From the Laps of the Editors
Hello Readers (all twelve of you). We are excited—and apprehensive—to share with you the first volume of Bad Jacket, a poetry magazine produced as a means to redeem our rotten souls. After burning all of our books during a particular “enlightening” pyschoactive drug induced vision quest, We determined that our only act of penance would be to give back—the books We burned were ones of thousands of copies, but it was still a slight against all which We held dear; We burned books, so naturally We had to write one. May what you find in these pages delight, soothe, provoke, and inspire you.
Forever dotingly yours, The Fucking Editors badjacket94@gmail.com
The Following Should Hold Themselves Highly Esteemed Thomas Blood, Jr. Katryn Dierksen Jena Doering Marie Kenney Sam Kolar Hart L’ecuyer The Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center Benjamin Luczak Thomas Mays Michael McLaughlin William Morris Abby Naumann The Slumpy Brothers UMSL’s Ludicrous Paper Budget
Aug 13, 2014 I remember every person who has ever given me a coat when I was cold.
Aladeen Stoll
“We’re being the best friends we can be right now. I expect a happy birthday text on my birthday, which is the 31st of this mouth, and I’ll send her one on hers. 21st of next.” Jason, Missouri State Fair, Sedalia MO
Style Thomas Mays
I Those who dress well cannot write a good poem; though they think they can write as good as they think they look. Good poets wear bad jackets, and as long as they can put a shirt into words and do not mind the words stitched on to their shirt, there isn’t much left to consider. II Levi Strauss, unzip me. Nike, stop talking and just do it already. Low cut jeans and panties dropped. Under Armour on top. Forever 21, are you sure you’re old enough? Charlotte Russe, make me feel young. Fruit of the Loom ripe and ready to be plucked: disrobe close your eyes and get fucked.
The Bellhop’s Revenge a sense of stratification stayed well-wide so shuffle along to tag dandified swinger ze grand so-called dead-ended bellhop sign off on latitude having learned such sloppy bulletins painting on the front steps ragtime
Hart L’ecuyer
circuits get advantages just because frequent programmatic dream faux pas to begin with the presence of a radio audience metronome dues tuxedo broadcasts soon but not to listen waltzing with the best of them the institution shifted strings lost-on watermark overtures this term subsidiary terminology of at least 2 of the royal parts we are dealing with the pieces themselves attempted minuet excuse shed monasteries decide the problem listed chronologically with extreme caution identical catalog no longer our climax (well-stocked) held her distraction just as we were matches— blossom no longer, inebriating noise
Weapons I read in “Detectives” by Bolaño that the blade is Chile’s national weapon. When you have a blade in prison you have friends. But when you have a gun and your neighbor has a gun and you have a family, you have fear. So maybe the Chileans with their blades could be skipping hand in hand through the streets while their distant American neighbors are sweating in movie theaters and locking their doors. But some Chileans prefer guns.
William Morris
Satellite City Projections in shapes; a city in pieces calls wildly on a vagrant wind. Traveler barrels out the door again, again with the leaves, again with the chalkboard stippled white. More grey against the trees who climb on heads, brothers’ and sisters’, to be the more green, facing that monster sky.
Katryn Dierksen
Real Ideas Michael Mclaughlin
Ploem
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Fat $tack$
So you don't wanna to play Baal? WHY'D he DO it Ma?
Eros waits in bated breath for the marriage on the hearth Loafer custom shatter blather other matter angler spoons, man Dearest kindly may you keep in mind the tidal way-fares Blank stares, arrows on a taut strung bow Only held at points essential Thanatos, be gondola anger duke align not over soon Lets see about that, said Rajul.
Walking Through My Father’s Mostly Surrealist Paintings
Back at a Dock unclear Where over sand and Day Storm over Night turns Ubiquitous Moon with heedless Stars Suspended Tightrope Eight-ball Light-rock Where do I follow On Teeter-Totter Swing set and Jungle gym Like family Photos sans Camera For Me before time or a stop in the Tate Were Three Stooges Who guns a-blazin' Wear stares Over Laundry Landscapes and Blue Skies twice-framed I Chin scratch Philosophizing Whether sonic Hues surprise You as much as acrylic Pen-Knife Magritte pieces. Yet I use painter's Tape as much as any, Only wear black suits For Funerary decency, But never Bowler hats— Just remotely. Beneath these scattered Rocks I stand Interrogating Matter and it all Que to palm And Dan to Disc—me too.
