Damion Postlewaight

The Mad Conductor

That time I woke up on the train
The passengers were just piles of gore
I get out & don’t recognize where I am
Empty – I yell out – nothing
The doors locked, then
An announcement
Next train arriving
It doesn’t slow down, it speeds up
Smashes into the corpse filled car
The doors open & bodies spill out
All the trains are due at the same time
I see lights coming from the next train
In the drivers seat, a glimpse of the conductor
His torn into a smile, his clothes rags
Trains approach from every side
All driven by the same mad conductor  

John Tustin

Another Morning

Another morning
of another day.
Another Monday 
or Tuesday
or Anyday;
all the same all the same
with a dose of coffee
and a stream of sunlight;
a dollop of ringing telephone
and a dash of meeting somebody 
in order to exchange something
for something else.

Maybe it will be
a more exciting day at that
and not the same –
a hurricane approaches
or the neighbor is embroiled in a scandal,
another neighbor can’t wait to say.
Those days are better
because they are less the same
but they are still tedious, flawed
and full of people
or else the memory of people

but this is
just another 
morning;
just another day.
A groan and a piss;
a dose of coffee;
The solicitor’s call
goes to voicemail.
The blinds stay shut
and I shut my eyes,
just to feel blind,
then I open them again:
sad the day is the same,
relieved I’m still alone in it.

Todd Cirillo

Slut Shaming

It was a wild one.
That much I know.
Now, first light of morning,
unclear how we arrived
in these unfamiliar surroundings,
clear on what happened though,
clearer still on the consequences
that await,
trying to be quiet,
I say out loud,
“You fucking slut,”
as I wash my face,
avoiding the mirror. 

John D Robinson

Leslie

She was desperate,
on the edge,
she was crazy,
she was beautiful,
she was doomed,
abused,
neglected,
cast aside
by family
and friends,
she was lonely
and vulnerable,
perhaps, naïve,
she was honest,
she was lost,
abandoned,
cast into a
desperation
and into
drugs and
prostitution
and beatings
and 
homelessness,
she was strong
and graceful
and held it
together
before she
fled the scene
into suicide
from the roof
of a 
multi-storey
carpark.

David Estringel 

The Moon Don’t Care

This old house— 
a rattle of bones— 
settles in  
for the night— 
the lights 
of its eyes 
dimmed. 
Graying roof tiles 
kiss, tentatively, 
twilight’s gloved hand 
in silent communion. 
Her pale eye  
peeks  
past kaleidoscopes 
of scattered sun 
and browns 
of rustling leaves, 
indifferent 
to the subtle advances 
of worn rooftops 
and old men.

***

(Originally published at The Milk House)

Jon Doughboy

Poppie

I want to write a poem about losing my virginity, not the erotic awkward momentousness of the act, but the one second where I’m on the mattress of a creaky fold-out couch in this tiny, dingy studio with the radiators hissing and I’ve already come once before even entering this young woman who is nine years my senior but who somehow thinks—I know how, I lied to her—that I’m actually four years older than her—and yet I’m nineteen, I’m still raring to go and go and go and her tits are nice though I’m not even really sure I like her but she likes me and that’s more than enough and she tells me soft-like, sexy, in a purring tone I’ve never heard before outside of pornos and once through a motel room’s thin walls, to put my dark little dick between her white, white tits and she has these big green eyes, her second nicest feature, the first being that she wants to fuck me, and I shake my head like Jerry refusing to eat the food Poppie made, you know the episode, because Poppie is sloppy, because Poppie didn’t wash his hands after he took a shit, but I don’t know what this refusal means or suggests or reveals, because I’m hard and she’s wet and I’m nineteen. I want to write a poem about that but I don’t know where to start.

Mather Schneider

The Spit that Fell From the Clouds 

When your wife has been ill for 2 years
and no doctor in the land can put a name to it
when she cries in bed each night
and flinches when you touch her 
and all you can do is remember 
how young and happy she once was
it is difficult to give a shit
that they’re fighting over sky-fairies in Tal Afar 
or that demonstrators are up in arms in Barcelona 
or that somebody made hot cakes on Facebook
or that glassy-eyed poets are passing mouth-gas on Spotify
bitching about Nietzsche 
with their backdrop bookshelves testifying 
to their talent and mental acuity 
or that the motorcycle rally is next weekend
or that the car is filthy
from the spit that fell from the clouds
or that jam has bits of fruit in it unlike jelly
or that a pubescent loop-job dropped artillery 
in a Missoula classroom  
killing eleven
or that the monarchs are fluttering again
on the motherfucking wind.

Christopher P. Mooney

My Name is Penelope

He sucked on my AlloDerm lips and pounded my concentration-camp hips, trying in vain to fill my belly. I’d suspected, when he told me he’d given both his dogs – a German Shepherd and some kind of coyote – variations of his own first name, that the sex wouldn’t be selfless enough to be good enough; that he couldn’t pick pleasure out of a line-up. And I was right. Even in a part of the country as flat as this, an orgasm was never on the horizon.

It started with his fingers – the middle three, large, like a bunch of fucking mutant bananas and with knuckles like moldy walnuts – somewhere inside me, fumbling so deep they might be clawing at marrow. Fuck. It felt like a lion was chewing my spleen. Then – my body willing but my mind detached from the consensual unreality of what was being done to me – his tongue slurped at where he thought my still-hooded clit might be the way a trapped rat attacks a metal bucket. Then he was on top of me. I tightened my legs around him, ankles crossed and hands clasped behind his neck, as he rutted away at me.

But I could deal. Not a problem, and not unprecedented: pro-choice and promiscuous, I’ve had more scrapes than a three-year-old’s knees. So, with him panting over me like a whisky-breath Santa stoned on puberty, his clammy skin the color of boiled milk, I drifted away, as oblivious to his touch as he was to my indifference, compiling a grocery list and a who-to-try-next list. 

‘Lucille,’ he shuddered as that cloying sperm smell told me it was over.

My throat constricted. Desire, the most painful of all the abstracts, was no longer with us. It died with his utterance of that name; an undeniable presence that felt as heavy as an iron lung.

He was soon asleep and I lay there, motionless in that bed of ghosts, my cheeks the only wet part of me.

Joseph Farley

Tell Me A Story

You ask me to tell you a story.
Instead I will blow up a balloon,
Puffing my words into it
Until it is full.

I will not tie up the end.
I will hold that part
Between my fingers,
Up against your ear.
Slowly relaxing my grip.

The air will come rushing out
Along with all the sounds,
Vowels and consonants
Forming syllables
And phrases.

Listen closely
As the wind whispers
All the tales
I could ever wish to tell.

Don’t mind the scent
Of rubber and latex.
The stink is part
Of the price you have to pay
For being entertained this way.