I wear each shitty tattoo
like a badge of honor.
The black panther,
the pinup girl,
the red rose,
the pair of dice.
I still don’t regret
a single one of them.
That wouldn’t do
any good anyway.
Because regret is like ink—
it never goes away either.
There’s no telling where I end
and you begin. All the kings men
are in the kitchen doing jujutsu with Jane.
The afterparty contains hostile agents
and bad news about the divine.
Your lips are layovers in a foreign train station.
Portals to a parallel reality
double back with dates and revisions.
Your friends call you the queen of Mars.
Dodie remakes the world with ECM classics.
Our talk turns to jodhpurs and clavicles,
the lilacs wilted in the vase on the table.
There are the wounds we are given
and the wounds that we choose.
I must be bricked up alive for the fortress to stand.
My dear ________________ ,
“Charlie don’t surf.”
The TV is a UV burn.
I play guitar
Don’t call me
Iggy’s right-hand man
I was always into Nazi shit
doing Hitler speeches
and wearing SS pins
at Ann Arbor High School
Don’t call me
Fat Beatle
They tucked my Iron Cross
medal under my leather
for the jacket photo
of our first album
the stooges
damn I was juiced
that Elektra Records dropped
the Psychedelic lame
part of our band name
I was into wearing nazi regalia
at all our shows
a Jewish fan came up to me
crying Why are you doing this?
I told him Aren’t you glad
the Nazis lost so a freak
like me can wear this?
Well I guess I was
Iggy’s best-man
at his first wedding
when he married
a Jewish chick
and I showed up
wearing a Luftwaffe
fighter pilot’s jacket
our Jewish manager
officiated
Kim Addonizio has long been one of the most fearless, versatile, and emotionally resonant voices in American literature — a poet, novelist, memoirist, musician, and teacher whose work moves with equal fluency through the ecstatic, the ordinary, and the brutally honest. Her books, from Tell Me to Mortal Trash, from Bukowski in a Sundress to her newest collection Exit Opera, have shaped generations of writers who recognize in her work a rare combination of vulnerability, craft, humor, and unflinching clarity.
In this exclusive interview, Alex S. Johnson speaks with Addonizio about the deep currents that run through her writing life: the hunger that drives form, the shifting terrain of desire, the body’s betrayals and astonishments, the role of imagination in resisting the utilitarian, the long arc of craft, and the wild patience required to sustain a creative life across decades.
What follows is a candid, generous, and wide‑ranging conversation with one of the most vital literary figures of our time — presented here in full, exactly as she spoke it.
ASJ: Dear Kim, thank you again for agreeing to this interview. Your work has been a touchstone for so many of us — not only the poems, but the essays, the fiction, the craft books, the music, the whole restless, shape-shifting body of it. I’m grateful for the chance to speak with you about the deeper currents running through your writing life.
Across collections like Tell Me, Mortal Trash, and Now We’re Getting Somewhere, your poems move with a clarity that feels both fearless and formally precise. When you’re drafting, what internal permission do you give yourself that allows that level of honesty to surface without tipping into confession for its own sake?
KA: I gave myself permission long ago to be as vulnerable and honest as possible and not to worry about what people think. My poems aren’t for everyone, which is fine with me. I dedicated Bukowski in a Sundress to “my tribe.” Poets, artists, thinkers, lovers, dreamers, seekers. People who understand that life is complex and who aren’t afraid of difficult territory. The lost, the shitfaced, the bold and the painfully shy, the bewildered. I think of Neruda’s “Arte Poetica”:
but the truth is that suddenly the wind that lashes my chest,
the nights of infinite substance fallen in my bedroom,
the noise of a day that burns with sacrifice,
ask me mournfully what prophecy there is in me,
and there is a swarm of objects that call without being answered,
and a ceaseless movement, and a bewildered man.
ASJ: You’ve worked in multiple genres — the novel Little Beauties, the story collection The Palace of Illusions, the memoir Bukowski in a Sundress, the craft books Ordinary Genius and The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and of course the poetry. How do you sense which form a particular emotional or narrative impulse belongs to? Does the form announce itself, or do you have to coax it into the right shape?
