My Sweet Love by Matt Dennison

Our shotgun
wall-neighbor
Tom was tall
and blond,
owned a truck,
had a job
with the city,
lived alone.

Tom had been
in hospitals,
his father told me
one night between
shared drinks
on the stoop.

They had held him
down and applied
the shock-stick
to jizz himself
all over himself
while they laughed
all over themselves.

He could not have
normal relations
after that.

Perhaps that is why
Tom whipped his dog
with a sharp metal chain
every night behind
our soft wooden
fence.

Perhaps that is why
my love, my joy,
my daisy

chose me over
Tom.

After a rather extended and varied second childhood in New Orleans, Matt Dennison’s work has appeared in Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made videos with poetry videographers Michael Dickes, Swoon and Marie Craven. https://youtu.be/UnoTelwXuww

Hepatica by Kenneth Pobo

Picture Dusty singing
“Breakfast In Bed”
to Norma Tanega.
They touch tenderly
in places that Ed Sullivan
fears, the swingin’ sixties
a time when even famous
heads get bashed
against a wall and
careers come down
with a terrible disease
and die of truth. Norma
puts her head on
Dusty’s chest. The sun
has already gotten up
to make breakfast
for a hepatica blossom.

Wanderlust by John Doyle

Calabria, Cantabria, Azores,
it’s like Cicero wrote the lyrics for Kokomo
instead of Mike Love…

The Junction by Emily Bilman

From his bronze bust, blasé,
Freud gazes at
the labyrinths of our libido,
his hands in his pockets.
Dedalus-like, the maze-exits
elude me like the thorns
of your absence.
Born by the blood
that cleanses us
like a resilient river,
we escape
the ogre-Minotaur
at the junction
of our inner journeys.

Navy Man by Jon Bennett

I have to admit
even after all the years of drink
dad still has the bemused look in his eye
looking at a painting of a sailboat
recognizing its year of production
the class, the country of origin
the knots employed
and perhaps even connecting
classical music from that period.
Even after all the years of drink,
after all, it was only drink
while I’ve lost chunks of years
from all the dope
and can barely recognize a bos’n hitch
let alone tie one.
I have to admit, as he says,
“things havent’ only changed,
they’ve gotten worse,”
he might be right.

Jon Bennett fuzzy — Jon Bennett writes and plays music in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. You can find more of his stuff on iTunes, Spotify, and http://www.jonbennett.info

Hippiecrits by Mark Antony Rossi

A hopped-up hippie
told me too much beef
will give me colon cancer.

I replied “once you quit smoking
Pot and Parliament
then you can lecture me
on clean living.

That SOB
ran for Congress
Got arrested for nuke protests
And became a vegetarian.

Good advice is hard to take.

Mark Antony Rossi’s poetry, criticism, fiction and photography have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Another Chicago Review, Bareback Magazine, Black Heart Review, Collages & Bricolages, Enclave, Expound, GloMag, Gravel, Flash Fiction, InBetween Hangovers, Japanophile, On The Rusk, Purple Patch, Scrivener Creative Review, Sentiment Literary Journal, The Sacrificial ,Wild Quarterly and Yellow Chair Review.
http://markantonyrossi.jigsy.com

All The Phones At Positive Pie by Ron. Lavalette

All the babes at Positive Pie have
phones that go unanswered, phones
that bleep and glurg incessantly;
insistent phones that flash and flash
and stab their heedless owners’ eyes
and ears and only add to the general
beer-filled boisterous brouhaha, add
to the overall overkill of noisiness
to no avail:
all the babes at Positive Pie
ignore their phones. The more they ring
the more they get ignored.
The old man
at the end of the bar, at the bitter end
of his working Wednesday, watching,
has seen the babes ignore their phones
before, has heard the glurg and buzz
and, buzzed, he works to find the words
to turn it into certain verse, to turn the
worst of sounds around, to make the
endless ringing sing a song.
He thinks.
He finds, at last, the ink. He sings along.

Ron. Lavalette - Copy — Ron. Lavalette is primarily a poet living in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, land of the fur-bearing lake trout and the bilingual stop sign. He has been widely published, both online and in print. A reasonable sample of his published work can be found at EGGS OVER TOKYO. Ron. blogs at: SCRAMBLED, NOT FRIED .

Untitled 4 by Texas Fontanella

Untitled 4 Texas Fontella — Texas Fontanella

Summer Rain After The Longest Damn Day by Gareth Spark

Smoke harnessing sky, old June
sits well on your shoulder-
dead tree spikes against
your thunder-full cloud;
and I do not move, still dressed
for sun bath and want
the rain to come, want to feel
beneath an action of the world,
to know,
water on shoulders,
that I am not a thing apart,
not memories, not dreams
but animal hair, and gut and bone.
Come rain and show me
the precious primacy.

I’ll sit here in the clogged heat
and wait.

Gareth Spark is from Whitby, Yorkshire. His short fiction and poetry has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Line Zero, Out of the Gutter, NAP, Poetry Bus and Deepwater Literary Review, among others. He reviews poetry online for Fjords Review, among others.

James Babbs Photo 2 — James Babbs is a writer, a dreamer, a three-time loser and an all-around nice guy who just wants to be left alone. James is the author of Disturbing The Light(2013) & The Weight of Invisible Things(2013) and has hundreds of poems and a few short stories scattered all over the internet.

In Between Hangovers

We Are The Underground!

Month: June 2016