Chuka Susan Chesney

Post Mastectomy Shoppe

On Brand Boulevard in a suburb of Angels

is a corset shop a lingerie store

Inside you’ll find along with sexy bras

a full array of breast prostheses

I visit the shop with my friend Alexis

after her mastectomy

as she recovers

The breast forms have nipples

made of plastic

Alexis tries one on behind a curtain

The form fits neatly

into the pocket

of a wire-free bra

beneath her blouse

The owner steps inside to assist Alexis

who’s sobbing as she fastens

the hooks into eyes

The owner says Don’t cry

or I’ll start crying

While Alexis swipes her card for bras and plastic

we noticed nipple labels in the case below

peony and rosewood-tinged areolae

similar to wreaths

and other stickers

Alexis pastes on backs

of Christmas envelopes

After a while

Alexis decides

her new breast forms

protrude like ping pong balls

She drives to Nordstrom and purchases

some more

says the new ones

are homey like

squishy bean bags

Chuka Susan Chesney, a graduate of Art Center College of Design, is an artist, poet, short-story writer, and editor. Her award-winning paintings and sculpture have been shown in galleries across the country. Her poems and short stories have been published on three continents. Chesney's anthology of poetry and art "Lottery Blues", coedited by Ulrica Perkins will be published by Little Red Tree in 2020.

Comments

Charles Rammelkamp

Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...

Karl Koweski

retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

PRYING, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski, Catfish McDaris, a Review

Roadside Press $18.00 https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/prying/71 Limited Edition of 69 The three poets nesting cheek by jowl in this fetching 2022 reprint of the 1997 Four-Sep Publications chapbook Prying from small press dynamo Michele McDannold's Roadside Press will be familiar to anyone paying attention to even the tiniest of the outlaw poetry scene in the last 50 or so years: Charles Bukowski, Catfish McDaris and Jack Micheline. Bukowski and Micheline need little introduction; their long shadows hover over the outlaw poetry world even now years after their deaths. And the third, the only living poet of the three within, Catfish McDaris, has been building his own small press reputation with considerable success, for nearly as long as the former men. Illustrations are from Scott Aicher. It's most fun to talk about the living McDaris. He appeared and appears so widely it's difficult to keep track and critique, or not, but as his portion of the cover copy says, he doesn...

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