January Palette
Beaks to birdseed.
Pigeons: peck, peck.
Under the birdfeeder, the snow
has been shoveled by doves.
A fat cardinal hops between them.
He is not the colour of seeds,
nor snow, but maybe
last year’s mixed reds in clay soils
Author: The Beatnik Cowboy
Harold Bowes
A Clip
The clip that fastens
the bread bag
It slipped away and
I can’t find it
Now lost on the white tile surface
Of the kitchen counter
The button on my sleeve cuff
It sprung off
When I was pushing the snow
off the car windshield
Now it’s invisible in the snowfield
The world is ending
The Five CDs
When we were in LA for a USC campus visit
My daughter and I visited the walk of fame.
As we approached Bruce Lee’s star,
Songwriters selling their CDs hailed us.
My daughter was a singer in the rock band then so
I bought CDs from five different songwriters in support.
Took them home and played them in a car with a CD player.
Three were kind of pathetic, one was ok, and the fifth was blank.
I sensed a kind of proportionality that applies generally.
The just ok mixed with other 80%: the boredom, the theft.
Gabriel Bates
Doppelganger
At a kid's birthday party,
I see a little boy
who reminds me of my son.
He's eating cake
and smacking a pinata,
laughing and smiling
the whole time.
I watch him
and feel the urge
to go over there
and pick him up,
tell him I've missed him
for a long time.
Nicholas Viglietti
Dilapidated Desperado
Dead-end desperado
On the run bravado
No water and all guts.
One in the chamber,
Raw dog love,
Next town, new sluts.
Dying horizon lines,
Wasted time,
Long trails and damaged feelings,
Temporal being,
Wrecked heart and clouds of dust,
No trust and days die despite never healing.
Ripped the whole joint,
Crushed every beer,
It was their tab,
So, I ran it up,
Then dashed on their pointless meaning.
Yesterdays that Craved Right Now
We are all alive,
Living beautiful little lives of lies.
Smiles that want to frown.
Dresses that desire wedding gowns.
Yesterdays that craved right now.
The milk tastes good,
But I miss the cow.
One day,
This life,
Will straighten me out.
Richard LeDue
“A Lost Battle”
The unopened bottle sleeps in my cupboard
and waits for a bad day to help me
dream of nights; the same shade
as all the days
we tell ourselves were victories,
while listening to music
and whisky conquer the ice in my glass.
I, drunk as a general about to order
thousands off to their deaths
as part of a gamble I rationalize as a war
that was over
long before my first drink.
The rest of the world another Switzerland,
offering enough aid
to keep its neutrality
with clean hands
and so many metaphorical mountains
making it safe from me.
Alan Catlin
The Bicycle Thief
Some sounds have
never been the same
since Nam: fireworks
displays, car back
fires, any sudden,
unexpected loud noise
in the night, but
the one that lays me
out flat, eating dirt
faster than a cry of,
"Incoming" is the sound
of an unoiled bicycle,
wheeling slow, deliberate,
rhythmic, unseen as
the homemade bomb in
the old man's covered
basket strapped to
the handlebars and set
to explode once the lid
was lifted, downtown,
high noon, wherever
men gathered.
Alex Stolis
I got a gun & oh, how it shines; I’ve sucked on its barrel plenty of times
(I Will Let you Down; Ike Reilly)
Everything is Pompeii-ed & buried
anonymously; the crack of electricity
it’s a punch in the gut,
& we’re too bold to endure rules
& we’re too drunk to get sober
& we’re too far from the edge
of the ocean to learn how to swim.
Remember Henry & Bones double-acting
out of control when cocktail parties
were raging like bulls,
& Ike Reilly isn’t dead yet
& Berryman can fuck right off that bridge again;
& the one time we were right we were wrong
with a swarm of bees punctuating our last words.
Ismael S. Rodriguez Jr
The Factory of Your Lungs
Every exhale is counted, weighed, and sold to someone who doesn’t live here—
someone who has never woken to the rattle of dawn
shaking the dust from its pockets
like a tired god clocking in for another shift.
In this town, breath is a currency.
The children trade theirs for recess,
the elders for a quiet afternoon without coughing up
another gray feather of the sky’s exhaustion.
We are paid in particulate promises:
tiny specks of maybe, someday, almost.
