Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/27/20

A FINE LINE OF DISTINCTION

In the mood for an orgy,
I followed the railway tracks
crossed a river
dividing a racecourse.
Oldest in England.
A group was gathering
beneath a large beer tent.
Soon we were laying on the tables
performing those tasks
usually left to the imagination.
Recognized a few nose breathers
from my sexual addiction class.
One person in particular,
had arrived by limousine
which then had a hard time
easing back into traffic when
consequentializing for the obscene.

©2020 Colin James All rights reserved.

Colin James has a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Massachusetts………

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/25/20

New Days

At the meridian
Of understanding
Toward the curving horizon
Of an anonymous
Blue sky
Hanging still
Like hot air
On a flat road
And stumbling over
The surface
Of an imprint
Past the discouragement
Of intangible obsessions
And the seasons
Of inexperience
Left to congeal
Modern and enticing
In the curing blaze
Of exposure

©2020 John Drudge All rights reserved.

John is a social worker working in the field of disability management and holds degrees in social work, rehabilitation services, and psychology. He is the author of two books of poetry: March and The Seasons of Us (both published in 2019). His work has appeared in the Arlington Literary Journal, Poetica Review, Literary Yard, The Alien Buddha Press, Montreal Writes, Mad Swirl, The Avocet, Sparks of Caliope, Harbinger Asylum, Black Coffee Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and the Adelaide Literary Magazine. John is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and lives in Caledon Ontario, Canada with his wife and two children.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/22/20

MEASURING UP

many nights I watched
before she headed out
to the cathouse
while she applied the blush
the eyeliner
the red lipstick
on lips that would soon
be sucking another man’s cock

I’d hear her come in
early in the morning
shower first
then climb in beside me
and count the money
while I pretended to sleep

it was always the same—
“it’s just a job”

you may say
I put myself there
and you’d be right
but a young man
must test himself—
in many ways I didn’t
measure up
and here was a way—

she was older
more experienced
men offered
to buy her love
to take her away
in Italian sports cars
or on yachts

but she came home
to me—
a drunken dishwasher
a struggling musician
a ten car pileup

I could handle it
I could deal
with what other men
couldn’t….
and tomorrow
I’d be stronger
I’d endure

I wouldn’t sit at home alone
and watch old sitcoms
and drink myself
into a blackout
while imagining her
taking it up the ass
or obsessing about
how she got
that rugburn on her back

I’d get it together
I’d write that song
that would take me
and the boys in the band
straight to the fucking top

©2020 Brian Rihlmann All rights reserved.

Brian Rihlmann was born in NJ, and currently lives in Reno, NV. He writes mostly semi-autobiographical, confessional free verse, much of it on the so-called “grittier” side. Folk poetry…for folks. He has been published in Constellate Magazine, Poppy Road Review, and has an upcoming piece in The American Journal Of Poetry.

 

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/20/20

Fuzzy, romantic feelings (in cars)

I don’t have a womb-like car anymore.
Back then, I saw the world from cinema-like windows
as the storms fell fast. Music played on the radio

an ‘80s dream soundtrack, giving off
fuzzy, romantic feelings. My eyes stayed open,
my heart pained as if I were 16 again.

The street full of rain is still there,
but most of the cars have disappeared.
The rain now extinguishes younger fires.

I traveled long & settled down thousands of miles away,
exchanging my old car for money & freedom.
The movie & music changed overnight.

I now walk in the elements;
a hired driver sometimes picks me up,
but the fuzzy, romantic feelings from the radio

still haunt me. I go back to Square 1,
remembering the girl with her own car,
longing for freedom.

©2020 Carrie Magness Radna All rights reserved.

Born in Norman, Oklahoma, Carrie Magness Radna is an audiovisual cataloger at the New York Public Library, a singer, a lyricist-songwriter, and a poet who loves to travel. Her poems have previously appeared in the Oracular Tree, Tuck Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, First Literary Review-East, Mediterranean Poetry, Shot Glass Journal and The Poetic Bond VIII, and will be published in Nomad’s Choir, Polarity E-Magazine and Cosmographia’s “The spirit, it travels: an anthology of transcendent poetry” (July 2019). She won 12^th prize of the 2018 Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards for “Lily (no. 48 of Women’s names sensual series),” and 3^rd prize for “The tunnel” (category: Words on the Wall: All-Genre Prompt) at the 69^th annual Philadelphia Writers’ Conference (2017). Her first chapbook, Conversations with dead composers at Carnegie Hall (Flutter Press) was published in January 2019, and Remembering you as I go walking (Boxwood Star Press) was published on August 23, 2019. Her latest poetry collection, Hurricanes never apologize, was published by Luchador Press in December 2019. She lives with her husband Rudolf in Manhattan.  

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/18/20

AIRPORT

She met me at JFK airport as promised.
Dirty rock-salt-snow clung to her ’70s mountain boots.
I mean the real shit-brown, throwback, faux suede with green laces and aluminum eyelets, ’70s
mountain boots.
Christ, does she still own a CPO jacket?
Or desert boots from Thom McAn?
I got rid of my Buster Browns and peacoat when I was eleven.
I’ve heard they’re back in style now.
Everything that goes around comes around.
I’ve heard that too.

“Let’s have a drink,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to drink in an airport bar, haven’t you?”
“I have, too many times.”
She doesn’t believe me.
I remind her I don’t drink anymore, because when I did I
ended up snorting the dirty rock-salt-snow that now clings to her boots.
“Oh, come on, one can’t hurt, I’ve always wanted to drink in an airport bar.”
So she did.
And I did.
I awoke in some hovel south of Brownsville, Texas, and never saw her again.

