Skip to main content

Drew Pisarra

Eros Thanatos Brutus

Am I sick? And does sobriety mean
this body will walk without knots
while soaking up life’s crassest joke?
Who does that? Again, am I sick?
And will I take to a healthy bed
where I’ll have the courage to act sick
at night and attract neo-kink-isms
fostered by some sister spirit that fists
and fingers a long-misnamed disease?

There is a crime of illness in your mind
that I need to know better and more:
along the way I promise you beauty,
I promise you warmth. But first, desire:
Tell me why are you so hard-headed,
so hard-hearted, so hard-pressed, so hard
that you should have me on repeat:
for here are six or seven me’s hiding
faces and phalluses in the dark.



Mourning the Crown Prince

Grief doesn’t linger. It sticks. It makes the hands
fumble and the throat gunge up. Time doesn’t heal.
Time inserts itself within the pain. The clock
is crueler than the calendar. Eventually the hour
hand lets up. In the almanacs charting the past
20 years, I fear I’ve failed big time from afar.
My record is one of gross inaction. You’re dead.
Dead and buried. A perfect specimen stored
away for some wiser, curiouser version,
of who we’re failing to become at this second,
to find. They’ll unearth you and restore you
to a world better than the one we’ve haphazardly
given and thoroughly botched. You weren’t
cremated yet the loss still burns. It burns,
and lately I alternately reproach myself
and numb myself to avoid fuller recall.



Drew Pisarra is the author of You're Pretty Gay (2021), a collection of short stories, and Infinity Standing Up (2019), a collection of sonnets, and The Strange Case of Nick M. (2021), a radio play commissioned by Imago Theatre. He is also a literary grantee of the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation (2019) and Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators (2021).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me