woman – Cajun Mutt Press

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.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 02/14/24

February 14, 2024 James D. Casey IV

Teen Angel

Even as prepubescent kids we recognized
the erotic possibilities of Annette Funicello,
a Mouseketeer with budding breasts,
a full six years older than me, pure girl.
We hung on her roles
in the Spin and Marty serials,
Anita Cabrillo in the Zorro series,
adolescent fancies exploding inside us.

But it was in her early twenties,
already at the mercy of our hormones,
in her series of Beach Party films,
alongside Frankie Avalon,
that she really featured in our prurient fantasies.
Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach,
Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo,
How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.
Annette as Dee Dee in Beach Blanket Bingo
sent our visions and desires into overdrive.

Only 45 when she began having balance issues, dizziness,
while promoting her Frankie Avalon reunion movie,
Back to the Beach, already a mom three times over,
she kept quiet for five more years
before the public disclosure of her multiple sclerosis.

I’d read Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” –
glut thy sorrow on a morning rose –
and I knew beauty was fleeting,
but the reality of my teenage heartthrob
falling apart made the evanescence of time
a fact you could touch, smell.

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 07/17/23

July 17, 2023 James D. Casey IV

Addicted

She awaits in her jungle, wrapped in inviting lace, her shoes, like hissing snakes, coil up her legs, luring him into a land that he knows and knows well, a land that he has traveled to and from time and time again.

But tonight is different.

Her back arches, ready to sink her teeth into the prey. As the walls roar, she inhales the power because she knows the high only lasts for so long.

Melody Creek resides in East Tennessee with her husband and three fur children. She has been published in Earthen Lamp Journal, Picaroon Poetry, Awakened Voices, Cold Creek Review, Snapdragon Journal, NY Literary Magazine, and Bank Street Writers UK. Her first book Anxiety, Depression, and Other Sorts of Trauma is now available as an ebook; the print version will be ready by late summer. When she isn’t writing poetry, you can find her performing magic and meditating in nature. Add her on Facebook: Melody Creek-Poetry.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 08/19/22

August 19, 2022 James D. Casey IV

Night Treats

The man
(a short
perfect round ball)
gimps in
speaks little English
knows the words beautiful American
and such pretty voman
I take care you
nice pretty voman
as his fingers snake around my wrist
I smile
give a dumb-girl giggle

Same shit over and over
his goldfish eyes start with my tits
mentally mark the galaxies along my body
his dragon breath full of lust as he performs
a ceremonious crotch shift

I feign heat exhaustion
scurry to the elevator with the packages
turn around several times
to reassure my paranoia
that he is not lurking behind me
nothing worse than a creeper
foaming at the mouth

I want to know if ever
(and I pray not)
a woman in my path
along any similar journey
has gone down the road of consent
to this brute
with a longish dark mole on the side
of his thin lips
curling into a smug
and menacing sneer

Donna Dallas studied Creative Writing and Philosophy at NYU’s Gallatin School and was lucky enough to study under William Packard, founder and editor of the New York Quarterly. Lately, her work can be found in Horror Sleaze Trash, Beatnik Cowboy and Zombie Logic among many other publications. She recently published a novel, Death Sisters, with Alien Buddha Press. She also currently serves on the editorial team for Red Fez.

Death Sisters journals eight years of sex, drug deals, after-hours clubs, pimps, hookers, deaths, and mere insanity in a very simple style, as written by Georgina. Nothing in Death Sisters was modified to read as politically correct. Death Sisters contains raw, untouched guts, written not to be shared and preserved perfectly from the eighties era.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 12/15/21

December 15, 2021 James D. Casey IV

Stolen Angels

Smoking a cigarette
in the dark outside
during a calm and dramatic
length of time.

How I flick away
my ashes makes it noir.
No matter what she says,
the dark haired woman,

with navy blue fingernails
and a cough, hands holding
a complicated drink

that doesn’t spill
no matter how often
she waves it around.
I would spill my drink

have spilled it like news
and all the booze
soaking my blouse.
I’m cold and sober

waiting for a refill
waiting for a light.

Carol Ellis lives in Portland, Oregon. Her books include the full-length Lost and Local (Pacific Coast Poetry Series, 2019), HELLO (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her publications include Comstock Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Trampoline, ZYZZYVA, and The Cincinnati Review.