Breakfast at Sedlac

Breakfast at Sedlac.
By Jon Catron

Let me genuflect at your pelvis, kneeling on your spine. Venerated, your skull hangs high above, its stern, loving gaze crucifying me. Your rib cage closes about me, an iron maiden of calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, and heavy metals. I share the fate of your heart, bled out, desiccated, desecrated, consecrated in this pain. Our anatomies mingle; fluids everywhere. I drift asleep awaiting the salvation that never comes.

The Fucker Inside

The Fucker Inside by S.A. Griffin
Tainted Coffee Press
ISBN 978-0-9814685-1-8



S.A. Griffin claims to not be an erotic poet. He even goes so far as to include a poem in this slim collection explaining just that point. Despite that, most of the poems in the book deal, in some way, with sex.

The opening poem "I Ate Fig Newtons Until I Puked" uses the act of gorging on a food until you can no longer stand it as metaphor for obsessive relationships and the intense sexual passion that normally occurs at the beginning of an affair. He does this with language that is often rough, and line breaks that seem almost jarring. This is strangely effective. He evokes the disjointed quality of love and sex wonderfully.

All of the poems in this slender volume are well realized, and complete. Standing above the rest though, is a piece that seems to be the center of the work, the core: "How Many Times". This poem, though short, carries real weight. I'm not one to reproduce a poem in its entirety in the context of a review, and this poem is too short to excerpt easily. It is about (on the surface) watching a woman undress, and then seeing her as the empty clothes.

Much of Griffin's work is reminiscent of Bukowski at his best. This is powerful stuff. Griffin manages well formed, insightful, intelligent poetry dealing with sexual themes, which may be the most difficult subject for the poet to face.

The Fucker Inside is a fine book.

I SAW A MAN WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME AT THE STORE AND I FELT BAD by Sam Pink

I SAW A MAN WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME AT THE STORE AND I FELT BAD

by Sam Pink



Time is recurring terror.



There is no night and day there are only small naps.



There is no way to understand anything there are only nods.



There is no holding hands there is only making sure the other one doesn’t run.



There is no idea there is only saying something one of us already said but forgot about.



There are no naps there are only blinks.



There are no blinks there are only small rips in sight.



There is no fun there is only me not saying anything.



There is no floor there is only feeling like you can’t go below where you’re at.



There is no washer and dryer in my apartment building and that sucks fucking balls.



There are no fingers there are only smaller pieces of your arm.



There are no arms there is only your body trying to expand without your permission.



Being dead will be the easiest thing I do. I am not accomplishing anything; my feet are shovels.





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Couch Thing

Review: Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland by Howie Good
Achilles Chapbook Series
www.dogzplot.com


I received Howie Good's chapbook Tomorrowland in the mail just a few days after my mother died in a car crash. Initially I ignored it because it did not contain any alcohol and I had no time for any object that lacked the ability to numb or kill. Eventually I picked it up thinking that it would distract me from my melancholy for a bit. After reading the first poem, "Love, Death, Etc." I flung the wee book across the room and curled myself into a ball on my couch. I was angry at Mr. Good. Solipsistically, I wanted to be the only person capable of understanding my level of pain and he had cleanly disproved that theory in a single page. Some time later I returned to the slim volume and finished it. I am glad that I did.

Good weaves poems into prose (or perhaps it is the other way around) and bends beauty until it breaks. His words describe and elicit agony and love and death (and etc.). He has captured the burning heart of god on the page.

He illuminates the human condition with simple lines like:


“Where we sleep, you know, it isn’t necessarily where we wake up, it all depends on what we dream, my dead mother for example, crisscrossed by the fence, fingers hooked through the diamond shaped links.”

or:

“Quick, send the extruded plastic moon to this address and because the ambulance driver will get lost in the maze of small, unlighted streets, send the moon out for an encore.”

or:

“not knowing what I’ll remember one day or that no one escapes the fire.”

Good plays with words the way a virtuoso plays the strings of some obscure, forgotten instrument. He understands grief and pain and how to express them fully in ways that most poets could only dream.

This is a wonderful and marvelous and painful book.


-Nathan Tyree

Sam Pink

Nathan Tyree has interviewed Sam Pink for Bookmunch. Pink is the author of I'm Going to Clone Myself then Kill the Clone and Eat it.

Over and Out

4 Poems by Z. Lustig

Four Poems by:

Z. Lustig


Dog Fathers

I ate her face
it tasted like
frozen peas
but I seemed
to enjoy it
anyway



Love Story

If I chew enough gum
then the bitch wont be\
able to catch me when
I run out back of the
shed
and fuck her sister
before she starts
to rot.


The Fight

She's dead now



The headhunter's hair

My last breath is taken by
a headhunter with the dread
gum disease known as
gingivitis. He has
golden feathers in
his redolent hair