my eyes and looked over at you.  As I thought, the sweater was being used to conceal, but honestly it was useless.
There was no hiding the fact that you had a phat, juicy ass.  I smirked to myself.  My pupils traced the contours of your ass, down along your thick hamstrings, along your round calves, finishing at your gleaming red high-heels.
I smirked to myself again and couldn’t believe that you were ashamed of an ass so perfect.  You didn’t understand that 99% of the straight men strolling the planet love a woman with a juicy ass and some thighs.
And you in particular are especially loved now days.   You’re such a rarity.  A white girl with a ghetto booty.
You see, most white women I know spend hours on a treadmill to “get in shape”, and in a few months they are reduced to sickening slumps of skin and bone.  They completely forget the fact that guys like curves.
And here you were trying to conceal your perfect, couldn’t be duplicated even with a cloning-machine, kinky-girl curves.
You made me think of Nina Hartley.  With your blonde hair pulled up, your black-framed glasses, your ass popping out of your jeans in those heels.
I watched you till you turned into the cereal aisle and were out of sight.
I should have said something.
If I ever get the chance to see you again, I’ll say something next time.
I’ll try to make you feel comfortable.  I’ll try to get you some place a little more private than the sales floor of a grocery store.
I’ll try to get you down to your panties and do what I can to get you to understand that you have nothing to be ashamed of—

ROAD WORK by Zachary Whalen

these streets are paved
with the bones
of your piss-stained
existence

cops, animals
trees falling on
rotten teeth
by the mouthful

our bloodlust fantasies collide
quarter tank, eyes askew
brain cells dwindling

just one more derelict machine,
built for love,
stalled out
in the left-turn lane.