Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Sausages By Bruce Morton


We are all sausages

In our skin linked together.

Blood, bone, meat put

Through the daily grind.

Some red, some brown,

Some white, each flavored

To local spice and taste.


Yes, we are all sausages

Ready for the plate, a meal

Off the grill or cold, sliced

Or whole in a bun, smeared

With colorful condiments.

We are a feast, consumed,

Both the best and worst.







Bruce Morton divides his time between Montana and Arizona. He is the author of two poetry collections: Planet Mort (2024) and Simple Arithmetic & Other Artifices (2014). His poems have appeared in numerous online and print venues. He was formerly dean at the Montana State University library.


Monday, January 20, 2025

Rock and Roll Memories: Motorhead at the Nokia By Alex S. Johnson



We're standing behind
the pressured air of

Murder One, Lemmy's notorious
amp as

Phil Campbell, the Lord Axesmith 
himself dances 
 
A kind of Monty Python
Jig onto the

Stage. The decibel level is 
more less than 

I remember from gigs past most
specifically House of Blues in '95, 

But we're all older now, still

Hard, and sexy, and mellow as the
smoke that 

Dangles forbidden in the air like
lace

Lemmy's buzz-bomb
Bass joins Mikkey Dee's precision
skins, 

He won't be Killed except by
Death as Phil's fingers slay the

Fretboard wringing wa wa wa wa

From the corner a familiar 
body long and muscular, fit as fuck

Not just for her age, it's Cherie
Currie from The 
Runaways, belts the song

KIlled by Death
Killed by Death
Killed by Death

The crowd goes mental it's a 
frozen memory later

Backstage Lem buys me a beer as
promised 

We discuss Cherie's memoir on
which the movie was based then

He has to go. I only remember standing next to him he was

Wearing a suit as he shifted Bowie-like into another costume he was

One of the kindest and most
Compassionate people I've ever

Met, a true gentleman for years I
kept that 

Signed beer atop a bookshelf.

We're all grayer now.

Lemmy passed in 2015. Cherie Currie is a MAGA asshole but

No bitch
we aint dead 

Yet.







Alex S. Johnson's music journalism career began in 1994 and has encompassed being a staff writer for the renowned Zero Tolerance and Metal Maniacs magazines as well as being a contributor to Metal Hammer and Horns N' Hails. Journalism coincided with a career as a dark fiction author, editor and publisher. Johnson's forthcoming anthology Hand Of Doom: A Literary Tribute to Black Sabbath, which he edited, features such original work from such acclaimed names as Anna Taborska, Christi Nogle, John Shirley, Gemma Files and John Langan. He lives in Carmichael, California with his family.




Friday, January 17, 2025

Spew By Wayne F. Burke


vomiting chunks into the

river, while

hanging over the bridge

railing as

my drinking buddy, an

ex ski bum pot-smoking 

hippy, waits

patiently, through the

up rush and

gush, as

all my sickness

and self-disgust over

what I had become--

what I was--

came to the surface.






Wayne F. Burke's poetry and prose has been widely published in print and online (including in THE RYE WHISKEY REVIEW). He was nominated for a Pushcart by THE DOPE FIEND DAILY in 2022. He lives in Vermont (USA).


Thursday, January 9, 2025

Poet By Manny Grimaldi


“In 762, Li Po’s wandering ends south of the Yangtze River, at someone else’s house, when he falls into a river and drowns trying to embrace the moon.”


 —David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Li Po


The moon is that which does not come and go.

The moon always agrees with water.


She hides, she is my eye moving as the earth turns.

She stands as light, my true mother to my father.


Moon holds, reflects him, where he shines—

in the clouded eyes of crones, 


and boys and young girls,

moon changes with the time. Many moons 


mirage in puddles during rainstorms.

Moons feed artists and madmen at night.


And my lover wonders why I write

about a Chinese poet with the sight who’s drowned 


himself, her hunger a yawn for lunatic stories 

lapping on Li Po’s dock. 


