Continue reading “ULTRAVIOLET: Table of Discontents”An issue replete with luscious adjectives and flights of form
Continue reading “Two poems 🍞🥖 by Sennah Yee”… sunny-side-up quail eggs on tiny slices of rock-hard baguette…
Continue reading “Two micros and a translation by Line Stockford”Serpent is truth, and so despised. No flattery, no eyelashes, no need, take what you will.
Continue reading “Prism 1 & 2 by Kenneth M Cale”ciphers small
upon a plinth
Continue reading “Holy Water (Overflow) by Colin Campbell Robinson and Paul Hawkins”We slip out into the night-bar, drink beyond satiety; fall in the
street of inequality, the place we live.
Continue reading “At the Carnival by Anne Spencer”For you—who amid the malodorous
Mechanics of this unlovely thing,
Are darling of spirit and form.
Nico in department store, New York, November 9, 1966. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah.
Sean G. Meggeson is a poet and video artist, living in Toronto, Canada where he works in as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist with his dog, Tao. He has been published in Antiphony, bethh, Die Leere Mitte, Ice Floe, Version9Magazine and others. He won the League of Canadian Poet’s Spoken Word Award in 2024. Meggeson has published three chapbooks, Cosmic Crasher (Buttonhook, 2024), ta o/j , and soma synthesis (both from lippykookpoetry, 2025). Forthcoming: a full-length poetry collection, j: poems (primitive press, Toronto, 2026). Video poems forthcoming in IceFloe, and Infocalypse Press.
Nico & Lou Reed , 1975.
Damon Hubbs is a poet and editor from New England. His collections and chapbooks include: Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), Charm of Difference (Back Room Poetry, 2024) and Coin Doors & Empires (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Recent publications include Expat Press, Apocalypse Confidential, BRUISER, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Literary Underground, & others. His latest collection, Bullet Pudding, is forthcoming from Roadside Press in 2026. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net.
Nico, Beggars Banquet Records.
Jessie Lynn McMains (they/she) is a cross-genre writer, visual artist, and longtime zine-maker currently living in the woods in northeast Wisconsin. They were the 2015-17 Poet Laureate of Racine, WI, and one of their poems received an Editor’s Choice commendation in the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. They are the author of numerous books and chapbooks, most recently There Will Be Singing About the Dark Times, a hybrid audio/print chapbook, which you can find more about on their website recklesschants.net.
Photo collage of Nico, by Billy Name, 1967.
Alistair McCartney is the author of The Disintegrations and The End of the World Book, two experimental novels published with University of Wisconsin Press. The Disintegrations is the recipient of The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. TEOTWB was a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award and the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White debut fiction award. His poetry and cross-genre writing has appeared in journals such as Hotel, Deleuzine, Fence, Light/Air, LIT, Stand, 3:AM, Vestiges, Nat.Brut, Animal Shelter (Semiotexte), ExPat Press and Pilot Press’s Paul Thek and Forbidden Colours Anthologies. He is currently working on a book of poetics and a novel. Originally from Australia, he lives in Los Angeles, where he is Teaching Faculty in Antioch University’s MFA program.
Nico in Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1967).
Yvonne Salmon is a writer, artist and filmmaker. Recent work has featured in the Ver Poetry Prize Anthology, Martello Journal and Frogmore Papers. Her study on queer sixties literature ‘Certain Circles’ appears in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (Tew et al eds).
Mark Jay is a film-maker, writer and visual artist who has been causing cultural disruptions for almost half a century. His documentary and fiction films have gained awards at international festivals and are in worldwide distribution.
Mark started SKuM ‘zine in 1976 aged 14 after bumping into members of the Sex Pistols in Rock On record shop in Camden. Issue #1 featured Sid Vicious’ first interview with his band The Flowers of Romance. Mark became an early face on the UK Punk scene— getting arrested on the Pistols’ Jubilee Boat Party, designing the cartoon poster for their debut LP, and stowing- away on the Clash’s Out of Control tour.
In 1979 Mark co-produced the post-Punk poetry ‘zine All the Poets, in London and San Francisco.
Mark has recently published two Punk Poemtry volumes on the Spinners imprint available
GESHMACK X GESHEFT (Tasty X Biznez), chronicling his extra curricular escapades from 1972-78 from Skinhead Moonstomps to Dead End Career Opportunities (that never knock).
