WASTED

“How much time have I wasted
each day
standing over the toilet, feeling stranded
and strangling the last piss drops from my pecker-head?”
I think to myself
while strangling the last piss drops out over the toilet
and also minutes later
as I lie in bed,
cursing myself because I forgot to close the bathroom door afterward
and now all I can hear in the dark is the water running in the toilet
while I try to but don’t sleep, dripping a drop or two of my own onto the sheets anyway –
in spite of my being so diligent
that even with all that strangling
I also patted my one-eyeslit with a bit of toilet paper at the finish
Just to be sure.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. His first poetry collection is forthcoming from Cajun Mutt Press. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

We Can Still Sit Up in Bed Playing Favourites

If ducks don’t fall right from the sky  
all the time, we can still sit up in bed playing favourites, 
beside that mini bar we believe too costly to touch  
as we drape opening night curtain call hands all over each other, 
take turns with the bathroom after the fact, 
like seasoned pros: on a 4-year contract from the front office  
that pretends they want you in town long after the harvest queen  
has climbed down off her float, but the guaranteed money is frontloaded,  
like that first deep flood of emotion junkie love keeps chasing after; 
a needle in the arm and eyes rolled back like tumbled laundry  
forever on the slow dry – what you love can’t happen without  
what you know, vison quests of someone else who never holds 
your drink so easily when you lay another losing bet – 
If I can believe there is someone else, I never want to meet them. 
Would you want to meet yours?  Fuck empires! 
Jealousy is a personal onslaught. 
Straight losers in front of sports betting televisions. 
That dry throated way you can never make yourself  
as sick as the never dying world. 

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, Fixator Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

So Seldom Solution

A stainless-steel situation
which no one admits
slowly simmers.
Several pseudo sorcerers speak
from secretly swollen sheaves.
At impasse,
several spokespersons shout
but the true speakers stay silent.
Soon
the solid substance
of singular suction savvy survives.
Success sees
a symbolic scratching of the surface.

R. Gerry Fabian is a poet and novelist. He has published four books 
of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, 
Electronic Forecasts and Wildflower Women as well as his poetry 
baseball book, Ball On The Mound. He lives in Doylestown, PA.

Bad Metaphor of Dying

I am that bare, crumbling
building that hasn’t been
inhabited in years.

Seeing those who
pass by my isolation.

Hearing their
inane conversations

that contribute nothing
but disdain for those residing
on this bitch called earth.

Falling memories crack
off my foundation, while

ten stories up—I teeter towards
the darkness of empty.
Plummeting, dropping
Off bit by bit.

Until the frame—barren.

Becomes the final segue from
gold
To
dust.

A former collegiate offensive lineman and football coach for 26 years, Dan Provost’s poetry has
been published both online and in print since 1993. He is the author of 15 books/chapbooks. His
latest, Wolf Whistles Behind the Dumpster was released by Roadside Press in November 2022.
He has been twice nominated for The Best of the Net and has read his poetry throughout the
United States. He lives in Berlin, New Hampshire with his wife Laura, and dog Bella.

The coming of snow

Comes the brown snowfall
The low, heavy green clouds redden
then darken to brown
Then let drop their leavings
one by one
or with a chill gust,
a blizzard of whirling, hand-sized flakes.
They cover the ground.
They pile up in drifts.
Dry, crisp, curled, veined and stemmed.
When they have relieved themselves of all that weight,
the trees reveal their skeletons
reach up with thin, bony, crooked fingers
toward those clouds that bring another kind of snow.

Lou Conover has never participated in a writing workshop and has no training as a writer besides failing a creative writing course in high school. With degrees in music, mathematics, cognitive science, and teaching, Lou is a practicing musician, an engineer, a mathematics teacher, and, by accident, for the last eighteen years, an artist. Lou lives in Western Massachusetts, has a blessedly gender neutral name, no pronouns, no active social media accounts, and two children.

The Impresarios of Light

arrive in darkness. Those who
are surprised by this bat it away
by saying it’s a way to heighten
the contrast. Others, with more
extreme views, ascribe it to the
influence of those game-playing
wikis which elevate the eldritch
to a necessary component of any
form of fine art. The impresarios
emerge smiling at all the misinter-
pretations, do not seek to remind
the mind-blind crowd that darkness
always travels at the speed of light.

Mark Young’s latest collection of poetry, with the slow-paced turtle replaced by a fast fish,
will be published later this year by sandy press.

Brick By Brick

We can grow or
We can shrink or
We can stay the same;
The worst bit is
We don’t get to choose our chocolate.
I pray the sun shines bright when I wake.
You pray for happy rain to bless your wheat.
Our prayers fight in
The sky with shiny guns.

Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. He was educated at The University of Nottingham where he got a degree in biochemistry. He lives in Bristol, England. His poetry has been published in ‘Dream Noir’, ‘Home Planet News’, and ‘Scars Publications.  

 

parallel

she lay nestled  
in the branches 
of death 
deep in a permanent 
slumber 
where dreams & truth 
& terror  
blend into 
a pastoral 
formality 
& the smiles 
of old ghosts 
are the floormats 
of eternity. 

jck hnry is a queer writer based in the high desert of southern california. over the years i have found success at: rye whiskey review, mad swirl, alice says go fuck yourself, 13 mynas, and others. in apr 23 GUTTER SNOB PRESS will release “LOS ANGELES.” a chapbook anthology. in 2021 PUNK HOSTAGE PRESS released “DRIVING W/CRAZY, a poetic memoir to their father’s last years battling with mental illness.

The Silver-tipped Fire Hydrant 

I never understood why they didn’t just paint it 
or find a matching part, 
but the silver-tipped fire hydrant just sat there 
out front my house. 

Strangely out of place  
around all the other yellow uniform hydrants 
in the neighbourhood. 

And I felt a kinship with my silent silver-tipped friend. 
We were both paralysingly quiet, had trouble fitting in. 

Then one day, 
I found that someone had spray painted 
some ratty blue expletive over the silver head 
of the hydrant.  

It was as though my own face  
had been spray painted over. 

It sat there for years like that. 
No one cared. 
Which prepared me for the rest 
of my Life. 

 

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, Fixator Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

Destruction

drunk sparrows fall like flaming
meteors causing holes in
streets pedestrians scatter while
nightingales go into
hiding finding crepuscular caves in
virgin jungles to wait for
the new beginning they desire the
new phoenixes to
be emerge out of nuclear mushrooms and the
sparrows keep on
falling down drunk and burning burning and drunk
the cats have no idea how to react to the
sudden barbeque gift and the cities are
emptied buildings torn
down for material the nightingales sing their
mellow melodies in their caves to help
the bears fall asleep again and some rocks fall whenever another
sparrow lands on the distant streets of faraway cities.

Currently residing in Greece, George Gad Economou has a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Science. Has published a novella, Letters to S. (Storylandia), a poetry collection, Bourbon Bottles and Broken Beds (Adelaide Books), and his drunken words have appeared in various places, such as Spillwords Press, Ariel Chart, Fixator Press, Outcast Press, Piker’s Press, The Edge of Humanity Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, and Modern Drunkard Magazine.