Live Nude Poems

As Below, So Above Heaven is a perv wishing they too could squeal the immaculate carnal joy release the stellar high-country shuffle coiling on sweet tar puppets say we’ve been rehearsing this pratfall for eons & so, they leak returned souls through every half-assed vortex sloughing over our deserts Don’t kid yourself about the one-way street afterlife ain’t what it used to be so below, as above You see it wasn’t merely the fabric of the walls we tore apart when we nuked the pearly gates they are coming for us the minions of a dominion we dragged to the strip club and god was never the same. Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of Bone Moon Palace from Nomadic Press (2021) and most recently the graphic chapbook The Sincere from Libran Apocaplyse Books (2022.) An original founder and current organizer of the Beast Crawl Lit Festival ( Summer Beast 2022 - Beast Crawl Literary Festival )   he currently teaches  worksh...

Faults Sense of smell gone, most of the time, except on days of a particular grace or drug. One bum ear, constructed from scraps like a clay ashtray. Lungs that suddenly fill and close, except when sighing their great sweetness, your astonishing gift. Waking before dawn. A certain restlessness. A certain propulsion. A hunger. Casting this way and that. Even now, a wolfishness under the skin. After the mammalian tears, the clear eye of the lizard, the skittering limbs and shed tail. That head of hair, your breathless corona, shedding silver. Those devil-like brows. Hands strong and rough. All the pleasing parts of you brought to please, as to a banquet in a dream where I cannot eat so much as a single bite. The bright kind of dark. Eyes like clouds sweeping in over mountains. Now I see: I was only imagining the long spillway, the rush to beautiful nowhere, the hidden fault where the earth might split and we'd take hands and dive in. Laura Cherry is the au...

Coronary on Aisle Six The EMT’s made great time when minutes count, the vise in my chest stretching seconds to eons, my will rewritten in my head on the floor of the WalMart, next to the socks. Then: electrodes, calm reassurances that don’t reassure, an IV, oxygen in a mask that doesn’t hide my face from voyeuristic shoppers and clerks on a Saturday. A gurney ride past the cashier (I never got my socks) and out the door, eyes following. I know what everyone will be talking about at dinner. A secret little part of me wishes that would happen every day F. John Sharp lives and works in Northeast Ohio. He is the fiction editor for Right Hand Pointing, and selected published works live at FJohnSharp.com. 

Post Card to Charles Wright from a Recording Studio in Bristol, Virginia Charles, today in the birthplace of country music I recorded guttural rock & roll, then crossed the double yellow line on the main drag to enter Tennessee. Then back again. How easy to move between two states. Like the drop in your low rider line: both break and continuation. Like light: both wave and particle, even as it wanes in the dwarf orchard at dusk, reducing the corporeal world to shadow. How often have I oscillated between grief and joy, how readily one becomes the other. This is why I love the prose poem. There’s hunger’s pangs and the pleasure of anticipation, too. I went for dinner in a dive bar where Hank Williams stopped the night his heart surprised him with its final struck chord, a D minor, dissonant with only a bit of twang. He hadn’t eaten there, but let me tell you, the hamburgers were to die for. Postcard to Jan Beatty from the CSX Rail Depot, Cumberland, Maryland Dear Jan, I’m thin...