KA: I’ve published two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. I hope I never want to write another one. They’re such a slog, day after day. Maybe one day I’ll become obsessed again — that’s really what it takes — and try to write another (small) one. I’ve also largely abandoned stories, though I’m really proud of The Palace of Illusions. I’m still drawn to writing the personal essay, and am finishing a collection called Anywhere But Me. But poetry is my heart, the thing that makes me happiest, the thing I always want. And yes, the form does announce itself, as a feeling, a hunger, a need. I’m still ravenous for poetry and trying to write something that maybe goes beyond, or in a different direction, from poems I’ve previously written.
ASJ: Bukowski in a Sundress confronts the “outlaw poet” label head-on, along with the gendered assumptions embedded in that lineage. How do you see your relationship to the Bukowski tradition now — not just the man, but the cultural machinery that surrounds him and the writers who get pulled into or pushed out of that orbit?
KA: He’s certainly been widely read, and has gathered a lot of rabid fans along with sniffy detractors. As I wrote in that essay, I haven’t read most of his work. I appreciate that he was a working-class guy writing about people at the margins who struggle and fuck up and rely a little too much on the bottle. My Dreams Out in the Street and my novel-in verse, Jimmy & Rita, are based on the same characters, and they would be at home in Bukowski’s world. While writing both of those, I spent a lot of time with Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels, as well as William Vollmann’s Whores for Gloria.
ASJ: Many of your poems inhabit the charged space between the ecstatic and the ordinary — the bar, the street, the late-night kitchen table. Do you see the sacred and the profane as opposing forces, or as two expressions of the same human appetite for meaning?
KA: The human appetite for meaning! I love that. Our culture certainly sets those in opposition. Whitman, for one, didn’t. Of course, they’re inextricably part of us. We need to function in the ordinary world, but we’re also drawn to, and require, non-ordinary reality. Imagination. A world without it–fascist regimes have long recognized this — would be reduced to the hell of the purely utilitarian. No music, no dancing, no true erotic expression. Just obedient little consumer units, or outright slaves, screws and bolts and O-rings in the machines that serve the masters.
ASJ: The body — its pleasures, its betrayals, its hungers — is central to your work, from My Black Angel to the more recent poems in Now We’re Getting Somewhere. How has your relationship to the body, both as subject and instrument, evolved over the course of your writing life?
NOTE: Latest book is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton, 2024).
KA: I’m not the same writer at seventy that I was at forty, when my first poetry collection was published. Those were the poems of my twenties and thirties. I’m not obsessed anymore with romantic love, which was a big subject and struggle for me. I’m happier now. Mentoring has become important to me — to give something back, to offer something to newer poets trying to make their way. I take teaching very seriously; it’s truly a vocation, like poetry. And I’m still pretty astonished that I’ve been writing and publishing this long and that my work is still speaking to people.
I guess those remarks aren’t strictly about the body, though it’s clear that hormones are part of how my body, brain, and writing have changed. And aging is a bitch. Once you start really losing people, you get the message of mortality in a much more visceral way. My parents are dead, three of my four brothers are gone, and a friend or two has disappeared. Time and death are more acutely present. Everything about my body is changing. Kind of like puberty! I’m constantly going, WTF! Now this?
ASJ: You’ve written extensively about craft, especially in Ordinary Genius and The Poet’s Companion. How do you balance the unruliness of lived experience with the discipline required to shape it into art? Do you find that craft liberates the material, or contains it?
KA: And now I’m in the process of working on a third book, The Poetic Mind, about craft, creativity, and community, with another poet. I always remind my students that craft is their friend. It’s what helps them get their vision into form. Life is unruly, uncertain, unpredictable, messy, fraught–however hard you may try to control it, you can’t, quite. Same with art, really. But focus, purpose, commitment–those will take you a long way in both. Artists are not people with vague creative yearnings. You may start that way, but if you’re going to get anywhere, you can’t stay in that place. In Ordinary Genius I talk about the Roman concept of serving your genius, which is a sort of tutelary spirit that guides you. Call it divine, or non-ordinary, or an essential self; it’s what you need to serve in order to manifest your desires.
