The Snide Ethic by Jessy Randall

You're having a lot of fun while the rest of us die off around you. Giggling in the back row while we decompose in the front.


Jessy Randall's collection of poems A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road Press, 2007) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her poems and other works have appeared in Asimov's, Coconut, Many Mountains Moving, McSweeney's, and No Tell Motel. She has a young adult novel forthcoming in 2009, and her website is http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall.

Phone Sex With You by Jessy Randall

What are you wearing?
Um, pants and a shirt
Can you make it more sexy?
And a knit hat
Now you're lying
I'm wearing a poncho
Take it off
I'm taking off my poncho in a really sexy way
Describe it
It has Velcro and I'm unvelcroing the Velcro
What sound does it make?
A sexy sound like khkhkhkhkh
A velcroey sound


Jessy Randall's collection of poems A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road Press, 2007) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her poems and other works have appeared in Asimov's, Coconut, Many Mountains Moving, McSweeney's, and No Tell Motel. She has a young adult novel forthcoming in 2009, and her website is http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall.

Say What You Will by Grace Cavalieri

I miss them. The women of the 50's, plain sheath dresses, large plastic earrings, coifed hair. How they moved in the room. The one with misshapen legs would be complimented for her stockings. The women greet each other and touch hands. I lean my back against the white linen lady, my back against her heart. She places her hand over my shoulder high on my chest and holds me to her. It says I know something bad, I will never tell you. Your husband. There is no redress. How I miss them, the women of the 60's, sandals and long colorful skirts, flopping their brilliance for sale. A high level of amiability, motives for manners, the women of the 80's clicking high heels at meetings, lunch, umbrellas lost in restaurants. They do not like the light, these spirits. I lean back. I can still feel her hand on my chest, they died just when everything was going so well, and she almost a perfect stranger.

Grace Cavalieri has published several books of poetry. Water on the Sun (Jacaranda Press, San Jose) was listed on Pen American Center’s 2006 Best Books List. Among production awards, her recent play “Quilting the Sun” received a key to the city of Greenville, S.C.. Anna Nicole : Poems (Goss 183: Casa Menendez, 2008)is her latest book. She produces and hosts “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” for public radio.
www.gracecavalieri.com
http://www.miporadio.net/GRACE_CAVALIERI/
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html (The Poet and the Poem from the LOC)
_http://www.themontserratreview.com

I'm In No Tell Motel This Week

On a personal note, my poems are up at No Tell Motel this week. I thank Reb for taking them, and I hope you all enjoy them.

Bird's Eye by Kim Triedman

The day is still— fly with me.
Already I can see
the burning of the trees, and
above me only more and more
of yellow
spun to gold. You used to know
all the best places, the
ways.
See there—
that cornfield? Perhaps
that is where it all began,
the plowing and the seeding, the
sweat, yours, mine, salting
the earth. Even those
low stone walls, the ones that
stitch a lifetime
into patchwork, I thought
they were the kind that
never fell down.


Kim Triedman has worked in both poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection – "bathe in it or sleep" – was named winner of this year’s Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition and has just been released by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. In the past year, she’s also been named finalist for the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award, finalist for the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition and semi-finalist for the 2008 Parthenon Prize for Fiction. Her poems have been published/accepted widely by literary journals and anthologies, including The Aurorean, The New Writer, Byline Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Journal, Main Street Rag, Poetry Monthly, Current Accounts, Ghoti Magazine, IF Poetry Journal, Great Kills Review, Trespass Magazine, ART TIMES, and FRiGG Magazine. She is a graduate of Brown University and lives in Arlington.
links:
website - www.kimtriedman.net
Main Street Rag on-line bookstore - www.mainstreetrag.com/store/chapbooks.php

Kerning by Ann Cefola

Don’t give me that stenography crap,
the designer says, protesting two spaces
inserted after each period. Let me tell you what happens
when you do that: In the text you create rivers of light.
But, I want to say, spaces tell me to stop. Breathe.

They are waiters bringing tropical drinks with paper umbrellas. Twin beds
made up perfectly. Binocular lenses that form
one image. Miles of thought
after reading a billboard. The weekend. Systolic and diastolic pumps.
Good fences that make good neighbors. A swim lane’s
quivering blue lines. Deus
ex machina.

Give me a canoe. I will paddle those illuminated waters,
salute capitals and glide over run-on sentences like rapids. Yes,
the river will take me. Past misspellings and dangling participles.
Don’t dam them up. Text is tantric, it must stop
to be savored, to be full. Save the double spaces!
You must be reminded to—as the counterman
sighs when you hunt for change,
Take your time.

Ann Cefola is the author of Sugaring (Dancing Girl Press, 2007) and translator of Hélène Sanguinetti’s Hence this cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2007). Her Web sites are www.anncefola.com and www.annogram.blogspot.com; chapbook: http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/sugaring.html, and translation: http://www.spdbooks.org/root/pages/serp.asp?Title=hence+this+cradle&submit=Search&Author=Firstname+Lastname

Arrangement #5 by Jordan Sanderson

We live in an obvious manor,

if a bit unconventional, capricious.

