Jon Riccio and the Disco Incredible Hulk, the Bed of Nails Hammock, and Seraphim Science

Pan- Variations Featuring Carter-Era Mutant

“Dr. David Banner: physician, scientist; searching for a way to tap into the

  hidden strengths that all humans have.” – The Incredible Hulk

There’s a disco version of The Incredible Hulk 

putting a piano together from sawdust. 

Its harmony leads to window gazing and 

the panoply of children sired by neighbor 

whose passenger side has a broken sun visor, 

so I place pancetta and a roll of duct tape 

on his doorstep like the deadpan Samaritan 

advised. Faith, your backup panoramic 

sparing the 1/3 peace sign of my 

gluteal crack carousing loose pants

because we’re a surge from Easter 

metaphor pandering to Judas virus. 

Pandemonium, the gamma rays essential 

to David Banner’s crisis, tabloid 

panic tangential to ‘Hulking out,’

Lou Ferrigno’s makeup seat 

panoptical with swivel. Adrenalized, 

a Eucharist bench presses a city block. 

Pantone couture? Sewing-machine grey. 

Pandemic-on-newsprint, a testament worse. 

Distortion Aphrodite 

 

Circus and ficus, the horticulturist trapezing

that embroidery trick because the bed-of-nails

overnighter wanted a hammock, not homecoming.

 

Sideshow journals were hanging on a social-

media comeback: Carniveil and Gaff Quarterly, 

 

stage-hands cleaning tightrope perspiration.

Who wouldn’t be a stilt of nerves on highwires

that stretch from there to equilibrium when

 

lifeline and paycheck depend on sensitivity

of feet? Christ, the ankle variables! Then

 

you have the barker’s pyrite shouted

into microphone: juggler gospels and

machete physics that break their promises 

when crowds peer too closely. We’ve run 

out of elan. The fire eater lab-bound or tent,

the dung records a peanut-allergy elephant 

breaks. Flowers to photoshoot, Aphrodite 

wobbles the conch between make-believes.

Malaria and Christ Helmet

My Grandpa Floyd’s combat stories included a bullet- 

dinged helmet because Catholicism had his survival

down to a seraphim science. Nicknamed Doc based 

on the telephone repair kit he carried, his last days 

walkie-talkie sized.

 

         The funeral luncheon fed us 

a buffet of spaghetti in ceramic bowls better suited 

to the pomodoro elbows my father made two nights 

a week. 

             Half the family got his name wrong. 

Punishment for my parents’ quickie California 

marriage three months pregnant—an Eastern 

European to a hairdresser Italian. 

Did Floyd ever move him like a chess 

piece into son-in-law tense? 

Maybe your grandfather had worse war 

wounds than malaria and Christ helmet, 

house emptied of mementos prior 

to the estate sale. 

                            My one request, 

a globe with calendar numbers wed 

to Australia, the stakes life and cocktail 

sauce spilled on obituary draft.    

Jon Riccio received his PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers. His chapbook, Eye, Romanov, is forthcoming from SurVision Books, and his full-length, Agoreography, will be published by 3: A Taos Press. 

Vernon Frazer with an Actuarial Burp Cartel, a Decimation Sutra, and Squid Warranties

Grand Opening

server transparency

prides a shuffle rumored oblong

skillet failure diversions

refute trellis gender octagons

rumors inspector

looming unseals

radar slush cans

ricochet pollution

panellist dockets

chart antipathy, reprint

soil lacquers

when lachrymose probationers medicate boldly

( )

hard awareness rash

seeding used enormities

headlights follow-on crazes

an actuarial burp cartel

calling the whether pollution

indeterminate vertebra

server beyond sample

lends their blip dockets

gabardine turned relaxation

( )

the headlines

rush the pronouncements

wrapper gadget technologies

breath flutter crazes

innocent follow-up starved a nun

for

suburban panegyric

prides

the abdominal tablespoon

misdeals

the tragic reconciliation

refutes a server vertebra

Guerilla Tactic

lemur decimation sutra

where a gaping instance applied

dilatory involution taper

better less than unmentioned

estimates

precede

domination

when playing the role of spare parts

dominion curls

the ears of the

chant hearing

wet echoes

aching across a tongue

and breath

an instant’s gasp beat

for time cycle

no camel raga

drone can dare to afford

Species After Dark

libido badgers

dissemble their bleary hypotenuse

bangles

in conversational storage

their tell-tale fury

tears a taint unknown

tambourine luxury

beats a calamine drill

when elsewheres vacate

columnar shading

behind the outpost

hanging timber loose

behind

the wary cadges

squid warranties

enabled

limberjacks to jump

tentacles dangling obliquely

foreplay

over

a cougar thicket

burning in the bush

BIO

Vernon Frazer’s latest poetry collection is Gravity Darkening.

