Gabriel Hart

Shelter to Cinder

I tore apart the tweaker’s shack
now, firewood for the winter
my little way of getting back
at them, when they burnt
their shelter to cinder
their field mice
escaped
to bunk with me
assuming they were evading
flame
yet all I’m doing here: waiting
for the half-sane
human being
to earn
my heating
a reason
to learn
the discipline
of a controlled
burn

Gabriel Hart lives in Morongo Valley in California’s High Desert. His literary-pulp collection Fallout From Our Asphalt Hell is out now from Close to the Bone (U.K.). He's the author of Palm Springs noir novelette A Return To Spring (2020, Mannison Press), the dispo-pocalyptic twin-novel Virgins In Reverse / The Intrusion (2019, Traveling Shoes Press), his debut poetry collection Unsongs Vol. 1., and the Pushcart-nominated story "The Maid and the Maidens." He's a regular contributor at Lit Reactor and Los Angeles Review of Books.

William Taylor Jr.

Centuries More Alive

In some dirty old bookstore in downtown San Francisco
I found a copy of Hustler Magazine from 1976

featuring an interview with Charles Bukowski.
He was in his mid-fifties and just reaching
the height of his fame.

In the photographs he's got
a bit of a snarl on his face,
a smoldering in his eyes.

He comes off as somewhat nasty
and full of himself, but reading it
felt like a brush with livelier times.

He said some things that would have
buried him now, things that would never
have made it to print.

For the better, you might say,
and fair enough

but there was an energy there,
some moxie, a kind of ragged joy
that feels largely absent
from the present times

and I'm a bit wistful about it all.

I miss the 20th century.
I miss porno magazines
and Charles Bukowski..

The day at hand feels
beleaguered and half-alive,
just wanting to lie down somewhere
and be done with it all.

The poet is long dead, and the young girls
in the glossy photographs are old, their bodies
now just something else to hide.

I open a beer just like Bukowski would,
turn on the stereo and disappear
into music from centuries
more alive than this one.

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. He edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). Pretty Things to Say, (Six Ft. Swells Press, 2020) is his latest collection of poetry.

James Croal Jackson

Hydrangeas

with my arm around yours
around mine a garden grows

into meadow of petals each
day a field a boundless

entrance to tomorrow's
tomorrow

hydrangea petals floating
even through the rare rains one

white petal for each new year
that sings through time to land

inside your hand
enclosed in mine

James Croal Jackson (he/him) is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has two chapbooks (Our Past Leaves, Kelsay Books, 2021 and The Frayed Edge of Memory, Writing Knights, 2017) with one forthcoming: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel, 2022). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Steve Passey

Five Dollar Dress

I’ve seen forever
dancing in the kitchen
in her bare feet
and her thrift store dress.
The sweater on her shoulders
was left at her place
by some past Tom Sawyer of a lover
(it’s some kind of a test.)
If we don’t have a car,
we can ride the bus.
If we don’t have money,
we will still have us.
We could really use some money,
and some better days to come,
but
I’ve seen her dancing in the kitchen
in her bare feet
wearing her summer dress.
It won’t always be like this.
Something will come for us,
Come in the future or come from the past,
Tom Sawyer for his sweater, maybe,
or money we have to have and haven’t got -
but until then
we have right now, and
we have enough for the wishing well,
five dollars for a dress.
a pencil for a poem, and
whatever for the rest.

Steve Passey is from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the collection Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock, (Tortoise Books) the novella Starseed, (Seventh Terrace) and many other individual things.