Spirit the Sailor
A sailor named spirit
Found himself lost
Out at sea
With his ship in decay
And his body in atrophy
He sat down to finish his last poem
About a scarab beetle
That escaped a pharaohs
Tomb moments before they sealed it
He placed the passage
In a bottle and
Jumped into
The dark salty water
Buy Johnny Huerta’s chapbook here
Read more "POETRY: JOHNNY HUERTA – Spirit the Sailor"Rocky Mountain High
I don’t remember mountains in Denver.
I mistook them for clouds steeped
in shadow, soaked in wind, hugging
the horizon, limiting the distance of
our spectacled vision. Without a car,
the road through the mountains was
something to imagine, not to travel.
I remember walking wide streets, past
empty storefronts and flickering neon cacti.
Cutting through the university quad free
of weeds and students, we talked
about books we’d read and then
ambled to Safeway and the apartment.
I remember watching Seinfeld in black
and white. We drank Crystal Pepsi,
ate toasted bagels, the frozen kind,
smaller than my fist. Cynthia drew the
smoky drapes against night’s noise, against
mountains in the distance, the future
of endless beginnings and false starts,
our late twenties, the nineteen nineties.
Brown Dog
Brown Dog sleeps in a trash heap
beside the Bière Club,
awaiting exiting patrons,
barley-hopping to Friday night’s next stop,
who might spare her a handful of chicken bones,
a scrap of leftover pork fat.
Unable to snub the small dab
of creamed spinach and mashed potatoes
she spies on the broken-slabbed sidewalk,
she consumes the gray-flavored calories
that will sustain her night’s prowl.
She watches with maternal fret
as her small companion
dares to dart, despite bum back leg,
across the beehive-alive side road,
avoiding auto-rickshaws and motorbikes
buzzing through their corner
of the pocked urban sprawl.
An agile navigator, she joins him.
They give a few quick sniffs,
then trot into fractionated night,
where they’ll blend into the blurred scurry
of Bangalore’s nine million people
and three hundred thousand other street dogs —
a population gone astray.
Read more "POETRY: Sheri Vandermolen – Brown Dog"Paging Doctor Numbnuts
There was this drunk at the bar
many years ago
who wore a stethoscope around his neck
so everyone would think him
a doctor.
He was in rags otherwise, begging drinks in the worst way,
but always with that stupid black
stethoscope.
One day
a regular decided to screw with him
and wore a stethoscope of
his own.
The drunk drank beside him
for seven straight hours
and did not say
anything.
Then everyone wore a stethoscope,
even the bartender.
Waiting until the drunk went to the crapper
before putting them on.
When he returned
he walked about four feet
then his eyes got really
wide.
Like almonds split with a mallets.
MALPRACTICE!, he screamed,
MALPRACTICE!
MALPRACTICE!
Running out of the bar
so that everyone could share the same
dumb laughter
for once.
Something In the Way
When I heard the news that Kurt Cobain died
by shooting himself, stacks of bedpans trembled
in my hospital room. Lyrics of saline
dripped in my arms. I saw an image of Kurt’s face,
his scruff blurry on the TV screen. I recalled
a concert I attended months earlier. I went
and saw Nirvana, Kurt’s group. They performed
an acoustic, hoarse rendition of one of my
favorite songs: Something In The Way.
The puncture marks on my arms were almost
almost completely strummed away
with the memory of each chord. I thought
of his music’s rawness; his screams and whispers
expressed how I felt: frustrated
with the world at that time:
love was never free. I studied hard,
just like my parents and professors told me,
only to find that my degree was a weathered shingle
in a job market of aluminum siding.
I unloaded trucks, and Kurt, Dave Grohl,
Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear unloaded
their music. I finally felt
as if someone understood me.
