145 South 4th Street
Sean Flaherty
In the span
of three months:
my friend's wife died
in a car accident,
his infant son
was diagnosed with
brain cancer
and the company where he worked for twenty years went
belly up.
Considering the
fragility implied by this,...
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Essay
Gil Scott Heron RIP
City of Strangers
I discovered Gil Scott Heron the summer of 1991, after I returned to Montreal following a riotous five months in NYC. It was the first time I'd lived in the city, and I felt like I'd caught the tail end of an era. In one s...
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What I Did Today Chapbooks
Ron Kolm
Dan Waber is a terrific poet, and he owns a bookstore in Pennsylvania: Paper Kite Books on 443 Main Street, in Kingston. He also publishes several lines of chapbooks, but the one we’re interested in here is put out under ...
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NEW
Crack
Jose Padua
I can’t tell whether the flowers are falling or
floating in this painting just as I can’t tell wh...
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Weeks After the Tsnumai
Lyn Lifshin
LETTER DAYS AFTER THE TSUNAMI
the last few days
everything was in
chaos. When I close
my eyes, I see dead
bodies. When I open
my eyes I see dead
bodies. Each of us
must work 20 hours
a day. I wish there
were 48 hours in the...
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NEW
Virginia
Jose Padua
Let happiness lie like a dog on your lap,
Virginia, state of green, state of mountain
roads, and tackler of new centuries, but
don’t get upset if we leave you. Virginia,
let your vagina set you free or get out ...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #7: Beer = Liquid Cartoonist
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC Burp #7
X-Large I see is the new large in clothing sizes. Size matters, so now a medium cup is like a trough of soda at McSubWenNuggests. They even try to super-size you when you rent a car, from an obese sedan ...
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NEW
Unnamed Oysters.
Marguerite Van Cook
My hands dripped mud as we counted out ten thousand tiny oysters for seeding, but it was not the slime that disturbed me, rather it was my fear of losing count. James anxiously scooped the plastic pail into the mother va...
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NEW
Eve To The Serpent
Bonny Finberg
Smoking star,
listen to me.
Call the stain
to your hand.
Go-I’m ready
to burn.
Has caffeine
a tiger’s kiss?
Be wild,
shove the
sequestered
kiss with force
and school me
in your pause.
Is this
blood
clean as
the sea?
Make...
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NEW
P-Funk Reshapes the Landscape of the Redneck Town I Live In and Other Acts of Reformation and Reconstruction
Jose Padua
Behind the wheel listening to P-Funk in my new neighborhood
the blank stare of the shirtless Larry the Cable Guy lookalike sharpens
to crystal clarity as his lazy slouch straightens up into a confident
strut and the words ...
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Sensitive Skin Salon – Jennifer Adams
Jennifer Adams
To celebrate the release of our sixth issue, we had a salon out in Brooklyn early in June. Here's the first video from that event, Jen Adams reading her excellent story "Medium".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ4PFxZ87B4...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #6: Plagiarism and Unpaid-for Beer in a Paris Swamp
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC Burp #6
We made a toast. “To he who casts the first kidney stone.” Clink of beer glasses, tink-tink, small amber waves sloshing over the sides, beer-head mustaches as our only disguise in the Pik-Clops in th...
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NEW
On These Days Driving
Jose Padua
Perfection is all those horrible old love affairs
they tell their latest lover about in bed as they smoke
ci...
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Essay
BEER MYSTIC Burp #5: A Mental Jersey Leads to Spirited Beer Consumption
bart plantenga
BEER MYSTIC Burp #5
Before Jersey Shore was a TV show, it was already a socio-anthropological phenomenon of some steroidal bonehead beach bum magnitude. Summers were and still are an excuse for so-called [or seemingly] norma...
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Essay
Why Drunken Poets Need to Procreate
Jose Padua
If it were somehow obligatory that I sum up my existence with a single sentence—or perhaps with just a phrase and a simple image—I’d be at a loss. I would, in fact, feel quite helpless, as if I were trapped in some h...
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