My Computer Crashed

By Emmanuel Jakpa

so I reformat
its
hard drive.

Re-install
its programs
& browsers.

Start from scratch
typing all my documents
again.

You might miss
what I
am trying to say.

It is not like a
human body.

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Cowboys & Indians

By Robert Vaughan

It wasn’t that it never happened,
it’s that I had to change it. Because
once I was tied-up in a harmless
game of cowboys and indians,
I discovered it was the only
way for me to
feel aroused. No, to
feel anything. And then I
went from being tied up, to blindfolds,
to harnesses, and various
forms of thrills. Who knew
some harmless childhood game
would leave such lasting impressions.

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Rolling On the Floor, Laughing My Ass Off Because I Started To Really Examine My Early Experiences with Organized Religion

By Rich Boucher

I can’t give you the exact measurements
of hindsight, sorry, but all I do know
is that it makes no sense now, years later,
to consider that I really believed
I was drinking Jesus’ blood
and eating his flesh just on the say-so
of a priest who didn’t even know me,
but to maybe recognize my face
sometimes, on a Sunday.

Why would I have chosen to think
I was being a cannibal about God?
Why would I have desired to believe
I was the good kind of vampire,
with a deep-down body thirst for penance?
Why do drops of rain opt for striking dry ground?
What would a scarecrow do with a brain if it had one?

He would say, “The body of Christ”,
and I’d reply, “Amen.”

And then a miracle was supposed to happen.

But if transubstantiation could have been
spoken into happening that easily,
why didn’t I simply request
that the priest say, “The body of Lynda Carter”,
so that I could say “Amen” to that?

And then a miracle was supposed to happen.

The keys to a brand new Corvette? Amen.
A bank account that puts me in the Winner’s Circle
in Forbes magazine? Amen.

A miracle is supposed to happen.

The panties of my sixth-grade English teacher?

Amen.

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Bringing It

By M.P. Powers

Allow me to introduce myself (in the third person). R.P. Chezwik is
a Pushcart Nominee and celebrated SlamPoet
of the in-yer-face variety. He has been published worldwide
(courtesy of the web), in such places as “The Dryhumping
Chronicles of Larry King,” “NAMBLA Review,” and is currently
a featured poet
at the fledgling blogzine “Angry Ernie & His Four Flabworshiping
Yes-men Take Minneapolis.”

Now touring parts Cheboygan
with a licentious troop of Ukrainian squaredancers, Chezwik recently
spent four weeks riding the rails,
sitting higgledypiggledy with three barrel stiffs plus one
Coach Jawrower and a gravedigger named Slick Fulwood,
the six of them in glad rags
listening to a hallelujah peddler before hopping off in Winnemucca
to score a spot of armpit
detergent, and then the carsalesman who sidelined
as a stage prop (in another life) telling him, “You have to be qualified
to drive a Ferrari.”
“Qualified? I’m paying cash! What do you want a bag of money?”
“Step into my office.”

Dung Press will be publishing Chezwik’s first poetry collection
entitled “Pedro
Restoreth My Soul.” Threehundredfortyeight sonnets & haikus based
on particleboard bathroom partitions
and his recent arrest and imprisonment
for disguising himself
as a jockstrap in a YMCA hamper,
this superb work combines classically trained vision
with impassioned restraint. “I really liked the one about punching
the old lady in the gut,” said Salvatore St. Pierre-Louis,
an Italian-Haitian Mona Vie
salesman/maggot farmer living in Upper Saskatchewan.

“And what about the night we hogtied your old uncle Al in the living room
and pawned off all those stupid antique
coins of his?” asked Emile Annus, who plays a bit part
in the rhyming couplet
“Who Cares About That Guy?”

This unique collection is due for an October 2011
release. In the meantime, Chezwik will be appearing on/off
(as himself)
in bowling alleys, boiler rooms, unsuspecting food courts
& public parks

with the horniest group of squaredancers
you never saw.

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Springsteen Never Sings Of The Hard Six

By Dennis Mahagin

God help a gambler
from Rahway, cooking up
his sweetened coffee dregs
in a microwave
oven,

with that chime
that pings
when the cycle
is complete, as when
a nickel slot machine
briefly defeats
entropy

for a dollar
and ten cents.

