Phantom Cento By Michael Dwayne Smith

too slippery in the world & exposed

we were surrounded by syllables

from lungfuls of tarantulas &

pink-mouthed cats in the shower

(press star for customer service)

us all scraping our eye sockets clean

with broken whisky bottles—

but you cannot demolish a hole, so

we mustn’t cry over an absence of air

Michael Dwayne Smith haunts many literary houses, including The Cortland Review, New World Writing, Third Wednesday, Gargoyle, Chiron Review, Monkeybicycle, and Heavy Feather Review. Author of four books, recipient of the Hinderaker Prize for poetry, the Polonsky Prize for fiction, and a multiple-time Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net nominee, he lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town with his family and rescued horses. His latest full-length collection hopes to go from apparition to publication in 2024.

We Love Our Audience By Alex S. Johnson

"Because we can"--Illuminati

Breaking through the

inevitable cosmic

Crust

Starshine, fumbling fingers of ocean, topographic maps to never, rain

slicing like

surgical steel

Scraped rust of clever

Because we can

Because we must

Draining the sutures

firing bullets of rainbows over

Galaxies skin deep

We're not proud

we have agents in

Every country

sporting mirrorshades

that feed back

into your

brain

We speak all languages

including

alien and

angelic and

android and

animal and

pain

We are the Illuminati they warned you about

the vampire hive mind

Relax

Don't be afraid

Accept your true

Nature.

We never die.

We never die.

We never die.

We are the gods your ancestors thought they invented

For millennia we have been hunted

We are the goblins and ghosts that haunt your erotic nightmares

We play for keeps.

Join us

Do not weep.












Alex S. Johnson is a retired English instructor, disability rights activist, author, editor and publisher (Nocturnicorn Books). He is known for his highly unusual poetry style which combines influences from Dada and Surrealism to hip hop, black metal, industrial noise, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman and Rimbaud. His books include the acclaimed collection The Death Jazz, Bureau of Dreams, The Doom Hippies and Bizarrely Departed. His work has appeared in such venues as Horror Sleaze Trash, Black Noise, Bizarro Central and Cease, Cows. His upcoming books include The Junk Merchants 2: A Literary Tribute to William S. Burroughs, featuring a roster of luminaries including Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, John Shirley and the co-founder of the iconic Goth rock band Bauhaus, David J. Haskins. Johnson ilves in Sacramento, California with his family.

Johnson's poetry and prose collections The Doom Hippies and Skull Vinyl have been acquired by the Widener Library at Harvard University

Aubade By Manny Grimaldi

Never enough drinks in me, not quite

what I want, still sober when I start;

and today, this is the day I wake

and begin anew, my head whisked

to the refrigerator by wheelbarrow

where a Black Russian waits for breakfast.

It’s not a good idea this morning, 

and the avocado wall telephone rings,

sawing and splitting my ears like logs.

Time to hide in the barn, someone’s

coming for me, the mail not checked

in weeks, and the glancing, pierces, rays

through the blinds—I drop my only drink,

and begin to weep to face anything 

so unpromising, like when my father took

me aside sweet seventeen hounding

with the words I’d ruined everything;

when that little girl Kay had full measure

of my smothering and said goodbye;

and when it dawned my rage had the cart

before the horse, I whimpered and drove

the car by a drive thru liquor store,

and talked to a bottle for five hours.

Until noon.

Manny Grimaldi is a Louisville, Kentucky poet, a spit and a cough just west of the "bourbon trail".  He is the managing editor for the poetry journal Yearling out of Lexington, Kentucky.  Years ago, his drinking got arrested and thrown in jail, and occasionally Manny has marched on its behalf.  Manny is also a clown.  Personally, and by training.