Owen’s parents sat by the fire smoking joints and lighting ladyfingers.
Heath’s mother passed out with the TV on.
Mike’s grandparents drank lite beer and played euchre.
*
The cliché is …experimentation should be reserved for the college years,
but it was old news by the time I was eight.
My sexual revolution peaked in the first grade.
*
Owen gave me my first blowjob.
Heath pinched my nipples and called me Kylie.
Mike told me to buttfuck him.
*
I wrote a poem about a neighbor boy who asked me to piss in his mouth –
it quickly became my most popular piece, inciting loud and drunken requests
at Open Mics. The infinitesimal celebrity felt good.
In my first workshop I was told I use humor to mask my shame.
(Josh Olsen is a father of two and a writing instructor at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University)
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I’m not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.
Somewhat of a Symbionese Liberation Army
Found Poem with Credits
to Bob Dylan and CNN
sara jane olsen
was released
today
one year early with
interstate parole
due to clerical error…
rearrested
returned
a bureaucratic
wtf
investigation underway
to determine why
you don’t need
a weather man
to know which way
the wind blows
(Scott Young writes for Be Not Inhospitable To Strangers)
Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn’t impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats
Hemingway’s Shotgun is an online magazine devoted to all manner of poetic verse but with a particular emphasis on poetry on the topic of literature, books, and reading.
Send us your poetry today. We’re not particular. Iambic pentameter? Cool. Sonnets? Sure, why not? Haiku and haiku sonnets? Absolutely. Anything that displays the art of rythmical composition and speaks to the subject of literature will be considered. And of course all authors retain their copyright(s). Include a two-line bio.What we’re doing doing is community building and exposing good craft with verse. Which is another way of saying that there is no compensation.
All works appearing at Hemingway’s Shotgun are selected and edited by Rodger Jacobs.
Send your submissions to rodger_jacobs at yahoo dot com
Hemingway’s Shotgun is a presentation of Carver’s Dog
