in Buy Print Editions, Issue 100 (6 November 2011), Poems, Prose, Word Art, Writers from China, Writers from Colorado, Writers from Illinois, Writers from Italy, Writers from Maryland, Writers from Massachusetts, Writers from New Jersey, Writers from New Mexico, Writers from New York, Writers from Pennsylvania, Writers from Spain, Writers from Wales | Permalink
3 Google Poems
by John Collector of Bronxville
Alphabet as Acronym
A brazen Christian defector eventually found God. His ideas justified killings, loathsome morality, nervous opposition. Preachers quietly responded, sounding the unholy verses with xenophobic young zealots.
by Taylor Saldarriaga of New York
Joe's First, Last, and Only Denominator
We drank as friends and spoke beer for hours, but on love, Joe spoke but once: “All I look for in women anymore is sustained interest in the contents of my butt. The last woman to have it was my mother, and they say it's normal to desire one's mother.”
Sexist? Yes. Charmless? Yes.
But still.
My finger caressed the rim of my mug.
by Joe Montalbo in Binghamton
And Pity 'Tis 'Tis True
“Jeeves,” said Bertie, “knows everything.”
“Really?” Sir Hugh inquired.
”Really,” Bertie asserted.
“I propose,” Sir Hugh said, “a test. I shall hide on the roof. See if he finds me.”
He departed. Stairs creaked.
“Jeeves,” Bertie called
“Yes sir,” Jeeves replied.
“I’ve a question…” he said.
“Yes sir.”
There was an awful scream.
“Good God! What was that?” Bertie exclaimed.
“E flat, sir,” said Jeeves.
There was an awful thud.
by Anatoly Belilovsky of New York
Extant
The artist is dead,
as the post-moderns
said all that exists
is the text. Now,
the sky paints itself
with broad brush
strokes I want to unfold.
by Alicia Hoffman of Rochester
You Make Me Feel Jurassic
it will all work out, because when i awake staring at your you, i say:
corn on the cob you fucking dinosaur. & that's what love sounds like.
by m.g. martin of New York
Strikeout
She wants
to crack a bat
with stealthy precision
shattering both his kneecaps
and illusions.
by Marguerite Maria Rivas of Staten Island
The Long and Winding Road
by Deena Acquafredda of New York
Number 9
by Deena Acquafredda of New York
BANG BANG SHOOT SHOOT
by Deena Acquafredda of New York
Virtual Zuckerbergian (non)Reality Blues
An 86-year-old schizophrenic died dithering herself on a hospice bed–-my mother’s boyfriend, Chad, was an orderly and texted me a pic of the frosted cucumber (followed by a series of intermittently barfing and winking emoticons)--and when I told Katie, she wanted to know why my face didn’t look like my profile.
by Chris Vola of New York
Giant Cow Restaurant
Suckle that. It's of health and a good and difficult taste. Mouth and suckle from sacked and swinging flesh, teeth to leathered teat. She sways and lows, pleased and unconcerned. You drink your fill, hung from leather harness, the brass buckled skin of her child holding you to her, aloft, thirty feet from the earth.
by Ben Segal of Buffalo
Taken
She took me to school, took me to a show, took my arm in hers and twisted them both until they became one arm that was the same skin color and took the same vitamins and had the same hair and wore the same clothes and talked at the same volume and ate the same salad and drank the same coffee until I didn’t realize that it was just my arm there and I wondered what I’d been doing by myself this whole time.
by Helen Levin of New York
Marvelous Landscapes Greet the Voyagers
Our discourse redshift leads
Away from all these beacons
Engineered from lines I understood
In songs I can’t recall by heart.
by Alex Crowley of Brooklyn
The Fallacies of Hope
A guidebook
to Belgium.
4,000 killed here.
Bloodstains
that by some
strange act
become farms
and buildings.
The sun is god
stupefied with ether.
by Howie Good of Highland
The Gentlemanly Art of Pugilism
I punch you
in the head.
You fall down,
unconscious
but not
quite dead.
Thank you.
It was precisely
the response
I had intended.
by James Tolan of New York
History is not forgetting
that I was born an orphan and a bastard into a world of nuns,
that I once had a mother named Diane and a father listed only as deceased,
that I was born Joseph James Gera, a name denoting war.
It was during Vietnam.
My father.
History is not forgetting I have never seen a face quite like my own.
by James Tolan of New York
Blue Monday
I make a cup
of my heart
to contain the rain,
the cloud shapes
like accusations
increasingly hard
to dispute.
by Howie Good of Highland
[Insert Age] and [Insert Mistake]
Reality TV is the new scarlet letter. Mistakes broadcast for fame. I want to paint a rose under womanhood's tongue, in memory of the unwise.
by Christina Rodriguez of Queens
*Italicized words found in The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector
