Live Nude Poems

To Ann’s Typewriter for Anne Menebroker Will you tell me HERE, typewriter, what you miss most about Anne since she’s been away? She’s with you still, you say. Are you SERIOUS? The words remain. Someone still reads them and finds joy. Will you tell me more? My ears have perked up. Let it all out in typewriter speak. I am down. Tell me more. I am right here. Drink in hand, I feel so peaceful like if the ocean was outside my door and the mountains on the other side. Will you go on typewriter? The sky is crying. Rain is falling down. Can I come back again someday? You’re a lovely LECHEROUS MACHINE. Like Ann said, with a slow and greedy excitement , you find a way to end one’s days. Luis has lived in California for 45 years. He works in the mental health field in Los Angles. His poetry has appeared in Ariel Chart, Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, The Rye Whi...

A single page, barely room tries, almost fits its envelope the way splinters already there know exactly where your hand was trying to reach - at the end her name, all else is doubt though once face down even you will stare at the wood, half table half crate leaving a place - the letter will get used to you, stay festering between your fingers through no fault on their own. Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com .  To view one of his interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8

The Inconsiderate On a dirt road threading out of Port-au-Prince A man discarded alongside the ditch By thugs, former Tonton Macoute, Laid flat with machete hacks Bits of bone and brain fan out from the wound    Blood seeping into the dry, dusty ground. Our squad arrives securing the scene, Interviewing witnesses and recording the crime Two MPs stoop by the corpse, and strike a pose A souvenir picture is snapped while nearby Cordoned off with onlookers, a woman cries. Étienne, our assigned interpreter, tells the GIs The weeping woman is mother to the deceased But they do not flinch—it is lost on them How they are treating her son’s remains Like the trophy hunters of some big game. Years on, these soldiers would be dead too, But that day in Haiti, it was going well for them. David Cranmer is the editor of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and whose own body of work has appeared in such diverse publications as The Five-Two: Crime Poet...

Rudy Dog and me Blood in Rudy’s diarrhea. Again. Standing, he rocks. Tail glued to anus. Fifteen years threaten to topple him. I stroke his back, trace each spiny ridge. My hand nestles his rib cage,  supports legs that crumble from caress. I lift him into my arms,  palm cups his bottom. He jerks his head away. My chin, a hazard? His nose searches. He nuzzles my beard. Rudy and me, we’re mates crawling the same arc. After my chemo, he curls next to my chest, a sentry for a decade. We share his purple blanket. Aging, disease disrupt the fulcrum. Must help him up, down from the couch. Cuddle him when confusion mars his face.  We sense our debility, the erosion of awareness. Gastric attacks leave him more brittle. Infusions wither me irreversibly. I wonder, should we pose beneath the purple blanket? Me, holding his rear paws? He, snout balanced  on my shoulder? Let sleep bless our arrival.  When not wr...

Susan Tepper Confess $8.00  ISBN:978-1-950063-38-3  21 pages Cervena Barva Press Susan Tepper's Confess is a small intimate gathering of reflective poems from Cervena Barva Press published in 2020. One of the many problems with collecting a group of poems is that you have to decide if you want a book with some unity, not a miscellany. Miscellanies are all right, certainly, and they comprise most books of poetry printed today, but you want another unifying factor. The title CONFESS  lends itself to the illusion of forward momentum. What is the narrator confessing, and to what end? "I come to you broken/have been trying to say/all that is not the way/it shows on the surface," the narrator says opening the first poem. They follow this statement up with a nostalgic description of an old photo as an illustration of exactly how broken they are, with the placid surfaces of the photo's subjects--Victorian women--undermined by the fact that the narrator ha...

For a Very Tall Gentleman who does Not Fit in Elevators ever wondered what the rodeo would look like if horses rode people through the streets really whooping it up? it is nice to think of the master race as a thing of the past the same way cable cars are only dragged out for nostalgia children thrown into schoolyards of hate like tiny grass shoots into the path of summer lawn mowers the blade is the same to us all why so many shave with such care before putting a loaded gun in their mouth and I know this very tall gentleman who does not fit in elevators he works in a drugstore downtown, drinking up all the cough syrup on break and it is good to pass the time, what else can be done with it? meals planned like executions, the necessity of sleep turned to dreams; a phonebook on the floor with many numbers in it. Ryan Quinn Flanagan   is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that r...

Erbium For lack of anything better to do at 4:30 a.m., I decided to break out the Ouija board to see if we might reconnect so that you could tell me where I’d flamed out for from the looks of things, life’s burned to ash. Is it common to cling to a past that did not last? I would ring you up if you were still alive. You’re not. You know that better than I. What we’ve got are A through Z above zero through nine, the words yes and no, plus the phrase good-bye. So… Are you game? Shall we give it a try? Calling Keith, I mean Ken, or was it Carl? I forgot your name whoever you are. Drew Pisarra is currently at work on a series of sonnets inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, a project funded in part by the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. His first book of poems, Infinity Standing Up , was released in 2019 by Capturing Fire Press.