ASJ: Your work often interrogates the stories we tell about ourselves — the myths we inherit, the myths we invent, the myths we eventually outgrow. Looking back across your books, what personal mythologies have you had to dismantle in order to keep writing truthfully?
KA: Wow, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about a personal mythology. I have been aware of dramatizing the self; I mean, I always want to create some kind of drama in a poem, and there’s a line between that and melodrama I may not have always succeeded in avoiding. The “I” in my poems is me and not-me. I’m trying to inhabit states of feeling, which start as my own but might be tweaked in some way for greater effect. Maybe, anyway, self-presentation is always a kind of myth or story we tell ourselves about who we are.
ASJ: Music threads through your work — not only in your collaborations, but in the sonic architecture of your poems. What role does music play in your writing process, and how consciously do you think about rhythm when you’re composing?
KA: I find it impossible not to think about rhythm. I’ve studied various musical instruments since I was a teenager. First guitar, then voice, then flute, harmonica, and now banjo. In my head, I hear and orchestrate the music of every line. By now it’s innate. I’ve done a couple of word/music albums and will be doing a third with my partner, a professional guitarist. I’m really excited because I’ve created some banjo accompaniment to one poem and I’m going to play flute for another. Plus, this time I’ll also have access to a band for a couple of pieces. I’m definitely an amateur, but I have obsessively worked on some things I can perform without humiliating myself. I tell my students to put their ear down to their lines and listen hard. The music of a poem is one of its great pleasures, for me. But a lot of my students can’t hear their lines; I’m also telling them to tighten, not only for the music, but also the concision a poem can offer.
ASJ: Desire — erotic, intellectual, existential — is a force that runs through your poems and prose. How do you think about desire now, as a writer and as a human being, compared to when you were publishing The Philosopher’s Club and Jimmy & Rita?
KA: Can I say hormones again? A lot of things have calmed down, thank God. I still have plenty of longing, though. When I began, I was so immersed in poetry, and gripped by the powerful need to swallow it whole, to make it my own, and yes, to succeed at it. There was nothing else I really wanted to do with my life, until I found poetry. I was floundering in my twenties, doing a lot of drugs and drinking and hooking up. I didn’t have a lot of faith in myself. I had a lot of childhood trauma to reckon with. I was trying hard to focus on music, but when I found poetry in my late twenties, something profound happened. I can’t quite say it saved me from myself, but it was the beginning of the process. In terms of those first two books, it was of course really gratifying to find a publisher and realize I might actually be able to make my way as a poet in the world. Now that I’m twelve or so books in, it’s easier, of course, to get published (though like everyone I collect my share of rejections); but I’m more confident in myself as an artist, and mostly I want to write new work that feels urgent to me, even if it may not be to others.
ASJ: You’ve mentored countless poets, both directly and through your craft books. What do you wish emerging writers understood about the long arc of a creative life — the part that requires endurance, patience, and a willingness to keep reinventing the self?
KA: Exactly that! I use Adrienne Rich’s phrase: “wild patience.”
ASJ: You’ve lived through multiple literary eras and scenes. What has remained constant in your work, and what has changed in ways that still surprise you?
KA: I’ve grown less attached to narrative, and more interested in surprise. I’ve tried to turn outward more. Not exactly away from the self, but to put the self into a larger context. I’ve interrogated “The Confessional” in various ways–there’s a sequence in Now We’re Getting Somewhere; and while I value it as a mode, I’m a lot more restless in terms of subject matter. I’ve noticed that the new poems I’m writing are still engaged with the personal, but what I see in terms of subject matter are things like the current political shitshow, what’s been called the Sixth Extinction, evolution, ancestors, ancient Greece, the Vikings, war.
ASJ: Finally, who are the poets — past or present — whose work continues to challenge, nourish, or companion you? Are there writers you return to when you need to be reminded why you do this?
KA: I’m not going to name any living contemporary writers, though I’m aways casting around for who is doing interesting work. In fact, I won’t name anyone, because it would probably distort my actual reading habits. Mostly, what inspires me to write lately is anything dealing with history, culture, the environment. I rarely used to read or watch that kind of stuff. It was always personal essays and stories and novels. One day I’ll probably return to all that, but I’ve hardly read a novel since Covid, and the only one I read then was one by Graham Greene. I was able to finish it because it was short, and involved a lot of pink gin.
