MEN GUESSING THEIR LOVER’S DESIRES

She sent me to the porn store

with the following instructions:

don’t buy anything gross.

So the 19-inch dildo with a purple tip

and rippling veins is probably out

but maybe not.

One woman’s gross

is another woman’s orgasm.

-- Dave Newman

CAREERISM VS. LITERATURE

Years ago

when I was in grad school

I had a poetry professor

who wasn’t much of a teacher

but was a lot of fun to drink with.

One evening after a night class

he pulled me aside and said

in a very serious way

“I may drink a whole bottle

of Jack Daniels

and fall down the stairs

but it doesn’t mean

I have to put it in a poem”

which may have been decent career advice

and suddenly made clear his own PG-rated poems.

I was writing autobiographical narratives

like most young poets

and my autobiography was pretty scruffy:

I lived an old apartment with a struggling Army vet

and an undergraduate alcoholic who stood

six feet tall and sometimes set his hair on fire

I was 3rd assistant manager at B. Dalton

which meant I had to steal dinner money

from the cash registers to have a proper meal

I read and believed Baudelaire when he said

“Be drunk…with wine, virtue, or poetry”

though I would have added dope and fucking

and long mornings staring at the ceiling

with vigor and great seriousness

and eating long slow breakfasts with bacon

and listening to Bo Diddley at midnight  

and tongue kissing strangers in Dee’s Bar

I didn’t have insurance and wouldn’t for years

I was a recovering born-again Christian

who woke each morning with God

puking last night’s sins in his ear.

I subsisted on writing and reading

believing that somehow my poverty

might end up useful.

What my professor meant was: be fake.

He meant tell half-truths.

He could have been everyone I knew

at church and work, the people I’d hoped

to ditch by becoming a serious writer.

My professor put his arm on my shoulder.

The other students walked off, maybe

believing I was receiving extra praise.

What my professor meant was: bullshit.

He meant: the way to success

is inaccuracy and a spit-polished life.

I laughed at him, not in a mean way

but because I was stunned.

The language I most loved and wrote in

was barspeak, dive barspeak, and it may

have sounded garbled in a workshop

obsessed with politics but it told more truth

than anything I’d ever heard in a classroom

and I’d have quit writing before I spoke

in anything less than what I heard in the night.

Do I have to say my professor is more successful

than I am and will ever be?

This was more than 20 years ago

it’s still everything that’s wrong with literature

and the general fuckheadedness of the world—

no one telling the truth and claiming it’s the truth.

-- Dave Newman

MOTEL 7 GARY, INDIANA

Sitting on the edge of a vibrating bed

without any quarters

     truck parked outside
with some

other trucks

at least one

still running

woman next door

threatening to gouge

her husband’s eyes

out for looking

at pornography.

I paid 60 bucks for this place

and the water is cold

and the bible
underneath the nightstand

crushes a generic tissue box.

Do you know the story of Mizpah?

He walked across Israel to become

a fisherman and the Romans

hung him upside down on a cross

then stabbed him in the side with a sword.

No one knows if Mizpah loved Jesus.

No one knows if committed a crime.

I took a bus across the country

to work a job I hate.

Now I hear sirens.

My three options are:

Wisconsin
jail

or home.

I turn the bible upside down and shake

but the verses refuse to fall out.  

-- Dave Newman

The Climbers

We leave the world with our heavy clothes on,

slough off a day's worth of sweat and strip dress clothes

stuck to our skin. forget the television with its terrible news.

We know that we’re too tired for change, except for a worn sweater

and slippers, share just enough energy between us to climb the steps with you

to our bedroom, untwist the question

of floral blankets, cackle together like old spinsters, slide off

into this shared body of sleep. After the dream, tomorrow will be rain,

and the city sky will  bleed out over the three roofers I watch, climb

a neighbor’s house, as I walk to work under their downpour

of bent nails, the dust their work stirs up. They toss over empty coffee cups,

ragged shingles, the green one scurrying up with tools.

already knowing the importance of being helpful, too young

to consider the edge, slip of a tennis shoe on wet gutters,

that eternal oh shit moment.

I’m thinking of the first time I fell from a ladder, How the plumber

I worked with said, they’d bring flowers if I was dead, hire someone else the next day.

I learned to survive the white knuckle climb, to hide

the shaking knees, the flaming back and get there. Leave the boy

on the steep, wet rungs below. Don’t look back at him, ask if he’s ok,

let him think about what might happen, the grip this has on his hands,

the rain, when it picks up, how it’ll make the decision for him.

never again and never again and never again.

