Punk Monk Press/Magazine

Nerves terminally frayed like fiber-optic threads unevenly broken off at the ends, jangling spurs working their way up and down your spine. A little prick here or there (especially there) to let you know you're awake dreaming still crunchingly conscious of the soothing background noises. Blinds creaking across the street. Scrape of a pair of worn-down dress shoes. A whining that seems to be coming from somewhere much too close by. You take another handful of frazzled filaments, stroke them across your virtual whetstone, admire the way they glitter under the neon lights. --Jeffrey Park

Jobless Something's wrong   you're doing   what you said you'd never do teasing men for a date and dinner at the restaurant table   inspiring him to take a peep at your cleavage then as he glances away   you hide a chunk of steak and bread in your purse saving it   for home and your hungry father. Nudist Wishing I was a flower showing my inner colors not worrying what others think sun caressing my petals no man moaning blasphemies.

I live on a midriff. I'm a souvenir of a birth twenty five years ago. I zigzag down a cheek. I'm the evidence of a knife-fight, just last year. Once I could burst into flame with just a touch but I'm calm now. The embers are faces. The ashes are spread throughout this world  I'm a story teller. I say to you tough guy, I can eat pain. I'm supposed to grow more invisible with the years, though maybe that's indivisible. I just say that as long as I live I will be the unsmoothable join of anger and terror. And I've got brothers and sisters up and down two arms, I've got a second cousin crisscrossing a heart. Better than that, I've got a body hanging off me that was a billion or more scars in the making. --John Grey

December twenty-twelve and if the Mayans got it right I can stop fretting about my bi-polar suicide attempts. I'm happy now, thinking of disaster (outside myself!), the unequivocal joy of swift and certain annihilation. Gone the agonizing dilemmas of just how to do it (gun, blade, pills, gas… rope, bridge, booze, risky sex or radio in the bath)…I'd considered both razor and rat poison, an anchored dip in the frigid black lake at midnight. Meteor, earthquake, asteroid. Hail big as the moon (come soon!). Take my mom, too….she owes me money, whoa, this is getting good---so many problems solved in the blink of an eye. DEAR WORLD, if you read this (hopefully in some exotic poetry magazine) we have survived . I remain, no doubt, screwed-up as always and fantasizing my own demise. Me, me, me, on a globe of you. Forgive my narcissism, petty thieveries. Come Valentine's I'll be jolly again, really manic, Hell-bent on chocolates and red-velvet

Anxiety swirls within my bones and fills my fingertips with poison And my feet with a beating, a bleating, A wanting something to quell the pulse, To still the beat that brings the restless sense Of darts rushing towards me, through me, in me. And I am sure one of those darts will pierce my heart. I tap my foot and my voice shakes. But to be manic is to be fully alive; to feel each pulse Coursing through my veins and want to feed from it Want to move, fly, smile, cry for joy. Work and mere thought becomes the simplest of tasks. You can do anything. You are a king, a president, the master of your Universe and the stars line up to praise you when you are around. You stop the dart with your eyes, catch it in mid-air, and send it back to where it came. You make a bull’s-eye. Then comes the crash. Depression takes the wind out of you like an embalmer removing all of your fluid. You can’t move. Your limbs are weighed down by the very air you breathe.

You were gone when I got home at midnight from a double shift. Now you’re back, two years later. I had no idea where you went so I packed up and got a room. Long ago, I begged you not to leave but that was then. You can keep the house, the car. I'll come by some starry night when the moon is bright and you're asleep. I promise not to wake the dogs. When you get up you'll find I used my key to take the kids. -- Donal Mahoney

such profound pronouncements on personal disfigurement, I wonder if once you were pretty, perhaps, prepubescent, a child angry at adults who adored the doll with all the bumps and scars on the inside. did friendly hands, friendly eyes, friendly voices chuck you beneath your chubby chin look into innocent eyes and lovingly only see a happy, beautiful  baby? struggling to stifle the screams, the dreams, labored breath clinging to damp, dying lungs, I wonder, when you were young, with this limp, these twisted bones, did loving voices coax you along give you hope? --Holly Day

although affluent and choate before permitting entry she was left quite broke/n after he broke in. it was a sordid sort of checkmate. -- Jocelyn Crawley

