Mark Antony Rossi of Hostile Disciples, Barren Hometowns, Blood Moons, and Ballgames in Heaven

11th & Hudson

My hometown

Is a page

In the hall

Of history books

It is a room

Reserved

For my hungry

Heart

No tale

I tell

Will bring it

Back again

Amen.

Soul Custodian

If I could

Offer

God humility

I would be

The greatest disciple

But all I have

Is hostility

For a world

Where I must fight

For the most

Basic fairness

I'm not heaven's

Soldier

Nor am I friend

Of hell

Neither is the place

For men

Who make their own way.

Best Intentions

I can't high five
animal lovers
Whom step across
hungry homeless men
To rescue a pit bull

Often animal lovers
Are disappointed
In people
And I appreciate that
But I wish I was worth more

Than a pampered cat.

Gang Way Style

It's hard to live in a world
That doesn't want you
you stay strong
to piss them off
But their anger
is not your joy
And your survival
Is not a victory
You can't belong
Unless you're wanted
Dead or alive.

Night Run

Blood moon

Blinds my eyes
Breaks my thighs
On a low rent
Golf course

Blood oath

Take my Bible
Take my stables
Take the reins

So I can make
The night run
Without another

Blood fever

Boiling the bad
So I can take
The night run

Like a secret lover.

Outside Matthews

Old man Harold
Never wore a coat
And sat on a bus bench
Outside Matthews
Listening to a transistor radio

The ballgame blared
And he knew every player
But pneumonia hit faster
And he was gone
A chosen fan sent

To the bigger game above.

Mark Antony Rossi's poetry, criticism, fiction and photography have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Another Chicago Review, Bareback Magazine, Black Heart Review, Collages & Bricolages,  Enclave, Expound, GloMag, Gravel, Flash Fiction, Japanophile, On The Rusk, Purple Patch, Scrivener Creative Review, Sentiment Literary Journal, The Sacrificial ,Wild Quarterly and Yellow Chair Review.

 http://markantonyrossi.jigsy.com

Donal Mahoney Chronicles Drifters, Skid Row, the Gendarmes, and Body Bags

Special of the Day

It’s Rocky’s Diner

but it’s Brenda’s counter,

been that way for 10 years.

Brenda has her regulars

who want the Special of the Day.

They know the week is over

when it’s perch on Friday.

Her drifters don’t care about

the Special of the Day.

They want Brenda instead

but she’s made it clear

she’s not available.

Her regular customers tip well.

Long ago, they gave up

trying to see her after work.

After awhile her drifters go 

to the diner down the street

to see if the waitress there

is any more hospitable.

Brenda’s regulars don’t know

she has three kids her mother

watched every day until Brenda

took a vacation out of town,

then came back and helped her

mother find a place of her own.

Now Brenda’s back at the diner,

serving her regulars and

discouraging her drifters,

while Marsha, her bride,

watches the kids.

Just for a Day

If you want to know

what it’s like to have nothing

just for a day

head for Skid Row.

Trade your suit and 20 bucks

for the attire of a resident

standing against a wall.

Buy a tin cup and yellow pencils

and go to Union Station in time

for the evening rush hour

when suburbanites with jobs

on Michigan Avenue go home

for dinner and a little HBO.

Flop down near the entrance

in your tatters with pencils and cup.

Wear Charles Bronson sunglasses

and hold high a sign that says,

“Will Work for Food.”

Count the briefcases that sail by

and see how many pencils you sell,

how many people even look at you

before the gendarmes arrive

and poke you with a baton

then walk you away. 

Body Bag

I'm on my way to Larry’s Place,

a food pantry in the city.

I park a block away because

parking in front of Larry’s

isn’t wise even if one drives

a clunker. My old Buick

almost qualifies as that.

It’s getting up in years

but still able to get around.

I’m wobbling in the middle of

two shopping bags of food

my wife found in our pantry.

Someone at Larry’s Place can

take it home and have a meal.

If they have a home. Not all do.

Certainly not the fellow sleeping

on the bench outside Larry’s

in a black body bag, the zipper

slightly ajar so he can breathe.

Lots of people go in and out

but no one bothers him.

I go in, drop off my bags and

exchange pleasantries with Larry.

He says business is too good.

