Kenneth Pobo

Plans to Stay

My husband remembers

to buy milk before the container

at home expires and he makes sure

that my computer doesn’t catch

whatever electronic flu

is going around.  I’m not an easy guy. 

Sometimes I’m a pencil, the lead

breaking just when you want

to write a note to stick on the door

for the propane dude.  This could be

an anniversary poem.  27 years,

a couple of bluebirds, beautiful,

but ready to fly away. 

We promised forever.  That’s not possible,

so we took till death do us part.  Death

always finds our living room.

We watch TV and eat popcorn,

hold hands.  Even then,

it doesn’t take a hint. 

It plans to stay.

Confederate Judy

On Halloween I learned

I’d better not dress

as Judy Garland.  That would

get me beat up.  Why can’t

a boy sing “Over the Rainbow”

on a suburban street?

Instead I wore a gray jacket

and told candy-givers

I was a Confederate soldier.

We lived in Illinois—

no one blinked.

A boy can be military

even if he looks like

a schnook kid in baggy pants—

I wore Judy in my head,

belted out “The Man Who Got Away”

and savored my Butterfingers.

Kenneth Pobo has a new book out from a press in India (www.cyberwit.com) called Wingbuds.  Forthcoming from the Poetry Society of Alabama is his chapbook called Your Place Or Mine.

Joey Gould

A12 After a Concert 

Full after a meal

we recline,

this night different

from a normal night

in the way the cool hits

our overwarm bodies.

Sated, ears popping,

hardly hearing Bjork

on the tapedeck singing

All is Full of Love

on the A12

& the radio leaves a wake of sound waves

skipping over the pond.

Streetlights morph & distort

Nicky’s half-sleep half-smile,

Karen’s knuckles curl

& cuddle the steering wheel.

We listen listlessly

every hard breath of soft

night air we sigh.

My forehead touches the glass

and melts into condensation,

I am parched, but drink

2 am like I’ve been desert-crawling

between panes of chilled glass.

In the dark,

eighth notes scatter behind us.

Joey Gould, a non-binary writing tutor, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review).  Twice nominated for Bettering American Poetry and once for a Pushcart Prize, Joey's work has appeared in Paper Nautilus, The Compassion Anthology, Memoir Mixtapes, & District Lit. Joey's character Izzie Hexxam features in The Poetry Society of New York’s Poetry Brothel. A long-time event organizer at Mass Poetry, they plan & execute poetry events at Salem Arts Festival. They also write 100-word reviews as poetry editor for Drunk Monkeys and write a weekly poetry prompt & analysis at JoeyGouldPoetry.wordpress.com

Dennis Mahagin

Don’t Want

 

Air Sickness

is a walk in the park

compared to 

withdrawal, they say

we are free to 

move, to fall

about the cabin. 

I have a nightmare

I meet her boyfriend

while standing in line at the Walgreens pharmacy; 

he lets me know in low, burning tones

the way she likes it,

the way it was going

to stay, he said, lightly gripping

my elbow like a prison guard

leading a skel

back to his cell. “she makes me

crazy enough to bust a motherfucker,” 

he says, “and you don’t want that, you don’t 

want it here, right?” I shake my head, then

nod, as my turn comes 

at the Walgreens

window; 

the pharmacist slides my package 

across the counter. We hit it, that 

turbulence, more and more 

turbulence, yet the woman

in question stays right there, 

in my mind, 

a kind of living grief in bas relief; 

then I’m back 

on the plane. We continue 

our climb. 

I whisper 

to the flight attendant 

struggling in the aisle,

as she’s swaying there, 

with a tight-lipped

smile and her tray of drinks. I say, 

listen, I say, listen I don’t want 

this anymore.

Dennis Mahagin is a writer and musician from Montana.

His poems have appeared in magazines such as Exquisite 

Corpse, Juked, Thrush Journal, DecomP, Oddball, Unlikely 

Stories, 3 A,M., Stirring: A Literary Collection, and  previously at Live Nude Poems. Dennis has published two poetry books:Grand Mal, from Rebel Satori Press, and Longshot & Ghazal, from Mojave River Press. Dennis is the poetry editor for Frigg Magazine. He runs a music store in a town called Deer Lodge.

