Punk Monk Press/Magazine

The Sinkhole Neglect has brought us here. Neglect the underground culprit eroding us. I stare into my coffee, into its blown pupil. Our sinkhole grew by slow collapse, by swallowing more and more. I hardly noticed the rising dew point. The spongy joists. The strawworm nest. Did you? What simple frogs we used to be– breathing through our skins, breathing each other in. And the moon. How easily it lustered our nuptial pond. Now it only indicts, spotlights our cracked glass house and the two of us dissolving– two dry drunks on the rocks hissing in the glade. Mother of Invention Today’s the day I’m supposed to snip the belly of my cat’s cradle, read my fortune in its stringy entrails. But there are no sharp scissors anywhere in the house, nor scalpel to transect its tiny navel knot. Why do I wait until every last blade is dulled before I’ll mount the sharpener, part its cowry lips,...

Meditations in an emergency/tragedy:   Guns don’t kill people/people kill people but people with guns do it faster/psychotics do it because they can/Ben Hur you should have kissed Massala instead of dealing in death/twenty and seven fireflies extinguished forever. Useless, words linger/but for now:  silence. --Felix Maple

she took his lungs and salted them: yes: they pickled and smelled of jaundiced rubber: of too-careful afternoons: of chlorine, smoky and ethereal, chlorine, insistent and sweet. (she was the queen of hearts and he was her knight, forever doomed to treading water for that lilied hand: outstretched, always outstretched, but too bright.) and smiling from two lanes over: palms pressed together: she’d promise kisses for near-drownings – he would feign stillness until the coldness seeped to his forehead and he became convinced that the world was draped in erstwhile frills – the veering vertigo of her mirth, to be sure. (his lips would taste of iron for many days thereafter: but it didn’t matter as long as hers did, too) come winter, when the water was too still to fathom and his eyes were too cold to see out of, she brought him goggles, asked him to slip into the water. head submerged, he drank in the chlor...

5am death dirge the street lamps shut their eyes and listen to the sui- cide cry of 5am, the dry cough of a night run out of gas, the lament of a gutted love, its tragic breath pungent with decay but wearier and a deeper blue, the throb of exhaustion as the executioner sings his last torch song, and the sparrow twitters her response: she has no regrets and he wishes that he were only so lucky  a wretched intimacy decorum is dead, your cheery welcome mat, no  more than an artifact when Misery shows up and steps over the corpse and  when Misery decides to move in she doesn't wait for an invite to cross the threshold (of your pain) arriving with all of her usual baggage side- stepping the sofa to claim your bed, a perfect setting for the spectacle of naked suffering in repose, her legs sprea...