Prop

the painting looks like a prop,
or it is a prop, or
the boy is a prop,
or he looks like a prop, or
the painter saw him or used
him as a prop, or
the painting was a prop for a large
and pretentious receiving hall or
middle-class cascade of staircase, or
set as a prop in a film or on tape.

it could also have been an ad,
or a mockup for an ad, maybe a
generic boy for any number of ads, with
no copy, or a painting of an ad for
anything, a bill board could have pro-
vided to the painter a free model of 1 the human figure,
2 how you can produce commercial art, and
3, that if you are a boy, this look would be OK.
this painting could have been the result of a grandmother and
some ads she'd seen and wanted that look for this boy.

moths b and c

garlic phallus

am i strong willed? is that why i'm doomed?
as fish schools part and switch back,
the shading i cast, as fool, seems to dissipate.
half-buried chains wave to give anchor but i drift.

my staff are a bunch of dicks posing in lab coats
, and even they can't find a way to get after me.
some friends might fuss or threaten, chumming on
jetsam of the callow marrow of a man's trajectory.

Donna

something empty we share

The emptiness between us is something empty that we share.
Your head blocking the light behind you makes our faces dark.

Let's not

Let's not
take this any further
or end it either

wild poinsettias bobbing in circles is their race up the mountaintop
and while we're someone who'd never say no to a splash of color
we're stuck with the translucency of skin as a crude odometer


Ken

self-regard

i see fresh irises, ski slopes,
pancakes, cross hatching,
a jutting larynx ridge.

there is an eyed, faceless being
inside a face with no eyes.
spasms, years pin back a jeering.

clusters of melanin
are moving back
and blending in,

for youth is in a reversal.
dyed payback is all ahead;
winter is nearing an end.


by Missy

information in search of a vehicle

violence as social media

admonishment

wasted bird of paradise
edging sideways through life
straight is the final arrow's flight
even if you do things right

harsh are the rains and tides
jarring are the co-confined's
needling the pines
wicked the minds

Latest Starving Titles

• Bourgeoisie, please!
• Effluvium of underarm and flowers
• i guess it's my testosterone make me wanna force things
• Torsion and beyond to what can be cured by narrative?
• Bag o' Cock
• Now! Less Panic
• No, we're not smosta spoke here but we do.
• Fagnimicent
• There's nothing for me in these bushes but cover.

By Donna

Another Damn Sun Hole

"You could drive a truck through it."

cicada

Its wings are bright green webs.

the drive home

broken pot

smoke

punkin' barn

the most tempting metaphor

migrant worker

post-family group living situation

everyone just taking a station, doing their own tough thing:
it's how i'd always envisioned a post-family group living situation.
adults, having moved from home, create a nest on a low branch
of the prison-industrial complex, establish a knowing unit leverage:

knitting searching and learning to growing into a cognizant vendible,
you can rule this whole vein of living and make yrselves indispensable
by plowing, polishing small then wise-ass investing, prpetually winning:
intrpersonal relations don't have time to get in the way of all the fondling.

by Ken
"I'm afraid it's over, Diane."

Empathic Death Trance

Must have been 36 hours now a tabby cast this depressive jinx on a whole house, me, the dogs. I lay here unblinking with one hand up near my head poised in soft clenching just as, in the unmown grass near the hedge, did the cat. It's as if my bones'd been tentatively crunched like Kaintuck fritter in the teeth of a strong little bitch who wants to help her boyfriend put me down. He's at my neck. They've frozen to create a vacuum for my last breath or thump of chest tho I'm already blown out.

After at least a day of heavy brooding on the couches I say to Juniper sarcastically, "You the hunter, boy." Jumpy or abash to be urban, he stretches on his rug, catches sight of himself again in the glass fire door at the hearth and sits to stare, hyper self-aware, not just grinning, really trying to closed-mouth get his mind around the reflection. Don't know how you can stand to look at that, I add, aware of the projection. Then I turn to find a small praying mantis resting green in my bare leg whiskers.

Because I have PTSD from bad dating practices, witnessing a violent death and having to make manly judgements during and after can put me in a momentary tailspin, meaning a vortex of moments, visual playback, empathic shock, and unattractive tightened jaws, accentuated jowls I see now in the 7-ft mirror I had just installed in the master bathroom, which is prolly as big as someone's bedroom. I realize I don't know how I look talking to others because I don't ever watch myself speak.

I lift and drag it onto a black cloth wearing elbow-length, heavy-nap, dyed suede garden gloves, and I have never felt death so warm and fresh. LaLa and Juniper, strangers, had to be jabbed at with a push broom to relinquish their vigil and project. Cat had already taken hold of us and we were closer to mortality than we thought, or that's what we felt, when in reality, we are healthy and renewed. Or it's just the bloom of surviving that comes over you to help with the wounds, after a kill, even if you haven't any.