-- Bob Walicki

Frances Feeds the Bear

That's a bear, Frances.

Yeah, says Frances.
Do you want to feed the bear?
Frances smiles and shakes her head happily.

What should we feed it? Apricots maybe?
Yeah, says Frances.

The bear wears a soft smile.
And I have a soft heart for him.
He belongs to Frances's mother.
The bear feeds on invisible apricots.

Frances disappears behind the sofa.
The bear stays still.
The afternoon grows into evening
like Frances's hands looking more like my own.

-- Joseph Hurtgen

Like I Before

Sober and undrugged I rehearse in my head

to my wife in the kitchen "I'll have a cup a coffee,

Please, love," but instead hear myself say

"Ittlebut wattleap..." then "Spipton,"

when I want to apologise for nonsense.

I see my right hand side as a grey blur,

my left hand side is clear and sharp,

my headaches. I can't communicate.

I wobble as my brain sloshes from side

to side of my skull until I sit.

-- Paul Brookes

The Ideal Husband

Should know his wife's knicker and bra size,

her favourite perfume,

shoe size, how she takes her tea and coffee,

what she hates to eat,

her ideal colour scheme.

Especially after 16 years,
until she changes her mind

-- Paul Brookes

Reminds

herself to use her legs when pulling out weeds

so she don't get pain in her back aggravated

by weight of cat litter bags she puts

in her tartan shopping trolley when she meets

her friend Flora in town to share a tuna salad

homemade by Sully the African refugee.

-- Paul Brookes

Three by J.B

Brazil

yellow flowers

surround brazil

although 

the popcorn festival

is no more

Ozark Sunset

hypnotized

by an Ozark Sunset

and twelve hours 

on the road

headlights spark

fireflies

with sleep

still in their eyes

For Don Wentworth

there’s magic

in the room

as I watch’

your words

land

-- Jason Baldinger

Horizons, Et Cetera

It always goes back

to these crowded bars—

talking of nothing

in between sips of beer foam

it always goes back to

the stage where they hammer

out love bites into sound,

beat their feet with the pulse

of a hundred lungs inflating

staring into the spotlight of

a vagabond horizon.

These weirdos, jock heads, stoners,

yupsters, post hippie-hipsters, 

free-love megalomaniacs, dead poets, these

burnouts, these forgotten souls

look a lot like me.

And I'm wading through their

choruses of self-deprecation 

humming my own refrain.

-- Damian Rucci

The oddest things can save us

Every broken piece

                                is a part of something

                                   

                                the form that it takes at the end 

is only a sign 

of how we survived. 

--- James Diaz

Mario Lemieux

Waits for the puck in a New Kensington living room.

The wall poster action shot above a worn out couch.

A woman bends down to sweep her carpet with a broom.

Dog hair, Dorito crumbs, torn receipts. I wait

with tools to be told where the broken sink is.

“That was 92" she says. "Their second cup.

Third period. I was there when he scored the game winner,

banged that puppy right in.” I walk past toys, strewn clothes,

a ceiling fan dangling by the wires and kneel before the porcelain God.

A cracked sink and faucet that screams burning hot water or nothing

at all. When I leave, the new sink shines like a full moon in the dark

of burned out lamps, the unswept dirt of pizza crusts and Legos.

Mario on the wall, looming like a ghost on ice, before the shot.

Before any goal could save a city. In town, the buildings I pass

fade into a wet blur. Flecked with rain, the businesses stripped

of names, boarded up glass, soaped up or duct taped.

Nothing open but a bar and a bank, Citizens

flashing alive in neon.

No one here will scoring anything tonight, but maybe a little weed,

a six pack after work and the game on tonight, the ice

cleaned of its scratches and cuts, made new,

TV’s filling our rooms with blue light, a chorus of screams.

That hunger we don’t want to name.

-- Bob Walicki 

A Warm Winter

I pine for the

soft robots

and fast sloths

of spring.

it’s been months of

hot blood:

hot blood

at lunch,

hot blood

in the shower.

I want to kiss you

like a kitten licks

things

but we kiss

like we’re chatting,

not like cats

at all, and

anyway, ever since

I found that cat

and brought him back,

my life is

re-interpreted

through a haze of fur.

I saved his life

instead of watching

werewolves.

now it’s all stupid

meows instead of

transformations.

even my nosebleeds are

mundane.

there’s no snow.

we hike in the mud.

my only pleasure is

the feel of your arm.

please don’t

tell me that anecdote
again.

  -----Tessa Barber