ephemera stranglehold

I thought our block was mostly
north facing in order to adapt to
changes in light. I know less about
clothing. Just because something
doesn’t do what you hoped it
would do, you won’t want to
waste your money on excess
packaging. Winnings can be

calculated by multiplying one’s
continuing health by the number of
private gardens in Japan. Now that
the swivel chairs have been chosen
we will end the afternoon with a
few topical musical contributions.

varied expressions of the other’s corporeality

At another time they would roll
back the conflicting operation &
forward an economical option for
boat owners. We do not know
what kind of aggressive techniques
were used, couldn’t find any other
relevant products or a quantitative
explanation. It’s crystal clear that

there is no current, due to decreased
investment in new facilities & a
lack of enthusiasm for finding a new
way to conceive the creative work.
Everyday vessels never wait long
enough to adapt to changes in light.

Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry since 1959. He is the author of around fifty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages.

Poem for a Security Guard Who Brings His Own Flashlight

I can’t believe they don’t supply you with one,
expecting you to go floor-to-floor on a future demolition site
in your steel toed safeties, a mask for the asbestos
and your brown bag in the fridge downstairs,
the many watch out for falling concrete signs in all
the stairwells, exposed steel beams and trip hazards everywhere,
rats the size of your foot falling on you from the torn
insulation above, in those dumb blue overalls with someone
else’s name on them because he quit a week ago and you just started,
you may as well be flipping burgers for what they are paying you
and you had to interview twice for this gig, lie twice on your resume
and once to their face, still nowhere close to all the doozies
they told you and this is your early obituary, a poem for a security
guard who brings his own flashlight, paying your own way
down into the city each night, just happy to have the job,
that potato chip crunch of cockroaches under foot,
searching out squatters that piss in juice jars and amateur
ghost hunters that have watched too much television,
until they decide to finally implode the bloody thing
and you find yourself out of work all over again.

The Statues Downtown Never Have Crossed Eyes

BARKEEP – there are war crimes in my drink!
Tiny atrocities floating around in lazy dunce cap circles
that make one dizzy for staring too long.
The statues downtown never have crossed eyes,
I’m beginning to believe in conspiracies no one else
has thought of.  The laces of my shoes frayed with
someone else’s workday.  And those fingers down the bar
that peel the labels right off the bottles, how obsessive!
I think I am in love with the obsession and never the person.
Not even the fingers that seem to prattle about like
a displaced spider.  The church organ has the same fingers.
Every Sunday it is spiders and absolution.
Can I get another drink?  Some ice this time.
I like the sound my glass makes when I hold it to my ear.
You could put it on vinyl and make a bundle.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Ariel Chart, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

it was every bar in the North Side
long gone places like the 222 on Federal
the Rosa Villa on East General Robinson
a couple places lost in Spring Garden
the bar that burned down on Woods Run
that one that seemed darker than the rest
somewhere in the holler on Bascom
Riggs on Brighton somehow still stands

everyone knew my dad
in those places that hung heavy with hunkie smoke
those places of little hiding
those place of forgetting
those dark places with the rough comradery of men

they were always happy
to see my dad, he had a baggie
or a couple pills to palm
into some cash

we’d belly up the bar
he’d order a Stroh’s
all the bartenders would laugh
as I climbed the stool
already seasoned
I’d order a Shirley Temple
a Roy Rogers, they may
muss my hair, say
you got a fine boy

these are the secrets
as they are, as they were
passed down from generations
sometimes from father’s to daughter’s
always from father’s to son’s

Jason Baldinger is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He was recently a Writer in Residence at Osage Arts Community, and is founder and co-director of The Bridge Series. He has multiple books available including The Better Angels of our Nature (Kung Fu Treachery) and the split books The Ugly Side of the Lake with John Dorsey (Night Ballet Press) as well as Little Fires Hiding with James Benger (Kung Fu Treachery Press). His work has been published widely in print journals and online. You can listen to him read his work on Bandcamp on lps by the bands Theremonster and The Gotobeds.