He says the guy in the body bag

is a new arrival from out of town,

suggests I have a chat with him.

His story is remarkable, Larry says.

On the way out I see the fellow

in the body bag is sitting up.

I give him five bucks

and he asks if I want to hear

the story about his body bag.

I say I’d like to but I’m rushed,

that I’ll be back tomorrow with

my notebook and camera and

I’ll pay him. After all, everyone

has to make a living. Or find

their food at Larry’s Place.

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, Missouri. His fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications, including The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune and  Commonweal.  Some of his work can be found at http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.OSYzpgmQ.dpbs=

Jim Brennan Watches the Whiptails, Nightrcrawlers, Monarchs, and Firecrackers in Watermelons Upon Brawn and Fine White Sand

Thirteen Easy-to-follow Steps

Beneath three feet of snow outside the bedroom window
lies dirt.
Three inches below dirt live six-inch night crawlers
my grandson likes to pull and bite. They burst
like a firecracker stuffed inside a watermelon
grown in the dirt night crawlers enrich
burrowing their long, juicy bodies into the soil
the way Steinbeck’s laborers tilled the fields of Salinas.

Replace the sparkplug each year
diligently, like mid-April tax filings.
Fresh gas is imperative
condensation-free like the oratory of Churchill.
Clean oil is translucent
on a machined stainless steel shaft.
Pump seven times to prime the carburetor.
Only nine easy steps remain.

I prefer a shovel
powered by sweat and grunt and brawn
and that good soreness in the evening
when I ease into bed nearly too tired to make love
with my warm lover who sautés vegetables
in just the right amount of olive oil
they slide across the pan like night crawlers
and repeat again and again.

The Water Diviner

A water diviner deems
the witching rod a hoax.
Faith leads to the well.

You veer from the weary path
trodden by tired men who worship convention
muddied by interpretation, bloodied by sermons.

You sidestep rattlers on the rock-strewn ridge
snapping at leather ankles, unleashing venom.
You blaze ahead undeterred.

Even when the earth cracks
open and swallows the timid
who cling to convention

you follow your soul,
the fire that fuels
a mountain spring.

How To Write The Last Line Of A Poem

There’s a cold-water spring
on an unmarked trail in Big Sur
its healing waters hidden

by thicket under a canopy of Torrey Pines
two hundred feet above iron surf
washing fine white sand into the sea.

Nobody has ever sipped
the spring’s hallowed waters
except whiptail and monarch,

neither of which are able to sketch maps
or scribble directions with their tiny digits
and even if they could it’s unlikely

they ever learned proper penmanship
or the dreary rules of formal grammar,
which, of course, is inconsequential to the poet.


I was a street corner vendor, carwash grunt, and labored on warehouse loading docks before I turned eighteen and went to work on the Philadelphia waterfront. Decades later this blue-collar heritage filters into my work as author, poet and Cityscape editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. I read poetry in and around Philadelphia, and my work has appeared in Everyday Fiction, Fringe, Salon.com, The Moonstone Anthology and other print and online media outlets. My stories have been finalist in competitions at Fish Publishing in County Cork, Ireland, Allegory Magazine, and The Summer Literary Series at Concordia University. I am the author of the memoir Twenty-four Years to Boston. I blog at Poetry In Motion and my website is www.jimbrennansr.com

Holly Day Explains A Mummy's Confession, Belgian Monasteries, Rampant Bulbs, and The Frigid Coast of the Simulacrum

The Mummy, 20 Years Between Visits

this bundle of dried skin, matchstick bones
hands folded over one another in
frozen yet thoughtful contemplation
caused me such nightmares
impossible, this

tiny brown thing, half-seen through
the crumpled, painted lid, teeth not
bared in an angry grimace as I
imagined as a child but in
a peaceful, purposeful smile
as if to say

I am dead, I really am
I’m dead.



The Monks in My Head

my garden makes me think of God, of
the Alsatian monks toiling endless to create
climbing, bright-faced clematis that would spread
all over a wall, taking tiny yellow down-turned flowers on thin
upright stalks and unleashing something holy, wholly
new twining plants with palm-sized flowers in shades
of blue and white and pink and purple.

my beer makes me think of God, of how
hours of studying and painstaking labor
in the basements of Belgian monasteries helped improve
guttural meads flavored with clover and honey
how those monks must have thought they’d bottled something holy
when they tasted their own creations, kept them secret and hidden
from the hungry flat-ale-swilling masses outside.