Thomas Blood, Jr.
Couplets Are For Closers Hart L’ecuyer
you wouldn’t steal a car so why would you want to make America great again? in the stratosphere, there’s a saying “it gets worse— take it from the ground” Abraham Lincoln once said, “Fuck off, I never fucking said that, you fucking child. Coffee is for closers.”
if you don’t know the reference you’re probably just not cool enough he was quoting a movie which really just goes to show he was an extraordinary man this is why couplets are a fucking joke
do you know there are literary magazines that pay by the line in America we incentivize cheapness at every turn you wouldn’t steal a car so why would you turn the page when you could just read this poem again? YOLO.
Silver-hair She’s all angles. jerking left & right, away with elbows, hips, jaunting in regular dance; a sway, in the heat, a faint patina, a sheen, on her forehead. My lover hasn’t touched me, for I climb, ascend a staircase, to a second level—a heightened rooftop, the professor’s window a paratroop below; I erect my spine, shoulders sharp as if awaiting command in the hottest heat of day. The books beneath, lodged in torn jackets, reach up anyway. She falls on the slab, over the basin, under the hill, fingers pointed, sending me anywhere: the cool fringe of the woods, the damp of the rocks, the water on the wind’s back electrifying her silver hair.
Katryn Dierksen
For Nathan, Standing on the Corner I’m picking him up since he’s back from elsewhere, leaning against the stop sign on fifth street, rolling a cigarette. There’s a paperback Sailing Alone Around The World jammed into his front pocket like a holstered silver six-shooter. The tale of his trip encoded in whorled white paint on his pants. I’ll be the first to hear. I’m always the first to hear. And the smile of recognition he shoots me through the windshield as I sidle up is enough to make the sun hang deliberate, pausing, taking a moment to rest before continuing a perpetual tramp.
Benjamin Luczak
Prayer for Andres Serrano After this slander, forgo praying: Our Father which floats in Urine, Piss-stained be thy face. Thy Kingdom: Cum. Thy thrills be cheap and dumb— Attain mirth in excreting essence— Evacuate yesterday’s bread. Administer a cankerous lick to seal your dead letter. And lead us not from infection, but deliver us unclean needles: For dying is freedom—though dour— and gory surrender. And then?
Thomas Mays
Going Through The Motions In Salem Hart L’ecuyer
scandalously long wooden tables just enough to miles-down-the-road open up a service predator defeating lamps to lift celebrity hides through secretaries my darling: I must remember to see this Gene Tierney picture! maybe at the cancer valley 10? she sawed up the fishy least of my brothers when I came in her purple yawn moved over waded in the motions of my story with a polka-dotted shotgun like masturbating in the first week of November
Good God five bankers were lately executed, impudently demanding of God a miraculous vindication of their innocency. Immediately upon this, our God miraculously sent in five Andover bankers, who made a most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their villainies! Cotton Mather/ August 5, 1692 I chances channel, respectably flushing the taste of her metropolis,— did singular moonlight leave for a dinner table Caesar?
Zero Degrees Farenheit Donald Trump Blues
William Morris I wanted to tell myself that this too shall pass like the hopeful tattoo on a sad teenage girl’s forearm, but sometimes you’re stuck with bad decisions you can’t even say you made, really, if you’re really being honest with yourself about who you are now, and who you were when you got that tattoo, which really, now that you think about it, turned out OK, considering the circumstances.
“A Real Fixer-Upper�
Jena Doering Your love was home. I could curl up in the blankets and pillows of your sweet nothings and rock in the arms of your patience. I could run down hallways touching nothing but memories of time well spent. But when the leaves started to fall around us you stuck a FOR SALE sign in the yard because you weren't interested in raking and repairing our landscape. You yanked away the covers that once held the promise of our future andwhen I try to walk down that same hallway all I can breath is stag nant, negligent air. I can't find a memory worth holding onto. There isn't a corner in the void house that I can at feel home in anymore. But I can feel the ghost of a love lost aching in my bones and I wonder if I'm not alone? As I open my eyes and fill them with cleansing light, the demons danc- ing in the dark recede from my dreams, return to their place in my heart. Monsters wrestling in the lining of my gut leave muddy gashses from talons the size of your excuses. Smog and resin fill the place where my lungs once flourished. I can't breathe around the memories and scars you left behind. Can't feel the places where your hand prints once were. This body needs a sage cleansing with a medicine man to rid it of all these unwanted ghosts of you, of them, of all of the yesterdays spent hating myself for the pound of flesh you took. I need you to be a memory, but every night you creep into my reality.