  You’re dark and pretty and I’m too blonde.   You’re petite and              probably a    little shy.                 And I’m gaudy and                                rough enough not to                                                              care.   You’re no-doubtedly elegant and                                           quick,                                  but I have sturdier wheels.   Even your man would probably                                             drive us                                             differently.   He might kiss you more. He might beat on me a little harder.       --Misty Rampart

ziggy knows the lack be-hind my starless eyes the zombie addiction & flinch checkmates me in bad super- markets i am meat or fowl my own mother would have said "shit" & returned me to produce saved her hop- e for a second son in a back freezer --Kyle Hemmings

i so badly want to stick my fingers up my vag i mean it. i would trade anything in the world my new suit, my freshly blown hair and this whole set-up of murphy's law - my nice house and this air of culture i have to put up around other women with the same coifed mane. i just want to dig around the old bush and scratch the itch with my index if not for the bloody fact that i just did my nails today. manicure. red as rubies gleaming evilly at me under the light whilst someone passes me a glass of red wine in which i am dying to break the stem with, upon his pompous head. i would go to jail right now just for that just for the chance to feel up my blubbery lovely labia. --Euginia Tan

Want some dirty little secrets on what makes us tick? (And purr? And hiss?) Check out our smashing six-question interview conducted by Jim Harrington! http://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.ca/2012/11/six-questions-for-jennifer-patterson.html Yours in love and darkness, Ms. Taylor Adams and Ms. Jennifer Patterson

The doctor says the o-word and it hangs like a guillotine in the air. Your father asks,  If this was your child?  The doctor says,  Yes, of course. Without a doubt. Do I have your permission?  Your mother, exhausted from delivering you, is crumpled on the bed, her open-backed gown still pushed up around her wet thighs. Your father looks at his wife, at her damp curls slicked back. She is too scared to cry. That's when your father says it.  Yes.  You imagine that tiny yes fluttering down from your father's lips like a falling maple seed. Sometimes it is a helpless yes, a grasping yes, a choking yes, a yes that wraps itself around his throat until it squeezes the last drop of air from his soft esophagus. Sometimes it is a mean yes, a cruel yes, a yes delivered in relief, a yes uttered simply so the decision will be behind him. And sometimes it is a no-yes, a yes that might have been conceived of as a no, a no that might have morphed into a yes, spontaneously, on his lips, like

Black tie-dye canaries stall the hands of time cradling infants still umbilicalled in the hanging garden’s euphemism Cataclysms and Catholism may be the answer to a self-imposed self-apocalyptic junk-alcoholic veering down the tracks @ a 125 miles per hour but I can’t see the moon trying to  eclipse the sky for it is fucked as I am fucked LA must be a logical place harboring my body as an epileptic earthquake the Richter scale reads: 10+10+10, and I wished my superficial girlfriend would stop reading me bedtime stories gauged with animalstic fairy tales of skid row; I feel barbaric and I want to conquer Germania just to fuck with the demon dogs in her head but she constricts and I have flash backs of birth of contractions of gestation of copulation, and I can see my mother poetically broken by what took an eternity to create merely took seconds to destroy- and the roses smell pretty, still -- Devlin De La Chapa

I listen Will it ever end? Her gentle, velvety voice mimicking childish sobs amidst animal grunts   Head under pillow Camping in Africa on a space ship in Galactica; an unseen witness to murder in an abandoned graffiti-coloured crime district     I cradle my teddy bear, close to my chest, covered head to toe in my feathery nest.     I stroke it whisper You’re not alone I’m here. Shh, don’t cry Fingers in ears so hard it hurts to avert my ache—her cries—his screeching—the insufferable thunderous thump through thin floor     I climb out of bed, creep down the hall, peer through the crack of the kitchen door.   Grey netting hangs from naked papery breasts, dark purple tulle fastened round her waist black smudges smeared ’cross her face. patterned like lace wet stringy hair sticks to her brow her neck wet cotton sweat toxic breath menstruation blood the onion soup we ate for lunch— I dry-wretch     It stops—silence Her arms hover in the air. Twisted

           Animal sounds exploded from my parents’ room late at night. From the bottom bunk, I could hear my sister’s breathing, quiet and steady as my own. I covered my head with a pillow and waited for it to be over, for the sounds to stop. He’s going to crush her, I thought. I waited to hear my mom’s voice or her footstep, light, in the hallway. She never came. My father walked heavy to the bathroom, running water, coughing. No mom. She was still alive in the morning, but tired. The circles had purpled under her eyes.                Today I can see her then, eyes turned to the ceiling, searching for some pattern, waiting for the light to come. She is holding her breath, being forced against the sheet, mattress springs in her back. Where was it before her? Where is he taking her and when will he get there? Her face has turned toward morning drifting through the window. Maybe she is waiting for me to save her, to meet her in the bathroom to nurse her

What if I were to reach the height of life Aged, alone, unmarried rotting with the walls eating their pet rats in my New York New York apartment awaiting a vicious horde of angels to sweep me off my feet infect my lungs with cosmic dust rather rationalizing reality an indivisible banner ravaged by Gale of Perspective What if I were to be Aged, alone, unmarried   -- Jeremiah Walton    

