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.