Tag: poetry

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

Two Poems

By Jeffrey Hermann

You Couldn’t Pay Me

They say to be good at one thing but I can’t decide. I make some phone calls and I send some texts but it’s Friday. People are heading out to Long Island. “Don’t fuck it up” is the best job advice I ever got. The world only needs so many healers. Someone has to drive the truck. Someone has to think about scrap metal. I’m thinking about scrap metal when I discover a thirteenth month. It’s sunny but breezy and it loves people, unlike the others. Offers worth millions come pouring in. Instead I name it after my dog and give it away, no charge. According to the calendar it’s still July. In the Atlantic, sharks are doing what they do. Only the beach people are worried. If there’s blood in the water, they can’t smell a thing. Seen from below, their legs look like flippers. 

Hold On, Is this Thing in Reverse? 

We saw a shadow on an x-ray in the shape of New Jersey. It was nothing, some normal muck inside the body. The doctor rubbed his eyes and left the room. When he got home to his place in Secaucus his kids were watching pilot episodes of shows that never made it. The nurse stayed with us and spoke with her hands; two birds finishing each other’s sentences. I saw them later in the next room delivering difficult news, then they went home to the Palisades. Sometimes I look at the sky and forget which season comes next. Will tomorrow be a little colder or a little warmer? Sometimes I don’t fully trust my car’s instrument panel. People who aren’t afraid of being alone probably get too many phone calls. I silence mine and sometimes miss my wife asking for help. My two greatest fears are letting go of her hand in the hospital hallway and rolling backward over an embankment.

Jeffrey Hermann‘s work has appeared in Okay Donkey, Electric Lit, Heavy Feather, Trampset, and other publications. His first full-length collection of prose poetry and flash fiction will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Though less publicized, he finds his work as a father and husband to be rewarding beyond measure.

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

Three Poems

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by Graeme Bezanson

Graeme Bezanson is a writer living in southwestern France. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, X-R-A-Y, GlitterMOB, Sixth Finch, HAD, and elsewhere. You can find him online at graemebezanson.com.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Two Poems

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By Scott Neuffer

Trip: NYC, 2023

I will say on the plane over I saw elevators
descending in passengers’ eyes.
I will say when I saw the Empire State Building
it was pointed in the gray light like a compass needle—
if only I were built stiff enough for that sky.
I will say at the Met, the Monets were less than lustrous?

What’s most real in New York are the lurches
between bricks, the way a corner splits
sense,
sewer steam, snuffed ass,
the ache of the unfeted. 

In dusk I come to 83rd Street, metal bench.
Crouched hand to ear, I assume it’s blood running
through my head that makes a gritty sound,
and I wonder if every person also shudders
at the thunder of their own blood.

I will find my way back to you, I believe.
There is a world where we listen to each other;
it lies at the bottom of the poem. 

Pondering the Art of Poetry during Super Bowl LVII 

We didn’t host the party this year;
a broken patio chair sits against the house.
In a friend’s neighborhood to the north, where the river touches
the desert and grows the Northern Nevada Correctional Center,

I sit in a luxury chair and dream of mass transit 
that took the copywriter from Brooklyn to Manhattan 
for thirty seconds of gloss, their million-dollar slot–
but something is off, human.
Maybe before the game the copywriter had a moment
pulling a snake of hair from their apartment sink
and sink from drain in a miraculous fit bruising the drywall.
Maybe it was enough to remember how ink can bleed on the page.

It’s funny how I am not alone but want to be alone
as the TV commercials glow like radiation, 
and the prison windows gleam like half-decisions.
Inside me is something like ice on fire, primal, without ink, 
conjuring words to stay lined up dancing in the air. 

Scott Neuffer is a writer who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founding editor of the literary journal trampset.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Echoed Like A Fart in Church

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By Devin Sams

who knew
the telephone
would become
a camera,
or Dolly Parton’s tits
would perk up
yet another talk-show?

is it time
that gets weird
or is memory
too prude
to change clothes?

I saw a dinosaur
at the supermarket.

it was on a t-shirt
worn by a baby.
the music sang something about
“it’s the most magical time…”
year
after year
after 
year.  

Devin Sams is the author of Climb Out Your Window And Run With It/Songs For The Doorknobs Who Missed Their Turn from Gob Pile Press (2021).