You told me I was ugly.   You told me I was cold.   You said my surface beauty meant compassionless.   You called me selfish bitch .   You called me trashy slut .   You stuck your fingers in your cunt, ran them through my tangled hair, spat in my face -- I let you.   You liked to slap me.   You needed to choke me.   You encouraged me to drive a knife into my trusting arm.   But still I stroked your cheek when you’d overdose, because I loved you like a child who had no where else to turn.   But, Mother can you please release me from your twisted grip? I know it’s not a prison cell, but heavy grief grows mould.   I need to clean these chains— these strings of velvet woe, before these memories stimulate one more masticating echo.       -- Jessica Bell

For 48 hours, strangers paraded up cold,  concrete steps, investigating a lifetime  of collectibles, fishing lures, marina sketches, chopped  bits of animal pelts he had placed inside boxes  like trophies. Dusty books about ancient aliens,  Yukon prostitutes, and PCs for Dummies  bordered the edges of each room, showing off  those subjects that had consumed his mind  in private. The procession continued after the burial, each visitor anxious to get their hands on a piece  of his life’s work, odd figurines, food choppers, Hummels  with missing body parts, and miscellaneous books  on how to be a millionaire in secret.  A blue-haired lady wearing a tight  bun gaped in disgust. The man who’d fed her family  40 years of fish dinners was a disgrace, his home gutted,  his skeletons laid out on the table for all of the hungry  bargain hunters to see. --Linda G. Hatton

  On rental bed in the apartment where her drunken boyfriend peed on borrowed living room furniture late one fall, she gripped the phone with moistened hand, wet from the news that you were marrying someone else, knowing she deserved better than getting pissed on, knowing still it was all she had left   -- Linda G. Hatton    

You’re no longer my lover not since you twisted that speculum inside me, to examine my connective tissue.  Revision: fuck. Watch the blood and filaments and flipper- feet expand then contract when untimely ripp’d.  Black specks. bulbous brain cavity swimming in an air-less bucket, seeing and not seen in the amniotic fluid within the bubblegum sphere. you walked out this morning.  Pacing as you turned your panties inside- out.  Slid one hole up your leg, then the other. Cloudy silhouette, still now – you look at me. Are you crying? When our eyes meet, this time- I feel nothing. And I didn’t even get to tell you, how pretty your dress looks, when you’re on your knees, disinfected.

Already lived in too many places- could make a necklace with all the keys. So many faces blurring into one, some man-god stuck-up and stupid. Only one I don't want to forget... After a while he saw past me, what I would probably become. He told me and left before I could beg him to take me. Probably the years between us would widen too much. This is what I tell myself, when the night stretches me out on my bed, comfort of his words still in my head. Long nights hanging heavy around my neck, those keys staining a rust river running between my breasts, dripping into emptiness. --Anita McQueen

A Pussy Riot masque-- Faces tucked beneath cowls They gyrate madly Awkward Elaine-dancing-sisters Weeble and wobble To punk rhythms, agitated dys-syncopated sixteenth notes of protest. Freedom dances in their heads head-clanging freedom songs Thirty seconds of cause célèbre Joyful kerfuffle Marshall McLuhan would have relished. Congregants sizzle, nuns shackle themselves to the foofaraw elders shoo them from the altar. Police indignation hies them from the scene where they languish in cells. Soft-shelled crab, Vlad the Impaler, skin so sere blood flows like lava just below the surface. Put in chains-- Free speech, they learn Has its limits. --Sy Roth

anxiety encumbers the soul    melancholy+depression—colour of coal      life is tiring coal in this regard is the antonym of ease the way a tight pair of black stockings    [wraps]       chubby thighs tearing the pair of s/t/o/c/k/i/n/g/s away                                 is the synonym of ease liberation+euphoria—colour of light -- Ali Znaidi

Back Beat? I wish I knew you or understood you when you speak to me or even when you don't speak to me when you say don't go don't stay don't talk don't think don't speak don't walk don't wait don't feel just fuck just fuck just fuck you say the words like fists strike me batter me batter my mind batter it hard until it drips with thick golden goo and drops to the steaming pavement in a bubbling ball smashed flat with an old wrought iron plate that probably belongs in my head grey and cold like the lock on my belt my chastity belt your toy you like me to wear you know so only you can fuck me or maybe so only I get fucked I never could get that right or straight as the way to hell that's where I'm going nowhere else to go but down down but only when we fuck then go down way down on a spiraling slide of darkness that spits me out regurgitates that sticky white wad of me right back into the misunderstanding of your arms. Resp