Live Nude Poems

I Loved Lucy The grocery store gave a dime apiece for the pop bottles I collected by the side of the road, righteous money, but I kept one back to hold the wild flowers. The flowers, a Snickers, and a lame knock-knock joke went fine with the sunset. Next day in school you blushed as we passed in the hall.

Thrift Store Sweater Threads dangle off the sweater I’ve worn forever, blue and purple billows all across my torso. I can’t just throw away this salvaged dollar from a Goodwill. A cloth can sheath itself on the body and glide forever, walking toward an inevitable unknown destination. The distance is empty space, jammed with ubiquitous sound. I will sew none of it. James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022) and Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021). Recent poems are in Stirring, Vilas Avenue, and *82 Review. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Stalks This abyss of dark corn fields floods your brain and nervous system with violent effigies, waiting to abduct you. Immerse you in flames then just throw you away. Your un-model hands shake inside this pit of toxic abrasion. Turbulent then blurring. Trapped in the never ending descent. Your spinal column degenerates into a rotting corn stalk. Unwanted. From a pall to appalling. 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 "Another Set of Ripped-Out Bloody Pigtails" (The Poet's Haven, 2019), "The Rabbits with Red Eyes" (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2020), "Histrionics Inside my Interior City" (part of Ghost City Press's Summer Micro-Chapbook Series, 2020), "red flames burning out" (Grey Book Press, April 2023) and "Contorted Doom Conveyor" (Gutter Snob Books, July 2023). Later this year, s...

Wayfinder In Reykjavik The mother of the goldsmith shows me the rune beside the protective eye of awe near the lava stone & silver necklaces adorned by the carved teeth of whales. She says, Here is the wayfinder & puts it on so I may imagine how it will look on you. Along the walls, she has modeled her son’s creations. In black & white, a grandmother, still beautiful. I hope this is where we will follow, the way an older culture set the symbol to stay in one place, offering something of the earth that skill shaped, clasped with a magnet to hold the rope, so you will know where you are going even when you don’t. Max Heinegg is a poet, singer-songwriter, recording artist, editor, and literary critic. His previous collection, Good Harbo r, won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press. His second book of poems, Going Therre, came out in September 2023. Born in Cooperstown, NY, he lived in Schenectady, NY before moving to Medford, M...

Stopped at the Gate It is easy to forget we are fragile without skullcaps, without sweaters, without television to tell the stories           that warm us. In the snow I pee a sketch like a boy. It is a refugee’s boat, medieval, with a shallow prow, and beside           the single mast the dribble of all that can be saved in a shipwreck. All that freezes in deep cold. All that melts           when it thaws. There’s a rumor that Jesus could walk on water, right through these walls, your iron gate           a mirage of fish. Al Ortolani’ s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, One Art Poetry Journal, Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, and many others. His most recent poetry collection is The Taco Boat, published by New York ...

  Tarnished     You can replace things   an alternator, a starter   but the real skill is in diagnosis   you have to keep learning   have a passion for it   I’m passionate about passion   but don’t have much left   I drink tea, play the guitar   the chord progressions are different   but somehow all the same   the finger picking patterns   never progressed   At work it’s the same thing   I know what I learned   in the first two years   but then seized up   I’m rebar in concrete   old silver fillings   rigid, rusting   and hampered    by a fear of pain   these scribbles of a staid teetotaler reflect   “Today I brushed my teeth   and lost a crown,” I write   but there are many things   in my mouth   that will never come out.   Jon Bennett writes and plays music in San Francisco. You can find more of his work  here  and  ...

 It's been some time, and since we have a surplus of material on-hand, we will publish poems every Monday and Friday from now on. Please accept my apologies for the length of time it's taken us (me) to get things back in order. Rusty

Immortality You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts every third or fourth morning, cover those non-nut nuts with blueberries because they have gobs of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss every other night to inhibit heart infections, use mouthwash several times-a-day to ward-off armies of oral bacteria, walk the dog every night for a mile, eat an orange daily, take your Lipitor horse pill, your Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi- vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut your Metoprolol in half and take it for your arrythmias, and you do all this instead of church, instead of fingering rosary beads and telling yourself that somewhere near our galaxy’s big black hole Jesus and Mary are floating around without oxygen masks or spacesuits, and it’s in this way that you avoid the anvil of disease, the miasma of malaise, the numinosity of pneumonia—in this way you make sure never to die, you make sure to live forever and ever. Amen. Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry ...

D’S BLUES The backyard was sun-kissed, better than death. a sun kissed lawn always better than death. and he came back on the way he had left. He came back in a way he had left. It was hard, but the sun was better in this yard. He came back, he came back the way he had left:to take the Kiss stay away from death. Dennis Mahagin is a writer from Washington state. Many of his poems have appeared online, and in print, via two published poetry collections: “Grand Mal,” and “Longshot & Ghazal,” Dennis also serves as the poetry editor for Frigg magazine.

something they call home For a few hours, white snow fell before nightfall; then rain came and washed it all away. The lone streetlight on this dead end street, the one that often makes the poems, makes me think of Weldon Kees and his porchlight coming on. My neighbor, a miserable man who never waves, whose name I will never know, called the electric company about the streetlight’s stutter, about its blinking off and on, from dusk to dawn. They came and fixed it when I was at work, when I wasn’t around. And now, it’s just a well-lit beacon, birthing brightness upon this street, guiding lost souls, wet from rain, towards something they call home. Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world. He has authored twenty-five chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including Cleaning the Gutte...

  Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “ Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, wo...

John 1:1 In the beginning was the word and the word was tired, but even half-conscious I was seduced by the slurred speech of the holy. Oh, Christ the carbohydrate chased by twelve shots of whiskey, take me to thy church. Be gone from my lips, oh, demon expresso, oh, CPAP hose making love with my airway to keep my oxygen happy. If the word becomes flesh, something I can kiss, with a glassblower’s flaming tongue, summon me quick, so the dead in me may rise from the heart’s silent ruins. Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems have appeared in Phoebe, Southern Humanities Review and others. His work is forthcoming in Action Spectacle Magazine, The Meadow Journal, The Chiron Review and Delta Poetry Review. His book, “Waxing the Dents,” from Brick Road Poetry Press.

 Inheritance A lack of paperwork an emptiness of filing cabinets  a distinct lack of manila envelopes   he was born unwanted  learning at a pre-verbal age  to tolerate the hot-potato shuffle  his budget plywood crib cheaply painted with angry rabbits following him from house to house  the aunt with oversized teeth  would peer for a time  from above a severe absence of chin  and the very next day  the hairless uncle who lacked even eyebrows  would fail to appear surprised  he didn’t care much where he went as long as he was fed  his taste in adults supremely inclusive  but at some point in time  the ball had to finally stop rolling  and life then settled into an equilibrium but everything now is upside down again all interested parties reappearing  as lawsuits drag anxiously on an inheritance contested  the entire clan eagerly awaits to see how poor or rich he might be and every last one of the...