I keep a picture on my desk
from 23 years ago
a photo of myself at the typewriter
sitting at an old metal desk
in an attic apartment with plaster patches
on the sloping walls

I look 15 and geeky at 31
and I wonder if I was happy
and as I remember I wasn’t
all those years I wasted depressed
and now, older and living in comfort

I’m happy, but the comfort has little
to do with it. My wife and my dog
have a lot to do with it. And a while back
I Googled my name to find
there are a lot of my old poems out there
in little magazines on rare book sites

but I lost some poems to flooding
and a hard drive gone bad
and I got discouraged
and I started thinking my writing at work
was enough

but something about that photo
and stumbling on bukowski.net
and surprised to find that people knew my name
I realize that
I’m not Whitman
I’m not Frost
and I’m certainly no Bukowski

but unlike an NFL running back
whose average career is four and a half years
I have as long as I live to catch up
I’m not Bukowski
but I’m writing again
and what I am is

back

(Harry Calhoun has been published all over the place but you’d probably only recognize a few of them — Writer’s Digest and the National Enquirer, for instance. He has found frequent editorial favor as a poet in small-press magazines since 1980, edited a poetry magazine, and had a lot of freelance articles and literary essays published in the 80s and 90s. Harry kindly provided the Preface to the First Edition of Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride.)

Thanks for bearing with us during our absence, folks. We’ve been busy with so many other projects the last few weeks, including a cross-town move and production and promotion of the first title from Trace Publications, Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride (featuring introductory comments by poets David Barker and Harry Calhoun).

Anyway, we’re up and running with new poems and even more waiting in the queue. Our apologies to all who have submitted in the past few weeks only to be greeted with stony silence. Submit away. We’re paying attention. I promise.

Rodger Jacobs

the speculator at the head of the Poetry Foundation
issues a dictum poetry henceforward mortals
shall be epical with its craft hard-won
and we shall have to read Richard Wilbur on Wall Street

(Los Angeles-based Christopher Mulrooney has written poems in Beeswax, Vanitas, Guernica, echolocation, The Delinquent, and fourW)

Poems can be written
without falling
into the arms of institutions
like Fergusson

Without sailing
into the blue unknown
like Byron

Poems can be written
without taking a gun on board
as a sole companion

Poetry didn’t die
with Emily Dickinson

Poems can be written anywhere

Experience of Red Sea trading
is not a prerequisite

William Carlos Williams wrote in between consultations
T.S. Eliot worked for Lloyds

And Borges knew poetry is the queen bee
that pollinates our libraries.

(Steven Porter was born in Inverness, Scotland, and lives in A Coruña, Spain. A chapbook of poems entitled Shellfish and Umbrellas is due out this summer.)

stumbling across old floppy disks

like a born-again blackout

saved and forgotten

some of the files are corrupt

and it could be the one bad apple syndrome

some of the poems I recovered

were so bad they might have tainted

the others

but that was 14 years ago

and I have come to realize

that writing is not so much a process

of getting better

as getting rid of the bad

so as I get older I suck

less

and the goal I guess

is to stop sucking altogether

before I stop sucking

air

Connecticut, 1989

The rumble of the milk trucks

grinding up

Chester Main Road

slacking and then

roaring

as we lay on our

backs in the road

our fingers weary

waiting for the slow

curving variations in the growl

these were no ordinary

milk trucks

those of our past

with jolly

drivers with

caps and insignias

these were 18

wheeled behemoths

crawling up

a hill a mile

long to drain

the milk of dozens

of cows who

are always complaining about

the early morning

we sat, wrote,

edged,

gulped coffee

and steaks

at any time

the day was fluid

and the nights were

made of

such that we

could not discern

the rolling

clocks

and the simultaneous

droning of

IT

we stored it

in the eaves

words dripped from

greasy fingers

and fled from

air-deprived

pasts

only to ascend

to the same

we are no longer

we

but we still ooze

words

I’m not sure

where the

words ooze

from

but they keep showing

up

under foot

Angel heads are telling tales and scaring bland children into nightmares where the unknown, unseen, screaming madman is a terror and not an expression of faith twisted by the paradigm you so well derided. If you could see and hear what we hear and see it wouldn’t endear you to the America that you chastised for its prude identity, rather you’d be a relic lauded for shaping a time that has gone by and on your shelf sit with sycophantic children high with lapping up your drool and spit, would you have anything else to expound? Or, would they have beaten you down to no longer howl, but, in your disillusion, drown?