It’d been about six weeks since the day they’d run into each other at the downtown library. Grace supposed they were seeing each other now. It’d happened quickly, the weeks passing without her even really being aware.
Grace liked the way Adrian held doors open for her. He teased her about her white-knuckled driving. He was smart. He had what turned out to be a very good job as a industry colorist. She could overlook the way he seemed to occasionally disappear, zoning out staring at mirrors or streetlamps and during movies and even sometimes in conversation. He seemed to want a companion he could relax in total silence with, and she was used to filling this silence, in any way possible. She equated this to the awkwardness of their first date last summer—they’d been mismatched because she was so frazzled, being new in town, and he was so gentile. It’d unnerved her at the time. But things were different now. Her various liaisons had made her brave. Grace felt she’d completed a step, been allowed to move up: she liked having someone real to go out with on a Friday night now, getting out of the Valley and away from her computer screen.
A weekend in late March, or was it early April? They had a good time. He took her to the Catalina Jazz Club on Sunset. They ordered steaks and watched a pickup band play Oingo Boingo songs and he let her finish the chocolate pot de crème, scooping the graham cracker dust from the corners of the plate. Grace got buzzed off three glasses of Sonoma Coast chardonnay. A warm wind pushed her into him on the street, and they kissed for the first time: his lips were soft and determined pressed against hers. She didn’t dislike it, feeling oddly helpless in his arms. He grabbed her by the back of the head, forcing her into place. It hurt a little, but she let him. The thrill reminded her of her long-term penpal, GHOSTLOUPE. She imagined that was how he’d kiss her. This bled one fantasy into another, and she was beside herself by the time she got home, aching down there for hours. Very quietly in her bedroom, after midnight, Grace masturbated, her mouth dropping into an ah of shock at her body’s hasty, shuddering response. She felt less ashamed afterward, now that there was a real person involved.
Her first time at his apartment, they’d had a strange conversation. She’d been admiring his vintage cameras. He had three or four on the side table next to the door: she recognized a 35-millimeter, a cracked rainbow strap curled around it; a vertical folding camera, and an old Kodak brownie from the 70’s.
“Have you ever shot anything on these?” She asked.
“Oh yeah,” he nodded, moving forward to touch the lens cap of the 35-millimeter. “This one is a family heirloom. I’ve shot all over the city with this one. And the brownie I like to take out sometimes. Developing is a bitch though, I need to do it at work.”
“What do you like to take pictures of?” Grace asked.
His face seemed to cloud instantly. She was starting to notice it a bit, like a curtain falling, whenever something came up he didn’t want to talk about.
“People, mostly.” He said this curtly. “Do you want me to take your picture? I could do that right now. Here.”
Grace blanched. “Oh no, I was just curious, I wasn’t—”
“I think you may need to earn it first.”
“What?”
“You haven’t earned it.”
She faltered, staring at his grave face. She’d suddenly lost points somehow. “I—okay, if you say so. I didn’t, like, mean anything by it.”
“No.” He was agreeing, but it felt like a condemnation. His gaze dropped from her to the cameras on the table. Then something seemed to change, a beat passed, and he was back.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—this equipment is delicate and very old. And I have a—I guess it’s a sense of privilege, when it comes to capturing a subject. It’s a very vulnerable thing. It’s very intimate.”
You brought it up, she thought, nodding her head sagely, backing away from the table.
“But,” he was saying; his voice changed and it was suddenly loftier, happier. He grabbed her by the hand, twirling her around with his arm extended. “You, my dear, may have earned other things.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” She asked, mimicking his playfulness, trying to lighten her own heart. Hoping for a kiss, anything to sweeten up the moment.
“Follow my instructions,” he said to her pointedly. He was grinning, but serious.
“Okay.”
He dropped her hand, and she stood there stupidly, waiting.
Adrian smiled, enjoying her visible awkwardness. When his admiration had waned, he said:
“Remove your clothes, please.”
