feminist

POETRY: Ryan Quinn Flanagan – Paging Doctor Numbnuts

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.

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POETRY: Michael Bartelt – Don’t Try To Escape

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.

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