Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #14: Beer = Food = Books
bart plantenga
Apparently I said “In NY the louder and crazier you sound, the more attention you seem to get,” and this was quoted in the Sunday Boston Globe about our Cambridge gig. Luckily they used a photo of Judy Nylon and not me.
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Subway Pome #57: Most Girls Wear Too Much Makeup
Sean Flaherty
“Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don’t need no other lover” – from Something by George Harrison
Around eight
Saturday morning
the chilly wet October fog
makes it feel earlier than it is,
the bus depot
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NEW
Dong of the Dead
Jose Padua
The name of this poem is Dong of the Dead.
It is my attempt to cash in quickly
on the literary zombie craze by
writing the first literary zombie
porn novel in verse. I am writing it
while sitting in the back of a pickup
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #13: Without the Voodoo of Hope
bart plantenga
Hitching through mid-1970s Canada usually meant Canadian Border Services stopping you, inquiring how much money you had on your person. If it was under $25 they’d refuse you entry, which meant hitching the long way round ...
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Poem
Twenty-Four Islands
Marguerite Van Cook
Island No 1
This island is inhabited by turtles,
Flowering shrubs linger past the drift stalks
Seashells flock the debris
This is the island where I forgot my sweater
That summer my breasts began to grow
The beach even...
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Poem
How They Fucked (In Three Parts)
John S. Hall
I
Well, yes, they fucked like bunnies, and yes, they fucked as if it was their last night on earth (when in fact it was early afternoon), but more than that, they fucked like so many, different other things completely.
The...
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Story
Mt. Eden 1978-82
Drew Hubner
It started in a pool hall. Juan Colon had a girl friend, and so did the cop, Jimmy O’Donnelly. The problem was it was the same girl. Usually a policeman is issued whatever number comes up, but special requests can be made....
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Story
"Li’l Punks", A Screenplay
Mark Netter
It's 1977 and four upstate-New York high school students who have formed their town's first punk rock band are in NYC together for the best night of their lives. They've been brought to NYC this particular Friday night b...
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Story
Pilgrims
City of Strangers
An excerpt from a novel
I met Dupont at the Bar X, a totally anonymous-looking place with tinted windows wedged in-between a McDonald’s and a pizzeria. I might never have noticed it had it not been for the neon Bud sign i...
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Essay
Unsupervised: My Life as a Bad Girl
Erika Schickel
I recently watched a “reality” show called “The Bad Girls Club” and was saddened to see what has lately become of the Bad Girl brand. The show devotes itself to a lot of scantily clad, cranky harlots who do nothing b...
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Story
Fat Wallet
Díre McCain
As luck would have it, Tecate Flats turned out to be a goldmine. Throughout the duration of my addiction, I had a fortuitous knack for attracting people—more specifically, men—who not only facilitated my habit, b...
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Essay
Beer Mystic Burp #12: Stroh’s Cans to the Head
bart plantenga
I suddenly have vivid memories of survival in Flint, Michigan, Motor City Jr., birthplace of GM. I was a stranger here because I rode a bike with books of poetry in my back pocket and some locals could smell this alienness ...
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Where the Exiles Go — The Canadian Literary Outlaw in a Conformist Culture
Mark McCawley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkoByHco_Ig&feature=related
For as long as I've been writing and publishing in Canada, the concept of a Canadian Literary Outlaw has always been something of a contradiction. Not that ...
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What I Did Today, Carl Watson's Issue
Ron Kolm
After contributing to an earlier issue of What I Did Today, Carl Watson collected three two-thousand word essays to go along with his already published one, to complete his own follow-up issue. Here’s Michael Randall’s ...
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