Grace made a face. “Here?” She asked. She looked at the couch, turned around to glance at the TV, then back to Adrian, who was nodding, stony-faced. She remembered she was supposed to follow instructions. Right.
She sighed loftily, partly to curb her beating heart. They hadn’t yet slept together. They’d only made out on the street and in his car a few times—and to her surprise, he hadn’t even tried digging his fingers into her underwear then. Their knowledge of each other in these details was still unexplored territory. Her face was on fire as she sunk to the ground to remove her shoes.
“No,” he said. “Stand up.”
She eyed him silently, and stood back up. She kicked her shoes off, not bothering with the laces. He watched, one hand on his chin, as she wriggled out of her jeans and, sighing loftily again, lifted her arms to take off her t-shirt, draping both on the end of the couch.
She hesitated in her bra and underwear.
“Both of them,” Adrian gestured.
Grace’s eyes had lost some of their brightness. She stared at a spot past his head as she slipped herself free of the bra—a little mesh thing he liked quite a lot, light violet, with halter straps keeping her nipples pressed tightly against the fabric.
The briefs, navy blue, were opaque and covered both cheeks, giving everything a wide berth. Angles and cuts and nothing else to see, really, other than the tiny, wedged impression of her sex in the fabric.
A roll of flesh dimpled together sweetly at her waist as she curled to ease the underwear down. Muscles reflexed as she curled back up, and he could observe where baby fat had given way to cellulite, and where she’d remained lean. She was shorter than his Arctic Fox. Her body was, broadly, a pear: her breasts, freed from the mesh bra, were small and white, pale nipples inverted on her chest, her waist narrow enough for him to wrap both arms around and have overlap. Her hips widened out from here, surprisingly so—into a large ass which was wide and shapely, practically an entire ocean’s surface he could imagine resting his head on.
She held her powerful thighs together stiffly. The little triangle between them was clustered with a soft swath of brown hair, a flesh-colored slit in the middle. He wished he could put his tongue in it right then and there.
“Good,” Adrian said. “Very good. Now—turn to the wall, please.”
Grace looked as if she were starting to disassociate: he knew the expressions. As long as she followed his voice, it was fine for the time being. He’d get her out. He was very happy with her. She turned slowly from him and faced the gray wall.
“Put your hands on it.”
Her palms sought the gray, flattened out. She stared at this, concentrating on the color. Grace imagined living inside an entirely gray world. She was suddenly chilly, and tried not to shake. She wasn’t sure what was happening down below, the sensations were confusing, and so she kept her legs together. She felt oddly hungry, a grumbling erupting in her stomach.
“Spread your legs, please.”
She’d been afraid of this. As she readjusted against the wall, taking a spread-eagled stance, she felt air reaching new parts of her in the front and back. Out in the open like this, helpless, all she could do was wait for whatever was going to happen next.
He came up behind her. She could feel his breath on her neck. Her ear. His lips seeking her hair. He kissed her neck. He breathed through his mouth, forcing warm air into her hair which sent quiverings up and down her spine. She felt drugged as he crawled her this way, taking in the poison through his breath, saliva, and she almost cried out when a hand also suddenly sought her ass, gripping tightly, digging the nails in.
He kept his hand here, on her ass, in an expert hold the entire time, while his other hand began to explore her. Tentatively at first, until it began to use the moisture provided and seek out a wider, sweeping gesture.
Grace was in a state, a place she’d never found herself. She couldn’t move. Sensations were beginning to rise—ones she’d brought herself to before, of course, but never in the presence of another and never upright like this, arms taught and trembling, as she struggled to control the rocking rhythm of his hand, which had grown enormous, and a terrible pulsing, like deep vibrating velvet, which also grew until she was gasping and squeezing her eyes shut and the word “No,” escaped her lips.
The moment Grace whispered “No,” he knew she was starting to come. He held onto her tightly, as she was trying to get away from him, drooping and sinking towards the floor, her legs like wet clay collapsing. When she cried out it was cough-like: not the sound of someone mimicking pornos or movies they’d seen, but involuntary. This pleased and aroused him, the authenticity of it. He liked how she naturally fought it, too.