FIVE YEARS (Between the Gutter and the Galaxies), which rips into the collision of Bowie and Primal Punk—where Rebel Rebels tore through 1972–76 Britain, spawning the Hot Tramps and theYoung Dudes who would carry Bowie’s spark forward into the chaos.
Both volumes are companions-in-spit to Mark’s forthcoming novel / Midrashic memoir of misbehaviour—THE NUDNIKS OF 1977 — to be published in 2026 by Spinners, which delves further into his back catalogue of sedition and religious disobedience.
Mark’s poemtry and prose employs an unreliable lexicon of Yinglish – a language of coughing and cursing brought over from Eastern European Shtetls in the 1880’s and stirred into the melting-pot of Cockney East London’s pie & mash emporiums.
Follow Mark’s instagram @mark.jay6262 or schlep through his website www.markjay.tv
Nico (1967) by Michael Ochs.
Vik Shirley is a poet and writer from Bristol living in Edinburgh . Her collections and chapbooks include: Persona Digitalia (PhotoWorks, 2025), a photo poetry pamphlet which was selected for the inaugural P5 photo poetry series, Some Deer (Broken Sleep, 2024), Strangers Wave (zimZalla, 2023) and Corpses (Sublunary Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Rialto, Magma, Perverseand 3am. She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from University of Birmingham.
Evening of Light music video (1969).
Jesse Hilson is a writer and artist living in the Catskills in New York State. His work has been published in venues like Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, Apocalypse Confidential, Expat Press, and others. He has published two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; a short story collection, The Calendar Factory; and a poetry collection, Handcuffing the Venus De Milo. He can be found on Instagram at @platelet60 and he runs a free Substack newsletter called Chlorophyll & Hemoglobin.
Nico in Tokyo album cover.
Logan Berry is the author of several books, including Doom is the House Without a Door and Ultratheatre: Volume 1.
A young Nico in Berlin, photographed by Herbert Tobias.
Nico Restored
I.
Because Nico could not foresee the danger ahead.
She was not careful, she was a child.
Above her Hell’s Sun
moved blackly—How far away? Shall I touch it?–
Like some shiny wet ink spot, or a stuck wet leaf.
II.
Before her journey back Nico slept and slept and
dreams: back then it was all right.
Back then it was a wall of black crickets and her baby
sitter’s ventriloquil voice.
As she slept It watched over her, and
loved her in Its brief, iron-lung heart.
It did not want to let her go, but knew, but knew.
It did not think of itself as lost, it did not think of itself at all.
It just was. It just wanted.
III.
Nico did not think of herself as lost
she did not think of herself at all.
She just was. She just wanted.
Christa wanted.
It has changed, she thinks.
Nico’s Nico. Come for Nico. She just
wanted the image of her lost face.
Herself. For a moment Nico could not imagine Nico, nor recall
the green of green, the hum of wires,
the flash of fires, the sound of sound
had come apart
IV.
It has changed.
She was nowhere.
Her heart. Inside her.
Christa wanted gravity. The thing that was not flat
watched her from behind a red cliff.
When she laid her white hand across her red heart Its mouth opened.
Her ears could not catch her own dripping sound.
She said her name to hear it, the sound
When It moved Its knotted head It pushed Itself out of gravity.
V.
Nico says: When I stand on the roof of the opera it’s amazing I don’t fly off.
Nico sits atop a red cliff, atop an expanse of red sand.
As red as far as the eye can see.
She is red, too, from the sand, mixing with her sweat.
She takes off her sweater, and
tosses it aside.
She takes off her shoes, and lies back.
She touches her body. It has changed. Her body is red.
Afterwards she leans forward to shake her hair
until grains of sand fall out like thunder.
VI.
Nico marvels that although she has not eaten she is not hungry.
It has fed her food while she slept, careful to remove each and every
crumb from her face with tweezers. It has spent an eternity
using its tweezers to move
mountains, grain by grain.
It does not want Nico to escape, but It does not know how to stop her.
The thing it does best is observe. It does not know how to stop things.
Back then it was all right.
VII.
Back then, Nico, thinks, it was all right.
It finally comes for Nico while she sleeps, curled in the sand.
It cleans her face, grain by grain, not even touching her skin.
It spread its wings over her to measure her size.
It considers its sack full of potions.
It worries she is dead and leans close in to her face.
It loves her so gently.
Take me back to back then.
VIII.
The marble index of a mind forever.
