Category: Poetry

John Grochalski

boycott you

in his bitter end

jack kerouac became a racist
and an anti-semite
he went on tv and blamed his jewish friends
for everything
the same can be said for eliot, wagner
degas and crazy ol’ ezra pound

picasso drove two women to madness
two others killed themselves over him

and ernie hemingway pushed through four wives
and two fucked up sons
before he finally took a bullet to his head over breakfast

on video i’ve watched bukowski kick his wife off a couch

over and over and over again
in a fit of drunken jealous rage
while norman mailer tried to kill his wife

hell, caravaggio and ben jonson actually did kill people

villon and genet were thieves
and rimbaud ended up nothing but a smuggler

nabokov wrote lolita and lord byron fucked his half-sister

of course flaubert paid to fuck little boys

dickens, the immortal Charles dickens

for all of his philanthropic work
chuck had a taste for the whores
just like vincent van gogh

and those are just the men, ladies and gentlemen

let’s not even get started about what virginia woolf

put leonard through before
before she took a pocketful of rocks to the river

the point is for all of their blemishes, heinous words

or despicable acts
i wouldn’t give one of them back to this slush pile life
i’d rather their art over their good conscience
and citizenship any day

because some of them have given me more light and life

than my family or the closest of friends

so to you people boycotting this artist and that

over their personal views

orson scott card or whoever you trolls have lined up next

someone who’s views aren’t yours

or aren’t the fashion of the day

do me a favor and sit down and try to sweat out

thirty novels in as many years

or a handful of operas
a symphony or another wasteland

hell, try to write out your grocery lists

do something other than pounding out your inane
uneducated opinions behind the safe mercy of internet anonymity

your dull bullshit in 140 characters or less

and then we’ll talk
about who’s boycotting who

you motherfuckers.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Trojan Horse

A blonde is wheeled up to my door
and I am too drunk
to turn her away.
She is beautifully constructed
and her legs seem to carry on
forever.
I bring her inside
and admire her
as I sing and dance
and toast my good fortune.
All is well
and I think she likes me,
when
suddenly,
two battalions of pointy-fingered feminists
a legion of angry lesbians
a four-star father
three divisions of divorce lawyers
and a squadron of jealous ex boyfriends
all jump out
and hack my drunk ass
to pieces.

Karina Bush

Take my hair

Like before
Take me into the woods
Drag me into the woods
I want to kiss you
Put me up against that tree
Wet morning tree
Use your other hand now
I’m helpless
Hand in my dress
Captured by a bad man
Nobody for miles
I’m going to get molested
And leave my knickers there
For the perverts

Cassandra Dallett

I Know I’m Addicted

I collect boys
like pairs of shoes
fucking one while texting another
I’m not slutty or desperate
I’m just a realist.
I know that none of them could hold my interest
if they didn’t play off each other like that.
None could talk of the prison industrial complex,
the evils of microwaves, the importance of reading,

start up my weedwacker,

and make me want to call him Daddy
while bent over,
streaming wet head
bumping granite walls.
These guys
don’t come in the same package.
The wise man Chris Rock once said
“You’re not going to find a guy who listens to Wu-Tang
and watches Seinfeld”
and I laughed cause I had one,
but
actually his dick was too small
and he was inherently
unfaithful
selfish
to the bone.

Brenton Booth

A Poem’s Worth

She was about
to finish work

at the laundromat
and we had been
talking for several
hours.

I asked her if she
wanted to come to
my apartment and
I would read her
some poems I had
recently written.

She accepted the
offer.

After I read one
we started kissing
and a little later
we were naked
having sex on the
floor.

It was some of the
best sex I ever
had.

She left to meet
her partner
and I decided to
write this poem
as a reminder
that sometimes
poetry
does pay.

Ezhno Martin

victimless slime

In case you were wondering
(and I’m sure more than a few are)

if you want to pound your pussy
with the backside of your hairbrush
and moan my name
or maybe grow your bush out
so you can tether paper-mache
effigies of Ezhno
to you sweetest spotI’m more than ok with that
No need to feel ashamed
if you find yourself
grinding and gushing on pillowcases

you’ve duct taped high-gloss photos
of my face on
or writing my name on your vibrator
so you can watch Ezhno
slip inside you
Everybody likes to have a little sexy time with themselves
and it’s no one’s fault
so many people are dreaming of me
while they are doing it
including evidently
you
So remember
I’m a gracious goo fairy
I don’t leave so little to the imagination
by any mistake
I take great joy
provoking puddles in your sheets
maybe I even get off sometimes
thinking about all that victimless slime
that’s being made about me
so I make a little of myown
why would I stifle fantasies
just because it isn’t meant to be in reality?I mean
can you imagine
actually sleeping with everyone you’d ever thought about naked?

