Thick With Conviction

Those People   I never wanted any more than I could fit into my head- Dave Grohl, Monkey Wrench   They want a McMansion, with a pool and hot tub on 25 acres. They want a summer home on the beach at the Outer Banks. They want a house keeper, cook, gardener, and nanny. They want a Land Rover, Porshe Cayane, or Mercedes. They want the best private schools for their kids. They want bodies and faces like gods, and a bank account so large, the bank manager himself comes to cut their lawn. They want Caribbean cruises, and world vacations. They want to have celebrity actors, musicians, artists, designers, and authors for friends. They want jewelry that startles. One day, a chauffeur, a large yacht moored at a private dock, a helicopter, a private beach. They want to always be happy and healthy, and never die. All I want is a twenty-four-hour Taco Bell. Don Kloss is a 60-year-old poet, musician, and songwriter. He is a New Jersey transplant from rural Ohio. His poems have been ...

Like salvation  And here is the jar of stars I've  collected - your name etched  into each glowing corner. And here is the pulse of my wrist against the soft flesh of your legs, a reminder of devotion, the Morse code of an unspoken truth. And here are the arms I travel like memory, like the record playing over and over into the deep corners of evening. And here is the weight of what I carry each day, in all of the inches of  skin, in the name of this perfect thing we cannot name, but know to be our reason to open tired eyes, to hold like a newborn - like salvation.  Come bail me out of this god forsaken precipice I watch her cat eyelinered eyes flutter in the strain of the artificial light at 1am. Her body, a still, pale softness surrounded by a deep sofa embrace. Her forehead tilted back and exposed. I want to make a ritual of kissing the taut flesh, watch the anxiety's release, let the glow highlig...

Spoon Bender But I was left alone. Like a bent spoon. Or a cowboy. Boot that needs reheeling. I walked around for a while feeling. That I’d put too much faith. In Uri Geller and symmetry. My new and expanding faithlessness. Would take me far. I embraced that national restlessness. That so many young men before me had. I drove my rental car. To Redondo California. But I remained alone like a show dog. Only bred when some shadowy. Master’s needs took precedent.  Or a discredited theory. I would have thrown the broken boot. Into the ocean if there had ever. Been a broken boot to throw. Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three recent chapbooks: Set List (Bitchin Kitsch,) In Stone and The Most Awkward Silence of All (both Cruel Garters Press.) His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit and Cloudbank.

The Stages of Grief Obviously, surprises aren’t always good. There are so many areas where someone can get lost and not even realize it until they’re lost. You did find hints along the way – memories, but no nostalgia. There’s in you some of the stuff that you don’t want to be there. It’s like a gray alien woke you from a normal night’s sleep and showed you the moons of Saturn, leaving rocks in your heart. And then it’s not like that at all, and then it is again, and then it’s not, and everything is blurred and ten thousand times brighter. Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry.

A Dream with My Great-Grandmothers These women, stories finally made flesh, sit across from me on an upholstered couch. Helen folds her hands upon her prayer’s knees. Margaret offers me a piece of heaven-scraping cake. Sitting across from me on an upholstered couch, they ask about me, how my grandparents are doing. Margaret offers another piece of heaven-scraping cake. I’m careful to mind my language and hemline. They ask about my mother, how my grandparents are doing. I ask Margaret if she threw sheet ropes out the window, was careful to mind her language and hemline, and lindy-hopped to Benny Goodman with men. I ask Margaret if she really threw sheet ropes out the window, if she wore three gold rings during WWI and lindy-hopped to Benny Goodman with men who kissed her gloved hands goodnight. She wore three gold rings during WWI because she couldn’t say no to soldiers who kissed her gloved hands goodnight. Helen attended politicians’ wakes on Sunday afternoons because she couldn’t s...

on the nickel block where we go to see about my best friend’s medicine and she explains how the city has been extraordinarily slow in filling the holes on this street for months and months again she tells me how much safer she feels there than in the fast neighborhoods how tall beautiful and immature her son is for his age and i notice lately that construction cones have become as thin as apricot stalagmites marking time as nothing but brave young titian colored brachium punching out and up like any part of a bird’s mouth rootstock reaching for a breath of finished air all they want alive we turn around in an abandoned parking lot behind the next pile of broken orange teeth i wait for you to reseal your blunt with mother’s spit Some things are better free Nothing happens in America until someone sells a ware and a truck or train delivers it unlike all my favorite songs that start squarely in the middle of the end. Our first Winter toge...

3 AM Insomnia Perhaps, my darling, The most intimate thing we can do Is give another our sorrow, To be open, split, and vulnerable, Even while knowing The wound might not be sealed, But left open, and crying, The way a child does, Without shame, or reprimand, But merely To have the hurt held As though it were just another Part of us. Ache You beat until you bruised my heart, You don't get to ask Why it's gone black.  Jonathan Douglas Dowdle was born in Nashua, NH and has traveled throughout the US, he currently resides in South Carolina. Previous works have appeared or are appearing in: Hobo Camp Review, 322 Review, The Write Place At The Write Time, Blue Hour Review, and After The Pause.