After his anxiety attack in the barely cold sea water, Barry walked to the outside European-style tiki bar where a woman with a roiling accent was singing Sinatra, with just a stand-up bass and conga player accompanying her.
Continue reading “Love Handles by Susan DeFelice”
I probably wouldn’t be in Mexico if there hadn’t been a knife on the counter at the Bad Dog Bar last Tuesday. I been going to the Bad Dog for two years, since I been working the graveyard shift at Drake Manufacturing. If you ever spent eight hours attaching table tops to the leg frames, you know why that kind of work goes better if you got a couple beers in you. One of the evening bartenders at Bad Dog is Hitch. He was working last Tuesday with Sheila, who waits tables. She ain’t much of a waitress, to put it gentle. She gets orders wrong ever night, even in a place like Bad Dog where most everbody orders the same cheap beer. Sheila’s popular, though, with them low-cut blouses. Most of the Bad Dog customers are guys don’t care what they’re drinking as long as they’re looking down a woman’s blouse. That’s one reason my brother liked Bad Dog right away. Plus he didn’t have to walk far after work. Then he got me to going. And I gotta say about Sheila and them low-cut blouses, when you look down that valley, you know there’s a better world waiting when you get there.
Continue reading “A Sharp Knife for Cutting Limes”
As an infant, I sought nourishment in bottles, draining milk with frightening speed.
Thirty-four years later, I still need my bottle, except this time they hold Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and the weight of credit card debts. They hold things I shouldn’t have bought to feel like a bourgeois dandy, antique bookshelves. Old lamps that glow and create illusions of home and communion. The bottles hold awards I pursued and barely missed, than missed big time, numbers, tempers lost over teaching philosophies and politics. Apologies I can’t speak. A life of could-haves, all laid out before me, scattered puzzle pieces whose counterparts are long missing.
Continue reading “Bottled by Yash Seyedbagheri”
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Holly More first got drunk at the reasonably late age of nineteen. On a late summer Saturday night in 1977, he dropped in on a pair of college classmates who shared a shithole studio apartment at the base of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The roomies extolled the virtues of “Bokay” apple wine, which sold for sixty-nine cents a bottle. Ritzy nectars such as Boone’s Farm, T.J. Swann and, Allah-forbid, Lancer’s were too fancy-pants pricewise for students who earned $2.10 an hour at Work Study jobs. That left MD 20/20, Night Train, Thunderbird and Bokay. Since the first three were what the Pioneer Square bums drank, the guys went with the Bokay. Holly later found out that Bokay was the wine of last resort amongst the Pioneer Square bums.
Continue reading “Elbows With Fishes by Leila Allison”
To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches.
Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil
This week, I thought I’d give you all a wee bit of insight into a part of our process. It is regarding acceptance and rejection letters.
Now just like being on the hunt for an interested person of the opposite sex, it is easier to be accepted than rejected. Not many of my rejections had ever been written, normally a ‘Fuck off’ would suffice. In the same way none of my acceptances ever produced a letter, just a very grateful me and a lady that I would later judge. (OK, I may have written some poetry, but it was the eighties and I had hair.)
It’s easy to say yes to a submission but we wouldn’t be doing anyone any justice if we did this as a given. So we try to keep the site’s integrity.
Continue reading “Week 185 – Letters Of Acceptance, Rejection And Diane Biting.”
I’ve been off. So I’ve been happy. I’m back to work on Sunday. So I will be suicidal!
I’ve had a few sherbets this week, throughout the week. (Sherbet(s) – ‘Sherbet Dip’ – Sip – Meaning having some alcoholic beverage.) This gave me this weeks posting.
If you are of a certain age, alcohol has been a constant companion. We marvelled at our relations who could handle the booze. Those that were never sick, were legends. We started off with a shandy (Beer and lemonade) and then had a sherry at New Year. From there we sneaked into pubs to marvel at our first pints. We had four and wondered how any man could drink twenty. Before we knew it we were drinking four pints as a thirst quencher, then starting on the haufs. (Spirits) Ironically, we all remember the first time that we drunk a bottle.
Continue reading “Week 115 – Identity, Excuses And A Goosed Liver”
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