Punk Monk Press/Magazine

furious to the wall heated in the hall laughter let loud shouting to burn dying to save reaching to feel need to be needed must be heeded.     --JD DeHart

my pink petals darkened brown  I thought for the sin of my unwashed hands.  Barbie doll romantic reenactments  always terminated in taboo  Georgia O’Keefe finger painting. When I first saw a lady slipper in the woods,  I knew it had nothing to do with shoes,  unless you’re talking pumps, just for the sound of it.  it has a labellum,  just say it slow and sultry like with your honey sweet lips. And of course bellum is Latin for war. A phalaenopsis orchid: phalaina from Greek, meaning moth but I see a soft phallus in the word, spelled more prettily. I mean it has a tiny nub called a column, and therefore columns in common flowers are  called the stigma,  and that’s what I certainly had, with my boy-bruised petals  back in a spring equinox that was never equal.  Maybe Aristotle knew what he was talking about when he used opsis to mean final tragedy, because everyone knows mot...

As far as I’m concerned, I told you I was gay When I bit Barbie’s head off   As far as I’m concerned, I told you I was gay when I stole Jim’s racecar pajamas And wore them underneath   As far as I’m concerned The baseball cap I wore from ages five to fourteen Was one of the many ways I told you I was gay   When I refused to wear the top To my bathing suits I was telling you   When I insisted on swigging soda From the bottle So it looked more like your beer I was clearly telling you I was gay   When I wore a sweatshirt Over 2 t-shirts With a mustard stain on each of them I was telling you   When you teased me about wanting To marry Joe Namath And I said, no, I wanted to be Joe Namath I was telling you When I asked you to call me “Sport” instead of “Sweetheart’” I was telling you When I wiped my mouth on my sleeve Shoved my hands in my pockets Practiced spitting, grunting And pe...

Wheeled out in prime time, dusted off, make-up girls powdering her up from crusted toe to nose, Lot’s wife dug from the desert, placed on a sound stage under lights to amuse the martini boys and girls and sell a few six packs—here the aftermath of a sand god speaks to the masses in a tongue they do not hear. Could be Oprah or Maury, Johnny or Dave—no matter, any full set of teeth and lacquered hairdo will suffice. So Lot’s dear wife sits as a caked mannequin, camel smile burnt on for millennia, limestone ears buzzed by an audience’s tinnitus, listens to the micro-phoned questions coming from a crowd eager to consume a rock woman’s answers. Her thoughts ooze out like moss on stone. They would fish-hook them from her frozen tongue. Her gaze of ages from welded eyes made cracked crystal by Sodom’s burned turrets. This the lack of obedience from the spirits’ warning of not to gaze on the white incarnation, solid fog made of ...

Starchy corn Plowing Summer heat Shit planting flies With a windmill in the background Possessions Enough money raised Timber, low beams Chunky leather sofas Sticks to our bare legs As the furniture moves                 past our noses A washing machine and wooden chairs            for the dining table Upstairs there are cries and groans Beds being assembled Trapping fingers Breaking nails and Bruising knees On the hardwood floor Rugs We need some rugs for our new home too. --Katie Lewington

As a girl I was told that it was better to sit in silence—because I was a girl, so I sat in silence as a girl.           Not to be denied, I knew my creative power, made a box of words that in curvaceous moments pulled muscle cars from the past that drove me along in perfect seeing silence. Those who made me mute may as well have written an obituary of rocks.   They did not understand that my multi-colored         leggings gave tread to my wanderings where I would someday embrace the PTSD, love the past ripped pains.           In my hush I saw that most men would have an Ithaca-moment, that metallic lingerie was nothing but a subversion of surfaces withholding encrypted love,         that their glass gears, confectioned cogs prevented them from ever knowing an intimate, perfect tension, from...

The disorder of the fluffy clouds And the crumbs scattered on the kitchen top The curtains rumpled And the prints on the floor                      My clammy feet are making                              ------- Untidy messes Starting with the bed The sheets wet,  stinking of sweat                   And sex You naked Cigarette smouldering in your mouth As you open the window And lean out Observing your Kingdom It ends abruptly A ring tone howling A phone call and your concerns are elsewhere Am I merely travelling the rainbow Will there be a pot of gold And I feel  -lonely Now Anticipating the weekend I will keep busy But it will be empty As I search O...

