Live Nude Poems

JOB HUNTING I’m overqualified for this. not qualified for that. And when I inquire at the local pizzeria the manager says, “Tim, I can’t hire you. You’d eat most of the pies before anyone else could get a bite.” I buy a small pepperoni pizza, twirling the box over my head in my apartment’s kitchen, aping the way the old pizza makers used to treat the precious dough. The sun trickles through a light rain, the first slice I take shines. A PHOTO OF MY WIFE WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER You can detect the determination even then and you swear you can hear her about to declare “I love you, Hong Kong, but I’m leaving for good”— her lips savoring the words she’s always wanted to say. Unseen and a number of streets down on the right her father is returning from work, stepping off the ferry, passing the fishmongers clustered like star snappers from one end of the pier to the other, a light rain sizzling under the hot sun, and a number of stre...

Litany I am mercy’s wayward apprentice. I am the dubious truant of grace. I kneel at the Stations of the Cross, then climb through the shreds of a fading downpour. I am the late sun that flames through a window. I am a cityscape of wind through the alleys. I am a desert highway fringed by meadows where fields and blossoms unfold into radiance. I am a clock that needs to be wound. I am a cello that plays in the evenings, ushers in nightfall’s infallible silence, and the sweet scent of creosote in the pitch dark. I am a love you may almost remember, your mind lazing loose in imaginary elsewheres. There is no amnesty for ancient sorrows, I am the galleon, sinking, still vanishing. Winter Tourist Once, in another winter, in a village by a seaside with different accents than mine, waves crash dark against the shore and over the breakwater, a woman in a red coat hurries through her realm of kith and kin: fishermen just docked—nets and boxes brim with still moving...

The Last Time I Saw My Father's Face My father was bearded and zoned out on psychiatric medication he could not pronounce behind the glass from us in county jail, where he awaited trial. He and my mother argued over why he did what he did until he could only slur insane gibberish.   The guards treated us so much like shit we could still smell it on the drive home, when we both agreed never to visit my father in jail or prison again.   Neither of my parents were there when I got locked up in the same madhouse that swallowed my father whole, but it choked on me and spit me out in a demented miracle no one prayed for but me. Kevin Ridgeway is the author of  Too Young to Know  (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including  Grandma Goes to Rehab  (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in  Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro Rive...

4:48 In The Morning R.I.P Sarah Kane It arrives like a yellow taxi swerving into a parking lot with warped flickers in the windshield. An insect crawling mindlessly up a concrete wall with five legs and the sixth dragging broken behind it. The small stone trapped in between the tread on the worn soles of sneakers that are too tight. The clerk behind the counter of the liquor store with the eyes like broken street lamps and a smile like a street fight. The doctor in a Christmas sweater with a handful of pills but a mouth with no answers. An empty coat on a hanger hung in a darkened window in the apartment building across the empty street. A broken umbrella, it still seeps in, soaks and dampens these fragile fabrics at 4:48 in the morning. Stephen J. Golds was born in London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing and listening to old Soul ...