Punk Monk Press/Magazine

  --Jerome Berglund

Tuna salad dreams fly overhead.  Hunger sets in. Childhood memories –  steamy bowls of canned tomato soup &  white bread sandwiches, crusts cut off –  soft & squishy. The warmth of youth,  when life was simpler. Checkered sheets  & floral print towels, an era from past pages.  Stories written in a lined black marbled  notebook with a leaky fountain pen.  Poems written in hope / words full of life. Resonate! Hand-me-down clothes & second-hand dreams. Walking backwards through a lintel of lost time.  Craving a taste of the past / I walk into the kitchen to prepare a tuna salad dream.  --Ann Christine Tabaka

they say mary wollstonecraft shelley kept her husband's heart wrapped in his poetry, maybe love and poetry aren't dead after all; but if i had your heart in my hands after you died it's because i carved it out because the love here is more dead than mary herself— my heart turned indifferent, angry, cruel, and dark at the sound of your name when your poured your lies out insisting lust was love but you never loved me; i gave you my naked soul when you only craved my naked body like some carnal devourer of temples— don't worry i grew a new heart, and the temple has been cleansed with fire; your darkness cannot find me any longer but my rage will burn you with those orange knots of sunlight that tangoed with my hair that you photographed once. -linda m. crate

This evening’s dogwalk: springlike light and pubic grass. I moped all day in brain fog. Now  I feel my rebel hormones–wounded band  of siblings–coming to. This May, I’m turning sixty-four. An earworm Beatles tune’s tamped down by gauzy rags of dream: six-fingered hands that cut a Tarot deck. I love  the pictures, never get the meaning. That’s the deal, my darker angel tells me. Sorrow,  loss, regret, departure; friendship, drunken dancing, rowing on the moonlit river:  all mixed willy-nilly. Backyard spruces sway in soft breeze, three times taller than  they were twelve years ago. They too will die --Thomas Zimmerman 

65-year-old picture surfaces me giving her gold bracelet while she put ring onto Ger to indicate just how we are “going steady”---whatever that meant, since unsteady as they go, the both of us  were enemies next week since each one currently dates our newest bestest friend ‘til this following  Thursday I’m now seen  resting head very sadly on my girl’s shoulder once again…..forever or at least during time listened to heart-throb Frankie Avalon record? --Gerard Sarnat 

I was belly down on the floor of Zoet’s carpeted living room sniffing their Ritalin by myself. They came out of the shower and checked the bottle while dripping on me.  I’d sniffed their hospitality. The bottle had dropped below an unspoken redline. I asked to buy a few. They said I had to leave.  This was the end of our friendship. It started when I was kicked out of my mom’s house for starting a pizza cardboard kitchen fire. Zoet drove up to my new high school in the city for the opening night of Romeo and Juliet. We’d miscalculated and shown up to the cast party with a full-size bong and a bottle to a parental-presence Boggle thing. After high school I learned how to kill people and Zoet swallowed a whole bottle of psych meds. Their mom said they needed us now because a dormant problem woke up in their brain. I’d tried, when they got out of the hospital, but for me that meant getting them high and driving around for two hours looking for an ATM that would give tens.   ...