jazz in the day’s wake, it is the songs that i will forget that are understood the most. in the quantum etching a part of me expires at a constant rate and the west goes burning on and the cars and trucks pass me by like pulses on the wire, electrons skipping town and we…

the drunk blathers, white kid college charisma, cheap thrills from modest risks, the hiss of the grill and the drunks babble on, talk over one another, loudly, louder, the louder they get the clearer their point becomes, augmented by repetition and decibel level. matters of love, family, of life and death should be discussed exclusively…

in a crooked house with crooked teeth, a bad heart and paper skin you watch the presence of specters with their vapor trails go ambling through the yard. sleep for hours, sleep for days and ignore the skittish infection rifling through your brain, bury old ideas in the dark and listen for the remote insect…

firebreather, shake that blood from your heart and if you hear of my approach let the others know the boy is coming home. we cling to some low hanging vine and i sobered up from the midday drunk before coming to watch you go, nestling in my adequate liver the same poison that will carry…

go sever that thread to the almighty, perish in a dark room just beyond the railroad tracks, the coal men come to collect your heart. create your own version of events in this dull orange light, move against the earth a slow body in exile. in christ’s narrow margins do you feel as a child…

i sent wave upon wave rushing through her, flushing at the base of her neck came blood tsunamis from the epicenters of her breasts, her pale skin translucent, embryonic, pebbled by the brush of my touch. her irises pinwheeled and constricted, the whole world for a brief depraved moment spun far out and well beyond…

watching headlights drift past in the drunken streets, unfunny cartoon characters and too many eyes follow me. so hard to hide now, must blend and quietly exit until they track me down again, chasing endlessly this object of turmoil. i will bleed for anonymity, bleed dollars and dimes for quiet evenings in the sundown, drifting…

waiting for evening to strike, the twilight’s permission to drink and drink heavily and alone, to come to an understanding with the circumference of my swing, how elliptical my reasoning may get. amber lights of poverty, the backyard dog calls to keep back, stay on my side of the road. now at a state of…

old demons released in rising curls of smoke, old demons released to complicate things, my fingers dance over nothing, invisible keys, muted melodies, sound without sound while i hate even this, this expression, this waste, energy unspent, poems that amount to nothing, literally nothing. -S.C. Martinez

the shadows are in their front yards while white figures play volleyball at the nice white church just down yonder, a few houses over in the by-mile neighborhoods of these strange highway folk, the edges of their driveways flanked with stayback orange reflectors warning wayward drivers elsewhere, an existence carved from southern pine barrens, people…