This is My Cry for Help

I find myself slipping into an unrecognizable reality
And I think I’ve been here before
Sitting on the bathroom floor
Determining if my will to live is stronger than my will to die
But it’s not death I’m seeking
I think I would regret that finality
But I don’t know for sure
I’m torn between wanting to feel nothing & everything
My mood cycles without consent and medication slows but doesn’t prevent
If my doctor knew, I’d be scrutinized & labeled unstable
I want to feel
Not like this
Is my bubbly, friendly disposition a mask or is my current fugue state clouding my judgement
I wish I could ask
Anyone
Without fear of the repercussions that may follow
My silence is deafening upon my loved ones’ eardrums
But I wish they knew my silence was a cry for help
I’m not a silent being
Pictures reflect wild & wide toothy expressions adorned in vivacious ringlets
Those photographs are a testament to the person I am, was, or should be –
I’m not sure at this point
Why does everyone keep telling me who I should be
Why can’t they just leave me alone
I’m suffering in silence, but my body is screaming this is not me
I don’t know what I need –
So, stop asking me
I’ll get better I promise
Did that sound fake?
I’ll mean it tomorrow

I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM

Despite my 4’11 and 3/4 stature, I find myself shrinking to fit a fictitious narrative
How should I behave?
Meek?
Fragile?
Unintelligent?
Naïve?
How may I please you?
Yessir. No thank you. Please. Bless your heart!
Mind your elders.
Don’t talk back.
But what if that’s the issue
The fictitious narrative that weighs heavily on my shoulders stems from a deeply ingrained societal framework that women, specifically women of color, are servants.
We are presumed useless until bellies are grumbling and children are crying
I feel the anchor of societal norms as I provide inherent caretaking
I feel the twinge of loss at my empty womb
I will never bear children,
And the realization of that is worse than a sucker punch to the gut
It doubles you over with your arms wrapped tightly around your frame – leaves you breathless
I try to regain my composure, but society’s anchor pulls my corpse deeper into the abyss
I’m terrified.
It’s dark
And I can’t see more than 10 feet ahead of me.
Will this trek change my mind or is this fear mongering?
The following rhetoric rings through my auditory canals –
Fill the void with children
Suck it up – this is what you’re born to do.
But what if I don’t want to?
Tell me the real issue.
Why is society punishing me for being a nonconformist, yet the White House hosts a Jester?
It’s unjust to expect children to facilitate my spurious American dream
Rip open the American flag curtains – disrupt the delusion –
No one can afford the splendor of the white picket fence, 2.5 children, and happily married couple
Look At Me.
Me!
I am the American dream!
2 degrees, 1 in progress, steady job, no children to take care of, but somehow, I’ve become the antithesis
Of privilege that was never mine.

Alice Blackwell resides in hell, more formally known as Southern Indiana. She has poems published in Alien Buddha Press, Pure Sleaze Press, and Horror Sleaze Trash.  She enjoys expressing herself through poetry and never shies away from a new ink pen, planner, or organization tool. 

A Dude With Questions

Everything is giving me
     pause
these days, like nobody’s business.
What a complication all this
unrequested bonus material.
Early snow has freighted
     the chipper trees.
Before we began this journey
most of this stuff was free.

Anyway, you give me
     feelings
in the pit of me that make
it all worthwhile, this stretching,
this beetroot reaching.
The world is a cloister
     for some of us.
See us out when you come back
from the jungle of your dreams.

Or else it makes the music
     easier
to dismiss as synthetic or
lacking the thing of old tunes,
that ineffable something no
nonhuman can fathom.
     Whatever
it is that makes this drum drum
I’m there for it, come hell or blackwater.

The Deep Life

Smiling as in scorn, I know my efforts
may amount to a charred mess of mac
and cheese if I take my eye off the ball.
I endeavor to please my toothy guests
before I lock them in ironic cages.
Best to keep the metaphoric macaroni
lithe and moist when entertaining
thoughts of testing that bastard gravity,
sitting eight floors down on the lawn,
waiting for you to show your face
edging over the balcony rail and not
just your calloused white knuckles.
Fuck this angle I’m taking tonight.

