THE FEAST OF IMMORTALS

The banquet begins.

The first serving
On the menu is the
Poor the taste of their
Devastation & suffering

Exquisite

An appetizer
Baked by the scumlords
The landlords who keep
Raising their rents forcing
The hardworking & the once
Middle class to their knees

Delicious

The profit
The disease &
The dance of joy
And of knowing that
They are never going to
Be a threat

Beaten down by
Smiling billionaires
With all their own jets

It tastes like apathy
Like greed

Keeping them all in their place

While the waiters
The controllers of
Wall Street & banks
Prepare the second course

Healthcare &
Pharmaceutical companies

Profiting off the sick the
Disabled & the elderly
Who can’t afford it

But hey?

Who gives a shit?
Who gives a fuck about them?
Who cares?

We’re just doing great
Supplying more corpses
To the funeral directors
Graveyards and cremation
Ovens

You should try it
One billionaire says

It smells just like more money

Magnifique !

And then, finally the
Greatest main course
The Entrée

Ground from the bodies
Of all the young dead soldiers
Who they brainwashed
With political banter & heroic
Tales inconsequential for
Their checkbooks & investments
In weapons, land and oil
Made with the finest deceptions
By the purchased politicians
Of a capitalist state

Who BrownNose
Them during bathroom
Breaks but aren’t allowed
To sit at their tables

( It’s beneath them to mingle with)

And for dessert?

The most tasty thing

Hatred from the powerless masses
Who they mock and laugh at
Calling them ” lazy”
While they offer them more
Credit cards and mortgages
They can’t pay

How disgusting !

The one billionaire states

Throw them all in jail
So they can’t keep
Reciting the truth

Plllllleeeeaaaaassseeee

I hope that you all enjoyed
Your portion of democracy

Now government
If you please wipe our
Asses & go fetch our
Limousines

Here’s a few million
As a tip

And btw?

The wine tasted like
Illuminati

~ R.M. Engelhardt
©2024

by PW Covington

He scribed all his needs onto parchment
All his fears and dreams and fantasies
Sealed behind repurposed glass and cast upon the tide
Distillery green and corked

The years, for all their barnacles
And Sargasso grass and oil slicks,
Never expected, never over-due
Pregnant, dead, and living all the same

Sunbeat in the doldrums
Forgotten like that physicist’s cat
Distillery green and ocean drifting, weathered

Currents carry poetry
And random notes
And artillery shells
And lovers’ scrawl and letterings
Circumnavigating the core across the crust

Insulated in his own
Demand for self-identity
He never heard the laughing gulls above
Driven mad by the haunting tones of humpback whales, galactic
Distillery green and hoping for hurricanes and jagged reefs
Of some never-coming, ever-coming

Messiah
Lover
Audience

by Marty Shambles

when your wine comes out
of a bag
it has no time to breathe.
its notes are stuck in the
packaging, like trapped
birds that sing into
breathless plastic.
i swirl the wine
in the glass
to decant its essence.
it comes to life,
gasping.

by Nick Gaudio

1.

The boy is woken in the night. A small buck has broken in the house.
The deer nuzzles the boy while he lies still in his bed like a mannequin.
The deer snorts. The boy develops epilepsy, a transparent love for Disney.

2.

A father and his son plod over tracks in the snow.

They walk around a frozen lake, 

up a winter-green mountain. 

The son doesn’t realize his father intends to shoot

the fox or her pups. 

You get up high like this, the father says, where you can see
the whole world and something inside
you says ‘Everything down there —
everything below — is yours.’ 

‘Maybe that’s what’s wrong with us, 

that that’s our first impression.’

He hands three pelts to the boy, a map to get home. 

Fox and the Hound.

3.

A boy laughs in the dark hallway. 

4.

On Sunday a father and son watch a race — tens of dogs, hundreds, thousands of dogs — the first past the line only wins because it’s terrified. 

See? the father says.

5.

A boy lies still in the night under the sheet like a mannequin,
thinking of dogs like foxes and foxes like dogs. 

His father keeps bullets in the fridge in a Tupperware container — in case of more foxes.

6.

The boy becomes a mannequin, a Tupperware container, a fox that resembles a dog.

7.

A girl saves herself from a carbon monoxide scare.

She admits to her new friend (the neighborhood boy, who seems transparent enough) she was up all night looking at porn .

Open oven porn and porn about automobiles idling with the garage doors closed.

Gas porn, the boy asks. 

Poison porn, the girl says.

8.

A daughter lies about the etymology 

of the word forgive. 

She makes up the origin of the word 

promise for her new boy friend. 

Her mother says: We’ve built a society 

around the sin of dehydration! 

A daughter is baptized in the word 

Water.

9.

An orphaned girl sees that her mother 

has succeeded in dying.

10.

A bird chirps. 

At what point does trying to sing become 

singing, she asks the boy. 

Mr. Blue-bird on my shoulder, 

he sings, without the slightest trace of irony.

11.

A boy and a girl watch the glorious red sunset 

on the far mountainside. 

The boy starts to fear that the only reason he finds anything beautiful is because he wants to fuck it. 

Kiss me, she demands. He does. 

The trees are on fire.

12.

A boy and a girl.

13.

A girl leaves a note on a boy’s car: Nothing was real. I don’t feel sorry. He pictures her leaving town while he sits still, like a mannequin, in his bed. But maybe for you, she’d written on the other side.

14.

A girl is about to leave town on the nearest terrified dog. She says: Stay with me.

A boy and a girl make tracks, 

then angels in the snow. 

They lie down. 

Above them, ice-gleaming boughs obscure the night sky.

There’s always one

pretty girl

at the grocery store

that makes me hope

some rich guy

comes along

takes her

away somewhere

that makes her eyes

go wide

and no one

is yelling for help

that ain’t coming.

by Jonathan S Baker

the kid behind the counter 

hesitantly asks

what happened to my eye 

& i hold in my anger 

just long enough to remember

that this is the only place in town

to get a halfway decent hamburger

where the coffee doesn’t taste like generational poverty

even though the water 

comes from that very same river

& i imagine his ancestors wearing coonskin caps

wiping the dirt from his face

& i wonder what happened to my eye too

& all of the things it once saw 

wiped away

like smudges of memory

like the manners we rarely use anymore

there are some questions 

we just shouldn’t ask.

John Dorsey

By Robert Dean

The bill collectors never stop calling. I recognize their numbers. 
My children ask me if I’ve got a job yet faster than they say hello. 
Every day, I throw applications for employment into a volcano, and what sputters out floods my inbox with, “We’re sorry, but we’ve decided to move on with other candidates.” 
A hammer in my heart pounds against my insides, daring my soul to break away from the skeleton of worry. 
I’ve stolen plenty from the self-check-out. I’m no thief, but I’m used to decimal points, not commas. My bank account is a graveyard of missed connections, rejection emails, and those bill collectors shaking their cups for my quarters. 
I’ve dreamed about what homelessness would feel like if I could handle the long nights of cold wind if it would break my kids’ hearts if I drifted off into the shadows. 
Ghosting isn’t just for dating; it also happens when you’re broke. As the Amazon drivers traverse my neighborhood, dropping boxes with a pep in their step because Bezos’ foot is on their neck, I wonder what I did to get ignored by them, too.