Cajun Mutt Press

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/01/24

May 1, 2024 James D. Casey IV

Gros Michel

The tu-whit
tu-whoo
of wrench
and workbench,
the whip-poor-will
of machines
gives me eczema.
Doctor says the buffalo hump is a seismic swarm
caused by the tallest stack on the skyline.
The herbarium once had something for that.
In Bologna, Ulisse Aldrovandi
cut and dried 5,000 plants.
I wear an aerosol wig
and like a Gros Michel my roots are infected
an internal necrosis
of tension discs
and winches—
the United Fruit Company calls it Panama disease.
I once had a handwritten recipe
a remedy
for plague, fevers
smallpox and surfeits.
O’ the popular errors
poisoned by the poison antidote,
a sharp metal bedfellow
green as a blade
in my soiled throat.

Damon Hubbs: gardener / casual birder / lapsed tennis player / author of the chapbooks ‘Coin Doors & Empires‘ (Alien Buddha Press) and ‘The Day Sharks Walk on Land‘ (Alien Buddha Press) / recent work appears/is forthcoming in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Acropolis Journal, Apocalypse Confidential, Dreich, Broken Antler, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. Twitter @damon_hubbs

May 2024 CMP Featured Writers

May 1, 2024May 3, 2024 James D. Casey IV

I haven’t been doing so great. Yet here we are at the beginning of May, and the show must go on. I had a big setback with the magazine by losing all my files. Plus a few books I was working on. It happened because of a dumb mistake on my part. I was trying to free up memory on my laptop. Everything was permanently deleted by accident. That, on top of all the personal issues I’ve been dealing with, had me wanting to pull the plug, but my Pop always told me that perseverance is key, and the poem “Never Give Up” by my friend Ron Whitehead keeps ringing in my ears.

That being said, Night Owl Narrative No.5 will be postponed until I sort everything out. I’m in the process of putting it back together. I was almost finished before it was lost so I had to start from scratch. I’ll probably push it back to June, but I’m still planning to get it released this month. I’m working on it, and I’ll keep y’all updated. You can grab a copy of issues 1-4 by following the links below. I’ll have more info about other book releases soon. I have to redo those as well. Stay tuned for details.

NIGHT OWL NARRATIVE No.1:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQVN1WPW

NIGHT OWL NARRATIVE No.2:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CTCJR9LY

NIGHT OWL NARRATIVE No.3:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVF469HX

NIGHT OWL NARRATIVE No.4:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYLKSXTK

Send 1-3 poems to cajunmuttpress@gmail.com if you’d like to submit for a featured writer spot. Artwork, poetry/prose, short stories, flash fiction, etc for the magazine can be sent to the same email. Please include a bio and author photo with all submissions. Today’s featured writer will be posted in a little while. Keep your eyes peeled.

I’m also in need of a little help at the moment. I have PayPal: paypal.me/JDCIV, Venmo: @Cajun_Poet_James, and CashApp: $CajunPoetJames, if you can donate to the publishing fund. Anything will be greatly appreciated.

Y’all Keep Kicking Ass Out There.
Big Love, Write On,
JDCIV
🤟💀

PS. I was having a hard time getting a good pic of it for this post, but that’s a badass etched glass CMP logo my Pop sent me!! About the size of a dinner plate. Love you, Pop!

May 2024 CMP Featured Writers:

Gros Michel
by Damon Hubbs
05/01/24

2 POEMS & ARTWORK
by Michael E Duckwall
05/03/24

The Long, Stilted Stay
by B. Lynne Zika
05/06/24

Nature’s Symphony
by Rhys Campbell
05/08/24

a broken life
by J.J. Campbell
05/10/24

Naff Off
by Jack Phillips Lowe
05/13/24

The Pale Horse with The Marble Eye
by Ben Holland
05/15/24

3 POEMS
by Daniel S. Irwin
05/17/24

3 POEMS
by Alan Catlin
05/20/24

Hey Baby
by Jc Rammelkamp
05/22/24

Cat’s Tongue, House No. One Hundred And Ten
by Kushal Poddar
05/24/24

STRETCHING OUT
by Dr. Roger G. Singer
05/27/24

Two Guitars
by James Hippie
05/29/24

Sobering Up
by George Gas Economou
05/31/24

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 04/15/24

April 15, 2024 James D. Casey IV

Blues for a Rainy Day

Dogs are barking
and background voices are muffled

Someone is playing an old record
from another room

My mind steps southbound,
one step away from another time

I am now running toward the arms
of moss-covered trees

This is where sleep took hold;
hidden in cloudy visions of a passing smile

Now awake, and stretching my arms upward,
I’m in the place of my birth; without a trace of love