So, such ripples of night’s white apple convict. 

This moment of peace. The green shallows 


fill lungs with water and with smiles— 

I sleep soundlessly. I am a mere piece of fruit-fall


for beautiful mirrors and rivers of charity, 

these—inviting bone-whites, fingers speak


sweetly, every syllable a clarity

to strum a song that I would die for,


to flock with fish 

beneath the stream.




Manny Grimaldi is a Kentucky writer and editor at Yearling Poetry Journal with two 

books Riding Shotgun with the Mothman and Ex Libris Ioannes Cerva. His third book,

slated for the near future is with Whiskey City Press on the subject of how to royally

fuck up every single relationship you’ve ever had. Without exception. He lives

with two stupid feathery bipeds and the dishes are never done.



Tuesday, January 7, 2025

October : Buildings near the Highway Have Some of their Lights Left On By John Doyle


Sunken through its face


this concrete skeleton's teeth makes light


pick out exaggerated cars on its skinny highway,



swallowing souls whose birthdays pack today like a sardine tin


controlled by so many wheels I wonder where they could possibly go


to escape the judgements of the bone-tinted light,



appearing from the mouths of buildings,


and the skull-shaped concrete


perched behind broccoli trees



wobbling a worried wind that tries to wobble broccoli trees back


and everyone assumes 


it's a language of vision and silence that poems magically fall from






Half man, half creature of very odd habi. t, John Doyle dabbles in poetry when other forms of alchemy and whatnot just don't meet his creative needs. From County Kildare in Ireland, he is (let's just politely say) closer to 50 than 21.



Friday, January 3, 2025

ALL OF THEM By Michael Minassian


Driving through New England,

I notice small towns

all have a cemetery 

crowded with tombstones,

weathered and leaning

into each other 

like old friends.


How many dead people

are buried there? 

I hear my father’s voice

ask years ago—


All of them, he’d say,

then laugh at his own joke.


The dead don’t mind,

having sailed away

like widows and warriors

taken by surprise

when the night sky

sinks into a fishbowl,

and the stars blink

out one by one.





MICHAEL MINASSIAN lives with his wife in Southern New England. He is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com

 

Monday, December 30, 2024

Dirty Women (For Ozzy) by Alex S. Johnson


They don't just stand in doorways

Although lurking is their mode of choice

Where it comes to crimes of 
the heart

Their glittering eyes speak volumes 

Their elaborate boudoir languors 
change perception and

Charge reality with 

A fuck-fusion of forms 

A tension insurmountable 

A vast need for release 

but into what vessel?

In his book Specimen Days,
Walt Whitman talks about

Fucking the earth

He would wrestle saplings beside
streams while

Declaiming his carnal verse to the 
clouds and grass and animals

Dirty women are my bane and my ecstasy 

I loved you and miss you
I loved you and miss you
I loved you and miss you

Miss you miss you miss you.




Alex S. Johnson has been called "the Baudelaire of our time; the poet of the underground" by no less than John Shirley, Bram Stoker Award-winning author, songwriter for BLUE OYSTER CULT and principal screenwriter of THE CROW (1994). Shirley also contributed the original story "Lonely is the Word" to Johnson's forthcoming charity anthology for Children of the Night, Inc., HAND OF DOOM: A LITERARY TRIBUTE TO BLACK SABBATH, which also features such dark fiction heavyweights as Anna Taborska, John Palisano, Gemma Files and Christi Nogle. Johnson is the author of numerous books including SKULL VINYL: POEMS 2012-2017, acquired for its cultural significance by the Widener Library at Harvard University. Johnson runs Nocturnicorn Books with Alea Celeste Williams and lives in Carmichael, California with his family. 

Sausages By Bruce Morton

We are all sausages In our skin linked together. Blood, bone, meat put Through the daily grind. Some red, some brown, Some white, each flavo...