Stunted, Thwarted

The tulips I grow in pots
never do as well as the ones
spreading rampant in my backyard
bulbs swollen big as fists
sprays of flowers bursting like fireworks
from a single hidden point. Every time I try

to recreate the flamboyant show of color from out there
in here, I end up with
shrunken, mold-speckled bulbs bearing
withered, yellow-green stalks
twisted striped buds that
open sickly as sea anemones
in polluted tidepools
on some frigid coast.


Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in Oyez Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.

M. A. Schaffner Navigates Peripherally Through Ambient Pornography of Snowbound Bookshelves and Spilling Honeysuckle

Miracle Machine

They could be with you or the someone else
on the object they hold as they walk along
next to you, so you go online to check
having learned to navigate peripherally
even in spring as blossoms compete with the sky
in color saturation and bees pop up
advertising scent and pollen, your eyes
flickering like a defective screen, teared
and itching from ambient pornography,
the sweet hectoring of horny warblers
and lusty cardinals and jays, just as
you walk down the street side by side checking
images from elsewhere and tweets from beyond
the slightly less intrusive world around you
and when you put the device back and look,
the two of you, at each other and around
the trees newly leafed seem improbable.


Zefiro Torna

The demanding season, promoting sprawl,
while burdens of culling the spoil from last fall's
forgotten herbage make an urgent call

on hours best suited for observing all
the feathered migrants who this time of year
conjure a spell when they simply appear.

Blistered from spade and fork, crusty with sweat,
rasped by clouds of pollen, wearied, and yet
amazed by blossoms and the rakish set

of a warbler's beak as it sifts the leaves
newly sprouted to weave infinities
of caverns and shifting balconies.

It had all seemed dead, or nearly so, just
a week ago, as I came to the fire
to read from bookshelves snowbound in dust.



Buy Now

Not little things but little short of all
we hope for when we think of it or feel
what life could be beyond the money spent

in hopes of comfort or validation
from the images in a catalog
or the music and voices from the screen

where everyone seems delighted with the car
or counter tops and carpets, where worlds
distill to number sequences on cards

and all the friends who "like" your purchases.
It's the other little things that disagree,
from the honeysuckle spilling over

the chain link fence that fastens every yard
to the next in a chain of property
that couldn't hold a hummingbird at rest.


M. A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, and elsewhere -- most recently in Hermes, Modern Poetry Review, and Pennsylvania Review. Long-ago-published books include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia juggling a Toshiba laptop and a Gillott 404.

Ricky Garni Is Blonde With His Liar of a Grandmother Building Caskets in the Laughing Cosmos

BLONDE

The first man on earth must have been a blonde.

Working outside all day long will do that to your hair.

And there was no inside then. My grandmother, who

worked on a farm, was also blonde until the day she died.

And until that day, she worked hard with the cattle and

the horses and had sinewy muscles of steel. At night she

would drink barley wine and dye her hair grey. She wasn’t

my real grandmother. Yet her hair was as beautiful as her

muscles and my lies.

CASKETS

I build little caskets for everything. Birds I see in the sky, donuts I find in the trash bins, people I barely remember. I even build little caskets for caskets. And caskets for their little caskets.

THE VERY OLD TV SHOWS

Sometimes only a few people would applaud. Sometimes only

one person will laugh. You don’t know who they are because

you never see them. There is always a chance that you know

their grandchildren. Or that you once saw one of them on

a bus and thought, “My, how old she is!” Her laugh sounds

the same on a bus as it did on TV. It seems like she can

laugh anywhere. She is laughing on the bus. She was perhaps

laughing this morning as she walked towards the bus.

Perhaps one day she will laugh in outer space, watching

an old TV show that no one else laughs at. Smoking a cigar

like crazy old laughing people often do in the cosmos.

Ricky Garni was born and raised in Miami and Maine. He works as a graphic designer by day, and writes music by night. His work is widely available in print, on the Web and in a number of anthologies, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on six occasions.

