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M.L. Smoker Q&A on her own favorite poem

M.L. Smoker, author of Another Attempt at Rescue (Hanging Loose Press, 2005), talks about her favorite among the poems she’s written.

17 years ago

Commandments

You shall visit a friend for dinner, an amazing spread of food and drugs, and you shall eat too much and you shall smoke some dope, though it kills the memory, and as your soul rises on a small metal rocket, propelled by nitrous oxide into an airless seizure, shuddering through something better than orgasm, […]

17 years ago

Nice World

We were a little too high, walking through town, under a sky so ocean deep and blue I was moved to say, Nice sky today, and a dog all fanged smiles and hairy muscle bounced by after a frisbee and you said, Nice dog. The grass was greener than grass, just dripping greenness, and you […]

17 years ago

He Pays the Bill at the Sidewalk Cafe

She watches as he signals to the waiter. He doesn’t note how silent she is now, he doesn’t catch her sadness, can’t see how her eyes go dark and still as standing water. Behind them in a fluid tangle, strange ideas swim in black spirals, entwined like eels. She watches how the subtle wind tears […]

17 years ago

What Her Father Said

After the barbeque the men stayed out in the cold garden drinking sake, rum, and whiskey, stomachs warm and fingers numb. The yellow cat began to nose about the chicken bones and cold asparagus, leftover steak and daikon radish, salt soy beans, cucumber salad. “It’s my fault,” he said, “She doesn’t want me.” “Just give […]

17 years ago

Worn

He’s cleaning out the trunk in which his clothes are stored for summer, bathing suits, surf shorts, swimming goggles, neatly folded beach shirts, all laundered, put in plastic, and then closed away—and finds a black and silky bra, some short shorts with a tiny waist, a sleek black top, all empty of her, as is […]

17 years ago

The 167th Psalm of Elvis

Blessed are the marble breasts of Venus, those ancient miracles, for they are upright and milk white and they point above the heads of the crowd in the casino. Blessed are the crowds that play, and whose reflections sway in the polish of her eggshell eyes, for they circle like birds around the games, and […]

17 years ago

Parable of the South Pole Buddha

“… the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being” A physicist is stuck in a bunker at the South Pole, freezing his burrito off, and trying to detect the rare light given off by one in six billion neutrinos streaking through the glacial ice, and it turns out he’s a guy […]

17 years ago