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Showing posts from June, 2023

M. J. Arcangelini

Sunset In Chicago February, 4:30 PM, the sun slants sharp through the large, streaked, boarding gate windows at O’Hare airport. Waiting for a flight home and for the sun to leave the sky around the same time, both of us heading west. The sun will sink beneath the broad tarmac of landing strips, turning everything between us into silhouettes casting shadows. Stuck in the airport waiting for a plane which keeps moving further away, taking-off later and later, hours delayed, allowing me to pound away laboriously at the keys of my laptop trying to wring poetry from the commonplace, pull profundity out of mere inconvenience. Yawning into the glare of the setting sun. M.J.  Arcangelini , born in Pennsylvania in 1952, has resided in northern California since 1979. He has published in little magazines, online journals (including The James White Review, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, The Gasconade Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, As It Ought To Be Magazine, and T

Alexis Rhone Fancher

Tonight I will Dream of Anjelica, My First Ex-Girlfriend, Who Taught Me The Rules Of The Road ... Anjelica comes on to me like a man, all slim-hipped swagger, relentless, dangling that red, ‘57 T-Bird at me like dessert. Lemme take you for a ride, chica, she sez after acting class. I figure what’s the harm, but Ms Angel Food gets out of hand. I don’t count on her heart-shaped ass, or those brown nipples crammed in my mouth. I don’t count on the Dial-O Matic four-way, power leather seats, the telescoping steering wheel, or the frantic pleasure of her face between my thighs. I admit, I’ve always been driven to sin. But Anjelica’s far from blameless. She rides me hard, week after week, double clutches me into ecstasy, hipbone against hipbone, the dulcet, lingering groan of our gears, grinding. When I confess the affair to my boyfriend he jacks himself off in the galley kitchen, comes all over his unattainable fantasies. He says he doesn’t consider sex betw

David Centorbi

Barbed Laughter Barbed laughter from a night of bitter parades: the holy left hanging held in no palms, genuflections to thorned spittled hearts. You heard the tears as they rolled down my cheek, jaundice and frantic. *** In what nightmare will you sleep next turning children’s eyes into cringing stones, their tongues into lonely red carpets? I asked you to pour your pleadings on the wind and scatter their rusty tears up to the sun– light of future cold and will-less destruction. *** You stood over the stillpain on the altar–cries long lost, forgotten curled fingers– and caressed the smiles of lies, stroked the silky manes of illusion. There was a fire there that had never breathed or eaten. Its orange lips cracked, the valleys holding pails of dizzy dying lovers. And you kept singing: Until the end of time, Blood, forgiveness, and laughter Will be mine. David Calogero Centorbi is writing and working in Detroit, MI.  He is the author o

Scott Ferry

sparkle there was a time when i wouldn’t notice the flash and weft of sun on water / back when i didn’t need to notice god in the wind / back when i didn’t need tangible evidence / back when i could just be unholy walking with the thunder and the broken psalms // but now i know i am broken and faithless / now i must collect each strand of light as it falls and weave it into my splayed chest / a threaded rosary keeping all the brightness in my blood / i must do this because i have to laugh with my children / because i have to show them there is music on the black waters / that there are sapphires on all of the graves sin i am falling asleep without my cpap / the middle of my body keeps opening until the feeling of being without a shell becomes soothing / the blood as a mist the bones crackling into a fine chalk / the presence inside of me now something singing / the words now a sloping breeze over the bed / but when i try to fly up the charcoal castles and canyons i fall jagged ba