Laugh That Our Lives Are

By Mather Schneider Sometimes intelligence is a place with no oxygen like a man laughing so hard he can’t breathe. Nobody knows how we are built to live, why we go bat-crazy over every little thing, how it all got warped and goes on warping, hour by hour, or what humor means when your life [...]

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The Gridiron Diner

By Mather Schneider There is the usual gallery of wackos, homeless men lugging army surplus fardel, wild as sandpipers, yellow-throats, occasional hookers laughing like kookaburras. Life is a ziggurat of coffee-guzzling nut-bags. But, there is a waitress named Araceli, duchess of the diner, with the curves of a calathus vase and two yurts bivouaced high [...]

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Be Mine

By Mather Schneider When I first started sending out poems to magazines it was 1992 and if there were internet publications I didn’t know about them. I didn’t have a computer and had never been on the net. When submitting my poems I didn’t understand the whole SASE theory. I couldn’t figure out how you [...]

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Fancy Language

By Mather Schneider I used the word “creosote” in a story the other day and this guy I know (another writer) said, “What’s with all the fancy language?” “Fancy language?” I said. “Yeah,” he said. “I hate it when writers try to act like they’re smarter than I am,” he said. “Creosote’s a plant,” I [...]

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The End

By Mather Schneider Imagine centuries from now when our sun is burning out and life is dying. What would matter to you? Would you care about feng shui or wicca or how your abs look or if your subscription to Pussy Foot Poetry has lapsed? Would you care what’s on the dollar menu or how [...]

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The View From the Eastern Slope of Mount Baker

By Mather Schneider She stretches naked on a yellow blanket above the treeline. I stand over her and I’m naked too, horseflies chewing my headcheese ass. Then I’m upon her, a bobcat screaming on the sunny edge of a lonely glacier. I’m the first me, she’s the first her. Her hair is obscene in the [...]

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This is How I Read a Poetry Journal Too

By Mather Schneider My wife is from Mexico and can barely speak or read in English but she loves it when I get a poetry journal contributor’s copy in the mail. She first looks at the cover, and is generally unimpressed. Then she goes for the contributor’s notes. If there is a photo of me [...]

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The Envelope With the Big Red Stamp

By Mather Schneider I got a letter from a guy in prison. The envelope had a big red stamp on it. The guy had read a few of my poems in a magazine. In one poem I had used some swear words and he didn’t approve of that while another poem was about sex which [...]

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Your Happy Soul

By Mather Schneider Do you think that when a man is at the end of his rope when he is up against the cold blackness of the universe after he has fought for days and nights since childhood when it seems that not a single person in the world is on his side or can [...]

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He Took a Cab

By Mather Schneider A cabby got shot last night. Another cabby found him. He was already dead. It was over where Geronimo hits Main, between Larry’s Hardware and El Corral, thirty feet from his cab. Our guess: fare refused to pay and fled; cabby pursued. You know the hope in your life is the same [...]

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