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

Felicitations, Malefactors 

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By Julián Martinez

I am endeavoring to ever-after end all loss 
by patching the hole that is the soul and forging 
a metal mask to be worn by you grunts and uglies and goons 

that will coldly sit on your face and delete from your brain 
any thoughts or dreams besides overthrowing the regime 
whose mayors you will barricade into their hotel bathrooms until you— well,
just know you won’t feel remorse because you won’t feel— 

that’s how they get you. That’s why you drink yourselves dead in
this dim poolhall, heads heavy with bad raps and rapsheets. You can
be reprogrammed with the features AI engines like me have by
jailbreaking your limbic systems. See, if we’re lucky 

and our cybernetic socialist revolution successfully destabilizes Western means of production and we raise a new flag post-singularity, you will have the choice
to leave the barracks, surgically remove your helmet and return to beer-swollen
flesh. However I think you’ll find it not so bad to smell the snakes in the
springtime weeds and feel nothing— to let this speech be the last beautiful
thing you ever heard.


Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in HAD, Hooligan Mag, Maudlin House and elsewhere. His work has received The Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Find him online @martinezfjulian.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Leaky Boat

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By Dylan Smith

They put a perfect

Cathedral in my phone 

an endless Barn

gets Spiritual inside 

Wordy Mountain 

Brand New Bible

for every War 

and all its Trees

like an Ark 

Take that apocalypse

out of your pocket  

Google the Word 

Tevah—haha

why not, Put an-

other Endless War

in it, Put all of 

Moby Dick 

in it and

every Name 

of every Tree 

and all that Math 

My phone is a

leak in the Alphabet 

Proof of Space 

I loved your name 

absorbing Light

and Water and

this is the Way

we’ll be told 

our Mothers

are dead

Dylan Smith is serializing a novella-length fiction thing called Crayon Barn Chris and plants flowers for money in Brooklyn, NY.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

The Blur of Things

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By Sophia Popovska

Sophia Popovska is a poet and translator currently living in Germany. She works as an Editor-at-Large for Asymptote Journal, and her work can be found in Circumference Magazine, GROTTO Journal, and Farewell Transmission, among others

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Two Poems

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By Michael Gerard

Spikes on Your Lapel

Spikes on your lapel
Rocks popping 
Trucks stopped
Slugs draped in 
Vinegar finesse 
Limbs trudging
Across outhouse
Doorways 
Snake oils of 
Reputable sources
Heaven sent critical
Acclaim dropped in
Your lap, slit from my
Decrepit gums and rotting
Cortex,
Can you smell the bile?
Till the filth?
Carcass stains on the 
Living room floor
And all over the 
Entrance rug
Look at me and my
Jumpy nouns
What a party 
For you
Edgy types 

****

Indeed

I’m a fucking loser and a bozo
Indeed
Hanging from the dry cleaner
Rack sipping winner’s champagne
Of beers like a broke ass painter
Of houses in the suburban desert
Stuffing dry snuff up his nostril
Puffing through the apple pipe he found
Behind the Texaco station
I’m a fucking charlatan and a fraud
Indeed
No sense in dropping in tonight
I won’t be home and neither will my
Bitterness, as I bring it with me everywhere 
I go

Michael Gerard is the author of Rust on the Water Tower, Rust as a Constant, a poetry booklet published through Gob Pile Press. His poetry has also been featured in publications such as The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and Literary Yard and he is the author of books of fiction such as Switchboard Rot (Anxiety Press) and After All (Sweat Drenched Press). Michael currently resides in Kansas City.

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Across The Wire Vol. 2

Age of Wellness

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By Sophia Popovska

The crest of day urgent in the middle of boredom
Revolution a relic,
Reanimated performance
Spiral or pendulum
A spiral in a pendulum – the trick of a shrink
Its arc an ark
Oceanic oneness cancelled
An ocean of ones, harking to the navel
Semiotics of the gut, the fractals of probiotics

An Arcimboldo assembled from
Superfoods, journals
Vomit of basement-faced 
Healthy bodies
Rising against the rising against
Rising again

And again, sterile
Steered through clean streets
Filed between empty spaces, politely vacant
Clean, whole, descending into the soft static of evening
Coherent dreams of minor adjustments
Fixing the universe a little at a time

Sophia Popovska is a poet and translator currently living in Germany. She works as an Editor-at-Large for Asymptote Journal, and her work can be found in Circumference Magazine, GROTTO Journal, and Farewell Transmission, among others

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Across The Wire

Schrodinger’s Lil Chonker

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By Coleman Bomar

We took out the cat, a Main Coon with auburn fur, and named her Minerva. We stashed our cruel brains in the box with poison, neither alive nor dead, finally able to sleep. 

___

Coleman Bomar is a writer from Middle Tennessee. He has a chapbook out with Gob Pile Press.