Live Nude Poems

skin this skin has started to fray reveals a torn elbow a tattered knee a body stitched up too many times. I tug at stray threads loose buttons watch my days unravel. this is a poor material to work with the weave all wrong a coat grown thin and faded      a patchwork blanket. I wait for the scars to harden a fresh skin to emerge pink, beautiful become new, grow from the inside out but I have slid from silk to denim become a worn fabric that cannot be shed there is a wound that doesn’t close a bruise that never heals when the night is cold I am a cheap cloth that will not mend Ken Cathers as a  B.A. from the University of Victoria and a M.A. from York University in Toronto.  He has just published his eighth book of poetry entitled Home Town with Impspired Press in England. He has also recently published two chapbooks, one entitled Kiefer by broke press and the other entitled Legoland Noir by Block Party Press. His work has app...

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, working part...

retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

black coffee blues all the cups we carry the sloshing of pell-mell life like drunks on the last ferry outta town montage of deja vu whipping neck down to check steam rise the careful setting of the same vessel of the same sun & moon backdrop drips indigo a river of black coffee drought stricken gone too soon A.S. Coomer is a writer & musician. Books include MEMORABILIA, BIRTH OF A MONSTER, SHINING THE LIGHT, THE FLOCK UNSEEN, THE FETISHISTS, & many others. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a "record label" for poetry.

  Business 101   W hen I was a kid, I built an ant house. That was before I ever saw one of those ant farm contraptions. I made everything small – the chairs, the tv, the Bible on the end table, even the room where you do number one or number two. After I finished, I showed it to my dad. He kind of laughed and said something about my mom’s goofy sister, Aunt Esther. That night, I put my ant house out on the patio. I kept looking through my bedroom window, waiting to see them arrive. First, just one or two, to check the place out. Then more. Until finally the place was on the map. Of course, we couldn’t let everyone in. We had to be selective, keep an eye on the bottom line. Reputation, after all, is everything. Robert Witmer is an American who has lived in Tokyo, Japan, for the past 46 years. His poems have appeared in many print and online journals, including Lily Poetry Review , The Main Street Rag , Bacopa Literary Review , New Verse News , Parody , Shot Glass Journal , an...

TED KACZYNSKI'S CABIN As my country goes collectively more mad every day, I keep thinking that Ted had the right idea with that cabin; get away from everyone, live off the grid, quietly, in the wilderness with only that which is required for life, that which gives one pleasure and sustenance, then see to it that no one can get to you. The bombings are where he went wrong. He could have continued living securely in his cabin if he hadn’t started killing people, if he’d been able to settle for writing about the rising evils of technology and what he thought needed to be done about them. But writing it all down was not enough for him. Ted's dead now, suicide in a prison hospital, his cabin no longer tucked away, decomposing in Montana. The FBI has carefully dismantled it, like London Bridge, then reassembled it at their headquarters in Washington, DC; a trophy, a stuffed marlin, a mounted stag’s head, antlers to hold hats and coats, Mardi Gras bea...

  The Party of Special Things to Do The Band was singing Kingdom Come. Freddy was there with his colored balls and his glass half fulfilled. Judy took off her blouse. Randy took off when the cops arrived. There were other women suffering things our eyes hadn’t seen before or since. Jay had a jay the size of a carrot, diamond bright like a night with Angela. The party wound down when the Catholics started chanting like airport saints. Rich asked me if I wanted to see Robin’s underwear but that bird had flown. And that meant I was sleeping in the bathtub again; my prayers would be filled with cleansing like the ethnic washday. I love you, I told the woman I woke up with. She turned slowly to salt and I used a pinch of her in my bloody Mary, which I had with the eggs from the communion tray. All day I replayed the party like it was Safe as Milk. All day I was a sucker but I loved myself almost as much as I loved Meghan’s tights, and her gams, lush like t...

  Pillow Talk My boyfriend hands me some necessary med. I think I’m quite sick. I’ve got a bad flu that’s warping my thinking, that fucks w/ my head, a sickness that makes me wish, I were dead. An illness can plant such an idea inside you. My boyfriend hands me some necessary med: a plain pink pill; a capsule half yellow, half-red; and one other one, two distinct shades of blue. “ That’s warping my thinking. That fucks with my head,” I tell him. I’m pretty sure that’s what I said. He holds out the glass. I know what to do. My boyfriend hands me some necessary med then patiently sits on the side of my bed as I pop the four pills then drink up. My temp is 102. That’s warping my thinking, that fucks w/ my head. There’s a stain on the pillowcase where I’ve bled ‘ though I’m less sure what’s caused this bad bruise. My boyfriend hands me some necessary med that’s warping my thinking. It fucks w/ my head. Drew Pisarra  is the author of two poe...

My Wife’s Back The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – only converted from one form of energy to another. I was lying in bed this morning with my back pressed against my wife’s back (she has a very warm back) and I started writing a poem (not this poem) about my wife’s back and how much I was enjoying lying against it I should’ve got up and started writing the poem immediately (I’ve been at this game a long time; I know the drill) but my wife’s back was so warm and I was so cozy I decided to lie on a while. When I got up I wrote this poem and as I did I felt my wife’s warmth leave my back. I wonder how much wound up here. Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years and has graced the pages of many now-defunct magazines and a few, like Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake and Eclectica, that are still hanging on in there. For ten years he ran the literary blog The Truth About Lies but now lives quietly in Sc...