Christa wanted.
To free her mind, because it was caught.
I wouldn’t want a different variety, thinks Nico.
Nico thinks in shapes
more and more.
Round and Square.
Truth or Dare
are not shapes.
Not sound.
Not gravity.
The Absolute Zero.
Nico’s mind is a shape that comes
to free her mind, because it was caught
with Its claws
and retraces her footprints
she just wanted to free her mind, because it was caught
with Its claws
retraces her footprints
squares and triangles, circles and cones.
Her own shape, the pattern of sunlight
just wanted to free her mind, because it was caught
with Its red mountain claws and triangular imagination,
circles and cones.
Fright and dread, fear and bones, Wehrmacht dreams.
Her own
but a King.
Come for Nico.
But a King.
Come for Nico.
Her very own body in the night,
beneath the Ibiza sheets, the shape her hands make.
The real Nico, more real than real, her old self
a Sleeping Beauty for some fierce Prince
but It is not a Prince.
Shape, the pattern of moonlight upon
more and more, the hospital floor.
Her very own body in the night
beneath the light, the shape the world makes.
The real Nico, more Nico than Nico, her old self
a Sleeping Beauty for some fierce Prince.
But It is not a Prince.
Come for Nico, no fangy King
beneath the sheets
the shape her hands make.
The real Nico, more real than real, her old self
a Sleeping Beauty for some fierce Prince.
She just wanted to free her mind to be
the hunting thing with claws of shade.
Where It went, Nico wonders, and retraces her footprints.
Sleeping and murder.
Squares and triangles.
Fright and dread, fear and bones.
Her own melodic shape, the pattern of moonlight upon
the institutional floor. Her very own body in the night
beneath the white cold sheets, the red triangulated claws
of Greek thought.
The real Nico, more real than real, her old self
but this thing–this It–is not a Prince.
Rather a King.
Come for Nico.
Sleeping Beauty for some fierce Prince.
But this thing—this It—is not a Prince
rather a Devil.
come for Nico.
She just wanted to free her mind, because it was
a trick and retraces her footprints
squares and triangles, circles and cones.
She just was. She just wanted.
Christa wanted.
Her own shape, the pattern of moonlight upon
the hospital floor. Her very own Nico in the night,
beneath the sheets
she just wanted to free her mind, because It was caught
with Its Trick
and retraces her footprints, Squares and Triangles
circles and cones
fright and dread fear and bones.
Her own shape
Red-sanded body and mountain side
her cold linoleum floor.
Her very own body in the night
come for Nico.
IX
Back then it was all right.
Take me back.
Come for Nico.
Nicholas Rombes is author of the novels The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio), The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books), and Lisa 2, v 2.0 (Calamari Archives). He co-edits TIMECODES (Bloomsbury), a film book series dedicated to slow criticism and is author of 10/40/70 (Zer0 Books). He’s an English prof. in Detroit, Michigan.
Misha Honcharenko is a Ukrainian writer based in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Their debut novel, Trap Unfolds Me Greedily, was published by Sissy Anarchy in 2024, following their first poetry collection, Skin of Nocturnal Apple (Pilot Press, 2023). Their work has been featured in Vogue Ukraine, Erotic Review, i-D, AnOther, Tank, Worms, Manchester Review, and minor literature[s].
over seventy windblown years
tied to the mast, patience has eluded me
leaving me to hum along the shrillest
siren call in grating irritation
struggling to find or develop
a minimal measure of discernment
to catch my breath, one breath
between the healing itch the mending pain
and the vicious nag of wounding aches
might say my suspicious mind
dove for a dark, silty bottom
and found the drain unclogging gratitude
or trust to sluice and flush a pressured dram
of bittersweet relief
. . .
David Rodriguez is a 71-year-old prodigal son trapped in a Ground Hog Day loop. The thought that all the scribblings of my circuitous, rambling life will either end up in the dumpster or belong to a posterity I will never see has been keeping me up at night lately.