The release had triggered something in her legs, and Grace stood there, her body curling inward, hot hands sliding against the wall, trying to keep herself vertical. She breathed in loudly through her nostrils, feeling like a winded rhino and wishing he weren’t there, wishing she could just go to the bathroom and get herself together for a minute. She concentrated on the gray world two inches from her face.
“Good,” he whispered in her ear, finally releasing his grip on her ass. It was stinging a bit. The room was eerily silent.
***
Fifteen minutes later, Grace was sitting in her car on Franklin Avenue, trying to light a cigarette. Her hands kept shaking, but after a couple of tries, she got it. She pulled away from the curb without thinking about where she was going, her mind blank, one hand resting lightly on the turn signal switch.
It was late, not many cars on Barham. Her left hand, holding the cigarette out the window, was sturdy only by the time she’d descended back down into the valley, bottoming out at the Forest Lawn and Pass Avenue intersection. She was rounding the corner at the Warner Brother’s buildings, glancing at the familiar tan gates, the Hot Dog Haus across the street where she’d once gotten sick outside.
He hadn’t offered to let her spend the night, but she wouldn’t have accepted, anyway. The evening seemed over, at any rate. He’d watched her closely as she pulled on her jeans, leaning against the arm of the couch. There wasn’t much said between them, and Grace felt strange, almost frightened of him as she gathered her things. Her crotch was still pulsing like a beacon, a humming filling her body which was not unlike the need she’d cultivated online with GHOSTLOUPE.
But that had all been fantasy. This was real, and she felt a new humiliation in it, that she’d come so hard and fast, as if this cheapened her, made her slutty. It’d felt forced out her, the pleasure itself incidental. She couldn’t read where his true interest lay, exactly, in regards to her.
This thought popped out in her head as she sat at the light on Olive Avenue. She was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before at some point.
He hadn’t thought it a good idea to try and get her to stay. He knew her discomfort well, and watched calmly as she avoided his gaze, grabbing her things. He was used to women not looking at him afterward. He was reminded briefly of the previous girl’s last path through the apartment. But Grace wasn’t angry or hurt, she was confused. Wrestling between pleasure and fear. It was best to let her go. He downplayed his goodbye, smiling sleepily at her, standing in the open doorway. Despite a growing fondness, or perhaps exactly because of this, he closed it in her face. Through the keyhole, he watched as she turned and, as if in a trance state, walked to the elevator alone. Turning back to the living room, he raised his fingers to his nostrils. The smell of her lingering effluvium was practically a drug; he felt woozy for a brief moment, standing there with his eyes closed.
Adrian knew the drive home would probably be enough, but if not, he’d hear from her in the morning. He was pleasantly surprised when about two hours later, while he was reading an article on the toilet, she texted him. He clicked over to the message, eyebrow raised.
-I had a good time tonight.
She was sitting on her bed as she sent this. Safely bathed in the soft orange lighting, returned to an adult womb, where her parents slept soundly down the hall and, cautiously, she’d made herself come again. Lying on top of the covers, breathing heavily, Grace asked herself what had been so frightening about the evening, after all?—he’d wanted to please her. That was nice. The separation and the time to think had made the eerie feelings she’d experienced in his apartment fade away. Or maybe she’d just deleted the shame, purposefully, all of it—the strange sense of unease which had followed, the feeling she’d been violated somehow, like something had been involuntarily taken from her.
It’d been surprisingly easy, standing in the kitchen in the stove’s half-light (which her mom left on whenever she was coming home late), absently eating chips from the bag on the counter and going over the scene again. She’d enjoyed fighting him. That was what had made it so intense. He’d known this all along.
When she woke up the next morning, Grace was absolutely starving. Her mother found her at the kitchen table, reading an article in Entertainment Weekly about Jennifer Lawrence’s favorite swear words, and eating an enormous bowl of Cheerios.
“How was your date last night?” Her mom moved around the kitchen, jiggering the coffee pot, dabbing at her eyes with a paper towel she ripped from the holder.