Still Life

Mozart street has gone. No spontaneous hosepipe game, no kerbies in a cul-de-sac,  no streets of open doors.  I’d forgotten it all till a decaf latte in a museum café brought it back till the bubbles went.  Black and white heatwave became red-amber-green on a spreadsheet.  Mozart Street has gone, like that squealing child; gone like Mrs McDermott; gone like car-free gutters fishing for frogs; gone like all them kids; gone like the boiling smell of tap-water on flags; gone like boxes of half-price processed colour snaps, waiting weeks to find your mum had missed your head off and third place in that race, well, you’ll just have to take my word for it and write it all down because there’s only me and my sister left who were there, a big deal at the time but in a year or two it’ll dry up faster than steaming screaming puddles.  Mozart Street has gone, like who’s bright idea was it to follow the dustbin lorry? Who you fuckin lookin at? Who d’you think you are? Which was her with the hosepipe?  Who can still see their toes without bending over?  Who can stand pork-pie and Ocean stick funeral teas?  Mozart Street has gone.  The filthy nets were the last thing left when they knocked them down. That kid who squealed as his Dad’s time-and-a-half-on-bonus arms lifted him into the range of the spray died eating a fry-up in The Station.  A shame, it was, he got out of breath even while driving that taxi, leaning out the window with his fag, at that age you’d hoped he’d just get one of them warnings like you hoped summers could always be like that one August heatwave when there was no school, and everybody seemed to have enough time, life time.  Mozart Street has gone and Mr McDermott still has time-and-a-half on his hands, still not an ounce of fat on him, still likes Don Williams, still beats the chair arms when he laughs, still taps his feet to the beat when the staff gamely fail to get the words on the karaoke they bought, still the backing lights a light way back in his eyes to an awkward summer where he’d lost his mother but them kids didn’t half keep you busy.

It was like that.

Jimmy Andrex is a poet and performer from Wakefield who co-founded Red Shed Readings in 2008, who makes spoken word programmes for ELFM in leeds and who currently is touring Stupidity Is Not The Problem, a spoken word and music piece based on Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists as well as promoting a poetry pamphlet with no title.

The Wind

Somehow we were always expecting something like this to happen, a strange wind off the Atlantic, moaning and cursing and full of old hurts, tearing the shingles from roofs and flinging the birds against windows, threatening to fling us, too, into another country, where there are unexpected roadblocks and frequent document checks and coked-up child soldiers with machine guns cradled in their skinny arms and more and more people given a kick and a shove and warned to move on, a pretty crappy way to die, when we might have all just stayed together under a green tent of leaves.

Season of the Witch

The weather hasn’t been cooperating. When the temperature drops, New Englanders proudly display the millstones that were used to crush Giles Corey for being a witch. I’ve started sleeping with a knife under my pillow. The purpose has eluded you, though I’ve explained it several times: I had to cross the creek by tiptoeing over a rotting tree, and now wherever I go, I leave a trail of mud behind. It all comes from the same place. The place could be everywhere. Once a day, there’s a burst of activity on the shore, the premeditated murder of bees and flowers.

Howie Good is the author of The Titanic Sails at Dawn (Alien Buddha Press, 2019).

First Look

i saw you for the first time

pressed against the inner wall
of mother’s womb your forehead
meeting the dark         eyes black circles without sight

they brought your life to me
on a colorless screen
vibrating
at the sound of your heart

i could make out a mouth
from which i pretended a faintest
smile

they pointed to shadows
feet above head     blocking clear view of spine

the first disobedient act

they told me here are the
hands feet legs arms lungs intestines
your ribs

i watched a profile obscured
by machinery and graphs
numbers and name removed from the reality of
fingers lips nose
toes

i was left on the outside removed
i was left to be propelled through
time and space           confronted with your
burgeoning life

their proof was a starmap of your every
inside every outside every
move

your future place

as evidence they gave me a
glossy image of bones

and some of the coins were black

america

a lot of people pick up your change in the street

you’ve suffered for those many

                                                   likes

a fucking multitude of pain

children in cages are paint by numbers

the scene

                 is enraged deceit

my money is on the subtle march of time
and you say who gives a fuck

we got guns
and an invitation to a barbecue

charring the bones will rid you of any bodies

and clear out the stench

a mouse carcass on my stoop

                                                impregnated by flies

it looks on a map like your full hips
your round lips

                          your bulbous shape

I vomited on it

                         before I could clean it up

I fondled the coins deep set
in my pocket

                      I just now

remembered to wash
my hands

Tom Pescatore can sometimes be seen wandering along the Walt Whitman bridge or down the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row. He might have left a poem or two behind to mark his trail. His first novel the Boxcar Bop is out now from RunAmok Books. He claims ownership of the poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com.