Adam Heart Mother By Kevin M. Hibshman

Poking with a stick. 

Looking for the crevice that started everything.

A vague meandering led to the science of destruction.

Big budget nightmares for everyone.

Let's do something they cannot erase.

In this tattle-tale age of surveillance, let's be sneaky.

I'm messed up about the past.

Let's put on some acid jazz.

Come to the cabin in Summer.

It's a bit of a fixer-upper.

Hey, bring whatever you can, man.

The stars are great here.

So are the fireflies.

I'll let you in on a secret.

These people are weird.

These people are missing something.

That certain component that makes you human.

Half of their brains are missing.

They are oddly compliant, pleasantly lobotomized.

They never listened to folk songs from the 60's.

I just want to feel wild like nobody's child.

Will you help me defy them?

Don't fret about having destroyed your liver.

Come down here.

We'll find a river.

I have enough to get by.

We'll take a stroll through the old campsite.

Sorry to digress.

Its no longer about protest.

It's all entwined in feeling.

I got a connection.

Maintain your reflexes.

Stay fast and funky man.

Get as loose as you can and we'll go swimming.

Kevin M. Hibshman has had poems published in many journals and magazines world wide.In addition, he has edited his poetry zine, Fearless, since 1990 and is the author of sixteen chapbooks including Love Sex Death Dreams (Green Bean Press, 2000) and Incessant Shining (Alternating Current, 2011).

Cease To Destroy from Whiskey City Press.

His current book is Lost Within The Garden Of Heathens also from Whiskey City Press and currently available through Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0DKHRDQD5/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Charged By April Ridge

How do you ground the notion of love?

First

you connect two to three hearts

with battery wires,

ensuring they are fastened

tight enough to

zap and zing

one another

hard as thousand year old lightning,

dark as lost-for-eons canyons,

deep as a new lover’s eyes

surprised at midnight,

sleeping over for the first time

when you invite them

as they’re saying their goodbyes.

After time,

love either grounds itself

or wasn’t truly love to begin with.

The notion of love

is sometimes taken

to the precipice of

a cliff you can’t afford to climb up to

or dangle precariously from

while awaiting the magic to overcome.

Sometimes you cannot

obtain that love.

Sometimes,

if you’re lucky,

it simply comes

and you just have to work

to keep that spark charged.

April Ridge lives in the expansive hopes and dreams of melancholy rescue cats. She thrives on strong coffee, and lives for danger. In the midst of Indiana pines, she follows her heart out to the horizon of reality and hopes never to return to the misty sands of the nightmarish 9 to 5. April aspires to beat seasonal depression with a well-carved stick, and to one day experience the splendor of the Cucumber Magnolia tree in bloom. 

The Revolution by Night by Alex S. Johnson

The leaves scuttle, are singed

and the meat is pink if you 

Stab it just a bit

it oozes blood

Like your tender

astronomy

A side of sidereal, cosmicomic

Laughter bursts from the veins, the

green tracery of being netted in a colossal shipwreck of forms

Desire gives way to a blossom of death to time

Where opiate pallor dabs at your cheeks

And you reach for an cigarette jammed

Smartly in its FDR cylinder, the Princess of Pirate Girls with an eyepatch and a hip flask of

Rum-drummer tattoos, watercolors of

rose and leviathan sinking slowly beneath the waves of 

The sun.

Alex S. Johnson was dubbed "The Baudelaire of our time" by John Shirley, screenwriter with David J. Schow of the 1994 cult classic horror film The Crow starring Brandon Lee in his final performance, and has been trying to live up to that beautiful comparison ever since. He lives in Carmichael, California with his family. 

