by Greg Cotter

Got a new pair of tight jeans today

they cut into my ass
like the side of a hand,

ride up my junk
like a denim blow-job.

*

Former Beatle George Harrison
says he’s tired of music
that insists on personality.

*

In the dentist’s waiting room
I tear out a photo of Mick Jagger
stick it in my leather jacket
a woman is stuck in the elevator
in the hall
a green iridescent bottle fly
flies around my room
in the morning just past
many dreams
I called Sarah last night
the message on your machine,
you and your roommate: “Even if this
is a wrong number leave a message
and tell us your shoe size.”

*

In my dreams
I’m a person
I don’t want
to be around.

*

I’m at a table sitting quietly.
“What are you doing?”
“Brooding.”
“Want a blow-job?”
“Fuck no, that would take my mind off it,
I must continue this useless, senseless,
repetitious
thinking.”

“What is it?
What are you brooding about?”
“My inability,” I say, “to write myself
out of a paper bag.”
“Sex can cure that,” she says
“I’m 27-years-old
what
do I look like a virgin?”

I leave for North Hollywood
to rent a Stones movie
to focus on how desirable it is to be thin
and sing.

—-for Paula Shepherd

by Eric Roy

If you had a dollar every time
a person found you unattractive,
you would be attractive. If we each
had a dime any time an outcome came
exactly as imagined, piggy banks
would disappear like hot air balloons

into the Albuquerque sky. Some red
flags flap violently from little poles.
Some red flags hang like fake roses
in vases thin & green, dusty blooms
so uniformly crimson we accept them
as part of the atmosphere.

by Eric Roy

Slowriding down Cemetery Road, late December.
Next to me, nobody now watches paints & palominos

graze the orchard behind lines of vined wire fence.
We broke all three—the trees, the horses, the land

& on the horizon distant houses glint like silver sequins
inside tears, like container ships about to slip over

an ocean plain. How is it what we need we’re not even
aware of yet? What cool, neutral slice of pickled ginger

could be set inside our heads? Instead, I whistle the only
way I can, involuntarily, a kiss blown in disbelief

circling cemeteries in a dark cloud spitting out dark birds,
rain held in its throat like practiced words, navigating

smoke. Pollution explosion wildfire, duck & cover, smoke.
Turning into haze that enhances our sun’s infected color.

by K. Alma Peterson

Waiting for dark to simplify my view

I stand and study wild quinine in the meadow
its bright white flowers bear upon resilience.

Bluestem grasses sweep and swerve between

bursts of lupine cropping up like decades-old
conversations, images of what we wore, where

we drove, when I knew you were my ground.

It all takes place on this heath of consciousness:
swales where details flatten like blown grasses,

where petals plucked declare the place and time

where loss provoked was loss sustained,
memory mistaken for something hard-and-fast.

Thoughts are fireflies and reality is the night sky.