Live Nude Poems

JOB HUNTING I’m overqualified for this. not qualified for that. And when I inquire at the local pizzeria the manager says, “Tim, I can’t hire you. You’d eat most of the pies before anyone else could get a bite.” I buy a small pepperoni pizza, twirling the box over my head in my apartment’s kitchen, aping the way the old pizza makers used to treat the precious dough. The sun trickles through a light rain, the first slice I take shines. A PHOTO OF MY WIFE WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER You can detect the determination even then and you swear you can hear her about to declare “I love you, Hong Kong, but I’m leaving for good”— her lips savoring the words she’s always wanted to say. Unseen and a number of streets down on the right her father is returning from work, stepping off the ferry, passing the fishmongers clustered like star snappers from one end of the pier to the other, a light rain sizzling under the hot sun, and a number of stre...

Litany I am mercy’s wayward apprentice. I am the dubious truant of grace. I kneel at the Stations of the Cross, then climb through the shreds of a fading downpour. I am the late sun that flames through a window. I am a cityscape of wind through the alleys. I am a desert highway fringed by meadows where fields and blossoms unfold into radiance. I am a clock that needs to be wound. I am a cello that plays in the evenings, ushers in nightfall’s infallible silence, and the sweet scent of creosote in the pitch dark. I am a love you may almost remember, your mind lazing loose in imaginary elsewheres. There is no amnesty for ancient sorrows, I am the galleon, sinking, still vanishing. Winter Tourist Once, in another winter, in a village by a seaside with different accents than mine, waves crash dark against the shore and over the breakwater, a woman in a red coat hurries through her realm of kith and kin: fishermen just docked—nets and boxes brim with still moving...

The Last Time I Saw My Father's Face My father was bearded and zoned out on psychiatric medication he could not pronounce behind the glass from us in county jail, where he awaited trial. He and my mother argued over why he did what he did until he could only slur insane gibberish.   The guards treated us so much like shit we could still smell it on the drive home, when we both agreed never to visit my father in jail or prison again.   Neither of my parents were there when I got locked up in the same madhouse that swallowed my father whole, but it choked on me and spit me out in a demented miracle no one prayed for but me. Kevin Ridgeway is the author of  Too Young to Know  (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including  Grandma Goes to Rehab  (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in  Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro Rive...

4:48 In The Morning R.I.P Sarah Kane It arrives like a yellow taxi swerving into a parking lot with warped flickers in the windshield. An insect crawling mindlessly up a concrete wall with five legs and the sixth dragging broken behind it. The small stone trapped in between the tread on the worn soles of sneakers that are too tight. The clerk behind the counter of the liquor store with the eyes like broken street lamps and a smile like a street fight. The doctor in a Christmas sweater with a handful of pills but a mouth with no answers. An empty coat on a hanger hung in a darkened window in the apartment building across the empty street. A broken umbrella, it still seeps in, soaks and dampens these fragile fabrics at 4:48 in the morning. Stephen J. Golds was born in London, U.K, but has lived in Japan for most of his adult life. He enjoys spending time with his daughters, reading books, traveling, boxing and listening to old Soul ...

Working Misanthrope Versus Pandemic They stole my singularity. Back to being among, not of. I played. I lost. I want to leave. No ball back. Home already here. #meetoos #neveryous both rejoice, tap on my glass bubble. No more I-love-you-don't-touch-mes. Hell is other people calling you back. Chad Parenteau   is the author of Patron Emeritus, released in 2013 by FootHills Publishing. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob's Tea House, What Rough Beast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule and Résonance. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. He has hosted the long-running Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston since 2004. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming. 

Drip A drip from the eaves into the gutter has kept me awake most of the night it's been raining my pillow is wet. I dreamt Bobby Darin came back after forty years of silence. What would Sandra Dee do finding him jigging to Mack the Knife in her living room? I miss you. Even though we never had a single intimate moment. Would you notice if I slipped away quiet for forty years. Susan Tepper is the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her two most recent titles are CONFESS (poetry from Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and a road novel WHAT DRIVES MEN (Wilderness House Press, 2019) that was shortlisted at American Book Fest. Other honors and awards include eighteen Pushcart Prize Nominations, a Pulitzer Nomination by Cervena Barva Press for the novel ‘What May Have Been’ (re-written for adaptation as a stage play to open in NY next year), shortlisted in Zoetrope Contest for the Novel (2003), NPR’s Selected Shorts for ‘Deer’ pub...

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...