Punk Monk Press/Magazine

Afraid of abundance, too long at the bottom. blessed I stood, bright male, brilliance magnified. in the inner city, and yet, shivering in the warm, terrified of cash and neon and the women ... anyone of them could be the one, and there were these horrifying mixed drinks that I could suddenly afford, and the face in the mirror behind the bar ... no longer a child ... I wanted to lie down, lick the floor, make it my home ... I was born blue, but now grown whatever color the strobe light would have me ... not forgetting music, throbbing, throbbing, so heavy on the beat, my heart's dominatrix. --John Grey

it is almost unreal watching them two on one side of the subway seat and two on the other snorting at each other howling so ungraciously and taking photographs on their phones these wild beasts of the american night nearly all of them three-hundred pounds in mini-skirts or corsets their bare asses plastered to sticky seats full of bum jizz and toddler snot sort of human just like you one of them looks like an ogre with yellow flesh and red nostrils she keeps huffing out of her wide nose opening her wide mouth and exposing square brown teeth she’s talking about all of the men who are in love with her they all want this, she says running her thick hands down her dress who are these men? i ask my wife where do men like this exist? the two who aren’t three-hundred pounds are taking photos of each other and spraying whore perfume they keep kissing each other on the cheek making like they’re going to french kiss w...

I wallow in the depravity you encase me in, longing for your temporary emotional fix. My body needs that sensual flood that forces me back into bottomless debts. Your physical consumption inadequately soothes, filling me with rejected numbness as you cover me in a blanket of blindness, desperately trying to erase the tracks degrading me naked. --A.J. Huffman

sometimes my poems about my pain aren’t polished sometimes my pain poems come out very bad but sometimes my poems about pain soar sometimes everything’s arranged just right but it’s fucking strange to distinguish between them b/c no matter what—pain is always pain sometimes i even prefer my very bad pain poems when my pain even fucks up my creative judgment & what i get is a sick knife plunged into a pile of shit --Rob Plath

jerry teaches checkers to the delinquents where i work we ride the same bus home sometimes only we never talk one time he asked out my co-worker wanted to take her for coffee which for some reason offended her delicate sensibilities so much so that she threatened to go to the administration about it that she flashed her ring in my face like a diamond mace and said don’t he know i’m married? as if that mattered to a man so clearly desperate for love and companionship that he was willing to risk his job for black bodega sludge cream and sugar and a pretty face. --John Grochalski