Live Nude Poems

Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Chiron Review, Cream City Review, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Chair Review to name a few. His third book, Secret Histories, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press.

Billy
In the years since you took your own life
on angry nights I still stare down stars and wonder if angels feet run fast
or fly in the opposite direction of gunfire and heartbreak
of divorce and all the suicide children
who thought it was over before it even started.

Matthew Borczon is a writer from Erie Pa. He has published 11 books of poetry, the most recent Ghost Highway Blues is available through Alien Buddha Press. He is a navy sailor and a nurse to adults with developmental disabilities. He has four children who joyfully take up all his and his wife's free time.

re(member)
I remember myself piece
by piece. How
does a woman
forget
she wears perfume
to sleep?


Hold
With both hands I hold your words gently in a cup hidden in my heart.
Jyl Anais is a poet, visual artist, and forensic medium. Her work appears in Anthony Award nominated Protectors 2: Heroes, Nixes Mate Review, and Asylum Magazine among other publications. Originally from Trinidad, she now lives in the United States where she nurtures orchids and faces the blank page. Soft Out Spoken, her first collection of poetry, will be available this fall. Find her at jylanais.com.

Nostalgia and Ruin 70 pages ISBN: 1365118002 independently published Publication Date: May 31, 2016 $15/5.38 reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Cameron Mount's Nostalgia and Ruin is a great example of a transitional work. Mount is one half of the duo that runs the pulp magazine Broadswords and Blasters, and I get a sense that this book is very much the work of an excellent writer feeling out interesting ways what will become his permanent subject matter.   
"Spring Break, The Unnamed Key," an example from early in the book, sets up reader expectations and follows through in a satisfying manner.  Simple declarative phrases set off the first half of the poem: "we took;" "we made;"we fished and caught;" we piled;" and so on, followed by simple but rich detail that gives us the feel of what camping on this unnamed key means for the poem's inhabitants, simply going through a day. "It wasn't long/before the drunk/and tobacco high/sent us rolling/throug…

Visitations
I was ten That winter night When my brain Burned with fever And I lay Dreaming awake That you had come back From the firmament; An unwinged angel Sitting at my bedside Speaking words That sounded like fire In my ears. I don’t know If it was real anymore. Maybe it was just yearning To touch you once more The way the blind read braille; Or maybe it was just The hot syllables of sickness Wailing like sinners At a tent revival Behind my burning eyes. But whatever it was That night, with the snow Beginning to fall Your hand touched my skin And the fever broke.
Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. He is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi. His writing has appeared in HeartWood Literary Magazine, Driftwood Press, and Biostories, among others. His photographs have been published in Hobo Camp Review, Museum of Americana, Blue Hour Magazine, Synesthesia Literary Journal and Midwestern Gothic.

Agnes Vojta Porous Land Spartan Press March 2019 57 pages 978-1-950380-01-5 $15 Reviewed  by Rusty Barnes
Agnes Vojta's Porous Land is nearly textbook minimalism.. Every word seems created specifically for the task she sets it to perform in the poem. I don't mean minimalist to an extreme, but rather that there is no fat on the words. The overall effect is a bracing shiver of recognition at the natural world and our place in it, as well as how that world shapes our thoughts.
I found myself in a sort of dream-state the deeper I got into the collection. in the "Greening Begins from the Ground," Vojta sets up a scene not by telling us what is in the scene but instead what is not, in lovely simple phrases and lines: "Not in the high places/that still belong to winter/not on the barren ridges/where buzzards rest on bare branches,//but in the valleys". In the valleys she describes, with an Eastern feel, where "shy white flowers hide" in the manner of Japanese mas…