I have fallen asleep. Perhaps I have gone home already. I may imagine the pollens of her voice, but the hostess says, “All desire a home. No one wants to go to one.”
I hear ‘One’ echoing around, murmur in my sleep, “One ceases to be one if we hanker for it too often.” The dreamy rag under our feet spreads softness, engulfs the drink I spill. Hush hides the glass fell for miles from my hands.
The hostess says, “The place you want to leave for the home matters.”
The author of Postmarked Quarantine has eight books to his credit. He is a journalist, father, and the editor of ‘Words Surfacing’. His works have been translated into twelve languages, published across the globe.
Their eyes slide over you when you walk in the dim bar and inch through the milling, processional crowd bidding to be next served at the long counter. The heavily made up women sit close at their corner table nursing drinks, their drinking funds palliative. Either one will have you but not until they finish the drinks they are on, then the obligatory ones you will buy them. They have that “Take me… But not just yet” look loitering in their eyes as heavy and half shut as yours: you wave at the bartender, circle one hand in the air and point down at table, nod at the women, pull up an unvarnished chair and sit down under press of buzzed and languid dead calm nonchalance. You exchange the usual opening overtures, worming ways into the core of everyone’s shared intentions, look from one to the other, take in the possibilities to wrestle with.
New Ghosts For Christmas
The ghost of Christmas Past appeared, shivering, covered in fur cloaks, frosted cheeks, frozen nose hairs and eye brows, and with breath that bellowed below zero.
The ghost of Christmas Present is here, comfortable in normal dress and a Spring jacket, in left over tan, a complexion the picture of health, bewildered that but for sooner dark, ’tis a normal day.
The ghost of Chistmas Future will arrive in surfer shorts and summer shades, walking in sandals, skin rife with melanoma, saying “The odds of snowfall fail cost/benefit analysis of placing a bet.”
Last Stand
Don’t stand on that clearance sale chair swept up in circular self isolation. Don’t stand on that clearance sale chair believing we will be legends later. Don’t stand on that clearance sale chair tightening a tie round your neck of braided twisted cordage: one leg of the faux wood chair creaks and strains under you… Unsure of itself, it might give out before you do.
David Alec Knight grew up in Chatham, Ontario, Canada.
He includes his middle name in his pen name as a means of disambiguation, his first and last name being fairly common. It is in response to being ignorantly perceived as a pretension by others that he wrote the poem “Disambiguation”.
In 2021, David was recipient of The Ted Plantos Memorial Award for Poetry. His first book of poetry, The Heart Is A Hollow Organ, soon followed. His second book of poetry, LEPER MOSH, was published by Cajun Mutt Press in 2022. It featured his artwork on the cover. Cajun Mutt Press would also feature a portfolio of his artwork online, as well as publishing his first full color comic story online, WRATH: The Masks We Wear.
Recent poems have appeared in Verse Afire, Cajun Mutt Press Featured Poet, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Medusa’s Kitchen. Anthology appearances include By The Wishing Tree, Poets For Ukraine Volume 1, Love Lies Bleeding, Phantom Parade, and The Cajun Mutt Press Halloween Anthology Zine 2022.
David sees dark and light around him in equal measure and that is reflected in his poetry, whether exploring working class themes, neurodivergence, addiction, urban living, our conflict with Nature, and/or the effects all these things have on individuals and relationships.
lost dance, somewhere in the bottom of a bottle yet unopened lies the rhythm that was washed away by the cruel torrent of reality. as I sustain the bender for another day, another week, or year even, I’m struggling to kindle the old fires of passion, of when the page was ravished nightly by the mad dance on the keyboard that saw too many of them ruined and tossed into the common yard of the apartment complex. the insanity of years-long benders, where sanity was maintained by puffs from glass pipes and inhalations from burning spoons. nothing happens, I just get drunk, pass out, kill the hangover with a rum/vodka/orange concoction, and move to coffee, trying to edit the lines of inebriation hoping to find the gems amidst the steaming pile of shit. nothing’s there, with insanity gone I have nowhere to go except for down, to the place modern writers sit, sip Starbucks caramel coffee and talk about character progression, diversity, inclusivity, and stuff like that. I once almost punched a classmate in a college class for trying to overanalyze Hem’s stories. it’s all about rediscovering the desire to walk near the edge, to drink haphazardly until you can’t even tell on which side of the canyon you’re on.
Currently residing in Greece, George Gad Economou has a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Science and is the author of Letters to S.(Storylandia), Bourbon Bottles and Broken Beds(Adelaide Books), and Of the Riverside(Anxiety Press). His words have also appeared, amongst other places, in Spillwords Press, Ariel Chart, Cajun Mutt Press, Fixator Press, Outcast Press, The Piker Press, The Edge of Humanity Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, and Modern Drunkard Magazine.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Cajun Mutt Press, Outlaw Poetry Network, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
