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.

Then I Send A Snobbish Job Interviewer To Hell By Trish Saunders

Ten minutes into our Zoom interview I notice 

a hole in my sleeve, and it is sliding down

my arm, not in a good way,

definitely not a hey, sailor-ish way, 

more of a, “she has but twenty dollars 

to her name” way. You clear your throat, 

shuffle some papers, and If I was a

 New Orleans seagull, 

I would stuff myself with beignets 

and vomit gently over your posh Knoll steel desk. 

 

Trish Saunders’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in Chiron Review, Off The Coast, The Rye Whiskey Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Eunoia Review, among others. Twice nominated (never winning) for Best of the Net, she lives in Seattle, formerly Honolulu. 

The Quiet of Tombstones By Catfish McDaris

Reclining against a warrior’s headstone, 

listening to a chevron of geese overhead 

watching the pewter dawn sun peer forth 

There’s no happiness at the end of a rifle 

or in a bottle or magic potion, sitting among 

my dead brothers, I know there’s no such 

Thing as revolution, it’s just another word 

meaning leapfrog of the rich, so they can 

buy a bit of power with the blood of the poor 

 

The honking dies and fog vanishes, money 

equals greed, possessions turn into traitors,  

no one can stop time or conquer the rain. 

 

 

(photo is from Alamos, Sonora Mexico)  

 

Catfish McDaris was born on Route 66 in Albuquerque, NM in 1953. He's a retired bricklayer, artillery soldier, and postal worker. He lives 4 miles from Lake Michigan, near Milwaukee. His 25 years of writing archives are in Marquette University, and he has a Wikipedia Page. He likes to do interviews.  

 

Welcome to the Round House By Rich Boucher

                    (for Valerie L)

Couldn’t have been a more beautiful late morning in Mona McCluskey Park out by Old Preese Elementary school; partially cloudy, sun shining full noon radiance in a sky of deep Dodger blue, maybe seventy-six-point-seven degrees outside because that’s how I remember it. I got dressed for a stroll in my brand-new reflective green windbreaker, casual-fit gray sweatpants and my favorite orange Adidas sneaks. Eager for loveliness, I headed out. Was the park full of people like school children and parents and children and dogs and parents who didn’t have children also? It sure seemed like they were all there. I made a shortcut to downtown through a closed-off section of the park when a parent tumescent with genuine Dad arrogance was suddenly breathing, heavy in my personal space. Don’t cut through there - you need to walk around; use the sidewalk. He looked to be around forty-one-and-two-thirds years old. He grabbed me by the hem of my elbow. Huge mistake. A quick shift in my stance put him off balance and right in front of his adoring son I gave him an epic, completely silent roundhouse kick to his zygomatic bone and he crumpled on the grass, asleep before he met the ground. Keep moving. Downtown Ithaca was hopping, asses-to-elbows busy on each corner. The crowd crossing Cayuga Street jostled me like a ball and then somebody shoved me from behind. You have to wonder who could be like that right in the middle of the city’s yearly and fragrant Strawberries-and-Oranges festival. I acted on instinct, whirling around, my limbs a handsome blur to deliver a powerful roundhouse kick to the front of the guy’s nose. His blood made a little Rorschach-shaped cloud in the air and I guess I did more damage that I intended because he fell to his knees and started sneezing up some bone. Keep moving. I broke from the crowd, cut through a few back yards and re-entered the downtown area right by the Fire Department. They had an official Dalmatian out there lying on the warm driveway, but the word on the street was that the Dalmatian had been caught using steroids, as evidenced by his notable and marvelous bouts of anger. Use caution. I tried to sneak past him there but the dog snapped loose from the chain in seconds and leaped for my exposed, vulnerable and admittedly beautiful throat. It’s true: parts of me are breathtaking. Muscle memory took control; I rolled up into position for an Ezekiel choke, absorbing all the dog’s momentum, steadied myself, and deterred him with a roundhouse bite to his hindquarter. He yelled uncle and loped on back to the fire station. I was reminded from all this that I was hungry, and down the block there lived a McDonald’s. When the worker told me in the drive-thru that I needed to be in a car to get served, I felt a little hurt by the massive, unbearable and suicide-causing injustice of it all and delivered an all-time prize-winning roundhouse middle finger right to his window and walked off. It doesn’t matter about my hunger. Minutes later, I walked into Coupland’s Music, even though it had been closed for at least two years due to the year it is now, and the young woman behind the cashier’s desk started crying because at last there was another human face. Didn’t she realize that they had long gone out of business, that she didn’t even have a job there anymore? I approached her to give her a hug and words of comfort. She insulted my offer and accused me of a pejorative expletive, and I don’t take that from anybody. Faster than anybody could please, I wheeled around and came at her with a roundhouse human rights protest against her offensive and bandwagon face piercings. The bricks and lights came down on us and I walked away with only an urgent, traumatic injury to my stigmata artery. Keep moving. The bleeding continued like the minutes like to do, so I jogged the six blocks to the emergency room. The nurse, buxom and third-shift, didn’t care for my dialect and the doctor, I swear, kept trying to seduce me with his honest love while he patched me up. The pretty and ample nurse, smarter than me because she was medical, tried to inflict a fee on me for service, but I found the amount I owed to be very threatening and/or triggering. In self-defense, I got her in a headlock so hard and profound that she started farting and crying at the same time. She must have been holding all that in for a while. I got the urgent care fee down to under twenty dollars. Next, I grabbed the lecherous, desperate doctor by his lapels and gave him a vicious, roundhouse kiss on the lips before ambling off to look for a drink. Ramlow’s was packed and in the deafening Allman-Brothers-hits-of-the-seventies of it all I made it through the crush to the bar and asked for a Redheaded Slut; I love that potent girl. A biker couple within earshot started making fun of me for not ordering something more masculine. It didn't take long for their comments to turn into intimidation, implied threats and then real ones. Things boiled over and they both made for me with a goal of murder. I gave them both the wisdom of my dojo years with dual reverse collar chops and finished them both off with a roundhouse hot three-way on the bar. How often in the hours that make up our days, do we give a thought, even absently, to our mortality, to our dying, to the end? I limped the twenty blocks or so to the cemetery. My mother and father are buried there, my mother and Dad, my Mom and father - however you want to say it. It was well past starting to get dark. The night came dressed in a smoky cobalt number that forced me to fantasize about consent against my will. The Moon, polite to a fault, was suddenly up there in all that and full of all that. The cemetery held its breath. Stop moving. I knelt by their headstones and told them how much I missed them. I tried not to cry even a little bit but failed, and as I wiped the tears away with some weakness tissue I had in my pocket, a ghost leaning up out of his grave nearby glared at me loudly and told me to suck it up. Everyone dies, you pussy. Shake it off and get out of my house. I balled my hands and feet into fists and charged at him, ready with a roundhouse exorcism right to the face and a kick to his foggy, ethereal crotch. Disrespect is something I won’t tolerate. 