There are stages of waiting: for the end of dying, for the lack of living, for the weekly garbage truck that always came yesterday. The first overnight, cat spent growing stubbornly more still in a loose wrap on the garage floor, in a high-beamed room for two hoopties, with shelves and appliances. If I'd intervened more, it could've lived as mangled, expensive remains. The gentleman at the Ministry of Humane does not refuse to schedule a removal, but keeps repeating, "It'll be okay. Just set it in the barrel."

Donna

Evening Swim 4 Rodney King

Waves rocked me at the shoulder,
try an shake in some sense
as i wet, floundered on the steps.
Standing back allz IC is beauty, green, breeze.
The surface of the plaz'm
is a funny color, a single layer.
Keep on like this mean
I'm a tire, can't stop, only slow down
to keep me in ribs, this tub.
Have 2 look back N laff.

by Mike

bug on house

Race Against Time Against a Timeless Place

Maddening waiting, stallers, obstructors, judging
you don't encounter here, except the atmosphere,
air going under tires, flatiron rises, fan of still water.
It's a ghost race against time against a timeless place.

Futuristic Pueblo Revival

when i first moved in
i didn't even feel
a secure line
between the walls and the people's
right to tread on me
but as it sinks in,
the futuristic pueblo
revival style,
just the porch lights from the street,
lift you off the level
of a typical drone.
exoskeletal,
scorpions clatter
on the patio at night.
tourists may imagine
some cult of art deco
around a selfish native-
american alien.

by Mike

Arse as a Country

I wish some of my contacts would
give me feedback on my affect
when they weren't pissed off at me

when i get on to access, say a song
an laika beaver gnawing at a log
other users think I want to cut them

or do i take on an innocent role
so that even i can't tell it's a play
but at my core's a big-tootht arbovore?

Missy

Retrograde echo

Low Star

Low star, pull your pants up
Low star, slippry and dense
Low star, walk the rooftops
Low star, impervious.

Because Kevin Reynolds experienced the miserable smoking child cardiologist as a deity, he overcompensated its malice with allowances, which were tithes. The meat divinity could slip along the gums of the spa mouth, a critical tongue clucking a roller-coasting ticker tape of praise and affront, while Kevin stood locked and branked in one spot twixt therapeutic jets and offered up a stance which looked relaxed (on a commercial for a 900 number or a mustang ranch).

Low star, a mud bottom
Low star, or a searchlight
Low star, banana trees
Low star, not high season.

Kevin looked like a statue in a grease fountain lamp, with stray dog hair, hanging on a chain. Stitching through conversation and anaesthesia, the skin-masked and sterile stethoscope imp had trapped him in a crib of adoration and scorn. The bars were taut suture wire, twisted like candy canes or stripers on poles, down which the serum ran in dizzying regular spiraling drips. A suffering physician took Kevin Reynolds's needful swell under advisement with the assumed entitlement of a faith healer rigging a magic trick or something you could plug into a cigarette lighter.

Low star, where are you now
Low star, surface drifter
Low star, moth ball in pop
Low star, gravid ardor.

When he awoke afloat in four-hundred-thread-count sheets, the message indicator on the telephone flashed like a red lighthouse beacon. There was pea seed in his hair, and the oracle was still ignited, drumming out that morning’s urgent crisis. There seemed to be no air, just a tobacco-y sealant which even caught the future and held it still. The Other Presence had left this disco-cabana world reemed and vacant as a church. Kevin Reynolds was once again a gentleman alone in society, but his manhood was broken in two.

Low star, you were fragile
Low star, melted cupcake
Low star, bloody s-curve
Low star, meanderer.

corona of failed sperm, II

"Desmoronamiento"

tengo un recordino
un cositino que
me da la risa cada
vez que me ocurre

pasando por la calle
vecindido casko viejo
tu me dijiste hey, it's
rilly decadent here, no?

But you called back the next day
y me dijiste hey, that's not what
decadent means. Es que mal lo di.
Tu/ yo tuvimos ni noción de pudrirse.

corona of failed sperm

tengo una cosita
es un recuerdo
of you vanishing under
water in a wild rapid
en nueve segundos
de aves charlando
you were gone from
everywhere that mattered
en ese sitio que te tomó
por el movimiento, no
se permite la vida

by Hoolie

pueblo revival

spending the night in my tomb-like pueblo revival, accessing content
it's a place where lesbians have been, flesh color in all-surrounding floor.
i stay when i can in the room i've allowed to gather cargo of records;
my bitches question any mother's son.

the stories of survival, horror, sacrifice are one long babble
they narrate the stagnancy of my one-woman battle
a chorus to the fight of my life wearing out an
office recliner and a bucket-seated death chamber...

for somebody who loves freedom as much as me,
have to say it's a bum trip to be a headliner
and you wonder if the people can come back strong
with the illing and just dealing and feeling it so long.


