Punk Monk Press/Magazine

Poems Hairless poems in the shape of wet yams. Like collars on the throats of girls, forcing them to read. Emptying their stomachs until they hurt with an infinite night. With steel pipes and the noises of a crowd of tobacco. Because I am captive in the pleasures of dust storms, bring me my friends and acquaintances. Oceans Blue salted oceans surrounding lovely Yemen. How many times must I say I don’t know you? For you to roll up and finally dry in my restless mind. Dark as you are I’ve never seen you. Girl shaped like wine, I never wanted you. You refuse not to belong in these snow piles of poetry, ill-fitting and absolutely real.

you're a phantom pulse against my fingers. i'm on fire with it (turns out i know how to burn; my skin can melt, peel, grow red and shiny hard once more). a bit adrift without you- i'm a compass needle, you're due north, all that jazz. lay on my back all day until the sun bleaches out my eyes and imagine clouds painted onto the sky; feel things i probably shouldn't- like veins expanding, shadows playing, stars pulsing. filling the empty cavities of space in between. i'm just playing cardiologist. pretending i can touch hearts; make something useful of them. but you can't keep alive someone who is meant to be dead. bedroom-blues into transparent eyes. you don't look at me, you devour me. i could map the bumps of your teeth all afternoon, but your chest would still be constricted from dust motes and the words you wished you'd said. i've shed so much blood in your name. sometimes i wonder how well you'll be able to remember my face. if two self...

this is not empowerment it's enchantment this is a basic hunger this is me owning up to my self absorption this is the same day over and over again i am clean memories are not drawn in chalk they are solid i can feel the weight i can feel everything your fingertips your bottom lip... everything there was no first time there was no last time blood is thicker than water it won't stop raining you will never think of this the way i think of this though we are doing the same thing i remember when words were bonds and now we tie things in bed sheets there is no recovery time there is no redemption i swallow your secrets and wait for them to burn me alive. --Karissa Satchwell

I cannot possibly think of you other than you are: the stranger of my curiosity. You stand there in the field, gorging on conversation like Bateman’s first confusion between consent and rape. Oh bedroll, be hollow, and be moderate. Do not excite me more than you have to! I must distort forever. --Andrew J. Stone

This unwanted obsession you spawned in the darkness of my mind is screaming. Suckled on crumbs of distortion, the child is bloated with self-loathing. Her cries plead adoration to ears that fall into blindness. The fading voice feigns unconsciousness as this unwelcome offspring is aborted with the rusty hanger of your indifference. --A. J. Huffman

On Saturday afternoons my brother and I go to Wendy's and look for heart shapped chicked nuggets in our buckets of mystery meat I show him how to bite them in half splitting our own in twos and fours to remind us of my other brother                      who's living in that heaven                       he used to have faith in I sip bubbles of caffeine, remembering him, and ignoring the reality of having a brother underground while another splits hearts in half                      while giggling. -- Emily Ramser

I’m strewn around this place limbless legless beheaded  but my heart remains in my flesh, and my soul... my soul lingers over the remains of this unfeasible torso as I lay across this slab, my viscera a buffet of fragments resembling colours in a Monet landscape portrait all puree as if someone had stuck my brain into a blender creating a splendid vision locked in transgression as the sea of tranquility etched in the moon brings about events of cataclysmic proportions within the relentless of my dismembered body because it desires to embrace life and death, to envelope around the  necessary of our counterparts, to guise to heed to respire to savor... oh how that sea of tranquility awaits me awaits me awaits me  just to be the death of me the death of me the death of me... --Devlin De La Chapa

Dad taught math at the high school for almost thirty years before a student finally sporked him to death in the cafeteria. He bled out right there on the floor. Thirty cell phones recorded the scene, but no one thought to call 911. I was at college when it went down, and if I have the timeline right, I was getting fucked in the ass when it happened, first time. It's funny, me and dad both bleeding out of holes on opposite ends at the same time. I guess true opposites would have been say, his neck and my feet, but Davey Braddock wasn't going to fuck my feet. I'd have let him though. Some people are into that. The bottle room used to be this little room where we had an electric train set up on top a broken ping pong table. We sculpted mountains out of chicken wire and paper-mache, painted them rocky brown and textured them with plastic pine trees, painted little buildings and the tiny model people. The train set was up for about a week before Dad thr...