The Speak Easy

Rusty Truck:  Do you have a particular place or routine where you write best?

Christopher Robin:  Whenever I travel, which is often, I take a stack of letters and poetry notes with me, get a motel room or a campground and get more writing and reading done than at home. Vegas is great for poetry. There’s something about writing and gambling that I really love.

Todd Moore:  Anywhere in the world is fine as long as the lines are coming.

William Taylor Jr. I tend to get most of my ideas and notes that eventually become poems from just walking around the city and hanging out.  The bars, the streets, whatever.  I generally hammer it all together at my desk at home.

if poems can’t protect you, you better learn to throw a punch by Steve Calamars

gorilla sunshine
pounds my
skin-shell

i drag a 300-pound
sled across the asphalt
out back behind
the gym

my calves feel
like cinder-blocks
my thighs tree-trunks

because words mean
little in the face of
fists and muscle

pencil-necks and
chicken-legs maybe
more often than not
produce poems

but fundamentally
the world doesn’t
give a shit about syllables
scrawled across a
sheet of paper

it only respects
a strong back and
monstrous forearms

sometimes not even that

so i pull this sled
across the asphalt

my heart pumping
ether thru my lungs

and pick up my pen
with the strain of
a dead-lift

and try to break your
jaw with the weight of
my words

the way i would with
my fists if you were
here right now—

Jason Hardung

THE GUY IN THE RED HAT

A guy younger than me
in a red stocking hat
comes out of the cold and
sits on the couch in the coffee shop.
His legs are tightly crossed,
so are his arms
his chin to his chest-
a cold bird high
in a tree with no leaves.
His mouth hangs open
from his pale face
thin rimmed glasses holding back eyes
that fixate on the wooden floor
slowly drifting in and out of consciousness.
A plastic grocery bag
full of his belongings sits next to him.
People go on around him
like he has always been there.

I always wanted to be an artist
so I could paint life like this.
My hand never steady enough
to trace man’s inner conflict.
I always wanted to be able to sing
so people would listen.
I wanted to be God
but I’m scared of water.
I want to buy this guy a cup of coffee
and get his story
but I don’t
I just type and look
over at him
and every once in awhile
he looks at me and wonders
what my
problem is.

Jason Hardung

INSIGNIFICANT MOMENTS LIKE BULLETS

I remember the note she left-

“I closed the window.
It was raining.”

She was gone
when I got home
from work that day.

I get dressed
and wonder whose head
she is throwing dishes at now.

Featured Poet: JASON HARDUNG

SECRETS OF THE ANTIQUARIUM

I was nineteen and still believed
the mystics walked among us
a guitar could get me laid
and I could control the rotation of the earth
with extreme concentration.
I drove a pick up truck
through trenches in Middle America
was in love with a slut
carried a gun
and partied until the ceiling
spun like a dream sequence
in a Ken Kesey’s home movie.

Gunfighters, junkies and cowboys
became heroes of mine
and love conquered all.
From the bus window I saw Jesus
stifled on billboards
and in the back room of the Antiquarium.
I thought his verse resembled Jim Morrison’s
Horse Latitudes-
and they both did the crucifixion
pose for their head shots.
I wanted to burn out young.
My life would make a great
made for TV special
and Kirk Cameron would play
my teenage years.

Once I was born
sucking on the floppy tit of the beast
fed it until it overcame adversity
killed it and made it holy.

I followed train tracks and miracles
fire on my heels
flowers in my ribs
sun on the horizon-

there was always California
if the bottom fell out.

Veterans Day Anthology–The devil laughs with us

Click on he wall to view chapbook, then on full screen for best viewing.  Poems by Alan Catlin, S.A Griffin, D.B. Cox, Bradley Mason Hamlin, F.N. Wright, Jack Henry, Raindog, and Scot Young.

Cover art by F.N. Wright.  First appeared in  Piss on the Pope published by Mystery Island.

ONE NIGHT STAY by Howie Good

An old man with eyes like dead sparrows
is telling a story at the next table

in the restaurant of the Quality Inn
in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, something

about the price of scrap metal after the war.
Suddenly he lowers his voice. The Jews,

he mutters. My wife and I look at each other.
Meat hooks. Gas chambers.

Our daughter notices. What? she asks.
I shake my head. We finish eating

and go up to our $74-a-night room
and all lie on one bed and watch TV.

The studio audience is laughing.

IT WAS BETTER HE SAID by Lyn Lifshin

than Christmas with
a half naked girl with
tongue down his
throat while the
record stuck on
Elvis’ Blue Christmas.
When he forgot the
language he couldn’t
remember how it
seemed, only how her
leg caught his lips
on the stained sofa
you could smell
ancient sex smells rise
from like fish egg
smell over Orleans
where the sea’s blue
in the mirror was
less blue than her veins

RIPTIDE TWILIGHT ON THE MACARTHUR PLATFORM by Paul Corman Roberts

I know this brother

……….Even during the big storms the color of the sunset sky
on the platform from ten years ago

……….over California’s coastline at its best
was a little more Rasta back then

……….a crisp and healthy hue of gold
with the serape and the leather cowboy hat

……….with the occasional slash
and the hot and wild hair trying to jump off into the universe

……….of purple and red but never
making him much more Bob Kaufman than ever before

……….with the kinds of profusion
I take great hope in that and he is going to San Francisco

……….like the skies
He is praying and he will be warm

……….while I stare down the crisp, golden green San Francisco skyline
in the Mojave desert at sunset

it’s not that i’m apathetic by Justin Hyde

read enough world history
from multiple
perspectives.

on top of that

walk around

eyes
pinned open

brain
unfurled:

we’re standing
on a
billion plus
years

of

sifting
change

&

not one drop of
forward
progress:

those with the winchesters
call the shots

those with the megaphones
sometimes manage to get hold
of the winchesters.

but all they do is
raise a different
flag.