The smokestacks rise like stern foremen,
tall as verdicts delivered without trial.
They do not blink.
They do not bargain.
They take their tithe of oxygen
and leave our chests echoing like half-collapsed warehouses.
Still, we show up.
We shoulder the sun.
We lift the morning until it glows faintly,
a lantern swaying above the picket line of our ribs.
Some nights, a breeze sneaks in—
an outlaw wind slipping between the factories
with news from somewhere greener.
It whispers: breathe deeper,
your lungs are not a ledger.
And we try—
inhalation as rebellion,
exhalation as prayer—
each breath a small strike
against the empire of smoke
that believes it owns us.
Subway Graffiti as Prophecy
The train rattles past midnight slogans,
each one a warning written in neon dust.
Letters drip like fresh constellations
on the ribs of silver cars—
WE WERE HERE, NOT YOUR CITY,
EVERY WALL HAS A PULSE.
Beneath the murmuring advertisements of tomorrow,
a sharper gospel flickers in unauthorized color.
The tunnels memorize it.
The rats translate it into twitching scripture.
Even the conductors read it with their eyes closed.
A crown made of spray caps rolls along the tracks.
A halo of sirens hums in the distance,
late as always, faithful as gravity.
Someone has stitched a future into brick and speed,
a prophecy that refuses to wait for permission.
We pretend not to see it,
eyes trapped in glowing rectangles of curated hope,
while the walls scream in wild typography:
THE CITY IS A DREAM EATING ITS DREAMERS.
BREAK THE SPELL.
By morning the messages will be skinned raw by cleanup crews,
bleached into respectable silence.
But the night will remember.
The tunnels will rehearse.
And the next train will arrive already whispering
what the daylight is afraid to admit.
A Brief History of Sidewalks
Concrete remembers the soles it carried,
the faces erased, the corners abandoned.
It remembers the soft geography of need—
bus tokens warm in palms, the choreography
of waiting, the loose change mooning in cups.
Once, this block spoke in many tempos:
domino slaps, arguments, laughter stitched
through open windows like second curtains.
Then the paint arrived first—
that clean lie of renewal—
followed by names no one here could pronounce
without learning new mouths.
Rent rose like floodwater without rain.
Porches narrowed. Lives folded.
Now the coffee costs more than the day’s wages
of the ghosts who still cross here at dusk.
Dogs with better health plans
tug silver leashes past the places
children learned the art of swerving traffic.
Even the weeds have been rezoned.
But listen closely at night
when the foot traffic thins to memory:
the sidewalk exhales names it is blamed for losing.
Each crack’s a ledger.
Each stain, a stubborn footnote.
Progress keeps receipts in erased feet.
And still—
the pavement waits, wide and patient,
for the next unpermitted story
to step back into the light.
Bob Carlton
“bathe the brain...”
bathe the brain
in a wave
of chemical pleasure
sing away sorrow
in joyful song
notes bent
to a
microtonal
blue
***
“sta/g/ger...”
sta
g
ger
to some
dest
i
nation
all my
all al
one
Mitchel Montagna
Catskills, Late 1970s
I thought I saw Kat near the bus station, beneath sparkling leaves
in sleek summer clothes, dazzling as the morning light
Treetops split the radiance around her; I know if she smiles, she
will fuse those fiery shards together
But I don’t wait to see. I turn away, looking for the 10:05, because
she probably doesn’t know me at all.
On 17 north near the mountains, cotton-blue sky, bluffs and
meadows like shimmering gardens
If you doze, you feel the tingling of haunted canyons; graffiti
carved by those who have become ghosts
After a steep climb the Grossingers sign looms, overlooking a world
at end, as our bus slips cautiously by.
Riding through Liberty, pale granite and dust, gasping old stores; strutting
unemployed, pretending to own the streets
I settle into a small cabin, then walk outside, purple twilight
descending on the woods nearby
A sparrow chants; a young woman sits cross-legged at a picnic
table and asks who I am.
Her dark eyes mirror the changing sky; a breeze carries a pine-needle scent;
her smile is clever and makes me smile
I’m here for a new beginning, I admit. She points to the moon, impeccably round
just above the horizon
Stars seem to creep out as if from behind a curtain. She brushes hair from
her cheek, and thanks me for a gorgeous night.
The Beatnik Cowboy 