Brenton Booth

The Pianist

At the piano recital she
started tapping her fingers
on my shoulder. I thought
she was measuring the
bars until I noticed the
articulations, glancing at
her hand. For the rest of
the concert she continued
in time with the virtuoso
soloist: never missing a
note. Tears filling her
once hopeful eyes, thinking
of what could have been,
before he broke her finger
a few weeks after she was
accepted into the famous
music school in New York.
To stop her from leaving.

Brenton Booth Lives in Sydney, Australia. Poetry of his has appeared, or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Chiron Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Naugatuck River Review, Van Gogh's Ear, and Nerve Cowboy. He has two full length collections available from Epic Rites Press. brentonbooth.weebly.com

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 Memphis Film Prize in 2017. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.

 

 

Internal Suffocation, poems by Juliet Cook

 Internal Suffocation

I'm an adult so I'm allowed to watch

as many horror films as I choose.

Some people say that has a bad effect on my brain.

I do sometimes have violent dreams, but

the last disturbing dream I had based on a movie

was re-seeing the rape scene from Boys Don't Cry,

which was based on a real life hate crime.

Sometimes I like some extremity in movies and art

because I can turn them off, turn them back on,

re-interpret them, revise them, re-analyze them, 

do whatever I want with them. 

Other times I can't control

what my own mind sees

or what happens to me.

Sometimes my mind exaggerates things.

Other times it blocks things out.

Sometimes my brain cells discharge 

uncontrolled electrical activity.

Sometimes it's not up to me.

When it is, I'll watch whatever I want to,

whether it's based on real life or exaggerated make believe.

Internal Suffocation 

I know what's starting to happen.

I've heard this before, this wooshing

inside my brain as the room disappears.

I sit down on the floor and shut my eyes.

Then I'm suddenly back up on my feet 

and confused about what day it is, 

what time it is, what I was doing,

how long my seizure lasted and why

I wrote a bunch of people's names

on a sheet of paper. Why I rearranged

rows of clothes in my closet and piled

rows of books in front of a suitcase.

I don't remember doing any of this.

I don't remember where I thought I was going to go.

I do remember who I am though. 

Demolished flesh that nobody wants to look at.

Least of all me.

Shaking around out of control,

groaning a low guttural moan

that dries into a hiss.

Acidic vomit drips

from a vulture's mouth. Clotted

saliva is mixed up with blood then rots.

The good parts get eaten up and shit out.

Haggard Hooded vulture woman

with nothing better to do than grunt and swallow

her own semi-digested dead heart.

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in a small multitude of print and online publications. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including "DARK PURPLE INTERSECTIONS (inside my Black Doll Head Irises)" (Blood Pudding Press for Dusie Kollektiv 9, 2019) "Another Set of Ripped-Out Bloody Pigtails" (The Poet's Haven, 2019), "The Rabbits with Red Eyes" (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2020) and "Histrionics Inside my Interior City" (part of Ghost City Press's 2020 Summer Micro-Chapbook Series).

Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, “Horrific Confection", was published by BlazeVOX. She's also included in a full-length collaborative poetry book, "A Red Witch, Every Which Way", with j/j hastain, published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Her most recent full-length individual poetry book, "Malformed Confetti" was published by Crisis Chronicles Press in 2018. 

Cook also sometimes creates abstract painting collage art hybrid creatures.

Find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Three Prose Poems, by Howie Good

 Meds

Four gray gulls paddle about like ducks, the sky above the bay rapidly changing moods, darkening, then brightening, then darkening again, while I make my own path up the shoreline, careful despite a brain half-paralyzed from new meds to step around the conchs and horseshoe crabs stranded at low tide, too many for saving, a massacre, the water rushing away over the pebbly sand whispering to me, as though in consolation, shush, shush, shush.

 

Interview Questions for a Job Yet to Be Invented

Have you ever demanded, received, or paid a ransom? Seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe? Spent a night in the gorilla cage? Bought a human skull on Etsy? Shared an elevator with the eighteen smallest dwarfs in the city? Laughed so hard you dislocated your jaw? Asked Alexa the actual color of the Red Sea? (Intense turquoise.) Been bound and gagged and stuffed in a wheelie bin? Visited a parent in prison? Shrieked like a peacock or impersonated a disreputable poet with a pointy beard and long wool scarf? Dreamt you were dreaming? Put a smiley face at the end of a sentence? Hummed while performing cunnilingus?

 

Life Story

At birth I was given a name I wouldn’t ever have chosen. The trick is not to care. I was still in school when my parents died within a year of each other to make more room for the future. And I remember people throwing their hats in the air in jubilation. What they thought was the light of dawn was instead the light of fires, the stench of burning eventually so bad I couldn’t breathe. Until then, I too wanted to bury everything that came before. Now I pass through crowds like a vague rumor. There’s only one story but a million ways to tell it.

Howie Good is a poet and collage artist on Cape Cod. His latest poetry books are Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).