Dan Raphael Somersaults Until the Pigeons Become Gift Cards and a Transgalactic Pickup Trying to Dot an Asteroid

Now I Lay Me

I sleep when I’m tired, wherever I am

I croon to the fridge when I’m hungry, no matter whose kitchen

an open door to growling darkness & uncertain floors 

neath a chalky mist of disconstruction

Why am I peeing gasoline

how far can my clothes escape when I’m out of my body

if you’ve never made love to a sidewalk

if the rains never left so many holes in your hand every gesture’s orchestrated

i could unravel into a pavilion transporting you to an unnamed mythology

leaving you dazed & lubricated, slightly taxed & spiritually attuned

When I do an upright somersault crossing 4 lanes the pigeons turn into gift cards;

a halo of applause I’ll redeem for the days first window

like a police car turned into a fruit cake we keep regifting

as the buildings add more floors the street must trim its budget;

as cars get wider & more must park tween fewer lines

got my armor from the u-pull-it & prepare to slay the petro-dragon

One song for the exhaustion over taking us

one song to convince the sun to forgive again

Arriving

the hand would knock, would find a knob to turn. a dour door diorama—

just finding a tree wide enough these days, of goldilocks density,

straddling the bow and the rib, tension when everything is still

things you have to bend to get in, be it room  crowd   or university,

to get into my old uniform, out of the many-form, the mostly blue and loose

the synergistic contact field of costume and identity,

the same song on another frequency requires different moves, a bump in volume

is that snow, glitter or some unexpected coagulate of the air and what we put inside it

shower before bed and wake in new clothes

as the less dogs go outdoors the more they run in their sleep

scratch to open, squeeze and turn bringing knee to nose

focusing on an upside-down pine inhaling the studio through polypore windows,

cellular alveoli, dervishes of constant transport

       the wind owes nothing,

the wind collects but has no pockets, no skin to bruise

that cloud with a hanging dog penis whose end unfurls to a starfish

swallowed by the ocean that spawned it, what clouds can do for teeth,

what wind can do to efficiency--wait until the door stops to enter;

hesitation may indicate contraband.

did i get the address wrong or is this the right house in the wrong city,

the area code in my pocket, the impatient streets this map ignores,

why do i have to be the moving part and provide my own lubrication,

signing a maintenance contract is waiving your rights,

replacing filters i never had, adding belts that clash with my atmosphere

turn the key, press the pedal, close your eyes and scream some song--

a big cup of electric guitars the only caffeine i need

Hunger Town

4 medium cost the same as 3 large

depending on who you’re feeding, where they’ve been, what we started with

not counting the drinkage and druggage, gasoline fumes, winter or summer,

what we can shoot along the way, whether they cut the pie into 8 or 10,

the radius of the sun bringing down several trees with its double axles

randomly studded smoke-tread hanging from the vine like clouds from a sprinkler system

i pulled up for chicken but the suit was too small, 

a transgalactic pickup trying to dot an asteroid,

share the protein as you want--that’s not my hand inside the glove

sprouting feathers like an instant forest convincing us growth is easier,

the weather is our puppet, water just happens

eat what you can catch, what you can afford, when no ones looking

don’t let those pizza crusts go to waste, whats the interest rate at the food bank,

free the seeds, a fence means youre paranoid, a road means youre running away

banished from the local coz the cows no longer speak your language,

like changing channels but you cant change back, someone replaced the satellite with art,

electrified oil in unsettled water as the pool liner evaporates in rapture

koi ghosts reclaim their skin from the lungs of the neighborhood,

herons we all have to pay for, this close to the river i dont want gravity to  know

grass explodes sidewalk

           the tallest not always first to go but soon

       or anyone out in the middle

         who would think of going against the stream and the wind

         random invisible furniture

         when the feng shui is perfect the building transcends

rivers reverse, clouds pulling up,

we ascend mountains and get elemental, broader-spectrumed

how is a thunderstorm like a drive through restaurant,

carwash re-automated to deliver, hot and seeping, we are not what we eat: 

food is fuel, work is paycheck, nothing this tasty is given away

For a couple decades, Dan Raphael has been active in the Northwest as a poet, performer, publisher and reading host. His next book, Everyone in this Movie Gets Paid, will be out summer of ’16 from Last Word Press.  His current poems appear in Big Bridge, Peculiar Mormyrids, Caliban, Tip of the Knife and Streetcake.