Sans the sense
God gave mania,
a Rahway gambler cracks
a couple of eggs in the micro-
wave, too– what a sick puddle
of dun and amber goo! — yolks
that explode
at forty two
seconds on the dot,
as odds do, catching up
to an A. City crap shooter
who got too

hot. Yahweh,
please help a
gambling man
from Rahway, pouring over
rigged point spreads in the
sports section, scattershot
hieroglyphs, egg whites on
the walls of a cooker, sticky
lime marmalade limning
the handsome ear lobes
of Marisa Tomei.
Yes, a rime of breath
clouds, muted roar
of the crowd strobing
crisp autumn air,
game day gone risque
at Meadowlands.

God, you got
to help a gambling man
with his leveraged stack
of Newark’s Last Stand,
fifteen grand
laid off

on the Nets, watching it
all unfold at the Sports Bar,
Jason Kidd dribbling
on thirty foot
wide plasma
screen, Jason
moving like a toddler
wearing messed-up
– Show quoted text –
Pampers, Kidd forcing
up unclean 3-point
jumpers…

Yes, Angel Breath
for a Rahway rounder, fogging up
the side view mirror of his Astro van,
parked in front of the Minuteman
store, just off
the turnpike, in for
sixty large to a
shylock named Ike,
drives a shark fin
town car that backfires
infrequently
as ovaries
exploding from the corner
of the eye, as muffled pops
of .22 rounds sequenced
by a goose down
silencer. By and

by, in the driver’s seat
of his panel van, with 80’s rock
on the dashboard radio — so low,
indecipherable now neither Ratt nor
Poison — with trembling,
manicured hands, a Rahway
gambler works over

the last green stamp roll
of scratch off lotto tickets,
tossing losers into the wheel
well with tire irons. Three
scratchers from the bottom
of the deck: My God,
there ought to be

applause, law, or a kind
of kindness: “Only winnahs
find a way … disappear propah,”
says a gambler to freshening
trees strangling
rear view mirror.

One of these
instants, Rah
way’s jackpot
draws near.

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the irremediable antman

By Arkava Das

now i have to pull out
(till my elbows scrape) tilt my head)

it modifies the azimuth
(somewhat incident) (wiped)

“You can just see a little peep of the passage”

this taper states three shapes
blueing on the fork

“Had I three ears, I’d hear thee.”

dry cellulose between lips
much mush

bite a spoon if nothing seems available

“in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door”

drilled a metal pouch under my tongue
(needy fashions) (the colonial grudge)

a snagged nest

this coffee smell comes from leaves
(drawn to) ants)

creosote lines
(finally sunlight) (synchronicity)

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Snap

By C. Brannon Watts

snap. you’d stir your toast

coffeed tendon.

sullenly beast
[don’t call me on the internet]
prowls toilet paper
tube gardens
;breeds holy starlight
[like pins]
;pennants in the firmament
,broken rainbows:
the cool calculation
,the read once-over

dismissed
and

snap.

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A Gentleman

By Suchoon Mo

of course
I am a gentleman

I remove my hat
before I bow to a lady

and I remove my false teeth
before I kiss her hand

if she screams
she is no lady

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Fast Lane

By Mary Curtis

To the right
three kids two parents
kicking up dust
on the side of a highway

a fast moving highway

a fast moving family
out of their car
in the mirror
as I pass

the littlest boy urps

pressing his shorts close
to white spindles in big shoes
(I imagine goose bumps)
his mom reaches him

pushes his head down

and he urps again
his dad stands beside
the kids watching

You ask how did I see this,

see this I say
my rear view mirror
a reflection passing
I saw in real time

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My Girl

By Len Kuntz

She has a ticker tape tongue,
confetti white irises
that loom and brood over a bridge of lash
taking me in strides and stretches,
stitching me into a new suit of clothes,
cheese cloth or something as sheer.
She wants me light and vulnerable
and my girl,
she might be possessive and wicked but
she gets what she wants.
Always has,
always will.

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