Climbing the Stairs

He had spent many years
exiled among the lost

Now his steps wandered toward rest

There had been many doors
both opened and closed in his travels

And he knew that divided armies must fall,
and there were really no winners in the game

But this is home, a world of cobwebs
and dusty books

The couch says, “hello old friend,”
and it’s all good

Richard D. Houff, currently lives and writes out of St. Paul, Minnesota. He has had poetry and prose published in Atom Mind, Brooklyn Review, Chiron Review, Conduit, Louisiana Review, Midwest Quarterly, Night Owl Narrative, Osiris, Wormwood Review, and many other fine magazines. His most recent collections are Night Watch and Other Hometown Favorites, The Wonderful Farm and Other Gone Poems, and Dancing on Rooftops.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 04/12/24

April 12, 2024 James D. Casey IV

Fused in openness

When the window opens,
we’re knifed by the breaths awaited.
When we do fieldwork much,
metal seeds fall from a cockpit
of some unprecedented hearts.
Good to know, I grow in the sayings –
day and night and daylight and moonlight
grown in my body.
That’s how I hear one wanting another.
That’s how, those blues and browns
and reds and beiges, reach dismembered
from the dry, mouthy sands
fused from us.
One more phrase, and the levering novel
shows how we are successful because
we’re complete in the space.
Too short to run, but legs and length originally
born to reshape trilling lights all along.
Too long, because we walk through
only stars after stars after stars
through breathing of love.

In the quantum of love

In a paperpiece of nonchalance,
I write spot, spot, spot.
Untorn, it shows the curious bookmark’s
anomalous track-record.
A page re-returns after all the pages
turned over, a matter of thousands of beats
sharded through the notepad of your heart.
Do you call it a petition of a repetition?
Let’s say you’re lengthened to a baboonery, –
you better count for a reachable number, –
your award of being Mortal, Sexy, Apostle,
Committal, Epistemological – additionally,
what kept for you in the hidden lulu.
In a paperpiece found flipping, I found
a piece of readiness desperate to be nothing,
gabbling for a vacuous dome.
It’s only the absolute, flowering a convolution.
Only an abstractedness, meaning:
a spot turning a star as all the unknown
spaces are created and decimated
in the quantum of love.

Jayanta Bhaumik is from esoteric field and counselling, and works in India and Singapore. His past works can be found in Poetry Superhighway, Juked, Blue Lake Review, Madswirl (their contributing poet), Vita Brevis Press, Cajun Mutt Press, Bindweed Magazine (Online Back Issues Anthologies / March 2020), Streetcake Magazine, Acropolis Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He is available @BhaumikJayanta

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 04/10/24

April 10, 2024 James D. Casey IV

Fuck Being a Nice Girl

I’m a nice girl.
I wear skirts below my knees and my mid drift is white

I’m a nice girl.
I only buy loose jeans and shirts that cover my bum
and smile at anyone who I walk by.

I’m a nice girl.
I wear shorts, it’s hot.
I get unwanted remarks
I walk by silently

I’m a nice girl
I started wearing eyeliner and hoops and I’m called a “thot”
I don’t smile at anyone anymore and I’m called a bitch

I’m a nice girl.

I want to be a nice girl.

I want people to like me.

I’m a nice girl.
I tell the man who wants to take me home that he needs to leave me the FUCK alone.

am I a nice girl?
there’s pictures of me I’ve never seen
in the camera rolls of men who I’ve never talked to
but took pictures of me anyways.

am I a nice girl?
do nice girls get their pictures used for un consenting pleasure?

I tell the men that holler to fuck off.
I don’t wear low cut shirts on buses.

I’m a nice girl,
even when the last thing he sees
is a short skirt and a shovel,
‘cause this nice girl will hide the body.

Paige Turner (“On some real shit, that IS my name.”) grew up in Alaska and has loved writing her entire life. She’s struggled with a lot, but poetry has been her closest friend, confidant, and go-to when it comes to getting anything and everything out in its rawest, holiest form. Paige is nineteen, and hopes to publish her in-the-works manuscript someday.