By Craig Sipe

Frocked
from “Tombstone” 1993

I bought one of those coats,
you know, the long slim
raven frocks they wore

in “Tombstone” to the OK Corral,
when they strode down
the timpani dirt
— Boom–Boom–Bomb
to the draw.

Mighty cool, coal coat —
serious Boom that I wore to
The Magic Flute
in Paris, and then later to

a Christmas party at work
where the celebrants
called me Sheriff.

But, later, I got lardy on
too many sarsaparillas,
and retired, to marshal–up
the weeds in the garden,

un–lubbing a bit
of the blubber, but
still the Earp won’t fit.

Just tried it on fresh out
from the cedar closet, and
not even an

Almost . . . Goddamn . . . Clasp
within a Verrazzano’s reach
of a mating hole —

All the reason to tear
out of this roost and
— Boom–Boom–Bomb —

right down to the Golden Corral,
take that bottomless gravy boat
across the river Drum–Styx

waving “I’m your Huckleberry”
madly, at the endless salad bar.

By Jen Cheng

She thought I was a “poor, raised by a single mother, low–class,
immigrant nobody” and
even if I was losing Nick
I was out to show her I am a strong, intelligent somebody.
Not only am I a professor who could command my NYU
classroom but I am also a cultured Chinese American
woman in her power smooth as James Bond, staging
a showdown with Mah Jong, and I proved to
Mrs. Crazy Rich, that she was so wrong.
Just because they are the super
wealthy did not mean that I was
going to submit to her
especially since
I am the domme of game theory.

*my imagined inner landscape of Rachel Chu
from the film, “Crazy Rich Asians” from my
chapbook, Braided Spaces (2023)

By George Szirtes

What terrible films we used to watch, films with their trousers
hanging round their ankles. Morecambe and Wise, do you
remember,
in Italy, in That Riviera Touch, on wooden benches, and the
laughter
breaking against something so soft and tender it was almost true;
films at the matinee with cowboys, cliff–hangers and ice cream
brought by an usherette, before we grew nostalgic about such
things.
There was no art then, none that we knew, since
it was not the film
but the entrance to the auditorium with its plush and scarlet
that drew us to the desired place where everything lived
on borrowed time, including us. They were truly terrible films,
shudders of embarrassment, reels growing a green stagy mould
that looked enticing, so we kept going to see more terrible films,
because times were almost terrible then but fell short of pain
that might be transformed into deathless dialogue, with death
like a vanishing into the ether of our terrible desires, now lost
and
laughable, turning into laughter somewhere on the riviera

By George Szirtes

No, not that Paris. The left bank of loneliness
has neither river nor tower and the solitary walker
has neither destination nor address.

And where are we? In one hell of a mess
in the middle of a desert, another forlorn figure
seeking what has brought him to distress,

and love is in its peepshow room where you confess
your guilt, and she weeps, and somewhere else it’s summer
in Paris where traffic moves past, silent, echoless.