Howie Good

Complicity

We dance with skeletons. We steal cable. We leave violent stains on the carpet. We shift the blame to the fellaheen digging for papyri at an ancient historical site. We cross off career options. We put likeable liars in office and dark-skinned mothers and babies in jail. We go around looking for this or that clue, this or that miraculous city, without even once catching a glimpse. Rather, where our gaze just happens to fall, worse soon follows. The ground bleeds, the moon aches. Fire chews through brick walls. Ideas lose elasticity. The dreaming heads of sleepers get pried open.

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera from Cajun Mutt Press, 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 online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

John Grochalski

arriving at work

to the homeless man who smells like urine

he sits on the stoop

like a sickly shroud

smelling faintly of urine

he’s huddled in black

black suitcase

black duffle bag at his side

his face ghostly and pale

his lips white with kidney failure

sometimes there is a beer bottle or two at his side

he sits there shivering

as people walk by going to work

with huge coffees and bagel sandwiches

and little rolly bags trailing them like dogs

in less than twenty minutes

i will let him inside

where he will find a chair and read or sleep

until he pisses himself anew

the good people complain

and i have to ask him to leave

arriving at work

to the homeless man who smells like urine

sometimes i think about

how glad i am that i’m not him

but sometimes i think about

how the only real choices in america

are to work like a dog until you’re half-dead

or to end up smelling like piss in the street

how everyone in this shithole nation

is just a few bad mondays

from being just like this guy

a few bad breaks

and america will throw you away

like trash

then i go inside

and i sit at my desk in the dark

with my head buried in my hands

and i wait for something better

that will never come.     

John Grochalski is the author of the poetry collections, The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and The Philosopher’s Ship (Alien Buddha Press, 2018). He is also the author of the novels, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013), and Wine Clerk (Six Gallery Press 2016).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, in the part that voted for Trump, so may God have mercy on his soul.

Mike James

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines throughout the country in such places as Plainsongs, Laurel Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Chiron Review. His poetry collections include: Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), First-Hand Accounts from Made-Up Places (Stubborn Mule), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He served as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review, as well as the publisher of the now defunct Yellow Pepper Press. In the spring of 2020 Luchador Press will publish his 15th collection, Journeyman’s Suitcase.

Kevin Ridgeway

BRAIN MATTER

chow time came

before the sun went

down on L.A. County Jail,

where people try

to trade shots

of instant coffee

for fruit in order to make pruno.

I had just been taken off

suicide watch and had been

stuffed into a yellow

mental health

smock for dings

like us or whatever else

the deputies laughingly called us.

Everyone’s favorite meal

was called brain matter,

our tray canvasses

decorated in gray

hamburger and

a decadent brown

mystery sauce

over curly noodles.

We slurped from

other inmates’ scraps

of a kind of meat

we couldn’t beat

after lights out

and we all passed out

fat, happy and behind bars.

I started to almost miss

the god forsaken place

in the cab headed away

from downtown LA

en route to the suburb

where my uncle

reluctantly said

I could sleep

on his couch.

That night I had to start

proving that my brain

mattered more than

the way I treated it

with the disintegration

of what I was really made of:

the armor I inherited

with a straight poker face

and everything my father

taught me in his old prison

stories of bad food,

toilet hooch, racism,

murder, riots, lock down

and solitary confinement,

but he never mentioned

brain matter, which

I want to ask him

about while lung cancer

brings his life sentence

to a close as he digests

his last supper and the epic

wrongs of his life

over a glass of toilet hooch

he uses to forget and come

as close to death in hot pursuit

of the double dragon

who ran off with my

father’s brain to another

place that doesn’t matter. 

Kevin Ridgeway lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. He is the author of the poetry collection "Too Young to Know" (Stubborn Mule Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, Trailer Park Quarterly, The Cape Rock, Spillway, Up the River, Suisun Valley Review, KYSO Flash, Home Planet News, Cultural Weekly, Big Hammer, Misfit Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.