That’s ludicrous
ludicrous like
the thought of Joesph Stalin personally strangling
35 million Russians because he couldn’t stand the thought
of anyone else getting to do the deed
But
I like boobies
and big fat white asses
my computer
and multiple external hard drives
comprise the chubby chasers pornographic Library of Congress

and in my exhaustive search
I have probably seen you naked
or at least I like to pretend
so there is no shame
in cum fresh squeezed to fantasies of strange
we all have a spank bank
overflowing with people we never mean to bang
So slap it beat it twist it buzz it bang it yank it
taste your sweet slime afterwards
and pretend it’s been mixed with my pimp juice
because when you are alone
anything goes
and it doesn’t do me any harm
if in that sick head of yours
I’m being held down
while you and seventeen of your closest friends
take turns pegging me
while dressed like Rainbow-Bright PegasusesYou make that Pearl Jam

And don’t worry about it being awkward

when you see me in public
I do it too
I’m a chronic dreamer
so I’ve probably done it thinking of you

Mather Schneider

Interview with a Poet

He begs his host and the audience
to be so gracious as to forgive him
because he’s “rather hung-over”
from staying up all night reading Nietzsche

and drinking Maker’s Mark
and hasn’t had the fortune
of nipping off to the cappuccino stand yet.

Plus he’s “positively exhausted”

from his two month reading tour
and needs to take a break
and let the
“well fill up.”

A font of incomparable input
we sup it up like burros
in a cultural desert:
he tells us if you don’t want to take the bus

on your reading tour
you can always take the train
or you could fly in an airplane
or drive in a car
and if you want to save money on food
it is best to eat in cheap restaurants
rather than expensive ones
(although occasionally it’s nice to splurge).

He tells us the best way to get “free in your mind”
is to stop worrying about money
and it is assumed the subject of how his bills are paid

is either a matter of mystical serendipity
a rich woman
or a government check each month.

When he’s not cutting poems
“to the bone”
he does fantasy football
supports angry women on social media
buys new headphones
alerts the populace to the presence
of Tom Waits and this strange new music

called the blues
acts as curator of newsboy caps
and guidance counselor
for hipsters.

He tells us his “ironclad character”

was “arduously attained”
and it took him “years of suffering”
to find his “voice”
which is odd because he’s 26
and sounds like every other stoner
who ever rode a pony in the small press parade.

His fourth “full length” is coming out soon.
He has a “primary publisher” but he writes so “feverishly”

that he is obliged to occasionally “let”
other people publish his work.

He mentions 38 poets by name and then reiterates

how he detests name-dropping
and groups
MFA programs too
well maybe not DETESTS because not ALL groups are bad
a poet needs to have a community
“To generalize is to be an idiot”
and hate is simply not a word
in his vocabulary
suffice it to say he is on
the fence
when it comes to groups and MFA programs
while the evidence is still being tallied.

He reminds us that poetry
is something one must do in isolation

with a pen
or a typewriter
or a computer
or a magic marker
or a stick in the sand
he himself has written poems in the margins
of sky-mall magazines
and on cocktail napkins
which proves a poet will write
because a poet must write,
period.

He advises youngsters to get back to nature
but not the roses and trees and deer and waterfalls

kind of nature
in other words, “write what you don’t know”
except sometimes it is also good to
“write what you know.”

His most recent book opens
with a Whitman quote
and if you don’t know who Whitman is well

then you’re still shitting yellow
in mama’s wam-wam.

He tells us it is best to eventually get down
to prose writing
because the world just doesn’t take poets seriously

due to the fact that civilization has been in decay
since the time of Bukowski
and perhaps even a bit before that.

He says he thinks it is important to
“keep literature dangerous”
and to illustrate this he explains that one of his chapbooks

is bound with birch bark
and stitched with tea-bag strings.

In closing
if you have even “the remotest interest in modern literature”

you will not miss his latest collection
though what it’s called
I can’t for the life of me remember—

something with “blood” in it.

John Grochalski

tough guy poets knitting circle

it’s always the feminists
that give them shit for being honest

those feminazis with their hairy pits and unshaved legs who don’t understand their place in this literary patriarchy

they just don’t understand what these white male poets are trying to achieve

so they bitch about the feminists online
complain and gripe about the women ganging up on them in their very own tough guy poets knitting circle

one claims he’s too edgy for the masses no one gets him because he’s so raw

if only bukowski would rise from the dead anoint him and set all of these bitches straight

another tough guy poet is mad because those fucking feminists didn’t like his rape poem

the one that was about this girl but really wasn’t

because he changed her name from jess to jane
even though the rest of it he took verbatim from her blog

another one continues to hate the MFA poets he’s hated those effete bastards for years

it’s agreed amongst the knitting circle
that the MFA poets suck
that they’re as bad as the angry women poets

