the year is 3045
the sky has been black for like 48 hours straight
when I look outside the birds are always singing
of never-ending wars
——-
There’s a stray cat outside meowing like
where’s this promised party
suddenly i’m so disconnected from everything
my tweets are like deleting as i tweet them
Human as alien as animal as transformative substance. My gills again. My lungs left behind. The anti-intro that discusses mutations and mutations only. New genes discovered in the side streets of North Inglewood. My personal mental fitness … a direct agency to despair. Psychedelic mathematics … the double helix … organisms occur as new species … desirous selection. Cockroach shells beneath my upper lip. A thousand times a day I vomit in the open hallways. No one sees this sign … let alone someone asking my name. I am not human. Live nude guys on Instagram … the micro-evolution of asexuality … the sticky goo of human bones … a total deterioration of feeling. Continue reading “Simpering by Shane Jesse Christmass”
——-
“I will make much of your voices, and so trouble you no further”
——-
There you are love, where are you off to?
Devon
A beautiful part of the world that, you have a lovely time, send us a postcard
All right I will
You do
I will
——-
but I did work hard very hard but there wasn’t enough time because it wasn’t the right questions I did a lot of practice questions and there was always characters but this time there wasn’t I knew a lot but none of my top questions were there and that’s what’s wrong with doing exams Continue reading “New Street, between trains by Mary Frances”
You say they had a thing like a drill?
Yes and pushed it into the side of my head
Like if I take my cordless model and do this?
Yes but the tone was more organic, this hurts like hell
Theirs did not?
No, could I have a towel for the blood?
Of course
It was more like a tongue flicking into my brain
So it was attached to the creature?
Continue reading “Interview following the incident by John Porter”
“So you still think you can do it?
So tell me, what did he eat today?
And how much does he weigh?
And how long will he remain a minor?
And you actually believe him?
Stop the talk about his future. We’re talking life or death here. I’ll give you a day to think about it. But that’s it. I can’t give you anymore time than that.
It hardly matters. In New Mexico kids are given most of their rights at fourteen.
Continue reading ““… please let him hate you too … ” by Bobbi Lurie”
“Memories resurfacing” … “coagulating underneath the meniscus” … “slowly lifting over the crest” … “kino eye gazes down upon my apartment” … “witnesses our inadequate sex” … “the timid approach and delicate placement of your hands” … “there is no good fuck” … “the fragments will have to be assembled later” … “Blondboy” … “Deadboy” … “Oldboy” … “Tommyboy” … “another silhouette waiting over the horizon” … “sunset is green or burgundy” … “they’ve stopped firing rockets in the middle of the night” … “I delay my need for glasses” … “the eye doctor tells me that I can only see the past” … “not what is happening in front of me” … “medical time is organized into a linear model” … “it becomes difficult to project myself” … “smut-maker gives his body to people he does not know” … “he collects these encounters” … “builds an altar from cum and diorite” … “attempts to summon a new boy” … “no more boys” … “stone turns luminous and then returns to normal” Continue reading “Post-Erotic Ritual Text by Mike Corrao”
In memory of Sam Shepard (1943-2017)
1. Under a fat summer moon the Lost Cowboy stops his horse. Stares at the scars in his hands looking for a map to guide him home.
2. Home is the place where you always long to be but which you will never find. The Lost Cowboy still hears the words of his father.
3. Come home, oh sweet baby, come home back to me. Startled, the Lost Cowboy struggles to place his mother’s lullaby in his memory. Continue reading “The Lost Cowboy [A story in 24 tweets] by Mauricio Montiel Figueiras”
Sweeney Todd
I can promise not a hair’s breadth betwixt life and bereft. A big something for the weekend, sir? If it ain’t kitten in the pie, it will be worse, I surmise. This precariousness of my barber’s chair. That skill of mine to really polish a string of basement pearls. I hear how hair is cut from ear to ear. In a dietary reworking: I love Mrs Lovett’s pies made from meat at MacDonald’s. The big sleep of a short back and sides is my favourite read. Demonology of ruthless styles. Once I have flipped, the tresses stand on end in more ways than can be undone. Continue reading “Mike Ferguson: three poems”
Burning House Press are excited to welcome JAMES KNIGHT as our AUGUST 2019 guest editor! As of today JAMES will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of AUGUST.
Submissions are open from today – 1st AUGUST and will remain open until 24TH AUGUST.
Continue reading “AUGUST 2019 Guest Editor Is JAMES KNIGHT!!! Theme/s: VOICES”
Atlanta
Sometimes it takes a six-hour drive to meet
another villain to understand why
you became one, too. Girl he used to beat,
consensually, becomes the one you cry
to, discrete, IM introduction: “I know
what it feels like to be his orphan.” Week
commiserating online while you grow
more sure your tenure, little one, is done. Weak
enough to say yes when she suggests you
should take a holiday, Atlanta — there’s
sex clubs. She knows what looks like love — your view
opened door, her pompadour, dark suit,
stare before she zips you in an obscene dress —
feel what remains of his latest princess.
Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker from Pensacola. Her sonnets have appeared in journals like Glass, Yes, Five: 2: One, Isacoustic* and many more. She is the author of twelve books of poetry including Pink Plastic House (Maverick Duck Press), Candy Cigarette Womanchild Noir (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) and the forthcoming Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream (TwistiT Press) and The Meadow (Apep Publications, 2020). Follow her on Twitter: (@lolaandjolie) and her website http://kristingarth.com
Banner Image “Pink Bouquet” by Robert Frede Kenter. Tweets at @frede_kenter
RECONCILIATION
I broke you
out of solitary—
I did it because
I could
because it was
a dream.
Tara Skurtu @TaraSkurtu is a two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems appear in magazines such as Salmagundi, The Kenyon Review, Plume, Poetry Wales, and Poetry Review. She is the author of The Amoeba Game. Tara teaches creative writing in Bucharest.
Banner Image “Dream #4” by Robert Frede Kenter. Tweets at @frede_kenter
Gullible eggs (reprise)
My mother lied with tenderness, sweet
aplomb, and range;
she’d seen a century, our crooked sea-swelled house
cost a million, and all babies were born with feathers
that softened the world’s edges
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 