William Taylor Jr.

Centuries More Alive

In some dirty old bookstore in downtown San Francisco
I found a copy of Hustler Magazine from 1976

featuring an interview with Charles Bukowski.
He was in his mid-fifties and just reaching
the height of his fame.

In the photographs he's got
a bit of a snarl on his face,
a smoldering in his eyes.

He comes off as somewhat nasty
and full of himself, but reading it
felt like a brush with livelier times.

He said some things that would have
buried him now, things that would never
have made it to print.

For the better, you might say,
and fair enough

but there was an energy there,
some moxie, a kind of ragged joy
that feels largely absent
from the present times

and I'm a bit wistful about it all.

I miss the 20th century.
I miss porno magazines
and Charles Bukowski..

The day at hand feels
beleaguered and half-alive,
just wanting to lie down somewhere
and be done with it all.

The poet is long dead, and the young girls
in the glossy photographs are old, their bodies
now just something else to hide.

I open a beer just like Bukowski would,
turn on the stereo and disappear
into music from centuries
more alive than this one.

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. He edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). Pretty Things to Say, (Six Ft. Swells Press, 2020) is his latest collection of poetry.

James Croal Jackson

Hydrangeas

with my arm around yours
around mine a garden grows

into meadow of petals each
day a field a boundless

entrance to tomorrow's
tomorrow

hydrangea petals floating
even through the rare rains one

white petal for each new year
that sings through time to land

inside your hand
enclosed in mine

James Croal Jackson (he/him) is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has two chapbooks (Our Past Leaves, Kelsay Books, 2021 and The Frayed Edge of Memory, Writing Knights, 2017) with one forthcoming: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel, 2022). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com)

Steve Passey

Five Dollar Dress

I’ve seen forever
dancing in the kitchen
in her bare feet
and her thrift store dress.
The sweater on her shoulders
was left at her place
by some past Tom Sawyer of a lover
(it’s some kind of a test.)
If we don’t have a car,
we can ride the bus.
If we don’t have money,
we will still have us.
We could really use some money,
and some better days to come,
but
I’ve seen her dancing in the kitchen
in her bare feet
wearing her summer dress.
It won’t always be like this.
Something will come for us,
Come in the future or come from the past,
Tom Sawyer for his sweater, maybe,
or money we have to have and haven’t got -
but until then
we have right now, and
we have enough for the wishing well,
five dollars for a dress.
a pencil for a poem, and
whatever for the rest.

Steve Passey is from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the collection Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock, (Tortoise Books) the novella Starseed, (Seventh Terrace) and many other individual things.

William R. Soldan

That Night I Left Work with a Pocketful of Cash on Fire

and you went and fucked it up by taking a bullet
through your hand. You never watched
After School Specials, so never learned
not to do stupid shit. None of us did.
He’s in the ER, Juanita said, her voice
so flat and put-out, as if describing how the dog
had just pissed all over the rug again.

You’d been playing around with it,
.25 with the pearl grip and nickel finish,
lifted by some kid from the projects
from his grandma’s top drawer,
the way we did, passing it back and forth
in the lot by the tracks, killing time between
fathers and griefs.

You could still roll a damn fine joint
with your good hand bandaged,
its fingernails caked with dirt, the raw
and ragged hole, the rotten smell of it
like a body bloating in the sun, and after,
with the bones of your metacarpus
tenting upward, a miniature volcano
pressing against the puckered flesh.

It would never heal right, no feeling
but the dulling of dead tissue, the ghost
of the round ripping through it. It pulsed
with heat, you’d said of the night it had gone
off, like a glowing coal or a white-hot wire
stitched along your lifeline.

When the others came, later, penetrated
your breastplate with hot steel and black powder,
I imagined the birth of stars, a whole cosmos
swirling in your sternum. The Y-shaped incision
a question, a constellation.

William R. Soldan is the author of the story collections In Just the Right Light, Lost in the Furrows, and Houses Burning and Other Ruins, as well as the poetry collection So Fast, So Close and, most recently, the novel Undone Valley. You can find him on Twitter @RustWriter1 if you'd like to connect. He currently lives in Youngstown, OH, with his wife and two children.

Chris Bodor

File Cabinet Full of Sins

At the Good Friday service
members of the parish
wrote their sins on paper
and one after another
they nailed their confessions
to the wooden cross
set up near the altar.

After the mass
before I cleaned the carpet
and swept out the chapel
I removed each piece of paper from the cross
and placed them in a small plastic bag.

The anonymous sins of the congregation
are locked in my second-floor office
in a file cabinet
near the paint cans
next to the dust mop
and the broken vacuum cleaner.

Chris Bodor is a US poet, who was born in 1967 in Connecticut to an English mother and a Hungarian father. After working for ten years in New York City, he moved to Florida in 2003. In August of 2009, Chris started hosting monthly poetry readings on the last Sunday of every month in St. Augustine, Florida. During the past 25 years, his poems have appeared in many independent, small, and micro-press publications, such as the Lummox Journal, FM Quarterly, and Old City Life. 

Maureen O'Leary

Grief (for J’uan)

Maybe we turn into clouds of reefer
Particulates coating the lungs of the people thinking about us

First and secondhand smoke
Clinging to the frizzing gray locs of the women mourning us

Or maybe we are in the splashes of Hennessey
Swirling in the bottoms of Styrofoam cups
A bad burn in the throats of our brothers
Something to remember us by
On the way back up.

Maybe we are still here.

In the way the candles keep going out
In the way they call out to God.

If they only looked up they could see our eyes
Shining through the branches and glittering through the haze
Below the stars.

Maureen O'Leary lives in Sacramento, California. Her work appears in Coffin Bell Journal, Bandit Fiction, The Horror Zine, Ariadne Magazine, and Sycamore Review. She is a graduate of Ashland MFA.

John Dorsey

1995

wolfgang & i burn a joint in the woods
behind his grandfather’s house

like stoned vampires who haven’t slept in ages
we laugh as his girlfriend falls
into a dry creek bed
while attempting to walk
across a log
in jelly shoes.



Poem for Ida in 1986

gyrating shuttles like dandelions
their screams blowing away in the wind
mashed potatoes from an ice cream scoop
ice cream from an ice cream scoop
sweaty hands
no metal detectors
no bomb threats
the captain of the football team
stayed in the closet
& died inside

everyone was lonely

the occasional fist fight
solved everything & nothing
that went unsaid.

John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Poetry, 2017),Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019), Which Way to the River: Selected Poems 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), and Afterlife Karaoke (Crisis Chronicles, 2021). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.