Rev. Chama Tilly, from
Letters to Hillbilly Jehovah

bully crush

life over you is a better view
than forest or either trees
someone to meet my knees
and occupy my sharpest tips
of bone most honorable dis-
respect i feel for you alone

Cloud Dam

Driving toward the coast, the great mountain shoulders that let between them a wind pass to the Outer Chanks, we've been seeing a barrier, white-washed stable door, crimson smudge curtain at sunset, between northern and southern High Gate, where bouts of weather can build up and ponder a spill into our open gravel bowl. One you could see from the Community College of Cement, there's been of late a brooding cloud dam at Crack Gap.

We've got two car shirts, one getting its tail beat to fringe hung sticking out top the driver's side as an ultraviolet ray cushion, for a hooptie these days wants you to sit n' roast in yr own cancer juice as it crab rolls face-up along in its morning-loving glaze. The other's for short-sleeve work days to wear like a smock if yr painting short crescent lines with yr knuckles, sad faces rocking left and right in a studio that could churn the whole globe with a gesture light as a mouse's joint.

Where in the Wrrrl?

Cap'm is AWOL. Last seen slipping into The Crack with Hillbilly Jehovah.

White liar

Lectric pole in a gale, base is wagging the land.
Walking on is half again beyond an eagle badge.
Nothing, writing letters, shiny coins can trip the session.

Empty, kissing awl

Empty, kissing awl, riding on a wagon in,
Your wheels are hewn square, cad, heel.

Beliefs are polluted with the lining of the head,
Every skull a holster boosting love and hate.

Your breath on share from others or in egress
Tastes of useful rubberiness or harbors a tax.

The World's Agents

Now that it's 11:39, a frightened user checks the time.
Even doing nothing, you are a part of the community.

When the filter came down we gave up futility,
traded it in for fear and opportunity.

She'd like to remember, forget, but she can't think
while the world's agents swim toward past and by me.


Phyllis
"Fuck you, men of Canada!"

Gore Vidal Army

Is it dt's? Everyone looks like Gore Vidal.
Turns out it's an army of an era of dreamy
princes, scowling beauties who're naughty.

obambic tom

liar, concubine
shill clown of energy
black oilfield lush

black as the deepest
grounds, the hegemony
of your work boss

black of temperture
a kinder doctoring
of loins, a fudge


Bill Naughdon

Black mute

puppy show
tourettic impulse
black mute
thoracic cavity

dark morning
fire exhibit
kyoot ko-leckshun
weather denial

notion aperture
end's wedding
life as fuel
auto-miraculous

Some kind of foam

Sylvia sees a film of herself on the outside wall of the gym. Her colleagues are stopping in the causeways and pointing out look, there's Sylvia's corpse. Why is it standing and moving? Because it thinks it's still alive. Maybe it sees a projection of its past life on that facade.

Tom comes out of his office with his briefcase and a v-8, does a double take. And I was actually married to that zombie. Look at her now. He glances back at his metal door, pulling it flat. Who was it confused the word crack for dimple. Said there was a dimple in the fence.

She'd had dimples everywhere they'd put her back together, dimples in the skin between the limbs and torso like momo dough. What if everything had dimples, what a cute world it'd be? Tom starts the walk on out to his hooptie, one drowsy thigh prickly as a stuffed owl.

The word jail was blocked out giantly across the side of the county jail to give everyone fair warning and to offer no illusions as to whut yor approaching. If you had a warrant, for example, you may not be released until morning. That's where he'd gone to get her out.

Once the attacks were confirmed they'd arrested her for having been the first to report a flight-gifted reptile in an olive tree outside her office. Her coffee, fortunately, had been in a spill-proof mug. She first spoke with the chair of biology Tom, her partner.

She next spoke with her labor boss, the chain gang lawyer, and a team of crack psychiatrists. When you let me out of here with a stern admonishing, and it comes back for me, will their be a separate co-pay? she asked sarcastically. Those creatures have saw-like teeth was the rejoinder.

And if it comes for my lover, even if he doesn't believe? Is he covered? Do we wait in line at emergency? Suddenly the panel revolved like a bus destination eight ball. They were things in robes, monsters of erect and punished gravity, disappearing unansweringly into some kind of foam.