VOICES FROM THE FIRE: Joshua Martin

Slipping through the briefcase abruptly 

Hunger pain of cruel side swiped dilemma rotten tooth & all, trees blown from mountainside where goats lay w/ shepherds who point their crusted fingernails at mailmen on acid washed jeans of environmentally unsound corporate nightmares, industrious, floundering, cooler than a kumquat & just as incomplete, whereas (& this begins at home) a stray bullet enters the throat & exits the abdomen just like a daredevil film played out to the delight of no one, purposeless, like a giant in a hot air balloon or the thirty-three yrs it takes to screw in a magnolia, just long enough to disregard the wisdom of the ages to the time of a Mickey Rooney coughing fit in a drugstore in the desert w/o cops on ego trips & the dust blaring like loud speakers as comatose as a leap frog dais & a misunderstood cat on the verge of a jump, pumping the room full of the vilest perfumes gave the trained seal the utmost pleasure, while someone resembling Belinda Carlisle made a face out of juice cleanse & then ran all the way home to avoid punishment, chain linked fence of nightmares, ice man, no ma’am, look out for the falling acid rain, smells like burning flesh all over again, destined to repeat failures, the historical impulse relegated to the gutter, bowling ball shaped like Robert Desnos, releasing mustard gas just to get some attention tho & if in another fit of wailing the child could render everyone nearly utterly incapacitated, then the plan could truly begin.

Discovered rimless spectacle a triumph

frigid atlas pumping literature guts

leaving bright spared cosmetics

at the door of bestiality grunged 

butt licked w/ comforting smile

unlike a simulacrum rollercoaster

once begged shot through the ankle

shanty town stripper pole glittered

nightingale bejeweled eaten thorns

glued previous & a stingray

monogramed shirt coarse

bossed around financial aid

hum humming humbug

feeling the wind on the skull

whistling infantile peekaboo

an issue springing windpipe

flowing biblical vileness gripped

shrimp clogging throat constricted

fetishized clause living speaker phone

Because of the sounds of crickets

take my library for granted

& squeeze your blackheads numb

being shoeless meant humming

while running with scissors entailed buckets

first sail to turn an orange

could easily become a pineapple

while second knuckle sandwich

revealed victory to be opaque

Diplomatic armored car seen from space

Every folded decibel skittish

troll looks to planetary movements

for indicative surveillance guts

tho mammoth diaphragm salad bowl

then barriers benefit bare bottom knuckles

against wall covered genitalia

converts soda pop each caveat

wildlife penetrates electrified fence

well springs ponder available regalia

Polish minister of culture trips on shoelaces

calls the ambassador a wholesale jumbo jet

& then visitation rights excluded.


Published by Mike Zone

Mike Zone is the former Editor in Chief of Dumpster Fire Press and managing editor of Concrete Mist Press. The author of Screaming in the End: Poems and Stories, Fuck You: A Fucking Poetry Chap, Shedding Dark Places (almost), One Hell of a Muse , as well as coauthor of The Grind and Razorville. A frequent contributor to Alien Buddha Press and Mad Swirl. His work has been featured in: A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Black Shamrock Magazine, Horror Sleaze Trash, Better Than Starbucks, Piker Press, Punk Noir Magazine, Synchronized Chaos, and Cult Culture magazine.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: