Live Nude Poems

Shelter to Cinder I tore apart the tweaker’s shack now, firewood for the winter my little way of getting back at them, when they burnt their shelter to cinder their field mice escaped to bunk with me assuming they were evading flame yet all I’m doing here: waiting for the half-sane human being to earn my heating a reason to learn the discipline of a controlled burn Gabriel Hart lives in Morongo Valley in California’s High Desert. His literary-pulp collection Fallout From Our Asphalt Hell is out now from Close to the Bone (U.K.). He's the author of Palm Springs noir novelette A Return To Spring (2020, Mannison Press), the dispo-pocalyptic twin-novel Virgins In Reverse / The Intrusion (2019, Traveling Shoes Press), his debut poetry collection Unsongs Vol. 1., and the Pushcart-nominated story "The Maid and the Maidens." He's a regular contributor at Lit Reactor and Los Angeles Review of Books.

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 ...

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 )

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 o...

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 ...

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 O...

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.