those fucking feminazis!
i’m a dish washer, one tough guy poet writes

so everything i put down on paper is authentic and real

fuck that, another misunderstood wordslinger posts i drive a truck, so that makes me the chosen one

yeah, well, i worked in the warehouses, another chimes in that is, until i got my cushy librarian job

but i’ll still take any fucker in a bar

fucking feminazis, they all write
lest they forget the purpose of this little gathering of brilliance

occasionally a woman poet will chime in
usually it’s something about how those feminazis are giving them all a bad name

real women aren’t like that, those enchantresses write

the tough guy poets knitting circle revel in those comments it proves their point entirely

people are just so easily offended everyone is so PC these days

the rape poem was a joke, the one poet says a commentary on the way the world works

how could she not see it that way?

and that poem about my ex-girlfriend’s smelly snatch man, that was just me saying shit for my art

no one gets art anymore, they agree

only the tough guy poets knitting circle understand what it takes to make great art

because they are all so edgy and raw and gut-wrenching and direct

only they can appreciate the appetites of jackson pollock

who killed art? they ask amongst themselves it must be the feminists

those feminazis who are giving true women a bad name

it always comes back to them
with their ancient gloria steinem bullshit
with their scratched ani difranco cds and butch tattoos with their small tits and penis envy
with their aggressive and pushy personalities
with their inability to take a joke

those feminists simply don’t know how penetrating and genuine the tough guy poets knitting circle is
because they can’t see beyond their own anti-male agenda

those tongue-pierced cretins who never understood hemingway those plain-faced haters who never understood saint bukowski

who hate all men
who are all secretly lesbians

those traitorous cunts who just want to turn and fuck the tough guys wives and girlfriends behind their backs

while the real men are off writing poems

about how hard it is these days being a visceral tough guy poet

the accusers and the victims
in a gender-wide conspiracy butthurt

pawns in world that fails to see them as true masters of the universe bathed in all the brilliant white light

of pure genius.

Stephanie M. Wytovich

Vicious Girls

Creatures,
creatures are what they are—
violent Eves, rotten apples,
victimized damsels, Salem witches;
they bit the snake that fed them
drank his poison,
pulled out his fangs
and now they bleed,
they bleed once a month for his death,
the death of the devil who cursed their wombs
for they are vicious,
they are venomous
they are women,
and they will wait,
patient and persistent,
ever-enduring
and damned
and they will sing,
sing in covens, sing in brothels,
sing for men,
sing for whores
and their words will kill
they will damn
they will puncture
for they sing with lips,
lips not of mouth but of sex
sex that weakens, that confuses,
that traps
and once they have you
have you between their legs,
they will kill you,
they will eat you,
and they will love you
the only way
that they know how

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

A Good Dive with Personality is a Great Place to Be

Whoever said mercy is for the weak

never knew mercy

and Doug and I are sitting in this bar
along Garson
with the smashed-in jukebox

and it is getting dark outside

in that slow way leukemia sneaks
up on you

bags under the eyes
and piss warm
beer

and Doug announces rather loudly:
I LOVE THIS BAR!

The bartender stop ragging the glasses
and looks up at us.

I take one long swig
and agree:

A good dive with personality is a great place to be.

DAMN STRAIGHT!,
Doug clanks his glass to mine
emphatically.

Hey, what’s that stupid word they use
for when rich people make a good thing bad?

Sex?,
I ask.

No, when they make all the cool places vanilla
and ship all the winos and whores out
so they can eat $14 olives.

Gentrification,
I say.

YEAH, THAT’S THE ONE!,
Doug hollers.

The bartender is glaring at us now.
I can tell he is about to gentrify the joint
out of the two noisy assholes sitting
in front of him.

A strange line keeps repeating itself
in my brain:

the devil smokes meat, then he says drats
the devil smokes meat, then he says drats
the devil smokes meat, then he says drats
the devil smokes meat, then he says drats

just like that
over and over again.

I do not share because sharing is not

always a good thing.

Give someone hepatitis
and they will not be pleased

that you shared.

YOU THINK LUDMILLA MISSES ME?,
Doug yells.

Do you miss her?,

I ask.

NOT ONE BIT!,
he hollers

so that everyone in a
five mile radius knows
he sniffs her stolen knickers
when no one is around.

That’s it, the bartender says,
I’m 86ing the both of you
right now!

YOU CAN TRY!,
Doug yells.

The bartender reaches under the bar
pulls out a green baseball bat
and knocks it against the top
of the bar.

I get up to leave.
Doug rushes past me out
the door.

It’s true, I think to myself,
all the good joints are gone
and most the good people
too.

Halfway up the stairs
I stop to pick up a dime.

It is glued to the pavement.
I have been tricked again.