CALIFORNIA BLONDE BY BRADLEY MASON HAMLIN

She sat on the beach sand like a soft painting, that long California blonde hair blowing gently in warm summer wind.

Maybe he misses her when she’s out of town or just in the other room, tries to listen to Iggy Pop or have a true vision of Picasso with a cold beer, but it doesn’t work because he has gone somewhere impossible with her, can’t drink enough to blur the image of her in that red bikini with that glass of red wine.

Or the fine shimmer of darkness in her chocolate eyes.

They drank in an alley once, in Los Angeles, as alley cats strolled fences, hanging onto sanity, broke, young, on the run and always cool west coast jazz, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Herb Alpert, a soundtrack, a stillness…

Facing each other and toughing out the metamorphosis of evolving.  Would she get upset if I ripped a butterfly in half or squeezed a kitten until it exploded?

She would.

But sometimes we don’t know our own strength when touching something delicate and beautiful until we destroy it.

view from a barroom in amsterdam by M.P. Powers

There’s a sex theater next door
with little flickering lights around
the windows and a bouncer
pacing out front. In the alleyway,
just a little further down, I can see
them –  two glass doors, one
with a thick red curtain
drawn. In the other, a beautiful
woman straddling a chair.
She’s smoking a cigarette, skillfully
dazzling the droll beasts
of the evening, who move past
with their umbrellas. Englishmen,
Turks, Americans, the lonely,
the debauched. I watch them all
go by from this table by the
window, as the church bells toll
in the tower at the foot
of the street; they toll out of sadness,
anger, remorse. They toll
and they keep tolling when
suddenly the curtain pulls back
and a man creeps through
the door. He lowers his head and scurries
off into the rainy evening.
A few minutes later, she appears
in his place. Barely legal, blond,
svelte; she touches her velvety
thighs belly lips sticks her fingers
in her mouth and somehow
you are led to believe
her next
will also be her first.

Long Way Home by DB COX

Alvin Stone is headed home. Because of his flimsy slippers, he’s finding it hard to step in time with the music. It’s getting late. The warmth has left the sun, and he wants to reach home before nightfall. “This time Eve, my dear,” he promises, “I’ll take my pills. I’ll keep quiet. I swear—this time I’ll be good.” Alvin halts. His pulse quickens. Just ahead—his house.

…Patients in the ward turn toward the old man as he stops wandering the walls and cries out her name. They watch mesmerized as he runs his right hand up and down his gown pulling frantically at a non-existent pocket—searching for his house key.

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.

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