PURE FRANCIS

The Janitor

by Michael Ramsburg

Two full decades since he
felt a woman's flesh.
He counts the years on
his fingertips.
It wasn't his fault, though.
He was in the hospital;
he needed some correcting.
Now he owns a parrot.
It only knows one phrase:
Get out of my house!

Michael Ramsburg loves a good Man Baby.

Women in the Land of Having

by Anjanette Delgado

I.
Evie is fifteen, can hardly breathe imagining
she’s licking the length of her teacher’s lean shaft as he pushes
global economy
of thought and perspective. She raises
her hand, wants to say in this country
everything can feel like nothing.
People all over the world feast
on hunger, while she can never find
something to wear, can never decide
where to eat: McDonald’s, Wendy’s,
Burger King, boredom or guilt.

II.
Maria is an American Idol
intern who already knows the world
looks like Angelina, whines like Paris, talks like Oprah and thinks like Jon
    Stewart,
who she secretly wants
to marry so she can live
happily ever after
in more and much-betterland.

III.
Alice is just a woman Who Loves
Too Much, doesn’t know The Rules and hasn’t figured out What Men Want.
She watches Sex and the City on DVD,
twelve for the price of one,
nothing more to buy ever,
hopes to become a butterfly,
be Codependent No More; change
her life for $12.99
in paperback.                      

IV.
Megan walks around with tiny head incisions,
glass-ceiling bruises like those from her heart’s
recent divorce-induced micro-dermabrasion.
She spends her settlement money botoxing her butt, laser-whitening her
    teeth, trying to buy herself
a reason to smile, shoots time up
with pills meant for panic-attacks,
knows this incredible TV offer
is available for a short time only.

Anjanette Delgado is the author of The Heartbreak Pill (Atria Books, Simon and Schuster - 2008).

The Spring of Summer's Flair

by Ernest Williamson

Ernest Williamson III is a 32 year-old polymath who has published poetry and visual art in 200 online and print journals.

Chicago, '64

by Charles Thielman

Headlines promising a day
of dark wings fed by thermals, sirens
circle below the plank of a dangerous night.

A paper carrier, fingers darkened by newsprint,
his arms full, walks beneath an arch of birdsongs,
porch to cement stoop, dropping The Chicago Tribune

on welcome mats, eyes and ears tracking the slow cars
and suspect doorways, pre-dawn sky like new skin,
a veneer over balsa grain, today being his turn
to raise the flag above half-mast, much
still held sacred this spring.

Charles Thielman is a poet and artiste, and a fervent supporter of Greenpeace.