Howie Good: "Gangster of Love", A Rain Of Bile And Blood, A Hulking Cosmic Bouncer, And Tennessee Williams On Seconal

Heart of Hearts

You know that saying “too mean to die”? Well, it’s not true. Dad is dying. I try to make myself feel appropriately sad, but a heart isn’t like a bud that unfolds on schedule. “Gangster of Love” is an old hit record by the Steve Miller Band. It’s also now a sort of job description. The work is more difficult than it sounds. When I walk, wherever I walk, my shadow walks ahead of me.

&

The white police officer has too small a heart. How is that legal? the prosecutor asks. The wily old judge gestures that he can’t hear over the roar of the rain. Witnesses in the case exchange anxious glances across the courtroom. The defense attorney just smirks. A while later, a van taking away the jurors runs completely off the road. No one is even hurt, but angels are everywhere, joking and laughing and smelling like turned earth.

&

It was soon raining again, scarlet and black, the drops alternating between blood and bile. Even the cows on the hillside wondered what the fuck. If you ever go searching for an answer, you’ll just end up disappointed and confused and alongside broken old farm machinery rusting in the weeds in an abandoned corner of the heartland.

Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity

The ground is littered with used paper face masks. I want to shake this person and that person and tell them, “You can’t be lost in your own world all the time.” But, of course, I won’t. A purplish darkness creeps over the city. I stream a movie about an international crew of astronauts on a journey to the cosmic womb. The ship malfunctions. Their sanity frays. They slowly turn against one another. Something out there in space is acting like a hulking bouncer who won’t let them through. If they knew what I know, they would just chuckle. A month from now my daughter is having a daughter.

R.I.P.

Tennessee Williams woke in the middle of the night groggy from two Seconals and reached for another on his bedside table, only to mistakenly pick up a plastic cap from a bottle of Murine eye drops, which got stuck in his throat. People have been crushed by falling masonry, burned alive with gasoline, run over in the street. But choking to death on a bottle cap?! I don’t understand that kind of poetry.

 Howie Good is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).  

James Diaz contemplates a god as a weapon in the mouth, a band-aid heart, and the shape you leave in the snow

Genesis As a Blur Seen from the Driver's Side Window

The girl was a cloud 

of moss 

over the missing eye of god

in a fire you know where the skin ends

and the bone begins

they gathered their stories in a bundle of heat

whip last and you feel it first 

this mountain of thirst tremble up

against the line of blue wall 

wrapped round a cloud of sound

say sky but not the how of it

it is here underneath the dire thing

all day they sing it like a broken tooth

drowning in milk - a god is a weapon in the mouth 

of everything 

we came crawling out of

speak to me of dark matter 

and I will show you 

where the blade 

of the beginning went in

and came out clean

up there they drew the line

but down here 

we just walked it.

The Time Of My Life

To be born

is to be ruined

so much more gets lost than found along the way

like a broken radio I kept my parts intact

even in silence

I waited for signal return

an unlikely kind of wild

like maybe forgiveness is always unearned

and whose hands were first to shatter me

also loved me and so on and so on

what is it, this thing in my band-aid heart 

telling me how to breathe like a bent arrow through luck-shot air

my god, kid, can you believe we made it this far

and you’d like to laugh it off

but no matter, it matters, you look a lot like them

your people, your kin, your kind

they went wild on you, ate you up,

my god, kid, don’t you know you had to come this way

along the riven path

that your bones were already lit and your blaze is beautiful.

Thousand Oaks 

you know who you are

by the shape on the wall

you know how to fall

into place, broken glass

memory shifter, your tired little body

flailing, failing 

it's your half light

it's the last call tonight

it's the wild wolf coming for you

ambulance lights

the shape you leave 

in the snow

one huge heft of human

wears you down, don't it

getting through 

getting by, slept it off one too many times

only putting down what you know

break and break and you're broken

after a while 

it's the only way 

the light you lay in 

hands to the floor, officer, I meant no harm

 

in the name of the father

i meant only laughter 

meant only the name i was given

sour in my mouth 

and here i am

take me in your shadow

i am dressed for the kill

i am dressed for the light.

