Crooked Smile 101. By Brian Fugett

my liver aches

worse than

your broken heart

& I will always be

one shot of vodka

away from

you

Brian Fugett is a member of the slacker, fast food generation that has been branded with an “X”. He sits in his pad all day consuming more oxygen than he’s worth. He’s been doing it for 47 years now & has become quite efficient at it. Some day he hopes to be president of the “International Society of Incontinent Gum Swallowers”, a support group for people who compulsively swallow gum & piss themselves. Until that day arrives, he occupies his time with writing, photography, boozing, tail-chasing and occasional pugilism.

Portrait of Joyce by John Drudge

Holding his hat
And ash plant stick
Twisting words
Around the bush
It was with
Great gasps of want
That the devil tipped
His drink to lip
And washed away
The circus

John works as a clinical social worker and is the president of a national disability management company. He holds degrees in Social Work, Psychology, and Rehabilitation Services and has studied philosophy extensively.  He is an avid traveler and a long-term student of the martial arts holding a 3rd degree black-belt in Kempo Karate. His diverse educational and experiential background gives him a broad base from which to approach many topics in his poetry. John currently lives with his wife and two children in Caledon, Ontario, Canada. 

Let’s Carry On. By Kelle Grace Gaddis

Help me through the valley low
below its bounds, not tree or
mountain, but bars hard before me,
not jail, the other kind neon signs
flashing “open” pulling me into
chaos, cold easy demon Champagne
bubbling with light stealing
reason, seasons, and life
Time’s an illusion, fiddling away
days until melancholy’s sad reflection
sees me, yet not me, older broken,
surprisingly still able to hope, or,
at least not ready to fashion a rope
Forgive me, friend, I know I shouldn’t
joke. My laughter’s from a glass before
noon, maybe two, so I can shimmer
like a glimmer of my misspent youth

Yellow Chair Review published Kelle Grace Gaddis’s first book, My Myths, in 2017. She’s recently published her second with Cyberwit titled, When I’m Not Myself. Other recently published works appear in Interim, BlazeVOX 15 & 17, Rye Whiskey Review, Chicken Soup For The Soul: Dreams & The Unexplainable, Dispatches Editions Resist Much / Obey Little, Vending Machine Presses Very Fine Writing, The Till, Five Willows Poetry Review, Thirteen Myna Birds Journal, Knot Literary Magazine, Entropy, DoveTales, and the forthcoming Fiction War Magazine Volume 8, 2019 and elsewhere. She was honored to be a Tupelo Press 30/30 Writer in 2018, a 4Culture “Poetry on the Buses” contest winner in 2015 and 2017, and a prize-winning finalist in the National Fiction War Contest in summer of 2018. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington in 2014.

poison, confined. by Eliana Vanessa

drank everything away, 

no reason to call the doctor,

took care of all my problems 

when i handed the devil

the gun in my dreams.

love ain’t what it seems,

when you’re 

changing the litterbox 

of your own mind,

blindly calling the cat a deity,

better to write bad poetry

than to delude oneself 

with the notion

that there is

any hope for escape 

and let the skull of every 

recurring nightmare

bleed toxic.

Eliana Vanessa is originally from Argentina and moved to New Orleans, Louisiana at a young age.  She recently participated 100,000 Poets for Change (2018) and served as part of a panel of poets in The Jane Austen Festival (2017, 2018, 2019).   You can find her work online at The Horror Zine, The Rye Whiskey Review, and The Sirens Call Ezine, The Ramingo’s Porch, Ariel Chart, Beneath the Rainbow, and Fearless.  Her poetry appears in two recent anthologies: Masks Still Aren’t Enough (2019) and Americans and Others (2019). She is Eliana Vanessa on Facebook at the following link: https://www.facebook.com/eliana.vanessa.7758.

In Case of Emergency by Wayne F. Burke

I spent days in the streets of the
city and
nights sleeping on a bench in
Longfellow Park
(some fucking poet he must have been)
and woke with the back of my head
flat as the bench.

I drank whiskey to help me,
to sleep and
for other reasons;
tried to keep an eye open
as I slept;
had a job
but
like Jesus,
nowhere to lay my head,
except the bench,
because
no rooms in the city
to rent until
one night
a room opened up at the Y
and I filled the preregistration form
but
after told by the clerk
to fill in the space
“in case of emergency notify”
I crumpled it up and
threw it at him across
the desk
because
who in the hell was he
tell me what to do?

Later,
back on my bench,
I told myself:
I must be nuts.

Wayne F. Burke has published six full-length collections of poetry, most recently DIFLUCAN (2019, BareBack Press). He lives in Vermont.

bukowski was always right by Scot Young

bukowski sat
next to
brautigan in
ginos bar
said
hey fucker
you know when
the words go
you got
nothing
no pussy
unless you
buy it
might as well
cash in yr chips

richard looked
at the small pile
of change
beside the
wet coaster
counted forty
five cents
tried to scratch
out a poem
to trade for a beer
nothing
now that's
what i'm talkin
about
bukowski said
rubbing the red
head's thigh up
under her dress
brautigan was
already on the
sidewalk
pea coat collar
turned up
against the north
beach rain
mustache still damp
from the last drops
of beer
45 cents clutched
in his fist
like his last poem
wasn't enough
for anything

Scot Young lives with the woman of his dreams and herds goats on a ridge top  farm in the Missouri Ozarks and nothing else is as important.