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, Drunk Monkeys and Cultural Weekly, among others. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.

Inside The Crackhouse Interview With Garret Schuelke

1.Do you often find yourself attracted to open fields, or is that just me

Absolutely. I love hiking, and coming upon an open field, especially in the summer, is always a pleasure. I’ve had to adjust though, since I’m more sensitive to things like mosquitoes and ticks as I grow older, so I’ve utilized my inner strength as an MFC (Midwestern Fat Caucasian), and now wear sweat pants over my shorts like a fucking lame.

2.Would you like to defect with me to Canada?

Lets do it! I’m a Canadaphile, and try to visit it at least once a year (usually Toronto or Windsor, being that Ontario is right next to Michigan). It definitely has its own terrible history and problems—just ask their Indigenous folks—but compared to the fascist shithole that AmeriKKKa is...yeah, it’s way better. I will also gladly fight to defend Canada from Trump’s thugs, cause once I’m outta America, I’ll be damned if I’ll be part of it again.

3.I'm thinking of a number between 12 and 14, Can you guess what it is?

12 ½? 

4.Why do you choose to write, and why on earth have you done so for this God-awful magazine

I write because I feel like it’s my mission in life. I like to submit to this magazine, and others like it, because I figure they’ll be more open to my writing style and interests—plus I don’t like to wait forever for a response/rejection/publication (like you’ll get from such publications as college literary magazines).

5.What is a question you have always desired to ask me?

Is it possible for leftover crack to exist?

6.Geraldo Rivera, do you believe Al Capone set him up for future failure?

Undoubtly! Capone knew that, before Geraldo even existed as a sperm in a nut, that he had to give it to him.

7.What do you enjoy doing in your free time that is hopefully not writing and very much illegal?

Burning down the homes of fascists, recording it, and getting loads of cash by making reaction vids to said crime I’ve obviously committed, yet never seem to get in trouble for.

8.Do you like skittles?

Nah, M&M’s gang rise up!

9.I read your work yesterday. You are welcome.

All I can say is that I’m glad you did something good for yourself.

10 What is the difference between a fjord and a bay? Do not Google the answer, as I did while googling myself.

Similar to questions like “What is the meaning of life?”, I prefer to just drink myself into a stupor and not think about it.

11.Why poetry in less than 12 words 

It’s something that has to happen, for better or for worse.

12.How would you rate this interview 

experience on a scale from 100 to 100

Over 100, because I can be truly honest for once in my career/life.

13.Do you know where I could purchase some quality drugs for research purposes?

No, but I know where we can get some mediocre drugs for dank decision-making.

14.What is your favorite sea creature?

Anything that was featured in that Aquaman hentai I came across one time at band camp.

15.Do you know the location where the world lost all common sense 

The Interzone.

16.Would you like to discuss any future project over some fine wine and gentle Norwegian death metal?

If the “fine wine” is Boones Farm Blue Hawaiian, and the Norwegian death metal is mostly instrumental, then YEAH, COOL, LETS DO THIS.

17.What endears readers to this publication that's called a daily yet only runs occasionally 

Because I love myself a good publication that’ll keep including two T’s in my name every time I’m published in it, even though I spell it with one T throughout my writing, social media, correspondence, etc.

GARRET SCHUELKE is a writer, podcaster, and musician that currently resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of the GODAN series (Bakunin Incorporated), Anamakee (Riot Forge Studios, 2016), Whup Jamboree: Stories (Elmblad Media Group, 2017), and three ebooks. He is also the host of The Garret Schuelke Podcast, The Cheeseburger Blues: An Exploration into Dad Blues Rock, and A Riot of my Own. He makes music under the moniker Neobeatglory.

To learn more, visit Garret Schuelke’s official website: garrxxqxx x wzx,wx

q 1xX ×- etschuelke.tumblr.com.