©2020 William Teets All rights reserved.

William Teets is an author and poet born in Peekskill, New York, who has recently relocated to Waterford, Michigan. He immensely misses New York pizza, the Hudson River, and his beloved Mets. He will write. He will survive. Mr. Teets’ works have been published in Chronogram, The Deadly Writers Patrol, Cajun Mutt Press, Art and Life, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has also published a novel, Reverend Went Walking, and a memoir, Upside Down (One on the House).

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/15/20

The Night My Dad Met Hank

One day, as he would later tell it to me, my father stepped into a bar in Bragg, Alabama to hear Hank Williams sing his own version of country music’s finest tunes. Now, Hank was not yet the star he would later become and this bar was not exactly the most pleasant of locales to take in a good time and some fine music. To tell you the truth, it was the roughest bar in the roughest side of town. My father knew this and more than likely so did Hank and so it was no surprise that when Hank broke into his favorite line of his favorite song, singing, “Hey, good looking, what you got cooking?” sending a friendly wink to the wife of a jealous man along the way that all hell literally broke loose in that rundown Southern honkytonk.

First, a fist caught the wrong fellow upside the head just the wrong way and then a few beer bottles headed the singer’s way sent the whole band to packing and before you knew it the whole place was a melee of flying fists and confusion. My father was caught right in the middle of it all when a chair laid upside his head split his scalp wide open and it was then that his fellows were sure to grab him by the arms and legs and carry him out of harm’s way. Good old Hank, for his part, however, had nothing to worry about. Like Prince Henry’s Falstaff, he was the only one to walk out of the place without a scratch, dodging a fist here and an overturned table there. His last words heard as he disappeared into the night were “Well, boys, I’ll have to thank you for the beans and biscuits. Now I believe it’s my time to go.” And with that, the man was gone.

The very next day as my father was getting his head glued back together the doctor said to him, “Well, Joe, you got drunk like an idiot. Now I’m going to sew you up like one.” That meant, of course, no anesthesia. My father said that he felt not a thing. We Mayos have always been hardheaded, you know.

It was not long after that Hank Williams’s road to stardom would be lit up in gold and it would be not that many years after that that Hank would meet his end along a country road due to a mix of alcohol and painkillers. As for my father, he never forgot the night that Hank sang his way out the door. It set his heart to burning just the right way for many years to come.

©2020 Will Mayo All rights reserved.

Will Mayo is the author of Hoodoo Voodoo And Other Strange Stories Of Life, Dreams Of Mongolia, Roadmaps Of The Mind, and other books of the extraordinary. He lives with his six-toed black cat in Frederick, Maryland, said by some to be the most haunted city in the state. Most of his writing is done between the hours of 3 a.m. and sunrise. He enjoys wordplay and strange tales, and hopes that you do too.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 05/13/20

Truth

The only place
I express my pain
is in these fucking
words I dare type…

In darkness mode, hoping
the means will not lead
to the act…

If I appear
friendly and courteous
during my infrequent
collisions with the
outside world…

Understand that I do
not want you to be
subjected to my dankness.

I realize that many
of you are content
the way life is going…

That is a good thing…
Nothing wrong with that…

Honestly, my acts of
pleasantries

are out of respect.
An understanding…
An acceptance you have
of yourself…

My oh my—I wish
I was wired like you.

Ready to step into
the day…the future.

Not clouded with
resentment…

Or fear…
Or anger…

Exist for
humanity’s sake…

Splendidly alive…

Avoiding the gallows
of half-planted souls…

That refuse to walk with you…

But seem to find their
way side-by-side

with me.

 

Where I Write

I read Patti Smith…glowing about being in France where Rimbaud and Verlaine drank their full of life…
Being in awe of strolling the same steps of iconic poets.

I wonder if Artie or Paul would care where I write?

Where I take notes, observe the
assholes and scumbags
that inhabit
and interfere with
my head screams…

Sometimes, I hope
my jottings are not
said aloud…Better
to be nutty and be
able to wander than
squirm in a straight jacket…

Humbled, bewildered…

The outward conquered by
the inward—

would have to be contained
by hulking orderlies so
I harm no one…

Still, I’m vetted
without shame.

Realize that I’m not
in the same ballpark as
above mentioned writers…

But still live, maintaining
a brutish charm for the outcast.

Well—Artie and Paul
are gone now…

Patti still lives somewhere
in some plush writing den.

Or maybe she’s on tour—living the cool,
bohemian life.

I’m just a bitch stepchild
with the words that
come out of me…

So, go on Ms. Smith.
Keep the poems handy.

So, fools, like me
can read, and witness—

the famous…
Those who made it…

To the

heights of fondness…

 

Transparent Lard

Disfigured minions
pampered as

gallery all-stars.

Shouting to the
nobodies from
the bleacher seats

An angular argument that fight
means might.

“They” worship an old
transistor radio…

That plays Roy Clark
and early Beach Boys.

The scene is mighty pale.

But these assholes
refuse to chime in
about the negro walk.

Guns and jugs and Bull Conner.

God and Hannity.

The finest day for
a lynching is

today for these boys.

©2020 Dan Provost All rights reserved.

Dan Provost’s poetry has frequented the small press for many years. His stuff has been recently published in Odd Magazine, Merak Magazine, and Poetic Review just to name a few. His book Under the Influence of Nothingness was published on 02/25/2020 by Kung Fu Treachery Press. He lives in Berlin, New Hampshire with his wife Laura and Bella, the Bichon Frise.