Mike James

Memorial Day

Some weeks seemed to be
More nights than days
Maybe darkness was just a hangover

So many things you could mimic
With your voice

Owls and crickets thought you kin

How did that all start?

One thing happens
Something else

Then you chop up a picnic table
To burn in the backyard

You bet on how long certain embers will stay hot
You talk about the driveway letter you will write with fresh ash

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His many poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.) He has received multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations.

M.J. Arcangelini

His Fringe Jacket (1972)

He figured he was at least
half in love with her, most likely
the half usually labeled lust.
He was so in love with her
that he gave her his tan leather
jacket with the long fringe.
He wore that jacket everywhere,
even when the Ohio summer was
too hot and humid for leather.
He liked the way it made him feel,
the weight of it, the way he imagined
he looked wearing it at a rock concert.
So when he gave it to her, because
she told him how much she liked it,
it was like giving her a dozen roses and
a 2 pound box of Whitman chocolates.
She liked it so much that she
took it with her when she moved to
the West Coast with her boyfriend.
After she left he appeared diminished.
In Oregon she soon tired of the jacket,
which never really fit her right, and
gave it to someone she'd just met.

M.J. Arcangelini (b.1952) has resided in northern California since 1979. His work has been published in print magazines, online journals, (including The James White Review, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, The Gasconade Review, As It Ought To Be) & over a dozen anthologies.  The most recent of his five collections are: “What the Night Keeps,” (2019) Stubborn Mule Press and “A Quiet Ghost,” (2020) Luchador Press. 

David Cranmer

Blue

Man, head in his lap, outside my hotel
window, healing in the Denver sun.
Oblivious, as life bores around him,
he frequently scratches both arms.
I don’t get his poison, I’m a whiskey drinker
myself, but I get blown apart.

Pouring morning coffee, I keep an eye
out, making sure no one flips him for
his sneakers, watch, or a few bucks.
As a security officer, paranoia is my
natural state, the dull cloak I wear.
He’s zeroing out as I’m ironing a shirt.

By the designer threads he’s wearing,
I’m guessing it’s heroin. His spiral may
have him on meth, but his face doesn’t
look all that fucked up yet.
When he lifts his head, he reminds me
of a younger and ultra-slim Warren Oates.

Three quarters of an hour pass and
Slim finally traipses off, I assume to the room
where I’ve seen him go a handful
of times before. Soon after, I head to
my gig off Inverness West. Guarding an
empty office of universal grey and beige.

The sun that peeled the toxins from
Slim’s skin pours in the window down
the wall and onto the floor, stretching
shadows across the room onto my
shoes. I type words into my iPhone,
capturing the poetry of a slow death.

Cranmer is the editor of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and whose own body of work has appeared in such diverse publications as The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly, Punk Noir Magazine, LitReactor, Macmillan’s Criminal Element, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. Under the pen name Edward A. Grainger he created the Cash Laramie western series. He's a dedicated Whovian who enjoys jazz and backgammon. He can be found in scenic upstate New York where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Brian Glaser

Perseverance

        -for Seamus Heaney

The sky, where we could not ever live
in the sea of the past,

now we are on an island there,
and everything has changed,

the name of God
in the swell,

in the foreign atmosphere,
the final spring of the sun.

Brian Glaser has published three books of poems, including Contradictions with Shanti Arts in 2020. He has also published more than twenty essays on poetry. He works as associate professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California. Twitter: @blendedbrian.

Catherine Zickgraf

Five-Thirty

When brakes all light up at red lights,
most drivers seem to go for their phones
and scroll to touch the outside world,
while some just get lost in their palms.

The impulse to scan the devices in hand
just fills the moment with foolishness—
for where the mind makes its residence,
there the heart will also live.

Watch sunset sky spread dusk above us
in fire-winged shadows of dying day.
See the tidal blues wash up the horizon
as night is reflected in oceans of space.

Here under the city’s blessing of stars,
I’m headed to get my son from practice.
I cap my pen when the light turns green—
excited to show him the seed of this poem.

Two lifetimes ago, Catherine performed her poetry in Madrid. Now her main jobs are to write and hang out with her family. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press. Find her on twitter @czickgraf. Watch and read more at www.caththegreat.blogspot.com 

 

Frederick Pollack

Collapse of the Wave Function

I’ve redone my forties
more times than I can count.
The latest version ended abruptly,
down on the beach when some visiting
oligarchs shot each other
and witnesses. But usually I’m safe,
there or on my balcony with my drink.
The abs and springy hurtless hips
derive from reps and runs I spent
my twenties and thirties on, which no doubt bored
me crazy but I did them. The money came
apparently from two meretricious novels
that metastasized into film. I try not

to think about them. I think about
my look. Half-awake, slightly stupid,
bad but not mean and, of course, hot;
when I walk the beach I’m like, if you get me,
a vacuum cleaner … This coast is immune
to pregnancy, emotion, STDs
and cellulite, and I’ve stayed here the last several
brief lives. I think about the novel,
how a saleable plot is like a tectonic plate,
forever inching toward disaster.
I think about poetry, an ancient world
without geologic activity, orange sun –
how could it still have mountains? Why is there life?

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former to be reissued by Red Hen Press), and two collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many other poems in print and online journals.