Cold Rambler

The concept of a fountain of youth is one that has crossed the centuries, as well as the globe. Yet, nobody  can agree on what it is, where it is and who has it, for sure. I step forward today  to submit an answer  to settle this ongoing debate— for I personally have tasted an elixir that has  shaved years off my life, in more ways than one.  Good people, hear  and believe me now! If, in fact, a fountain of youth flows somewhere  in our wide  and fucked-up world, I would bet  my last dollar that it tastes like cold beer from a freshly-tapped keg. But not  Bud Light.    Jack Phillips Lowe resides in the Chicago area. His poems have appeared in Cajun Mutt Press, Clutch 2025 and Bold Monkey Review. Lowe's selected poems, Flashbulb Danger (Middle Island Press, 2018), is available from Amazon. His most recent book, Brautigan's Blue Moon (Instant Oblivion Press, 2025), is available from lulu.com. 

The words are grinding ice and Ogopogo  takes a modelling job in the city. Fished out of the Okanagan depths by a kleptomaniac talent agent  who loses marbles by the bag. Picks up hitchhikers  with a pair of salad tongs, while their new monster signing makes pouty faces for the camera. Magazine poses  for the airbrush army. Pasted over highway billboards that used to show you your brain on  drugs.   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, Horror Sleaze Trash, Cold Rambler, Zygote in My Coffee, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Rusty Truck and The Oklahoma Review. 

Kaleidoscope plumbago on a zephyr wind jasmine, honeysuckle, and lilac perfume wafting in the vibrating heat wave as I wait Rivers thunder mellow jazz ravens dancing in the banana trees, time is wiser than people, dying is just waking up on another tomorrow Tears of God the panther ate the rose, a delicious morsel of ghost, memory, rain, for two months I waited by the house in San Angel and Casa Azul Sitting for a cafecito and churro, a red purse full of marijuana appeared, soft hands covered my eyes, “Do you like mota, gringo?” she asked “When I was a hippie, I toked,” “What’s a hippie?” I told her as we took a taxi to a park where they trained bulls for the corrida. “When the matador kills them I feel their pain, like my accident.”   Catfish McDaris is from Albuquerque and Milwaukee. He writes to keep his sanity. Most of the time it works out. 

I'm the guy with the yellow tape. I arrive  after the first responders but before forensic,      before the detectives in the suits who've  seen all this before. I wrap that strip around  fire plug, telephone pole, even a parked car  and a mail box. I'm paid to separate the ones  to whom death's only a job and the gathering  crowds who are there for the novelty  of bullet wounds and blood and tears.  Some nights, I do nothing but sit back  in my patrol car, sip coffee, maybe nibble  on a donut, with yellow tape balanced  on my knee, a whole mess of it in the  passenger seat, a box of rolls in the trunk. I don’t seek out tragedy. I don’t solve crimes. I merely tape off the area, tape myself off  in the process.   John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are...

History is littered with stories of imaginary futures unattained. Bread, land and peace were Lenin’s promises and the Bolsheviks believed them and, like others before and since, believed in themselves, believed they could achieve them then. But, they weren’t uncontested.  Power intervened power and conflict external and internal and internal contradictions all in the mix and look where it took them. What was there to be done then. Education, re-education, terror, year zero nostalgia for primitive simplicity, they’ve all been tried. Such promises, such imagined futures, have a long history and even longer future similarly re-imagined every time. So, what is to be done now. Once my generation thought we’d done it, achieved the imagined hopes of Lennon’s song and created the basis for a future based on peace and love and civil rights. Even a pandemic couldn’t stop us at Woodstock. We were unstoppable! Invincible! Peaceful! In diverse countries we saw the rebels become statesmen. We th...

You lay your iron helmet  on the dark field to build a citadel ridge, the sky banners embroidered with fire lilies, the sky unscrolls from the canter of a horse across the rampart, smoke surrounds a dagger in the flame, you decipher the offering glass as I search the city toward the evening with a pure lamp, I contemplate the stone swaths   for the veil of your hiding.   John Swain lives in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, France.  His most recent chapbook, The Daymark, was published by the Origami Poetry Project.