Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

To Ann’s Typewriter

for Anne Menebroker

Will you tell me HERE,

typewriter, what you miss most

about Anne since she’s been away?

She’s with you still, you say.

Are you SERIOUS?
The words remain.

Someone still reads them

and finds joy.

Will you tell me more?

My ears have perked up.

Let it all out in typewriter

speak. I am down.

Tell me more. I am right here.

Drink in hand,

I feel so peaceful

like if the ocean was outside

my door and the mountains

on the other side.

Will you go on typewriter?

The sky is crying.

Rain is falling down.

Can I come back again someday?

You’re a lovely LECHEROUS MACHINE.

Like Ann said, with a slow and greedy excitement,
you find a way to end one’s days.

Luis has lived in California for 45 years. He works in the mental health field in Los Angles. His poetry has appeared in Ariel Chart, Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, The Rye Whiskey Review, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Mama Magazine.

Comments

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

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I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Amy Holman

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