And then Kurt’s suicide. And then
my diagnosis: a condition that would
be with me for the rest of my life,
no matter what medical advances were made
or how it was treated. My pre-procedure meal
of ice chips—no dip—melted
in a metal dish. I thought of the mist
of second hand smoke above the stage,
hands in the air as Nirvana played,
me on a friend’s shoulders, singing along,
in my quiet, raspy voice. Before the nurse gave me
my final shot for the day, she explained
what the doctors had in store for me
to my father. I stared at the TV in disbelief.
My father changed the channel. We watched
a documentary about Jupiter, its Great Red Spot
a storm. Lightning crashed in its atmosphere:
my thoughts swept up in its off-key, cloudy air,
no sign of solid ground anywhere.
–
Check out Joey Nicoletti’s blog.
Read more "POETRY: JOEY NICOLETTI – SOMETHING IN THE WAY"Don’t Try To Escape
The empty beer glasses remind me
to take a break from this conversation
I’m having on the nature of impulse
with this girl I didn’t think had it in her.
I stand up, find out I’m drunker
than I thought I was, more open
to this environment
I thought wasn’t for me.
“Not divey enough,” I had said.
“Too many artsy fartsy types.”
New emptiness is being met by the band
playing that familiar song, this feeling
the bartender’s mustache is my own
and I like it, despite the joke I made
to Jack when we walked in.
I think I might have been
bullying myself.
Everything is becoming
too sentimental.
I think I might puke,
so I resolve to slowly kill myself
with a cigarette and some air.
I take my place
by one of those cigarette dispensers,
which I suspect has no need
for the process of emptying and refilling
because around it
there must be a hundred or more
cigarette butts becoming one
with the communist grass.
Oxy
frame by frame
your life escapes me
little white pill
many mashed words in a
mixer like mom’s 1950
powder blue or green
whatever my mind
sticks to whatever
memory pops out
whatever color smells right
like flour
wisps in sunlit circles
and by the time I write this
I am 30 years old
confined to my bed
in pain
high
higher still
too weak to resist the next four hours.
Visit Tom’s blog.
Read more "POETRY: Tom Pescatore – OXY"Two Roses
leaning against a gravestone.
Tattered twin soldiers of past
lives surpassed. Blackened
by the brush of sun’s many fingers,
they cling to each other, refusing to relinquish
their kiss. Their memory
lingers like petals yet to be plucked
by the wind.
Read more "POETRY: A.J. HUFFMAN – Two Roses"The beauty of the screams that lead to birth
Blue eyes handshake unless they are
beige walls. Rooms inside us grow
arms and legs. They nosedive into
each other. They decorate themselves
with cracked mirrors, graveyard wall-
papers, ground chandeliers, disco balls,
cacti, of course, and miniature arm-
chairs. Soon you will mistake them
with crooked smile paintings. In them
you will see the sun. He looks nothing
like them. It is close to loneliness,
but not too close, but close enough
to open like a cave mouth and be teethed,
obviously, with wisdom, among other
things. I can hear the screams from here.
I see the shiny head. They collide clearly
like two planets. The orbit was not fire
enough. I see a belly button. It’s a boy.
Read more "POETRY: Christos Kalli – The beauty of the screams that lead to birth"The Blue Ridge Parkway
Looking at the jewelry, bracelets, earrings,
and necklaces, books
about leaves. Clothes, wooden
canes, wind chimes
like dulcimers, angels, colorful rocks,
pictures of smoky blue lands and
paintings, calendars and postcards,
and maps, I look out the window at The
Blue Ridge like an ocean of mountains.
And buy a book to learn autumn’s
colors, as we leave Pisgah Inn not to
return before April, when winter comes
and the gates to the parkway are closed
for those cold snowy days. The sunset
glows in the trees and the tunnels howl
as Biltmore sits nestled in the valley
of Asheville and the leaves
swirl behind the car
as The French Broad flows in cool shade.
Read more "POETRY: Danny P. Barbare – The Blue Ridge Parkway"
Cacti Fur 