This piece was originally performed at Cha Island on March 26, 2015 for our local Speak Your Peace! event. It was amazing. You shoulda been. I never got to enjoy the oceans ~~ When the car creeps into the empty intersection on a red light, then slowly reverses at a sharp angle I say, "What the hell was that?" He says, "Turning...?" I laugh like a fool Apparently my laughter is contagious     If I wanted to go for a drink, I could do it now I can make my own decisions, drive and fuck and open a bank account I can walk from here to Europe if I really want because Every ocean has been replaced by rigid concrete And I no longer have an excuse to drown     200 days of being a juvenile later Whose feet are these, on which I must stabilize my weight? The advantage of seizing strong legs to hold me up is the certainty of a dance while the disadvantage is dancing a dance that is not mine     We promptly got lost. We en...

This piece was originally performed at Cha Island on March 26, 2015 for our local Speak Your Peace! event. It was awesome. You shoulda been. you can think if you like, the cosmic ebb &flow is an oddity you’ve come to intimately know chaos isnt a dance to be memorized its all improv babe thrash, weave maybe even land on both feet that moody sea lulls you to a false stability then flips ship on you sometimes im a narwhal or else im grasping at staying afloat what tastes worse , the water or the air? so often peace of mind feels so goddamn remote i dont know what to do anymore numb or overrun masterfully glacial or flash flood perpetual motion mind & cement in my blood i dont think i like it my sober stream of thought the screaming is too loud death wails of a planet clutching a knife wound-oil stain of human greed and obsession to"succeed" corruption down to the seed in the core in the rotten blood electric fruit served on rustic pharma fresh st...

I originally performed this piece at Cha Island in March 2015 for our local Speak Your Peace! event. Everyone was amazing. You shoulda been. Cunt Talk Now I know we don’t wanna talk about cunts ‘Cause men fear them which means they fear us Nobody wants to talk about blood in the soul or spit Nobody wants to hear about the times I thrashed against my clit when I fucked the whole world away and felt nothing. Nobody wants to see me look at her to imagine touching her to wonder if I could these fingers have drawn a thousand lines in my mind yet rarely materialised against thigh only once or twice and even then too ashamed to be wet preoccupied with a million lies like You’re cute when you’re angry I’m good when I do what they tell me I wanna fuck hard and loud and I don’t give a fuck who it is or if it hurts This body wasn’t mine it belonged to every eye and when he stuck it in I didn’t cringe. Didn’t cry. Just held my hands against his shirt ...

This piece was originally performed at Cha Island on March 26, 2015 for our local Speak Your Peace! event. It was awesome. You shoulda been. Whisper to ROAR I spoke, it wasn't very loud and no one heard me I was not heard and it felt like I was not seen, In my private place I spoke long of all the things I wondered about, thought about things, I wanted to see if someone would listen. If they saw me maybe they would hear me. I tried to speak again and no one heard me I felt so sad, so all alone, I started crying. Now there was SHOUTING!: I'll give you something to cry about. I was in shock, I did not know that tears were loud and could be heard when my voice could not. My voice kept trying to be heard but it had no strength I tried to shush my tears but they could not be quieted I tried to listen, to hear the voices of others, perhaps their voice could become mine In my head, I heard so many voices most of them angry, threatening and loud...

This piece was originally performed at Cha Island on March 26, 2015 for our local Speak Your Peace! event. It was amazing. For fifteen years or more, I've felt invisible. I recall saying, at the age of seven, that I couldn't possibly accomplish anything because I was a young half-Native girl (being the opposite of my oppressors, the middle-aged-to-old white men of power, but luckily I had parents to usher those ideas out with the words of, "It's because of those things that you have the power to do anything." And for a decade, half my life no less! I lived on the reserve, but there are people here who've known me for years without realizing where I'm from, so maybe I should stop my own erasure and declare my heritage proudly! (Or sadly once you realize just how decimated the culture truly is.) Passing on partial pale-skinned privilege, have I shucked the identity I lamented at age seven, I created on to suit the system for my late success. I wo...

There is bad blood in the genealogy of my Grandfather’s line on my Mother’s side, full of strange perversions and sexual proclivities that are not smiled upon in polite society. Things that make a normal man cringe, especially if that man happens to be me. I have to face the fact that such blood runs in my veins. I’ve detoxified on celery and carrot juice until the cows come home, but that kind of shit runs deep, and sewer sludge isn’t that easy to flush clean. There is toxic blood in the genealogy of my Grandfather’s line on my Father’s side, full of wine and liquor, full of ego and ink that spills on the page with each drink down the drain. The type of genes that cause the liver to fill up like a bloated whale, and can lead to nausea that takes the cake, and then vomits it up on occasions when the nights go too long, running into the mornings, once a year or so. All this crazy blood swirls like a genetic s...