The Sound of Pornography by Frederick Frankenberg

 

Photograph by Posterboy from Flickr

A mulleted old man was stuck in a genre:

the sloshing casual music of porn

He played it in the breakroom

of the Dubois supermarket.

He played it in the bathroom

He played it on an alto sax

A spectacular spectacle

His mesmerizing lyrics

were forced and nonsensical

in a jocular refrain, its excited interval

Until the manager came

and said, “Put it away”

***

Frederick Frankenberg (he/him) - Twitter handle: @FredIsAWriter

Billygoat by Ian C. Smith

Warning Hazchem by Adrian Scottow from Flickr

Emptied of the night’s mad dreams; old grief, boyish expectations, in my blood, I boil a kettle on my stove, discreet about smoke’s egress, check my phone to see how much I can afford to eat today.  If you sought me you would never track me here, a wraith hidden behind a nondescript door I bar from inside on which I attached a HAZCHEM sign, my lone caller the wind, industrial traffic belching past.  I imagine I am shipboard, master of a creaking galleon.  

Since my arrival, the only time people thronged these West Melbourne streets was when their football team won the championship after sixty-two barren years.  Stricken by lost time, their revelry alarmed me at first.  Small finds like the trove of abandoned sawn wood discovered when scrounging for sticks to crackle my stove into life, delight.  I relayed the small logs to my squat accompanied by an unseen barking dog’s forlorn protest, fantasising about a chance meeting with a kind, intelligent woman as if we were characters in a novel.  As if.

Gossiped about by pigeons on high, I sip tea wreathed in steam, click on old messages from habit, ward off remorse with poetry archived in memory, perfect words rubbing together read in a shaft of sunlight like a stage set: through willow-herb, cranesbill, and meadowsweet, I roamed, ghostlike companions savoured during solitary seasons, a faith against troubled times.  In vile contrast, the newspaper that flamed my fire was filled with atrocities and moneyed politicians’ damned lies among other abuses.  When I venture abroad again, in fine rain preferred, so, nobody else afoot, shielded by that traffic noise and my hoodie, I hope to magpie more serendipity to improve my Robinson Crusoe freedom.

On my reconnaissance of this derelict district of rusted steel I am borne back to scarred tables in dim bars of distant cities once more: Glasgow, Barcelona, Berlin, Gothenburg, dissecting my life.  With a woman then, both of us wearing the long-term travellers’ monotony of wretched oft-rinsed same clothes, we see vehicles, Matchbox toys, traversing a bridge soaring over an historic river as we explore the beautiful havoc of ancient Europe bickering in our clapped-out van that amused Austrian border guards.  Acting nonchalant to mask my true anxious self, I google enigmatic maps, all these yesterdays leading me irrevocably back here. 

I treasure vignettes, my print of Vindstille by the Danish painter Anton Dorph special.  Depicted from behind, a woman holding a child stands on a revetment gazing across still water at a fishing boat.  When I bought it I admired its timelessness in a bar, glasses tinkling, a barmaid flirting on the phone, wondering what Dorph’s watching woman represented.  A man’s return?  Hope?  The calm before a storm I thought in italics.  Then, through a window, I noticed a woman cross the street in a gust of rain.  Downing my drink in one draught, I paid, rushing, not for the first time, into the drama of a teeming city, breath catching because of the familiar way her curls bounced. 

Stepping around ferries’ and refugees’ jetsam, a shimmer of wintry salt blurring our eyes, we scoffed at the idea of deckchairs in pebbles on what some might call a beach after retreating from Europe across the English Channel’s murk to our ancestral home.  A single tourist railway line ran behind our cheap off-season coastal let; Romney Marsh beyond better days, stubble, thistles, a goat chained to a water trough.  At dusk wan yellow lights blinked on in bungalows, a daguerreotype now recalled in sepia.  How could we imagine the future?  Were we lovers, close teammates, tourists creating scenes, or just curious about genes?  When it was over we left no trace.  The goat had fouled its patch, stench powerful.  After the sweet slow train of the past’s shrill whistle faded I remember hearing that lone goat bleating at the end of its tether. 

Vagrancy by John Grey

Rock Bottom by Thomas Hawk from Flickr

There’s the bridge that Stella jumped from.
“What a life” screams the vagrant.
A car drives by with its radio thumping.
The moon is orange.
Its shadows seem to dance.
And Stella. Twenty-three years old.
And some guy says,
“Stella, such a shame.”
And then off to the bar,
the usual crowd,
the blue light of the bottles.
The vagrant, all creaking joints,
stumbles across a parking lot,
dressed for death in mid-November,
looking for a bed of dismembered leaves.
Fifteen years before, Stella was in Milwaukee.
And now cop cars blast by 
the last place she was seen alive.
Stella, I’m sure, didn’t mean to make a fuss.
But we all die
and the survivors have to do something about it.
There were others of course.
Insane Hal who cut his own throat.
And JT who went off to war
so those of us left behind
would have someone to mourn.
Now there’s these scratches on the door
from people long ago,
aching to be let in.
And neighbors of course,
mapped into their little squares.
This occasional desecration of life
means nothing to those raking in cash,
Or maybe something to the one
who spends all day staring at the wall.
The vagrant plays at life 
from a mound beside the river.
He watches boats. 
Or drags himself through the park.
Someone calls a taxi.
Someone waits at the bus stop.
All to the sound of ice-cubes rattling in glass.

One day when I'm dead I'll come back to life, by Gale Acuff

Superman Stick by A. Currell from Flickr

I don't mean the life eternal but real
life like I had before I croaked or God croaked
me, flesh and blood and bone and tacos and
all that, root beer and grape Nehi and that
candy you pop into your mouth and it
explodes, the candy that is, not your mouth,
ha ha, and I wonder if Superman
can eat it and feel it or is he too
invulnerable or is it even
better for him, he's super-sensitive 
they say so how could he have sex and not
snuff his lover with satisfaction though
you can bet that he wouldn't be selfish,
he'd croak, too, if he could. Up and away.

Stick by Dominik Slusarczyk

Eros by Egon Schiele

This stick is

The biggest bit of my life.

It is long and

Knobbly and

Nice like dry ice.

Watch me swing it

Like a lightsabre.

I would swing you like

A lightsabre if you’d

Let me.

***

Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. His poetry has been published in various literary magazines including California Quarterly and Berlin Lit. His poetry was long listed in the VOLE Books Summer Competition 2023 and was a finalist in the Flying South Contest 2023.

Nike by Brad Liening

EEIM, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Maybe the worst
Or at least
Funniest part

Of your slow demise
Is that it’s nothing
Personal.

Coca-Cola
Exxon
Et al.

Are thriving
At your expense
But they don’t know

You exist. They
Don’t even exist.

You have a body.

A fuck up tough
To come back from.

***

 Brad Liening lives in Minneapolis, MN, USA, and at bradliening.blogspot.com

A Grizzly Possibility by John Grey

 

I don't blame the grizzly
for the night-time tent raid,
the mauling of the wife,
the maiming of the husband.

The bear was old and tired
and winter had been long.
And the couple knew the risks.
The guy had said so on TV.

At any given moment,
we're as close to desires and hungers
as we are to rats.
We're all of us capable

of fulfilling another's need
A mugger could slay me for my wallet.
A car could knock me sideways
and all for the space I'm standing in.

Some people camp out in the danger.
Others just live where anything is possible.
I don't blame my vulnerability.
I've been mauled and maimed by worse.

***

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and  “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.