Live Nude Poems

Three sort of sonnets.

Carol's book Sixty Some has just been published, each poem a 45 second/up to two minute peaceful meditational space on the page. I've known of Carol's work for years, and though we've never met, I always look for her name in the poetry publishing world; I know it'll be quality. This book is different than many others, in that she's quietly released it with no monetary expectations--it is poetry, after all :-)-- in free PDF and soon-to-be MP3 format. There are dollar-attached versions available for many e-book platforms as well. I encourage everyone--all of you out there--to check out her blog and her publishing site and to buy an electronic copy to support her. There's really no reason this idea shouldn't spread. As for the inevitable stigma attached to self-publishing, I'd simply note that Carol's work has publicly signified for years, and questions of quality and professionalism have already been answered. If you know the work is good, and yo

I like my poems; I guess that's all I can say about them. They're not for everybody. When the Wrong Words Get Said Car-tire against gravel, rough smell of beer and roasted corn, heat-lightning like a sine wave loops across a pit of gray sky between pole-light and the quiet barn; the low of cows, moonshine slips in like a tongue through the treeless hedge fence; the empty faces of women glow, a child in shirtsleeves gums an apple while the mutt runs a rough circle around the feet of your friends, pissing every time someone raises a hand. Your wife says fuck it. Goes to bed. Shuts the door. Says go ahead and drink. Be with your friends. Wrong words get said. Your head breaks like a fist against a stone wall, knuckles feeding fire. Somewhere the swollen lips of angels call you home, but before you go smash-mouthed in to the house to watch your kids breathe, stagger into your marital bed, you tongue-kiss a seventeen-year-old, realize the sweetness i

I'll be reading prose here, and possibly a few poems. Hope you can make it. What:  Thursday Theatre of Words & Music When:  September 24rd @ 7pm Where:  Cornerstone Books @ 45 Lafayette St. in Salem, MA @ http://www.cornerstonebooks-salem.com/   Who:  Rusty Barnes, Lilly Roberts, and KL Pereira Contact: thursdaytheatreWM@gmail.com Thursday's Theatre of Words & Music features three to four established and emerging writers and artists to read/display/perform their work for the public at Cornerstone Books in Salem, MA on the fourth Thursday of every month at 7pm.  An open mic will be held following featured writers/artists--artists are chosen by first-come-first-serve. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- September artists include: Rusty Barnes has published fiction, poetry and non-fiction in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction. Rusty’s

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

  from catholicboy.com I'm not really a fan of Carroll --I admit, though, I haven't read anything beyond the Basketball Diaries --but these remembrances by the former editor of the Paris Review make me want to check him out more fully. A poet departs, too soon, and there is a void that will not be filled. From somewhere deep and old the tears well up in the dark night. When I met Jim in 1967 he was seventeen. He had been leading a triple life: high school All-American basketball star, heroin addict/street hustler, poet. On scholarship at the elite Ivy league prep academy Trinity School (alums include Humphrey Bogart, Truman Capote, Ivana Trump, Yo Yo Ma, John McEnroe, Aram Saroyan), he had shown unusual abilities on the court. He had played against the city's best (including Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who had starred at Tower Memorial, a school in Jim's own Inwood Park neighborhood). His skills had drawn the attention of college scouts. The turning p

Here are a couple poems I published this past winter. I hope you like them, and furthermore, I hope you'll go and check out the other writers in the Scapegoat Review . About the poems , yeah. Uh. I am nostalgic for the entropy of some aspects of my childhood.Somewhere along the way, as many of us do, I settled like silt in a pond, and these poems help me blow shit up again as I remember and redact and fake the words into remembrances/poems both real and imagined. The persona in these poems is a complex motherfucker, or thinks of himself that way. It's a good thing he's got a low-IQ translator like me. Abandonment I watched Uncle Walt pull a fake tittie out of his inner flannel shirt, present it to my father like a gift he ought to bow and scrape for. Dad laughed and pulled at his beer, I went off to watch the older kids fucking behind the old milk house on the hay left over from years and years of farming but the farm had been abandoned—plows still set in

Night Train Magazine: Read It Now! Editor, poet and writer of fiction. Like most of us in the literature racket, Rusty Barnes wears many hats. He is the co-founding editor of Night Train Magazine , hosts numerous literary blogs, and is busy revising his novel. Still, though, he found the time to answer our questions about the business of literary magazines. Sidestepping inquiries into what makes a story unique, or which types of fiction he prefers, this interview focuses on the schematics of literary publishing, Web versus print journals, and when, if ever, editing a literary magazine is a rational endeavor. .

Amy Holman is a writer I don't know at all personally except in the way you tangentially know people who are into the same things you are via emails and such. I published her story Saving a Sister in Night Train some years back, and somehow I forgot or never knew she was a poet as well. Following links today gave me a journal called the November 3rd Club , where I found her poem, a great one. I wish I'd published it. So read some Amy Holman; you won't regret it. The long lines don't wrap correctly here, so you'll need to go to the November 3rd Club site to see the whole. Pastor Among Suspects in Illegal Snake Bust Venomous snakes seized in an undercover sting, AP indulges. 42 copperheads, 11 timber rattlesnakes, one western diamondback rattlesnake, one fundamentalist pastor, two cobras, one puff adder, nine true believers, and three cottonmouth water moccasins. This reminds me of a telephone call one evening in which my mother spoke of an ancestor—one

I'm looking forward to reading Linda Annas Ferguson's Dirt Sandwich from Press 53 this weekend. And digging into Kenneth Rexroth's mammoth collected at some point. I have to write some poems and get contracts out for the new NT issue due 9/15, too. I just got a bunch of chaps from Faux Press I forgot about till just now, so it should be a good weekend. If I can just get some alone time. Here's one of mine, which many people in the world will reenact come Friday or Saturday night. :-) It was originally published by Mikael Covey in the journal Lit Up . The Ex-Boyfriend Checks In on Saturday Night by Cell Phone Remind me never to call you again after you get home late, for the familiar fear of the deadbolt noise, the shifty creak of your linoleum floor, the way you throw your jacket over the sofa and slide from your shoes like a tap dancer long and slow, the way you rattle the bowl with beer-piss knowing that I’ll crawl between your ankles anyway, par

It's not poetry. I serve the two masters of poetry and fiction about equally, though, so I'll mention the story and leave it alone from there. Crater was asleep on the couch when he heard a tub thumping black noise in his dream. He knew the sound was real the way you know in any dream, you wake up panting, feeling for your jeans, hoping it’s not the end of the world. He wondered what day it was. Having no job, he didn’t think about it much. “Cass. What the fuck you doing?” Crater stood up and hopped into his pants on his way to the bathroom. Cass had upended half of a plastic 55 gallon drum into the old claw foot tub. Three bags of ice lay on top of the toilet like bags of broken glass, next to four cases of beer on the floor among the dust bunnies, bought from the generic store, in white cans with black lettering, and marked BEER. .