 James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (forthcoming, Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) as well as the founding Editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Cobra Milk Mag, Bear Creek Gazette and Resurrection Mag. They live in a far too cold and snowy upstate New York, where they are waiting patiently for the Spring. 

Mark Young's Salted Fish Exports, Homolog of Traits, and a Young Flaubert

 geographies: Nouakchott

No mains drains, no eigen-

vector centrality, no standard

definition of casual work; but

indicators of scientific journal

prestige have been developed

as a further step to provide

tools in a study of the nation's

historical export of salted fish.

geographies: Denpasar

RealFeel, precip, radar; every-

thing you need to explode

the sun in your backyard. A

woman with bobbed hair

marks a pivotal moment in

the emancipation of rabbits,

given that the homolog of

the trait does not exist out-

side of the Billboard Top

100. A gray cameltoe paces

this way & that, unsettled

by the solar explosion &

the subsequent explosion of

free-range rabbits. An ad

for m&ms follows. It has a

soundtrack by Yo Yo Ma.

geographies: Haute-Normandie

In a naive homage

to the theory of

cyclical recurrence

so popular in

Victorian times

& in the belief

that it would make

his product much

more sellable, the

young Flaubert

downsized the

rôle of Madame

Bovary in his screen-

play adaption of the

eponymous book

& made the lead a

black lesbian vampire

with a PhD in nano-

technology who

dreamt of fame

as a soul artist

through funky

interpretations of

polemic poems by

ancient Etruscans

on the necessity

of eternal conflict.

Recent visual &/or text work by Mark Young has appeared or is to appear in Word For/Word, Die Leere Mitte, Home Planet News Online, SurVision, experiential-experimental-literature, Hamilton Stone Review, Utsanga.it, & BlazeVOX, among other places. His most recent books are turning to drones, from Concrete Mist Press & turpentine from Luna Bisonte Prods.

J.D. Nelson's flora and fauna, Lewis Carroll revival, a fractal fish, dolphin ridge, and a brain on bolts...

 the gamble of the gloss or gloos

peach was a settler on a magnetty little kow earth

that apple is the chain of the normal hum

                your old eclipse

                a wooden why

scrappo lion is the building of the head

the elf of the grass

to sleep with that feather

the same famished wool to be the wolf

the fractal fish

skipped rock sun is a spoon

the barn nabbers of the breakfast welty

the slot or sloot of the earth is a baby boar

the head of the anything cult

a message from the grocer

the wolf is a patient head

the first number one of the valley

standing with the pressure tanks on dolphin ridge

a sack of sharp pieces

the wall of the sinking thorax

downstream from the galaxy

a new model of the earth ready for waterworks

to warm the cold earth on this morning

the macaroni was a gel of the famous winter

                    a western yes

                    a slotted swoon

to name a canopy of barn owls

now for the earth to weigh in on the functions

to creep with the creatures

helio whipple

        bee whipple

the window of earth

a hammer of the bang-bang

the paper bag walking

I have the brain on bolts

that sharing cloud is my friend

the grown plant needs a lift to the soil expo

walking here using the hands this time

a clean rose to be the hello

on the level of the green goose

a little bugg knows how to land

bio/graf

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). Visit www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in Colorado.

Charles J. Marches' Poems: "Tail Chaser, "Glutton For Dysfunction", and "Bloody Mary's PTSD"

Tail Chaser

Glutton For Dysfunction

Bloody Mary's PTSD

 

Charles J. March III is an asexual, neurodivergent Navy hospital corpsman veteran who is currently trying to live an eclectic life with an interesting array of recovering creatures in Orange County, CA. His various works have appeared in or are forthcoming from Evergreen Review, Atlas Obscura, Litro, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, Lalitamba, 3:AM Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, Fleas on the Dog, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Recusant, Taco Bell Quarterly, Storm Cellar, Harbinger Asylum, Maudlin House, Misery Tourism, BlazeVOX, Blood Tree Literature (prize), Bareknuckle Poet, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Beatnik Cowboy, Points in Case, Expat Press, Stinkwaves, Young Ravens Literary Review, The Writing Disorder, Literary Orphans, Otoliths, Oddball Magazine, et al. Links to his pieces can be found on LinkedIn and SoundCloud.