Punk Monk Press/Magazine

it was the year they sent men off into space not to travel to the moon or Mars, rather to journey the chasm between deafened ears brains spilled wholesale into sinkholes that swallowed the crenellated gray masses whole some time after women burned their bras and draftees flamed the fires with their draft cards created a magic potion that showered one with fortitude the other with hollowness and intemperate indifference elephantine weight lifted from them, they stripped themselves to roam the streets forlorn in lumberjack shirts and droopy pants, buttockless bumpkins in their colorful BVDs astronauts of an earth without dreams, thumbed clods fixated on monitors and screens watching feckless selves meander inane highways their own space devoid of Aristotle and Archimedes ancient medicinals for atrophying minds now narcoleptic apes who deposit semen in jars that year when descendancy laid a black shr...

don't  scream against forbidden unspeakable  things SUPPRESS and daily life takes over raise me, take me,  feed me, show me Baby's daily demands camouflaging the one detail that rages in the turbulent conjugal bed the bites on the arms that imprison me, melt him the intensifying caresses rape us, the writhing hiding my pain hides his pleasure  slowly removing the hand that trespassed and the invasion of the injurious look of sex over and over and over  streaming beneath the cover of the washed sheets rewinding and reviewing  watching it unfold raw and somehow now flowing... ...the screaming...streaming --Montes DeRey

Caged These fucking breasts have condemned me Forced to relinquish my dignity.                 Bitch, whore, wife                 Love of my life I live where thoughts are a sin. My barren soul consumed from within Holy matrimony, my ass.                 Kneel, suck, spit                 Pray it be quick I live where thoughts are a sin. Forgotten in this godforsaken kitchen Tidy after the children.                   Cleanliness                  ...

tea leaves and dissolving sugar fall into a half moon   in the bottom  of my mug, slipping into ceramic trenches   like soldiers  dressed in camouflage  with grenades    and fingers folded around  triggers. --Emily Ramser

The whole memory of it is breasts: the baby trying to clamp on, head bobbing around the flesh, I help her find each warm nipple, holding her head in one palm, her bottom in the other. I told no one of her delivery. How suddenly she was there, belonging to me. I was some kind of whore a loveless woman, myself. She was five pounds and thirteen ounces: too small. I kept forgetting to feed her. None of it was as it should be; I was sorry the whole time. A half family and somebody's joke. She sucked through the whole dream. --Jennifer Raha