Live Nude Poems

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...