LITSNACK

Hangover,
Sunday summer morning;
through the window I watch my neighbor
with his lawnmower going at the green grass,
back and forth as he performs some high scale symphony:
there is no color in his eyes left and no life in the body,
he is just a machine going at it with amazing precision.
 
The sound of the machine fills up my room and the green
of the grass is no longer the green of my youth,
the yellow of the diminishing sun is no more the color of
Vincent;
colors be damned,
symphonies be damned,
let Mozart burn in hell,
the flies on my walls start to rattle,
while I light up a cigarette and puff a cloud of smoke to
the ceiling.
 
The summer streets out there flat on their backs,
the squirrels twaddle and sink in the branches,
the garbage trucks sweep majestically away
as the summer sun goes high and high.

Suddenly the man turns off the machine,
takes a sip from his beer can and looks in my direction.
He sees me at the window, nods and lifts his beer,
I smile in return and this day begins with
so little pain.

Peycho Kanev loves to listen to sad music while he slowly drinks his beer. His work has been published in Welter, The Catalonian Review, Off Beat Pulp, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review,Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, Southern Ocean Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He loves to put the word down and does not talk on the cell phone for days.He is nominated for Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His new collaborative collection "r", contains poetry by both himself and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II.  It is now available at Amazon:http://www.amazon.com/r-Peycho-Kanev/dp/0979129494/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245429788&sr=1-1
 

It is not the cold hands
of winter, nor evenings
spent drinking soju,
which make me shout
at birds and throw stones
at the moon.

It is not geometry which
keeps my heart from being
touched.  It is not
the sea urchins weeping
within my skull.

Like rabid wolverines and
the children of crack whores,
Time itself is rather
surly and perverse.


David Kowalczyk lives and writes in the one-stoplight cannery town of Oakfield, New York.  His poetry and fiction have appeared in seven anthologies and over one hundred magazines and journals, including California Quarterly, Istanbul Literary Review, St. Ann's Review, and Rumble.  He has taught English in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Changwon, South Korea, as well as at Arizona State University.  He was founding editor of the late Gentle Strength Quarterly.

black wood to hide me summer has ended all night the moon ghosts

all day I see signs what will I find no one knows no one knows the

sun sets higher again the mornings get colder and colder you see

beyond me I see beyond you too all the leaves turn red brown gold

"satnrose is a well-known antiquarian bookseller.  He has been published in a number of magazines in the past, but since his reincarnation as 'satnrose', He has been published in EVERGREEN REVIEW and ICONOCLASTand COUNTEREXAMPLE POETICS and DANSE MACABRE,and has poems forthcoming inSHOOTS & VINES, OYSTERS & CHOCOLATE, BRING THE INK,STRAY BRANCH, and APPARATUS MAGAZINE.

Four on a gloomy afternoon.
Noisy birds only contribute

further to the clutter
of her parents’ bedroom.

Loneliness. Solitude.
It’s difficult to explain

the difference
if you have no French.

We grasp at each other
like doorbells,

emergency vehicles.
Afterward, I walk back

under the shrugging trees,
my heart startled worse

than a bashed-in headlight.

I should never have thrown
away the box it came in.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 12 poetry chapbooks, including most recently Visiting the Dead from Flutter Press, My Heart Draws a Rough Map from The Blue Hour Press, and Ghosts of Breath from Bedouin Books. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and five times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana. He is co-editor of the online literary journal Left Hand Waving.

Like the man who quit school
and became a successful businessman
I, Bud, will quit school 
I will make 
the world somewhat better
I will invent
an Irresistible Spray, designed
by Martians, dressed like
hobos why not it will make the world
Super Irresistible® a successful
businessman, that’s me, someday
that’s Bud

Ricky Garni has worked as a graphic designer, a teacher, a warehouse manager, a wine merchant, a recording engineer, and, for one day, a bathroom attendant in a Pizzeria on Miami Beach that had a rather dainty and elderly thermostat and it was summer. Mr. Garni has written poetry and prose since 1974 and has been published fairly often in print and on the Web. He loves old movies and bicycles and still likes pizza, but prefers the honest, wholesome, North Carolina variety.

You are a dinosaur.
A gigantic creature whose bones are fuel,
And who fundamentalist Christians
Do not believe existed.
I see you in my dreams.
You are enormous.
Bigger than the Argentinosaurus,
Bigger than The Beatles.
You make it hard to not sweat,
To not have my sheets stick to my skin.
You make it hard to not wonder
If maybe I should’ve taken that job
In Columbus,
And disappeared from the scene
Altogether,
Only to be unearthed by paleontologists
Millions of years from now.

Spencer Troxell lives in Cincinnati with his wife and two children. He
does all of his best thinking in the bathtub.
spencertroxell.blogspot.com