Shows like sweet shingles,
the roof caved
above the kitchen.

The lawn never grassed & salted hill beyond.

Shoes in the bedroom and the milk-cow
painting hung above the oven.

Says, if I light matches it smells like
almost dinner, at least
like something roasting.

And this little cow
moos for me, see?

Anne Heide

Jim Leftwich & John M. Bennett

John M. Bennett & Jim Leftwich

sink explosion

chud and knock and grim and tore and
blat and me’d and dool and fine and
whup and age and gnarl and ass and
know and bloods and mutt and drawl and

blink revulsion

wore you halfing in the sudden?
wore you chowing in the planar?
wore you cashing in the chinleak?
wore you beaning in the pockets?

John M. Bennett

Breast offers. Mylar bone.
Mylar star

amid the lilies of a roadside shrine.
Her pic on my light box. Replenish.

If I gave her a plush chipmunk.
She’s drawn with a French curve.

Tim Botta

The slow draw
brings the best water.
If the skin is thin,
the marrow’s hollow.

Snakes lie low until the sun’s down.

A morsel in morning,
repast at last. Check
book’s dates signify
silence or sanddollar daydream.

Her polemics versus
my pole position.
Avenues to explore’re
the devil’s driveway.

Catch & release and solder the solder.

Allot cacophony
and assert desertion.
Oh erase head,
arbitrate my slovenly distortion.

Chandler Lewis

Though I’m up to my bifocals in manuscript,
my impressions of angels
and wide winged rainbows seem worth
repeating here as are the primitive love letters
left at a woman’s feet to illustrate
my virile ability to backtrack.

Not so very far into the rings
of this shaved white pine log before me,
my deliberate ink demands attention:
the poems into the neighboring woods,
the autobiographical novels of my automobile
all ways, with convention coming to mind.

While this snow storm bears
the same Greek column engraving as do others,
the carrot and coal want to speak
for the body of literature behind it,
want passersby to remember the confetti
of polar circles we become.

Rich Murphy

sink & tub & shower head & mirror locations

the framed
gender in warm clear
water pale

surroundings a fern

radiates from it

the soil marvelously
wet for the corner

of an antique shoppe

James Bellflower

Legend in a blinding flash,
L.S.D. is my drug.

And again it’s unwrapped
a soaked-up compound.

Gather sounds in the Dene,
goblins crackle in wild flowers,
rats and chiffchaffs
on the jungle-green leaves of twiners.

Maytime and Whitsun,
Michaelmas and winter,
the nights are always sable black
edges tinged with pale purple…

…and little-butch Kristina,
insisting with reflection
image-building and invention
are wings on which we fly.

Disbanding infusions of Blue Note jazz
with Malcolm and the universe,
I had a Sun-Ra fathomable eye,
gobbledegook to plot
the electric orb of life.

And trips were like river Oz
with lighthouses,
a galaxy of broken water,
incredible bearings to find
before climbing down from the bar stool.

Christopher Barnes