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.