Live Nude Poems

Everything Crumbles How everything crumbles like a cookie, like snow- men who get too warm. See the sad faces sitting in rickety chairs holding a book of sad poems read from top to bottom. The moonlight poems are the worst. Silence fills every room in the house. How the tumblers and bumblers fall on slippery streets. They do not cry when their bottoms bruise up in the cold Polar-like pavement. Luis is the author of Make the Water Laugh (Rogue Wolf Press, 2020) and eight chapbooks from Kendra Steiner   Editions, including Make the Light Mine (2016). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Ariel Chart, Blue Collar  Review,  Escape Into Life, and Otoliths. He lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles.

Hear Her Hellbent Leaving what can you really say about a lanky lovely girl who invites you home where you discover in the ratty bedroom only a rumpled sleeping bag snuggled close to a gutted chevy engine with every scattered part duly noted & numbered in order that one day soon she will return every nut bolt part & pulley to its rightful place before jamming the greasy hulk into a down & out camaro ragtop still somewhat metallic blue but leaning toward rust that will propel her down the highway & in her words out of this shit town toward neon dreams of a kick-ass life where nothing is improbable everything is possible & hell hath no fury like a small-town girl chasing big-city dreams tell you what you can say: you say go kick the living shit out of life take everything you want until the day you roar back into this little town to make the rounds tell everyone in no uncertain terms to kiss your sweet ass & then blast back out laugh...

In response to a text that said what else could I have done?   I've wet bedsheets with blood from stagnated piercings; middle-of-the-night fugitive weight. Earlier I was a monster, with no action as my only other option. I didn't know how to yell no at the time or that giving gifts of puncture wounds in that moment would hurt worse than the lightning scrambling through my body raising the hair on my arms and neck. Later at night, existing outside myself, the storms subsided absorbed by the bed. I imagined the mattress as soil, and the blood as springtime sun showers; and maybe one day, somewhere else, potions of puncture wounds will feed others. And then, I will become a gardener growing again. Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/her) is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and a former genre editor at Lunch Ticket. Jane-Rebecca is the author of Better Bones and Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House,...

Dystonia All night I watch as the rain collects inside of things left out on the porch some god above tossing out her empties from the sky I think of my mother her ache a million miles long and a century deep there is a moment when the word you want to use uses you and a body too wrecked in on itself so long ago the mileage on it has become the soul a family on a highway a small girl goes through a window and is never again the same and before that so many hands being put where they ought not I tell you the body’s memory is ruthless there is a dream I have where she is no longer hurting where her ribs are not crashing into her lungs like waves and she doesn’t have to flail her arms to be heard she does not drown in a goddamn thing she takes to the lighthouse finds all the other versions of herself drags them up from the undertow places them by her side says; let’s ride her body is her own she . doesn’t . move . a . muscle and it’s a...