“It was nice, actually,” Grace said brightly. She was in a good mood. She preferred talking to her parents in the morning to all other times of day. The sun threw a transparent yellow angle on the dining room table, and she thought all the sudden how easy, how beautiful everything was.
She pulled out her phone to show her a picture of Adrian. It was his main photo from the app.
Her mother wrinkled her nose from over her shoulder. “He looks kind of like an actor that could play a vampire on one of those Gen Z shows, doesn’t he?”
Grace couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing, and couldn’t stop; she inhaled a cheerio, and started coughing. Her mother slapped her on the back a few times, frowning pleasantly. She moved Grace’s braid back and forth a few times, as if playing absently with her own.
for Red Skelton
Calliope music fills the air
one sad faced hobo
seated in the comfy chair by the bed
where his lady is being filled like a Volkswagen
by an impossible number of Bozos.
When the big finish cums
her face is painted
and he’s hit with a cream pie.
Cello-mellow when Rainbow Yellow takes the cake,
and the recluse unpacks her violin,
while the widow keeps, on her hourglass, time.
That night the trio played the Neptune Blues,
Satan sat in – pitchfork open tuned;
black satin cowboy shirt, striped pants tight zipped.
Yellow blew her sax, like a whore in the black,
prostitute, for once, to toot her own horn,
alone with her love,
enough dollies the life to change.
Yellow’s love – in real life – stripped,
down at the Reality Club,
Mister Satan in perpetuity owned.
Gail crossed over the line one night,
let a good Christian boy huff her soiled rag;
boy held near to Second Coming
unholy tokes of bloody smoke.
And once the Christian glimpsed God,
he shot poor Gail dead.
Since God told him do it,
the good old boy walked, charges dropped.
Nothing more hazardous than a Baptist
smoking a bloody clout,
specially if with God he got clout.
Yellow blew her heart out
those Neptune blues. Satan Himself
held back his customary sneer,
eyes bright with brimstone tears,
cleavage of his hooves
showing through his Jesus shoes.
From the Top Shelf: A Six Ft. Swells Anthology 2005-2025
Six Foot Swells Press
174 pages
An interview with Todd Cirillo
HST: Over the years both Horror Sleaze Trash (HST) and Six Ft. Swells (SFS) have published many of the same writers, including William Taylor Jr. and yourself among others. For HST readers unfamiliar with SFS, why don’t you start by introducing yourselves?
SFS: Six Ft. Swells Press is a small publishing house that specializes in After-Hours Poetry. It is poetry for truck-stops, bowling alleys, soccer moms and barrooms. We strive to create connection through common experiences, stressing an economy of language. We are attracted to lean, clear, straight forward lines that tell a story. Our philosophy is, if the poet has to explain their poem to the audience, then the poet has failed. Our goal is to make poetry accessible, interactive and fun. Poetry for non-poetry fans. It was started in 2005 by myself, Julie Valin and Matt Amott. It remains us three to this day.
HST: Last year saw the 20th anniversary of SFS Press. How’s it feel after so many years out to sea?
SFS: Julie pointed out that it was our 20th anniversary and suggested we do some spectacular things to mark the occasion. To be honest, I didn’t get a true sense of the importance of it until I was putting the anthology together. It is like being out at sea for so long, that life just goes up and down with the waves, no real sense of time until you run aground. When going over all the poems from all the extraordinary poets over the years so many moments flooded my being. I recalled editing this poem, drinking with that poet, falling in love with that one, getting this poet published for the first time, costuming up for Mardi Gras with that one, encouraging many of them in their work. When the anthology was completed and I looked at it from 10,000 feet, so to speak….I smiled…I was truly proud ya know?
What I am really proud of is that after twenty years, we still hold true to our same poetic values and what excites us about poetry. Our books are distinct, people recognize a Six Ft. Swells Press book and, most importantly, the friendship between myself, Julie and Matt remains intact. We are poets, publishers and pirates.
HST: Tell us a bit about the latest anthology.
SFS: The anthology: From the Top Shelf: A Six Ft. Swells Anthology 2005-2025 was one of the four celebrations that we produced last year, the others included publishing Jake St. John’s book, The 13th Round, a first-ever book by myself, Julie Valin and Matt Amott: Three Poets Walk Into a Bar and we put together a huge party to launch the books in California.