The sacrifice__for Neeli Cherkovski By Merritt Waldon

Crashing mind 

Descends from lofty

Climb

Wildly landing against loam

The crackling bone 

Dreaming wanderers 

The howling blue dog star

Of yore

As we begin the adventure

Of lore

See the dancers 

Mute sirens hypnotizing

These eyes with careless

Passionate gyrations 

Pirouettes 

Leaps spins 

bows

Offering the joyful 

Sacrifice of bodies 

To an eternal

Idea

Merritt Waldon is Southern Indiana poet who has been published in Road Dawgz, Sun Poetic Times,

The Brooklyn Rail, Be About It Zine, River Dog #1, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, Americans & others anthology fourth edition, Crisis Chronicles, Cajun Mutt Press, Thye Rye Whiskey Review, and Fearless!.

At midnight Christmas night 2020, cajun mutt press released Oracles from a Strange Fire by Ron Whitehead & Merritt. He lives in Austin, Indiana.

Diamonds in the Sand By Brenton Booth

This poems for Shakespeare.

This poems for Christopher

Marlowe. This poems for that

beautiful son-of-a-bitch: Tom

Joad, and the even more beautiful:

John Steinbeck. This poems for

the sky. This poems for the trees.

This poems for everyone that

ever walked against the mindless,

cowardly mob. This poems

for Henry Miller. This poems for

Charles Bukowski. This poems 

for Neil Young: whose album,

After the Gold Rush, saved me

from the miserable death of

my father. This poems for light.

This poems for dark. This poems

for talk. This poems for silence.

This poems for everything. This

poems for nothing at all. Listening

to loud music at 4:11 p.m. in my

writing room on a scorching

summer afternoon. Forty-six in

a few weeks. Bright as ever. 

Brenton Booth lives in Sydney, Australia. Poetry of his has appeared in Gargoyle, New York Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Chiron Review, Main Street Rag, Naugatuck River Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Nerve Cowboy. He has two full length collections available from Epic Rites Press.  

WORKING MAN PT.1 By Brian Rosenberger

day in, day out

day in, day out

the same thing

the same routine

day in, day out

like a scene from a horror flick

the dead rising

day in, day out

the 9 to 5 treadmill

never noticing the sun

just shades of grey

day in, day out

a Deja vu existence

like reading the same story everyday

but worse, living it day in, day out

self-made man in a self-made prison

shop talk, the conversation of convicts

scheming and dreaming

day in, day out

parole is granted as the shift ends

or is it just a transfer to a different cell

Brian Rosenberger lives in a cellar in Marietta, GA and writes by the light of captured fireflies. He is the author of As the Worm Turns and three poetry collections - Poems That Go Splat, And For My Next Trick..., and Scream for Me.

Everyone Is Dead by Jimmy Broccoli

Late nights and we’d laugh, even when nothing was funny –

Up for 3 or 4 days – out of our minds –

The apartment windows blacked out with faded and tattered curtains

With constant mid-level fear of the police storming through our front door

Me sitting in the comfy chair naked and high as fuck –

My boyfriend sitting on the couch watching videos on his phone

It’s a Saturday night –

Or, perhaps it is a Tuesday

I don’t know – and neither does he

Bobby comes over to our place and brings his bong

I’m a hard-core junkie –

So I’ll stick with my crushed ice crystal fantasies, thank you

My boyfriend rails a line of coke and then smokes from Bobby’s bong

“Dude, why the fuck are you naked?”, Bobby asks me

My boyfriend spits out bong smoke – because he thinks it’s funny as fuck

Neither of us answers the question

I’m a 138-pound skeleton – look at me in all of my methamphetamine glory!

My boyfriend is 99 pounds – and we don’t talk about it

We both buy our clothes online, so we don’t have to shop in the Boys department at Macy’s –

It’s dinner time and I have a Dorito, and my boyfriend eats a single slice of cheese

And we think it’s funny –

It’s funny as fuck

Theodore wears glasses, looks a bit like Where’s Waldo and snorts up meth like a national champion

“Don’t trust him near your drugs”, my boyfriend frantically whispers to me

“Waldo will steel your fucking shit –

with his fucking pomaded hair and his skinny-jeans and with his big boy job”

Theodore sits next to me and takes off his shirt

“It’s hot as fuck in here, man”, he says – his Waldo striped shirt now on the floor

Neither my boyfriend nor I respond

----

Tonight is the big party – the lesbians are coming over …

Canadian Patricia and Melony and their drugs will be kicking things off nicely …

I wear underwear because CP & M don’t like seeing my dick –

and … they’ve got the drugs – so – clothing on it is!

