Wendy Taylor Carlisle | Addiction poems

Getting to the Fifth The woman who was not going to talk about her past, spoke to the woman who did not judge. That good, sad woman, the hard one, whose past was scars and fires, disfiguring, smoldering. The woman who figured speaking must be better than the old silence, the days with their vomit and combat, what that women says now, reveals ache and shock. Then, the woman who […]

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Hope Atlas | Longing for a Mom

I hold her frail, bony hand; stroke her stringy, blonde hair. She whispers, pleads, Don’t leave me. Closing my eyes as tears form, I can see the powerful, addictive white powder that brought us here. I feel her tremors, her anger. My ten-year-old body lies next to her, crying without noise, waiting for her to sleep. Now her bed— cradling her body bumping against the metal rail— has no room […]

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Ron L. Dowell | Weed Killers

We’re being lied to about cannabis, marijuana, weed, ganja, chronic, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, some arguing for its medicinal value, assuming that everyone must be sick and in need of a cure, others figuring how to monetize it by substituting clear thinking with a foul, smoky fog, falsely proposing that art’s created through your subjugated brain, a brain seeking something ever more exhilarating, more powerful […]

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Bonnie Stanard | The Payoff

Pleasure’s on the phone and Rosetta has putty fingers and a memory of soaring, was it last Friday? usually afternoons, absolute anytime. Too horizontal to make the call herself she puts her ear to the sound of Benny plunging along Saturday streets telling her to rise to the physical, try on filters, look through gravity glasses touch the riff in the backbone taste the trigger that forks the tongue. Feelings […]

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