Anthony Bromberg

Barthelmania!

The dilemma: Mr. Barthelme wants to get married. He thinks. He has been thinking for some time now. He wants a Mrs. Barthelme (Do I really care if she takes my name? No, that’s not the point.). He wants a partner. He wants Marjorie. He wants to share. He doesn’t [...]

Robert Brown

Isolationism

When the ketchup picked a fight with the salsa in the fridge, I decided not to get involved, you know, let them figure things out. Later that night, though, when I found a coagulating stream of red fluid edging slowly across the kitchen floor I decided to look around. To [...]

Ricky Garni

MY GREATEST FEAR

I would hate hate hate to have blond hair and a black beard. Morever, I would hate being beat up because of my blond hair and black beard. That happens, you know. Hey Blondy! They say, and commence to fisticuffs. The black beard, at that time, is of [...]

Lee Goodman

ONECENTER

She knows now that Hake Corse lives at the bottom of a long hill in Eureka, California. That when he laces his shoes, his fingernails scrape the canvas to make a sound like someone buried alive trying to get out. And he screams when he’s putting one over [...]

Lesa Alison-Hastings

Plotting Escape
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1.

He put her on a shelf with other jars.
At first glance her jar looks empty.

She had no intention of getting caught.
Thought she was invisible
against the overcast day,
debris filming her eyes
[...]

Caroline Klocksiem

Plow and reaper
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And when I slide back in, your arms wind over me,
thin shadows tendril into sleep.

Your legs the stick limbs of crickets perched in the white field
or long as the deep rooted Oak we left behind.

Your hips doubling, flutter. The nerves when we first
moved, first gave [...]

Ashia Lane

Please enjoy The Blues Club as a PDF so as to best preserve the poem’s original format.

David LaBounty

The Fit of it all

(for Amy Hempel)

There is a draining of a glass and a look towards the present and Joe says; I bought
some clothes today. I went shopping.

My wife buys my clothes, I say, and I think about all the clothes I own and how I never have to [...]

Sharon McGill

Prick
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She says it like that. She says: “I know you’re the prick.”

It’s Tuesday, 6 am. Dawn blushes the east as I stand amid a line of commuters awaiting the 6:10 to Emeryville. The sleepy dozen of us are heading west into the dark, over and past the [...]

Steve Meador

Father Figure

He was mostly pimples and pus, layered over skin the color of freshly rolled pie dough. Leroy’s appearance was not improved by being the victim of a Frankenstein-long face and canines that were the forward-most teeth in this mouth. All the freakishness was kicked aside when he pulled a [...]

Sid Miller

Coney Island, 1953
-after the painting by Paul Cadmus

The woman to my left leans over and pours beer into a passed out man’s mouth. Her bathing suit has dislodged and her right tit and long ugly nipple hang [...]

David Moyer

The Toll Booth

Darrel Merchant was not known to have the best luck. He had Murphy’s Laws and the Corollaries to Murphy’s Laws taped to the wall in his basement office. One time, he bought his kids a swing set. He opened the box and pulled out the [...]

Edwin Wilson Rivera

Work (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Job)

MACHINE roared to life

Great steel beast
Cobalt eyes
Copper-wire teeth
Smoking whirring
Eager for flesh
Dead yet alive.

Ash pits pocked
The crusted earth
Hot lava spurts
Burned passages in time
Slivers of fleshy metal
Banding across the valley
Steel mesh x-ed the skies.

Men and women marched
Bone skull and curtain flesh
Fused [...]

Ethel Rohan

Babies On The Shore
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Just as I reached the beach, it rained. The naked raindrops fell on my face, making me blink, and stuck to my lips, turning to syrup in my gloss. Mother’s ghost warned me to go back, that I’d catch my death, like death was [...]

Laura Ellen Scott

That What

That happened to me once, actually. Before Katrina. An antique shop on Royal hosted a wine tasting in a maze of hallways and mildewed rooms jammed with anxiety of provenance—how does one acquire a sixty piece golden tea set from a sunken ship or slave shackles from the very [...]

Allan Shapiro

The Butcher and the Breather

That night I had a heart attack. That night I laid in bed and listened to the people above me have sex and I waited for my heart to stop once and for all. It was two in the morning and then three and I’m still [...]

Anne Valente

Nines
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The ingredients emulsified — olive oil, balsamic, a pinch each of salt, pepper and sugar — and Jenna poured them over the lettuce she’d torn, adding a few sprigs of rosemary on top. She set the mixing cup in the sink and watched it flood with [...]

Robert Alan Wendeborn

Awkward

She practices stumbling, crashing kites,
Spills ice cream cones, and
Peels oranges with hooks.

She decides that every day she is going on
A first date, so wears lipstick.

Reapplies lipstick, to her now
Perpetual-red lips,
Leaves conversations
To “freshen up,”
And sticks toilet paper to her soles.

Bone me like a fish,
She says, beckoning,
At the end of the night,
In [...]

Joel Willans

One long queue of zeros

Gemma’s craving the young American. It’s obvious by the way her gaze skips across the others like a hungry bird hopping from one bare branch to another. When her eyes rest on Megan Bloom, Gemma doesn’t blink. Instead, she swallows as if gulping down the girl’s [...]

xTx

PAYOUT

Twenty-three million dollars was a lot of money and Annabelle deserved every cent.

Twenty-four hours for thirty-three days, never stopping; exhaustion long gone, now transformed into something akin to transcendence and the encapsulated air within the hollow bones that kept birds afloat.

Vision slowly returning; tear ducts drained, devoid. Her fingers, [...]

Sid Miller

Coney Island, 1953-after the painting by Paul Cadmus

The woman to my left leans over and pours beer into a passed out man’s mouth. Her bathing suit has dislodged and her right tit and long ugly nipple hang like a swollen udder. The man to my right is so [...]