My boyfriend stands in the kitchen hugging Joey’s girlfriend

She is big junkie girl crying upon his shoulder – her too-heavy eyeliner ruining her face

A knock at the door – it’s CP & M and their fanny pack of drugs

“Welcome lesbos!”, I too-excitedly proclaim as they enter the apartment

“I wonder which one of you fixes the car”, my boyfriend playfully sneers -

If he wasn’t anorexic, he could be a model – a short-guy model, perhaps

Melony is wearing a Bull Dike t-shirt, too tight and faded for a proper lady

“I see you put the nasty baseball bat away”, Canadian Patricia tells me matter-of-factly as she OCD lays out the mini plastic baggies on the coffee table

“Anything for you, love”, I say and smile as I produce the already-powdered credit card

Joey soon arrives and sits next to his girlfriend - then leans into her as a peace-offering

Waldo … er, Theodore and Bobby bring the ecstasy tabs with them -

And then Bobby’s little brother Daniel walks in the door – he’s 16

[Daniel would soon be the first to die]

“Pussy and titties!”, my boyfriend exclaims loudly after he snorts his first line of the hour

Canadian Patricia looks annoyed –

“What if I shouted penises and testicles after railing every line, eh?”

And the entire apartment erupts in hysterical laughter –

“Man – we’ve got drugs, man”, shushes Theodore as he nervously adjusts his glasses on his Where’s Waldo face

The apartment becomes quiet, and Joey & his girlfriend are making out heavy –

I guess she has forgiven him

I pass the mini straw to Daniel

He takes it and does half a line – that is a LOT for a beginner

My boyfriend puts an arm around him in celebration

“You’re one of us now”, my boyfriend says

As Melony looks at Daniel tenderly and motherly –

Like a mother who is drugged out would look at him

----

The thing about druggies is we don’t get obituaries –

We don’t receive flowers at the graves nobody pays for or marks

There are no ministers or representatives to conduct the funerals

[there are no funerals]

There are no loved ones crying and sharing lovely stories of how good we were

After Daniel died, Bobby killed himself with a tied rope and a chair that fell over easily

Theodore died of heart failure before the ambulance arrived

Canadian Patricia and Melony drove off a mountain edge during holiday –

Hard drug addicts shouldn’t be driving near cliffs

Joey stabbed his girlfriend during a nightmarish heroin fantasy

She bled out on their living room floor in mid-December

Joey overdosed that night – and I suspect it was on purpose

My boyfriend was the last to die

And I’m not okay with telling you how –

I was in the room when he collapsed and didn’t get up again

He didn’t get up again until he was carried out by the paramedics

… I’m just not ready to tell you about it yet …

They were my friends …

I’m here

I’m breathing

And everyone else is dead

----

“It’s Jimmy Broccoli – ladies and gentlemen”!

[thunderous applause erupts from an invisible audience]

Former methamphetamine addict

GHB, cocaine, ecstasy and benzodiazepines …

Triple-decade alcoholic

Poet

Aggressive and dedicated bodybuilder

Militant sleep schedule

Militant clean living

Militant nutrition & perfectly timed meals

43 daily supplements

Vegan & animal welfare advocate

Heath …

Almighty health!

And loneliness

So much loneliness

Being the survivor is awful

And I know – no matter what I do

I’ll always be the bad guy

______________

Jimmy Broccoli is the author of 5 collections of poetry and one illustrated book of adult satire ("Mommy, I Can't Find My Motherfucking Socks"). He is a librarian and a beginning bodybuilder who enjoys playing with puppies.