I’m boring myself to tears with it.
If I could pen something scintillant
I might lose this gnawing in my gut
or lighten this anvil on my head.
Then again, a trumpet with a harmon
mute is filling up my living room
with something deep blue and subdued.
A blood pressure hack, a slack, slow
beating of the heart of things, deep
from the soul of someone sonically
wise and majestic or simply blessed.

I sense no tension there, no reaching
for the lava lamp on the nightstand,
no raspberries blown for light relief,
no groping for the red thermal socks
warming on the clanking radiator.
I could bang it with a club hammer
until my arm felt dead as wood,
announcing to my sleeping neighbours
that the madman in this unit is wide
awake—his night is fucked, his mind
is ticking like a time bomb when it’s
still too early to blow things up.

Salvatore Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.

Piranha Juice and Panther Piss (Bussokusekika)

It was another
night of throwing back double
shots of piranha
juice and chasing them with tall
glasses of luke-warm panther
piss, and that’s when she walked in…

Until Further Notice

Seems like nothing productive
ever gets done on days like today
(not without a costly uphill battle, anyway),
here in this Any Ugly Cow Town, U.S.A.:
mid-July, no wind and 97-plus degrees in the shade
and God’s murder-red eye cocked and burning at us
in such a way as to suggest he’s been having second
thoughts about the human race (if not all of creation).
Meanwhile, cars continue to zoom their fleshy,
semi-sentient contents from one climate-controlled
environment to another, buses barrel and
bounce along on fluffy clouds of diesel fumes
and pedestrians do the heat stroke zombie shuffle
up and down the street, hoping to find that one
retail purchase that puts it all into perspective.
In other words, nothing much is happening
(at least not in the immediate vicinity of yours truly),
certainly no sexual or romantic intrigue to speak of,
no unforeseen meeting of great minds,
no major contributions to, or advancements of,
the arts and / or sciences on our part (those of us
who’ve somehow managed to find ourselves
(and each other) in this mercifully cool,
night-dark bar in the middle of the afternoon).
Probably safe to assume (so we might as well
get used to it), until further notice, there will,
most likely, be no retying knots that
should have been left untouched,
no putting the fallen baby bird of our lives
back in its nest.

Intimations of Mortality
Through a Mad Dog’s Eyes
(or, Lamar Pye Contemplates,
What Could Be, His Last Supper)

Through a mad dog’s eyes,
the right subtle shift in perception,
like the tumble and click of a combination lock
or secret code or complex equation,
suddenly fathomed at 3 or 4am, maybe,
can bring you to your bended knees
on the cold flower-patterned linoleum
of God’s dungeon floor.

Soon you find yourself there, nightly,
supplicant and luridly genuflected
before the smooth, round ass of Lady Death,
(of which, it is rumored, tastes faintly
of French Vanilla, Mimosa and black powder).

Looking through a mad dog’s eyes,
one can even come to admire
the legendary phantom sniper
(your long-lost evil twin, perhaps) who
has suddenly begun to appear, everywhere:

on rooftops and overpasses and grassy knolls ,
in the backseats of unmarked cars,
in the cruxes of the tallest trees
and ‘round every other corner
in the corners of your eyes.

It is whispered among the elders of the tribe
that he’s put many a mad dog into a shallow grave,
and lately, the tiny mosquito frequency of his cross hairs
has been tickling your ears and purring, incessantly,
around your sweaty furrowed brow.

But, meanwhile,
just outside of town,
all the bloodshot TV-eyes
are turning away from the senator’s aide
and the half-naked cheerleader
who are being pulled from the lake,
and the cops are all out raking the cornfield
with hounds teeth and itchy trigger fingers,

hoping to find a trace
of the raggedy, rangy scarecrow of a man
with the nail in his foot and a bullet in his side.

But, we all know it’s you.
You’re the one.

And you’re just kickin’ it,
sittin’ inside your Naugahyde booth
in the diner by the side of the road,
takin’ it all in from the big-screen picture window.

And they’re comin’, boy,
they’re comin’ for you.

They’re lookin’ for somebody’s crazy uncle,|
somebody’s low-down, good-for-nothin’ son,
somebody’s shit-head brother-in-law,
written off for dead ten years ago —
one more dirty white boy
that no one but his mama could ever love.

But she died.