Photo by Kelly Rebar
Every year I’m taken there
the air the light the sight
of leaves
drifting past
without a care I’m driving
in the Rockies
in my old Plymouth Valiant
a shade of bronze
you don’t much see
anymore
colour of stubble
fields
at sundown
I’m barely 23, endless Christmas trees
line the highway
now it’s the mountain peaks
the sun is tinging
pink I think I even sing
(I wouldn’t put it past me)
Neil Young’s Comes a time
when you’re driftin’
Comes a time when you settle down –
Okay, what’s this
side of the road
a herd of elk
just standing there
watching
five in total
the reason I recall is
I write it down
when I get there
the cabin I’ve secured
for winter
and right on cue
like a movie
I pull up just when
it’s not dark yet but getting’ there
now that song also takes me there
to that door
the smell of firewood
stacked by the door
I watch the kettle while it boils
I open my notebook
on the kitchen table
by a window
with green curtains
and lo and behold I find a candle
meant for emergency
but at 23 who waits for that
you see a candle
you light it
I write September 1978 on the first page
No, hold on, it’s not a notebook
it’s a school scribbler
dime store type, Hilroy, map of Canada on the cover
timetable on the back
and bottom left:
30 days hath September
April June and November
I write what comes to me
how people in the past wrote it snowed all day
baked so many loaves of bread
as if it needs to be said
“Saw five elk on the way here”
and leave the unpacking
for tomorrow
but when tomorrow comes
I don’t unpack
too busy
sitting
in the sounds of silence
a woodpecker tapping
in a nearby tree
maybe I imagined that
but I know this much is true: I set my Smith Corona
on that kitchen table
by the window, the green curtains
and I tap too
all day long
tap tap
tap tap
into the next night
and all the days
and nights
after that
Who knows where those words are now
they’re long gone
but not the sound they made
landing on the page
not the smell of firewood
by the cabin door
the leaves gathering on the window ledge
the candle going out
I probably slowed
the Valiant down
when I saw the elk
I’m willing to bet I did
you never know if they are going to stay
or if they will wander
. . .
Working from the small mountain town of Nelson, BC, Canada, Kelly Rebar has written for theatre, film, and television. After a long hiatus, she recently returned to playwriting and created two one-woman shows, both written in verse and scored with music. She also works with photographic images, old and new, and writes short poems.
Ferdaminni [XI/24 – X/25]
The dust on the road
Rotting leaves on a cold autumn morning
The faint scent of hasty intimacy hours earlier
The dogs are nervous tonight
There’s blood on the wind
Floodstained thaumaturge
Pyrolatrous and atavistic
Smudging our faces with ash from bridges burnt
I’m following a blood trail
My ego has been freebleeding
All over the place again
Shamanic nights under a bright full moon
Snow in the deep forest
Moose tracks in the frozen bog
Hematite rocks the colour of red ochre
Spells of protection in the night
I met a strange god
One that no man has ever named
. . .
Myrmalmens ballade [IV/24]
I found God at a gas station in Nissedal
Now I’m siphoning gas here in Niflheim
There’s a radio tower on the heath
Amongst the cows with their GPS trackers
My mind is a swamp
Where the air is thick with things
That are out to drink my blood
I’ve got a new best friend
The red forest ant, Formica rufa
Is it all in my mind or are they all
Moving with strange synchronicity
. . .
Purple Prozac [VIII-X/24]
Chafing on my chakras
Inflammations in my legs
Stains on my soul
And I’m standing over here
Trying to laugh it off
Saying pretty please, Pleiades
With your New Moon Theory
And my dharmatology
Trying to figure out
Where all these gulls go to die
I’ve got a bad back
From looking over my shoulder
The smell of rotten petunias
In autumn grey streets
I love your geometry
Even when you taste like dead dreams
If love is solitude gone bad
Then I’m sitting here fermenting
With your pyrolatrous autumn colours
Alight in the early evening sun
The man I’ve become has no reason
To be ashamed of the boy I once was
You laid me down among the lupines
Placed a cigarette in my hand
Landscapes of IKEAs
And your crepuscular smell
I’m standing in the middle
Of the wrong side of the road
Trying to snap a picture
For our interdimensional trophy room
Wake me if you wanna smash
You said, fell asleep
And ran a fever all night
. . .
Born and raised in northern Germany and emigrated to southern Norway in his late 20s to take care of his child, Alexis Karlsen‘s work spans three languages and reflects the life experience of a disillusioned underdog drifter. Alienation, death, restlessness, substance abuse, sexuality, and the unquenchable thirst for love are recurring motives in his writing. Karlsen’s background is in social ecology, and his German-language novel Am Ende des Fadens, which touches on themes of magical realism, is nearing completion after 13 years of work. He can be found on Mastodon: @brisling@merveilles.town.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 