The radical became mainstream and marketed with flow charts and yearly means that fill the heads of children undone by television, video game, and the six-day-work-week-latch-key-life and whereas you were in the streets scribbling madness onto shards of mirror in which you saw America, today they look into the screen and see nothing but IM messenger shorthand blings and blogs and would you even know what that means?

The spirit of the borderline case who might have been locked up if it were not for a the undercover yearning of the middle class to break into the world you made real, raw, and let them feel free, at least through verse, as you shifted souls with like minded ilk, but you would be hard pressed now to find the kind of mind that could be so free-wheeling and bold, it’s all homogenised, it’s a t-shirt, it’s all so old.

Burn it, burn it, burn it all I would hear you scream and let the ashes remind us of what had been, the son of the socialist mother who saw a future in a land that had once had opportunity close at hand but has since shut down the free-thought shop and opted for the safer, mundane, little-minded plot of a declining empire whose swapped its God and shall flame whilst the president struggles to play the fiddle.

 It’s not the same, the people spending life in different ways and you looking up from the grave, can you hear, hear the melancholy of the masses as they pass the days buying this and selling seconds to bosses who are counting on the bonus and excesses of the minions, it’s not working, no one is howling, everyone is ducking heads and suckling meagre mores as they blend into the bland, the America you knew, is no more.

(Dave Oprava is an ex-pat writer and poet who landed in Wales. He writes, because he is scared of what will happen if he doesn’t. Follow him, if you dare at davidoprava.com)

I keep a picture on my desk

from 23 years ago

a photo of myself at the typewriter

sitting at an old metal desk

in an attic apartment with plaster patches

on the sloping walls

I look 15 and geeky at 31

and I wonder if I was happy

and as I remember I wasn’t

all those years I wasted depressed

and now, older and living in comfort

I’m happy, but the comfort has little

to do with it. My wife and my dog

have a lot to do with it. And a while back

I Googled my name to find

there are a lot of my old poems out there

in little magazines on rare book sites

but I lost some poems to flooding

and a hard drive gone bad

and I got discouraged

and I started thinking my writing at work

was enough

but something about that photo

and stumbling on bukowski.net

and surprised to find that people knew my name

I realize that

I’m not Whitman

I’m not Frost

and I’m certainly no Bukowski

but unlike an NFL running back

whose average career is four and a half years

I have as long as I live to catch up

I’m not Bukowski

but I’m writing again

and what I am is

back

(Harry Calhoun has been published all over the place but you’d probably only recognize a few of them — Writer’s Digest and the National Enquirer, for instance. He has found frequent editorial favor as a poet in small-press magazines since 1980, edited a poetry magazine, and had a lot of freelance articles and literary essays published in the 80s and 90s.)

Pricks and vain bastards
scream about preachers and phones
damn glad I’m dead now

(Chris Dean’s family founded the remote city of Beaver, Utah, but fortunately he grew up further West–spending time in rivers, lakes, and even the ocean.  He calls Santa Barbara his current home, but his spiritual home is Portland, Oregon)

the first full moon
of spring
called for me
i answered
abandoning
literatures curse
forgotten words
that missed
the page
and the keyboard
that kept on typing.

“i. walks to sit where
the daisies grow
around the thoughts
of u. and melts
like ice cream
on july sidewalks.”

the first full moon
of spring
licks my face
in chrome
the keyboard
knows
i wait
and
strain
to hear
something
other than
crickets.

(Mr. Zach describes himself thus: Zachari James Popour is just like you, )

him, her, them; both the best and

the worst person in the world.