Brian Allen Carr

Falcon Jackson
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Falcon, your world would be different if Michael still lived. He would have followed your story from the beginning. He would have watched from his helicopter as the balloon floated on. He would have known the truth, because he would have sensed it, and he would [...]

Joseph Goosey

JUSTIFICATION FOR FAILING EYESIGHT.

It was probably the white linen pants. I was walking behind him one day. We were going to KOHLS or some equally dreary space and he was wearing these white linen pants and the whole situation was very disheartening. I looked firmly at the white linen pants [...]

Brad Green

THE BEGINNING OF SORROWS

Paperclips. That was what he wanted to steal from the office supply cabinet today. Not just one, but several. Perhaps an entire box, a case, untold multitudes. He’d soon have a system that would allow him to pilfer supplies of gradually increasing value. [...]

Daniel Gutstein

BEEF PINEAPPLE ROBOT.

I have become the kind of person who can order biscuits over gravy but not the kind of person who can tolerate the true definition of a Constitutional—what is, essentially, bicycle chaos. The French grape suffers more than the Chilean grape and more than the Syrian grape, but [...]

Jessica Hagemann

Please enjoy MySpace: Begin as a PDF.

Mary Hamilton

You don’t know how it feels to be pulled inside out: an ode to Bull Shannon

The moon has gone ape shit.

Sick of the tickling and the poking and the poetry.
“You callin’ me fat?!” She howls when men write of her bountiful glow.
“Your mother!” She moans as she throws waves over [...]

John Thomas Harris

I WANT TO RIDE MY BABY ON A FREAKING PONY

Wayne doesn’t want to get into a shouting match over a baby again. But beside him the stranger’s baby in the flowery stroller is wearing a white bib and a blue hat. Wayne can’t believe his girlfriend keeps staring at the [...]

Christopher Heavener

OMENS

Melody saw omens in everything. A spider crawling across the windshield, a withered flower swept out from under the refrigerator, an unsullied grain of rice in her curry. She received these little messages a few times a day, direct from the universe, warning her of danger or signaling her of [...]

Jeffrey Hermann

The Yielding and the Unyielding
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Not yet fall, orchard vines outweigh their fruit.

Some of these nights my son and I sleep
together, his small body and the September nights

too warm. All night long our arms and legs
spell out messages beneath the sheets—

the wrong language for each of [...]

Amorak Huey

How to Write a Poem About the Blues

I set out to write a poem called “How to Be a Bluesman.” This poem was to be clever and knowing and verging on funny. It would have suggested being born in the late 1800s to parents who might or might not have [...]

Nath Jones

SHOULD: How Mommy Ate Her Soul

There are more than 2000 hash marked lines on the beltway between my house and work. I get off at 5 a.m. and the only way I seem to get home is by staring at the hash marks off my left front fender. [...]

Nick Kocz

Dining by Candlelight

I was eating candlelight, gobbling it whole as it flickered from the ends of burning wicks, five or eight candles each night, in a consumption habit that proved addictive—no amount of twelve step groups curbed my appetite for the light, and such was the rising price of candles [...]

Diane Lockward

My Dark Lord
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Cover me in filth, for I have lain down with pigs.
Toss me like a salad in silt and grime.

Dig a ditch and bury me up to my neck.
Pelt me with mud pies dark as fudge.

Withhold water, soap, exfoliant, and loofah.
Cleanse not my polluted flesh.

Anoint me [...]

Karissa Morton

On The Occasion of a Felonious Assault on My Heart

it’s a love poem you say,
as you stab out your cigarette on my appendix.
[vestigial, only suited for the stinging
caused by the eyelids and cityscapes of ex-lovers.]

***

lachrymose, pulsating
lakes shoring up diary pages.
[i pray for a groundswell to hemorrhage the ink,
to leach her [...]

Jennifer Pashley

Magic
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Because your husband is far away. He is in another country, and you don’t even want him to be your husband anymore, but you can’t say that because he’s a soldier. To say that is un-American. And this is why you stay with your parents now, in [...]

Dan Piepenbring

Of Magnates, Mavens and Moguls

Speaking, in our company auditorium, of the smokers’ tendency to seek higher ground, he said, Of course it will all be fine in the end, so long as we can keep them off the rooftops. Turning then to the subject of our personnel and its [...]

Joshua Ware

Please enjoy Joshua’s writing as a PDF which preserves the unique formatting of the work.