A well-organized, safe manor.

An easy and conversational manor.

Everyone who visits has good mannerisms.

"What manner of manor is this?" you might ask.

Our manor is in the manner of Modigliani's

milieu. This manor knows nothing of mountains,

little of macaroni, even less of mourning.

Mooching, yes. Schmoozing, even more.

Of mayhem and mealie pudding, an expert.

A man of mangoes and a man of moons talk

man-to-man in the manor about a man of manacles

and a man of mandrakes. We are a family

of manicous, munching minneolas in the mangy manor.

Jordan Sanderson is originally from Hattiesburg, MS, and earned a PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi. His poems have appeared in several online and print journals, including Madhatter's Review, DMQ Review, and Parthenon West Review. He also has poems forthcoming from Double Room and Caketrain. He currently lives in Auburn, AL, and teaches at Auburn University. He has four poems in the previous issue (Issue 9) of Mad Hatters' Review: http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue9/poetry_sanderson.shtml. And two plays in a previous issue (2.1) of Prick of the Spindle: http://www.prickofthespindle.com/drama/2.1/sanderson/the_cow.htm, http://www.prickofthespindle.com/drama/2.1/sanderson/jamaica.htm

Early Onset Twilight by Carl Annarummo

The history of a city with its lights turned off. Its ghosts clad in
eurethanes in the western outskirts, sitting with hiccups in neon
alcoholic rooms. This city was once an anagram for the poor. The bus
routes traced into air with rust and washed away in the drawl of
american water. Someone left their list of favorite songs in the
frozen food aisle. Big songs lorn in the titty bars where backup
singers follow you home with their hair muffling the russet scrims of
the traveling skyline. There's been a power outage. Smoke rises from a
tire fire. A hundred Days Inn employees enter the throes that comes
with dealing with strangers in the night as the fires are off by dusk
and the nights erase the heat. Pretty soon, you, the backup sigers,
the Days Inn maid staff, the strange firefighters, the tire-fire
onlookers, and myself all gather in the house of whoever has a
generator and we we'll all share stories and occasionally throw up
from the smell of the burning rubber and by morning we'll all be gone.

Carl Annarummo runs the chapbook press "Greying Ghost"
(www.airforcejoyride.com). He currently lives in the Boston area.

How to Call It by Alan King

Take the woman walking
alone down a boulevard
of lovers,

or the guy seated
at a table for two
with a glass of wine

and his favorite book.
Those around them will
call it as they understand.

The two individuals
unaware of the spectacle
they've become.

As if some wind-up toy
marching into walls,
or ending up in a corner

somewhere, waiting on
the great hand of kindness
to set it straight.

I need a lot of things - lips
and fingers waking the body.
And from what?

Call it hibernation,
but never loneliness.

Alan King's current publications include work in Drunken Boat, Alehouse, and Farfelu. Alan King may be found at: http://myspace.com/alanking81, http://pw.org/content/alan_king, and http://www.pw.org/content/alan_king.

My Feet Are Not From Here by Naomi Neal

I have a place to call
Home
and a pocket full of
bus transfers.
Today the sun is out but it's too tired
to give us really
good weather.
There's autumn
and dim sum
in the air.

My feet are not from here.

I will spend all my money on candy and tarot cards
I will promise to do things that I don't want to do
I will close my ears to the sound of my voice

Dusk is coming on
More hair is left in the brush
every day.

Naomi Neal is seventeen years old. She is writing her first novel, a multi-perspective family drama set in Centralia, Pennsylvania, the site of a forty-five-year-old mine fire. She lives in California but plans to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico next year to attend St. John's College. In her spare time, she hikes, collects books, and cooks with friends.

—space between pickets— by Matthew Guenette

I'm going to study the yard. This is

what I'm thinking, standing in the kitchen


(in a brief parenthesis of calm in

the afternoon's demands) looking out the


back door's blue-latticed windows at the wet

yard littered with unraked leaves. Marking


the wood fence at the far end—its gnarled and scoured

tones of brown, the spaces between pickets


where slim fingers of lilacs have poked through—

I read it left to right, the fence ending


in exclamation. Shrubs, telephone pole,

a towering tree whose leaves have brightly


yellowed. The tree, what's its name? Already,

there's something I don't know.

Matthew Guenette's first book, Sudden Anthem, won the 2007 American Poetry Journal Book Prize from Dream Horse Press. I have work forthcoming in decomP, Umbrella, and the Versus Anthology (Press 23, 2009).

WHY THE FACE by Howard Good

Because the road climbs as though attracted by the form of a mountain. Because she has her sleeve rolled up and a snarling dragon tattoo. Because certain lies are best told in legal language. Because the machine accepts only quarters. Because Freud said whether it happens for real or happens in dreams it happens. Because matter echoes like an accidental gunshot. Because the graves are desecrated but the borders guarded. Because it isn’t raining. Because later it might.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of five poetry chapbooks, including the e-book Police and Questions (Right Hand Pointing, 2008), available free at http://www.righthandpointing.com/howiegood/