Nickel Beer Night Poetry
January 2012
"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." -Plato
Featured Poets:
Corey Mesler
Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published five novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), Gardner Remembers (2011), 2 full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2011), and 3 books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009), Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2011) and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (2011). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “Coronet Blue.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.
Joseph Farley
Joseph Farley edited Axe Factory for 24 years. His books and chapbooks include Suckers, For the Birds, Longing for the Mother Tongue, and Waltz of the Meatballs.
Zach Fishel
Zach Fishel is currently working on his M.A. in Literature at the University of Toledo. Aside from growing beards and collecting scars on his heart he has had work appear in The Legendary, Amphibi, Mad Swirl, Horrorsleazeandtrash, and many others.
Ed Higgins
Ed Higgins’ poetry and short fiction has appeared in various print and online literary journals. He and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon with a menagerie of animals including two whippets, two manx barn cats (who don’t care for the whippets), an emu named To & Fro and a pair of male alpacas named Machu & Picchu.
Valentina Cano
Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, White Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World. You can find her here: http://coldbloodedlives.blogspot.com
Harry Calhoun
Harry Calhoun has survived three broken ribs and three marriages, the latest by far the best and still active. He has had work published at odd poetry whistlestops for the past 30 years, including the books and chapbooks The Black Dog and the Road, Something Real, Near daybreak, with a nod to Frost and Retreating Aggressively into the Dark. He has had two recent Pushcart nominations and a Sundress Best of the Net nomination. His heart, and hopefully his liver, will go on. His latest chapbook, The Insomnia Poems, is just out and selling briskly. Well, selling, at least. While not born in the Southern USA, he believes that he embodies the immortal words of Tom Petty: “With one foot in the grave, and one foot on the pedal, I was born a rebel.” Hey hey hey.
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Corey Mesler
I am Not Dying
for Cheryl
I am not dying.
My soul burns
with crave and the
need to shimmer.
I am not dying.
The heart quakes
because the years
are stacked like a cord
of wood. But I am
not dying because
I love you. Because
I love you so hard
it carves a glyph
into the world’s
dense, impeding wall, a
glazed pictogram saying,
Love, wait, I am not dying.
Paper Reign
A horse gallops just to the edge.
You can fall into the blank.
I put my finger on the first period.
You whisper my secret name.
I write the story of our involvement
with a stick dipped in lightning.
The horse goes ahead and goes over.
I’ll Say Anything Once
Once you tested me, held up
the cards while I struggled with
this and that, the difference
between further and farther,
the catches on your bra. You
told me that I didn’t really fit
into your life plan, the one you
had drawn on the back of a
scooter. I said, I can see that, let
me just answer a few more
questions. I tried as hard as I
could to say the thing that would
allow me to stay in your hot
banquet. I’ll say anything once,
even if it’s a lie to hold onto
something precious, even if
you never believed a single thing
I said. I’ll say anything once
and having said it move on.
The test followed me to other
lovers. The answers always
seemed far away though the ques-
tions were similar if not exact.
I hemmed and hawed a lot. I
turned the pages as if looking
for something. I was only stalling.
I wanted to say to them, I’ll say
anything once, but I’d spent that
tactic. Instead I used a blank stare.
You can overwrite a blank stare.
Make me what you will, I said.
Make me, lover, say anything.
_________________________________________________________________________
Joseph Farley
Make Way
The purpose of life
Is to die on the road.
Others will follow
And make better time.
The soil you are
Will sprout better lives,
For others, not you,
So please step aside.
__________________________________________________________________________
Zach Fishel
Losers at the Bus Stop
She was a big girl
with pixie spiked hair in the back
and she owned hamsters,
twenty hamsters that ate,
fucked, and soiled
their homes.
Just like the people around her.
She was happy living in mediocre squalor and desperation.
I wanted to see her smile
once,
as we passed each other at the bus stop every morning.
I went home.
Slept early and all night.
Didn’t see her again until the
obituaries on Thursday.
She laid herself out cold with a Remington.
I made a sandwich
and finished another portfolio.
__________________________________________________________________________
Ed Higgins
Beer Drinking Haiku
#1
six-pack
unpacked
ah, empty cans
#2
knocked-over glass
crying over
spilt beer
#3
bone-dry thirst
guzzling desert-hued
amber ale
#4
drinko-de-mayo
salty-sweet beer nuts
sipping foam
#5
whoa!
beering aid installed
happy new ear!
__________________________________________________________________________
Valentina Cano
Classroom Violence
The rest of the room
trembled as he spoke.
Chairs and desks,
all full of days in the sunlight,
were submerged in an ice-cold lake.
The words dipped them
ever
downwards.
They tried to look back
up to where he was,
but all they could see
was a mouth,
shimmering, weaving,
through the water.
Nightly Hopes
He unbuckled his belt,
hoping to unwind the day
from around him.
Like a lazy snake,
it drooped, sagged
in cold coils around his stomach
then collapsed when his hand released it.
His body breathed while his mind
pushed back on the thoughts,
stabbing them backwards
with indifferent sighs.
It would all wait for him.
The thoughts,
the memories,
the forced smiles.
All like tickets at the deli,
just waiting to be crossed off.
__________________________________________________________________________
Harry Calhoun
Here, Drinking, Writing, What It Is
Sweet brandy
shooting you through the liver
while ratcheting down
the stress that kicks up
your acid reflux.
You alternate two pencils
keep a third handy
just in case you get inspired
and reluctant to stop and sharpen.
The day is too hot
to be truly beautiful
something you would not say
about a woman, but true.
The day is spent
like a cigarette burning
close to the filter
it has you here dispensing
cheap wisdom and some recognition
of what this might be
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