Yeah, that’s right, this has been just another sad
cocaine / Cadillac cowboy song
about one more unwanted lone wolf  /  black sheep  /
red-headed, hair-lipped step-child of God,who got tired after all the years
of trying to tell the old man what he wanted to hear,
tired of tryin’ to do the right thing
and always getting’ it thrown back
in your face all wrong,

tired of tryin’ so damn hard to be good
when the world just begs you to be bad.|

And there he is, boys,
just sittin’ there,|
beamin’ out a wounded tiger’s smile,
pickin’ the last little bits of his last meal
from his fearsome teeth
with a thorn.

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-five books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in- residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is And When There Was No Crawfish, We Ate Sand (co-authored with Abraham Smith, Justin Hamm and John Dorsey (OAC Press, 2025)). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO, with a rooster named Little Red and a billy goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters. 

Difficult Words

The humble poet
shares his most
difficult words
of love,
oblivion,
make-shift
cemeteries
buried in snow,
freedom
blinded
by dark shadows.

Twilight
contemplations
of missed

opportunities
fill his verse.

Life’s
absent
pauses,
carried off
by runaway
winds.
The color of
sunsets
draped
around
skyscrapers
and mountains.

The disgrace
of men
who do not
have the shame
to go away
like the sunset.

The Stone That Wants to Be Human

The stone wants a voice.
It wants a nurturing mother.
It wants love’s caress.

It wants to grow limbs.
It wants to change its form.
It wants to sleep away its sadness.
It wants to experience death.
It wants to smile at lovely faces.
It wants to perfect silence.
It wants to take a warm bath.
It wants to taste the sweetest of fruits.
Immobile, it fantasizes of walking,
of being a man or woman.
The stone wants to be human.
It wants to be more than a stone.

No End (Addiction)

There is no end to this night.
There is only the beginning.
It started off promising
only to become so sinister.

I watch the stars fall from
the skies, and the moon
awash with blood, dripping
like red rain over humanity.

I hear the faint song of a

nightingale, sounding like
a muffled cry. There are
feathers falling as well.

There is no end to this night.
There is no end to this night.

Born in Mexico, Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories. His last poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.

A HEARTBEAT BETWEEN

They’re sitting on the patio outside.
Three people, a woman and two men,
perched in black onyx chairs
at a matching round table.
Summer heat and sunlight retreat
to autumnal cool and
the ink-gray wash of twilight.
The season is
a different animal at night.

They talk, calmly, of everything
and nothing—a conversation
that could be happening anywhere,
with anyone on any evening:
in Egypt, on the banks of the Nile,
during the heretic reign of Akhenaten;
in Rome, with Vandals clawing
at the empire’s gates;
in modern America, within earshot
of a Midwestern city’s death rattle.
The falling darkness seems
to insulate them from time.

Three explosions, in quick succession,
scare the words away. A shootout?
A drive-by? Rioting?
Any one’s a possibility.

The woman and the men,
jolted from their dream,
retreat quickly from the patio.
There’s no insulation.
There’s only here, now—
a heartbeat between
beginning and end.
As ever.

REFUGEE FROM A LOST AGE

Wexford, age 55,
and Lorca, age 34,
are warehousemen.
They’re sitting in the employees’ lounge
on a coffee break—
though neither of them drinks coffee.
Somehow, the topic of conversation
drifts to the TV shows they watched as kids.

“Black Sheep Squadron,” says Wexford,
between sips of Gatorade.
“I loved that show.
World War II fighter pilots,
zooming over the Pacific.”

Lorca stares at him blankly.

“You must’ve seen it,” says Wexford.
“It starred Robert Conrad.
You know, Robert Conrad—
from The Wild, Wild West?
It was a pretty big deal.”

Lorca cracks open a Red Bull
and takes a big gulp.
“Sorry,” he says, burping.
“Never heard of it.
That was your time.”

The way Lorca says “your,”
with a mix of puzzlement and pity,
makes Wexford realize that
he’s not Wexford at all.
He’s actually Rip Van Winkle,
refugee from a lost age.

Jack Phillips Lowe is a Chicago area native. His poems have appeared in Cajun Mutt Press, Clutch 2025 and The Literary Underground, among other outlets. Lowe’s selected poems, Flashbulb Danger (Middle Island Press, 2018), is available from Amazon. His newest chapbook, Brautigan’s Blue Moon (Instant Oblivion Press, 2025), is eagerly awaiting you at lulu.com.