The anthology was a way for us to celebrate and thank the poets and the press. It gave us an excuse to throw a party and bring old friends together or at least try to get in touch with some and find out who still speaks to us. The collection brings together the best After-Hours poets in the country. Poets who were published for the first time or are nationally known: Wolfgang Carstens, William Taylor Jr., Madeline Levy, Ann Menebroker, Bill Gainer, Amber Decker, Carey Floyd, Marilyn Souza, Jake St. John, ourselves and others. These are poets who should be read more widely. Plain and simple.
The anthology spotlights well-crafted poetry that celebrates connection whether over drinks, dreams, jukeboxes, heartbreak or first kisses. Poems meant for non-poetry lovers. The poems affect the reader and every poem is written by some of the best writers in the country. Plus, another high point of the collection is that it is a quick read.
HST: What makes a poem “good” in your opinion?
SFS: My belief in what makes a good poem is that poems should be like a cherry bomb, providing the biggest bang with the fewest words while telling a good story. The use of common language and style to allow the reader/listener to connect and identify with that story, “hey that happened to me!” or at the very least relate to it, not be alienated from the work. A good poem is crafted and revised, like the track listing for one’s favorite album, meant to elicit big feelings from it. Lastly, my philosophy, as with Six Ft. Swells Press, is if the poet has to explain their poem to an audience, the poet has failed.
HST: Leave us with a few poems from the anthology.
SFS: Certainly.
Pirate’s Alley
William Taylor Jr.
I’m drinking absinthe at a little table
outside a 200 year old bar in New Orleans,
blocks away from the chaos and noise
of Bourbon St. tourists.
It’s midnight in August and 100 degrees.
It’s quiet here, everything old and pretty.
A black cat with pale green eyes
sits a few feet away and looks at me
without expectation.
I raise my glass and the sweet
liquid burns my tongue a bit.
I am one with Poe and Baudelaire,
channeling the ghosts of ancient poets
as the bright indifferent moon
hangs above.
Even the man-bunned guy at the bar
with the Bermuda shorts
can’t ruin this for me.
Moving
Ann Menebroker
The memory is sweet
and embraceable.
The slow, hands-all-over dance
with the turn-on in your life
pressing lips to your soft ear.
People all around, making touch
more exciting. A soft sweater.
A rough hand.
Something in the way you move
making the room too warm.
A trumpet blowing out its
sex, confetti, falling over everyone.
The floor is too small.
The world is too big.
Wolfgang Carstens
the human animal
possesses
an uncanny ability
to justify any action
after the fact:
if the devil
didn’t make us do it,
we were drunk,
stoned
or temporarily
insane.
when all else fails,
we blame it
on love.
When my friend Rodney
showed me a poem
about excruciating anal itch
at the age of five, his mother,
fearing pinworms, those small,
parasitic roundworms that
infect intestines, sticking
her finger into his anus
the poem ending, “pretending
I didn’t like it,”
I vividly remembered
my own daughter,
same age, scratching
at her own butthole,
making the same complaint,
me doing my parental duty,
and my immediate reaction,
I could be arrested for this!
I only learned later
Rodney’d been fourteen at the time –
another fresh perspective.
I have given
a damn about
you in the darndest
ways darling of mine
who shuns the only one
who ever truly cared
when your chips
and your mood
and the very sun
was down and out
in the gutter
with the roaches
and the rats
as you spiraled
into that clinical
low and had to be
triaged by a team
of doctors and nurses
who had to
resuscitate and revive
your once bright
and shining
personality
and all the while
there was me
and my big heart
and wide smile
watching over
the proceeding
and believe me
I was the one thing
you were craving
and needing
as your spirit
was bleeding
and now that
you are feeling like
you’re yourself again
you shun the only
person who showed up
in rain, wind, sleet and snow
and I can plainly see
you’ve got your groove back
just like in a tearjerker movie scene
and I can just sigh with relief
and finally say goodbye to you
my real-life Netflix drama queen
Horror Sleaze Trash 