Dosia N. Conner

Community Butt

I was a tall, skinny hustler with rings of abs and ribs
holding up a light armor pecs and deltoid silhouette.
I appeared around the same time hippies turned to drink.
My face looks like I got punched in the face, which I did.
Then I pulled a love handle.

Mike was a physical therapist who came into my life when
dawn was darkening the focus of every day,
and when I couldn't catch a ride in the city canyons from
one to another 3rd floor reflector curtain hotel,
he helped me pogo to the next level.

You grasp at stuff when it's too late, literally smoke;
as community butt, you have to set it aflame.
Fast lane living is about always looking out frontally
and maybe registering peripherally a bum hitching,
later as afterimage or sunspot, and then a funnel.


Love,
Hoolie

what an idiot

this weekend can't mean anything,
and not for lack of trying;
we're in a story's long stretch now.

this dread torques countenance
through your ancestors, correspondents;
the world's an idiot to your purpose here.

Static Parade

cott'ny balloons resting,
blobs splattered into frozen
place by a blowtube

billowed as if popped,
their shadows tattoos,
spread on a membrane

wanting humility

Sunflower heads, popping their stashes,
want to bend away and face the ground.

The earth itself likes to turn in its grave.
Diers of thirst circling are well drill bits.

In fire, grains of years curl remorsefully,
and only glowing caps of dust can relax.

gimme the dee effin money

gimme the dee effin money,
an eagle with wings that are a map:
these are the things that seem a
good idea to me.

a spaceship secured by
gravity and chains
where they chop down trees,
jubilant dirge of victory.

sorrowful tomahawk,
legs of ginger
stomping through tall grass,
tuneful recorders, fingers.

Hoolie
"desesperado"

Terror v. Horror v. Anxiety v. Fear v. Panic v. Paranoia v. Puzzlement v. Exasperation v. Dread

Headlights made me squat and lie down on my back like a cat burglar. Those and other slick gangster moves made me wonder who am I?

I'd stand before the oracle dispenser and a great personality, an exaggeration, appeared to bubble into the frame, a swelling from my skull.

Was it self-regard made me lose a way to muscle outta here? I wake up exhausted from a night of paramilit'ry operations: for bread.

Reptily

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.