J. Scott Bugher
A Cincinnati Boil

J. Scott Bugher - A Cincinnati Boil

Poetry
J. Scott Bugher is a writer, artist and session musician living in Indianapolis, Indiana. His poetry and short stories have appeared in a variety of journals and his novel-in-progress keeps him busy.… Read more »
Michael Lavers
Light Years

Michael Lavers - Light Years

Poetry
Michael Lavers completed an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including College Literature, Smartish Pace, and Rattle. He… Read more »
Ash Bowen
Murder in the Red Barn

Ash Bowen - Murder in the Red Barn

Poetry
Ash Bowen’s first collection of poems, The Even Years of Marriage, won the 2012 Orphic Book Prize for Poetry and will be available from Dream Horse Press in November. Other work has appeared in New… Read more »
Laura McCullough
Nautical Tattoo

Laura McCullough - Nautical Tattoo

Poetry
Laura McCullough's most recent book of poems is Rigger Death & Hoist Another. Her other books are Panic, Speech Acts, and What Men Want. She is the editor of two anthologies: The Room & the… Read more »
Roy Bentley
One Wench in the House between Them

Roy Bentley - One Wench in the House between Them

Poetry
Roy Bentley’s work has been recognized with fellowships from the NEA, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah,… Read more »
Mark Wisniewski
To Bukowski, #43

Mark Wisniewski - To Bukowski, #43

Poetry
Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, Show Up, Look Good, was praised by Ben Fountain, Kelly Cherry, T.R. Hummer, Jonathan Lethem, and Molly Giles; his first, Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman,… Read more »
Hilary Sideris
What

Hilary Sideris - What

Poetry
Hilary Sideris’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Green Mountains Review, Memoir, Quiddity, The Southampton Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Her new collection, A House Not… Read more »
Richard Prins
Zunguka

Richard Prins - Zunguka

Poetry
Richard Prins is a New Yorker who sometimes lives in Dar es Salaam. He received his MFA degree in poetry from New York University. His work appears in Los Angeles Review, Painted Bride Quarterly,… Read more »

One Wench in the House between Them

Roy Bentley

They lived together on the Bank side, not far
from the playhouse, both bachelors;
lay together; had one wench in the house
between them which they did so admire.
—John Aubrey

On meeting, Neal Cassady asks Jack Kerouac
about a rhythm that begins in the wires
above a road at dawn, wind just right,
and whether it has anything to do with Bop
or the whereabouts of God. Jack, smiling,
says that Allen Ginsberg, jacking off
in an East Harlem apartment, heard
a voice he attributed to William Blake.
Neal, Holy Goof, can throw a football
60 yards in a nautilus-like tight spiral,
run the 100 in under ten, jump 23 feet
dead still. Says he can please three women
in synchronous rotation for days and days.
“When I finished my first book,” Jack one-ups,
“I fingered this thin hole in the ground,
fucked Ozone Park.” Neal: I can see that.

__________

In the loft on Russell Street, in San Francisco,
Jack types, stops. Cable-car noises in the streets
punctuate a simple-covenant purer jazz of night,
idleness. Neal and Carolyn Cassady couple below.
Carolyn’s sweet, come-cry anthem, within hearing,
insists, though Eisenhower is President,
that this be shared. Come down, Jack, they say.
This land is not the sweet home that it looks.
They burn who are living. Come down.

__________

After On the Road three locals follow Kerouac
from the Kettle of Fish Bar in the Village;
they stop traffic to take turns at the famous face.
Staggering to hospital, Jack watches East 13th Street,
a gray tide and light, become a junked-out
Mexican woman, Esperanza Villanueva,
who sold morphine. A dark, bilingual angel.
Your name means Hope, he’d meant to tell her.

__________

Black night seas are the centers of the eyes
of a Portuguese woman Kerouac promises
one hundred dollars the year before he dies
to gaze, for an hour, back at him. The hour
the two sit, half-candle in a saucer the only light,
the woman’s lover sleeps heavily beside her
on a throw of pillows, defeating the concentration
and connection. It’s the intimacy he wants:
someone, anyone, to halt the thieving future
and return everything. After, he hears
“I have done this thing” and pays her.

for Kevin and Martha Michael
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