Live Nude Poems

Wax Cups The bridge over the Long Island Expressway was a jackdaw cutting through holiday traffic. a father flanked by young daughters, McDonald’s sodas in hand, bundled in winter coats, watched the cars below. The daughter to the left, her ponytail unfurling with flyaways at the temples— in middle school we called them “wings”— jumped, pointing at cars, as we slipped along underneath. They were 495 East sentinels celebrating a winter ritual. Years from now, with the snow falling sideways, they’d recall icy hands pressed against waxy cups, while the world sped under their feet— their dad in the center of it all. Museums exist, hovering over small towns, contained entirely in watching bodies. We tread well-traveled paths until we reach the bridges suspended above our childhood. “Remember?” the girl in the pink coat will ask her winged sister, and they’ll see times they didn’t know were sacred until much later. Jane-Rebecca Cannarella (she/he...

  Line by line retranslation of Ashbery Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years. Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion In between is the void filled with power This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones They only stop temporarily in order to focus Forming some kind of meaning, then they are qu...

An Affair on Lombardy Street The landlocked Airbnb has a nautical theme and an irregularly shaped board nailed to one wall that might work if they installed hooks, I offered to the man I’ve loved for 24 years before we kissed and carried each other into the bedroom. The backyard is at this time off-limits to guests, though we are encouraged to dispense of our trash there due to an ant problem for which we may be charged. Renters may also be charged for using acne products immediately prior the towels. Likewise, silicone lubricants are prohibited. The Airbnb sits a block and a half from the marketwhere my cousin and I used to buy croissant sandwiches when the jazz bar closed where the man I’ve loved for 24 years used to play. The Airbnb has a keypad for a lock and I give him the code. I wake to his face for the first time in years. I send him home in a shirt wearing wrinkles and the perfume my ex-husband sayssmells like my mother. My hosts have left two thick, hooded robes hanging in th...

Trespassing Aloud Listening to the wind misspell my name I sense desperation, a bruise of waxen yellow flesh. The wind explores the ruins of a factory abandoned decades ago, a complex of smokestacks and oil tanks, brown weathered brick and rusting machines the use of which no one alive knows. Why is the wind taunting me with its private misery when grease stains almost eighty years old still offer comforting stinks. I shouldn’t be here exploring private if useless property. I should go home and practice spelling my name correctly in case the wind has influenced my flimsy sense of myself. The factory closed after the war. Not even mice find sustenance or aesthetic pleasure in noting the aloof geometry, purposeful and rigid enough to warp the wind. I pocket a large rusty bolt and declare myself a petty thief, giving voice to all this loss. William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recen...

Our Most Vulnerable Maybe the phrase has always meant to misdirect A gunmen is taking aim at shadows in dark corners It must be someone’s job to ask after each life still here I was once someone noticed each must consider No fear I know like alone awake & shaking Losing all my grounding thoughts with no protectors left Mark Danowsk y is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of four poetry books. His latest poetry collection is Meatless (Plan B Press). Take Care is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2025. His poems have appeared in many journals including Right Hand Pointing, The New Verse News, Eunoia Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Summerset Review, Alba, The Healing Muse, and Gargoyle.

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...

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.

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.

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  ...

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 ...

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.

Tattoo She stands like a statue, arm raised, her wrist rests on top of her head as the artist draws with black marker on her naked body. The tree with the dragon will cover her side from breast to hip. A friendly dragon, she had insisted when they looked through the sketches. The needles of the tattoo gun etch art into her flank. She bites her lip. Closes her eyes, thinks it will be beautiful. Heart felt I put the laundry in the dryer and remember the day we strolled through the town after lunch, not ready to say goodbye. The years of absence had fallen away like dust in a breeze. Confidences came easy. We wandered into a store that sold soaps and wooden brushes. A glass jar with felted dryer balls stood on the windowsill. I told you how the dogs had claimed my old one as a toy. You picked a ball with a rainbow heart and bought it for me. I watched your car disappear down the road. We forgot to take a picture. But I smile and think of y...

Peppermint I was walking the frozen food aisle and I saw her in front of me, Loading up her cart with frozen dinners. She was just the right height and not a tattoo in sight. Dressed in a thin jacket, blue jeans and sneakers, She turned and looked at me as I stood there And she gave me a smile before going back to her business. Her eyes were something else, as grandma used to say. I imagined she was forty years old, probably had two kids in high school or college And she divorced her husband because he was unfaithful. I imagined she was alone most nights and she painted them away while drinking wine. I began imagining a lot of things standing there While she read the ingredients on a box of Stouffer’s Lasagna. I finally turned my face away, put my head down And walked right past her. She wore size seven sneakers. She smelled like peppermint. I went to the next aisle and then the next And then I paid the cashier. I didn’t see her again. When I got to my car I sta...

Morning Talk I dreamed of a conversation boring like this one where you failed to convince that I’m not repeating mistakes. Nothing learned. No one changes. Thank me for listening. Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, The New Verse News, The Rye Whiskey Review, Nixes Mate Review and anthologies such as French Connections and Reimagine America. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine.

Happily Never After His vow until death; hers, until her final breath— her mind not consigned once something inside had died. No, she hadn’t lied but stopped trying to fake it, which, for her, meant quit. Not denying that’s a death, both had bated breath. Before either died they’d find, since she had resigned, they were no longer aligned. She’d fulfilled her vow, avowing the time was now to make an ending longed for long before sending that shot through his head. Though he ignored what she said, the one became two and though neither departed, both broken-hearted, their domicile now askew, she ended their nights, terminating all his rights. His days in a daze; hers, stuck with but not by him, they lost to her whim. Each now pondered, worse to worst, whose death should be first? Ken Gosse  usually writes humorous, rhymed verse with traditional form and meter. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, he is also in Lothlorien Poetry ...