Catfish McDaris

Drunken West Milwaukee Blues

Drinking mezcal chewing up the worm
listening to Santana’s Blues For Salvador
the police car shined a spotlight in my van

This Barney Fife looking motherfucker
swaggered up and asks me if I’ve been
drinking, I nod my head and take a swig

“Keep your hands where I can see them
and get out of your car,” I finish the bottle
I get out slowly, he has his pistol pointed

At me, “That’s not nice,” “What did you
say?” I did my magic on him and reached
out and took his gun away, I pointed it

At his chest and said, “How does it feel?”
I gave him some gunslinger tricks, threw
it up in the air, caught it behind my back

I ejected the magazine and unchambered
the round in the barrel, faster than sight, I
put it in his holster and raised my hands.

Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. He’s been active in the small press world for 25 years. He’s recently been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, Yoruba, Tagalog, and Esperanto. Catfish McDaris’ most infamous chapbook is Prying with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. He’s from Albuquerque and Milwaukee

Larry Thacker

What’s on my mind?   

The problem is, you sit in class,

or a boardroom in a high rise office building,

or within some congregation,

say, at a recital or a baptism,

but can’t just sit there.

You observe yourself, as you’ve been taught,

from outside yourself. A witness

to your breathing, visualizing it:

understanding, but not quite understanding,

that most of what you’ve pulled into your lungs

your whole life, isn’t oxygen at all.

And that you’re a fool for thinking

so flippantly for so long

about an exchange so potentially deadly.

That this meticulous mixture

is a wondrous thing hardly considered

moment, to moment, to moment.

And how something very scary, full

of cosmic witchcraft propels your heart muscle

to twitching like a restless fist-sized alien

in a ribbed calcium cage, a body zoo

you transport everywhere you go.

And they wonder why you can’t concentrate.

Larry D. Thacker is a Kentuckian writer, artist, and educator hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee. He lives with his wife, Karin, and their cat, Abraham Lincoln. Larry D. Thacker’s poetry is in over 150 publications including Spillway, Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry South, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The American Journal of Poetry, The Lake, Illuminations Literary Magazine, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include three full poetry collections, Drifting in Awe, Grave Robber Confessional, and Feasts of Evasion, two chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train, as well as the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at: www.larrydthacker.com

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

Brief Conversations With Gary In Downtown, Los Angeles 

Thanks for the pancakes.

You should smile more.

You are my heart, Luis,

you are my soul.

What is your name man because

I don’t want to call you Fraser?

You remind me of Fraser.

Hey Luis, what do you know

about Jennifer Aniston?

I saw her driving in a red car.

My stomach is killing me.

I should not have eaten

that Chinese food out of the trash.

It is cold, Luis, aren’t you cold?

There is this guy at the tent

that tried to stab me last week.

Could you get me something to eat?

It’s my birthday Luis.

I have a 25-year-old daughter.

Voices told me that I should jump
off this bridge.

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, lives in Southern California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His first book of poems, Raw Materials, was published by Pygmy Forest Press. His other poetry books, broadsides, and chapbooks, have been published by Alternating Current Press, Deadbeat Press, Kendra Steiner Editions, New American Imagist, New Polish Beat, Poet's Democracy, and Ten Pages Press (e-book). Blue Collar Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Yellow Mama Magazine published some of his recent poems.

Howie Good

Advice for the Perplexed

Wash your sex toys (your unmotorized ones, at any rate) in the top rack of the dishwasher. Next up, put on some music. Have a trick for getting bong water out of the carpet; white wine, ironically, gets out red wine stains. But as of now there’s no proven method to erase false memories and the like. Try to avoid being carried off by a UFO when you can just walk. Make mute despair your default greeting to people you happen to pass on the stairs. And always remember, a wild bull becomes docile if tethered to a fig tree.

Howie Good is the author most recently of What It Is and How to Use It from Grey Book Press and Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Rob Plath

the mover

i dreamt my mother

was helping me

carry her own coffin
to the cemetery

strangely, she was both inside

& outside of the box

she was so calm
for a while i doubted

she knew who we were

planting in the ground

but after a considerable

amount of steps i was certain

she recognized her own weight

yet it was as if she was the mover

of a piece of furniture

& not her own pallbearer

peaceful as if she were

merely rearranging

a space— perhaps moving

a large cedar chest
for fresh linens
from one room

to the next

Rob Plath is a writer from New York. He is most known for his monster collection  A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY (epic rites press 2009). His newest collection is MY SOUL IS A BROKEN DOWN VALISE (epic rites press 2019). You can see more of his work at robplath.com

Gary Powell

Corporate Warriors

We are profiles in likeness

in our gray business attire,

splash of color in our ties,

cell phone whining in our ears.

We have important places to be

as we careen through streets

and airports, teleconference

with peers, interface and meet.

We do it for our families, our companies

and our teams, for the false sense of

security that allows us to sleep through

the night. For the sweet suck of the deal.

We queue up at our cubicles, genuflect

and cross ourselves before the throne

of the corporate prophet, awaiting the

news: merger, acquisition, or divestiture.

And in the CEO’s name we pray:

This stock option is my body

Think of me when you eat.

This red ink is my blood

Think of me when you drink.

We are the gray men, the

hollow men, living in a dead

land, a land stuffed with IOUs

and motherfucking lawyers.

We are the in-between, the rut

and rub on the road from desire

to spasm. We are the gut wrench

of the downward trending Dow.

So:

Give us this day our daily bread, man,

and forgive us our debts, although we

will never forgive our debtors. For

shareholder value is the kingdom

and the power and the glory

and the stick with which

we beat the competition

into submission.

Gary V. Powell, a recovering lawyer, is currently a home chef and all-around handy-man. His fiction can be read in many literary journals including the Thomas Wolfe Review, Carvezine, Fiction Southeast, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Best New Writing 2015, and Pisgah Review. His first novel, Lucky Bastard, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing (2012). Two collections of prize-winning and previously-published short stories and flash fiction, Beyond Redemption and Getting Even and Other Stories, were released in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

Brian Rihlmann

Prayer

if there’s a god

I have only one request 

and that is—

grant me eyes

to see in them

what I see

in a old farm truck

rusting in a field

how prisms 

shine through 

shattered glass

how wildflowers

sprout through holes

in the floorboards 

Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada.  He writes free verse poetry, much of it on the confessional side.  He has been published in Blognostics, Yellow Mama, Raven Cage Zine, Synchronized Chaos, Cajun Mutt Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, and others.