Live Nude Poems

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.

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 Jame...

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...

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.

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 ...

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 cou...