Longinus
Thomas Mays Jesus, I want to weep, too—probably not for the same reasons you do. Am I so much a bigger man than you because I was taught never to cry? Twenty-two to your thirty-three years I have tried, yet no tear of unselfish love has been allowed from my eye. Jesus, I want to pierce my hands with the pen I could never hold properly—but not my feet (though, I was told that you would carry me), because Jesus, I want to walk on the water that must have trickled down the lance to anoint The Skull, and turn it into wine and become drunk with your blood and weep.
An Event of Charity
Katryn Dierksen
Her hair freezes, her head cresting Lake Michigan. That’s broken surface tension—what an awkward baptism! The lace front wig squeezes her scalp like a nerve-cutting bandage, a reminder that you shouldn’t thank anyone for anything, the virgin strands coifed safely beneath the skull cup.
Hematoma Face / Hot Date Abby Naumann
Your idea of consent is a pause The time it takes for me to “put things gently.� Which is funny, I think Because my idea of foreplay Is the crack of my knuckles on your septum. Judging by your hematoma face We had a pretty hot date last night.
OkCupid Date I sunk my nail-tips into his sponge chest and dug, looking for my heart beat but my fingers thrummed only the sinew in his system. “Tell me where it is.� His stance wide, frozen as a bull calf after shot gun crack. The breath of an insect and he bolted, veins throbbing fresh scarlet across the whites of his eyes.
Aladeen Stoll
Leather
William Morris Draping down handcurved hooks in the dark hot silent shop: suncracked sweatless cowhide belts shoes jackets and the thicklybearded boy in back alone since dawn.
Here, Hold These For Me If I am quiet tonight, please continue to crack ice into your rum and Coke. Could we exist together? Already, I worry. Today, in a small room with an open window, I read about feminism. An ambulance went by and its siren filled everything.
Aladeen Stoll
Telluric I miss the way our skin touched: fingers, arms, nipples, lips, a current arcing between us.
Benjamin Luczak
“Telluric� always on the tip of my tongue, when my fingers grazed your arm. Now only words pass between us. I finally changed the kitchen lightbulb today. The one you always said was too bright. But the bulb burnt out as soon as the circuit was complete. And I left it there, hoping it might overcome its faulty wiring.
13 Ways of Looking at a Goat I I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are 3 goats. II Baaa said one goat. Baaa said the other. My life is a lie. III The great god Pan Was present At our party last night In the form of Billy, My pet goat, Whom we sacrificed. IV The glen encircled us Gently, Like a lover. We uncorked the wine. The sound of pipes could be heard. V “You know what really gets my goat?” “What?” “Animal clichés” VI I have a Goats in Trees 2015 Wall Calendar \January looks proud to be there. February’s confused. March refuses to acknowledge me. He gazes somewhere off to the right Into the future. VII “Who’s the goat tramping over my tree?”
Benjamin Luczak
Roared the troll. “It is I, Billy Goat Gruff.” “Shit. You’re kind of scary looking. Go ahead.” VIII Oh scholars of the school, Why do you seek the owl in the night When the goat stubbornly Head butts you from behind? IX The eyes were horizontal Black lines, As if painted on, Almost as an afterthought X When Lucifer met Pan, He said “You look pretty ugly” Pan said “Where’s your pitchfork?” They both agreed to a drink. XI After we had drawn the pentagram And burned the incense We eagerly awaited the Dark Lord. Finally the circle flared. “Who dares disturb my slumber?” The smoke cleared. It was a goat.
XII The goats in the pen Were three old men Chewing tobacco instead of tin cans and solemnly discussing politics Instead of blissful nothing. XIII The beasts of the field And fish of the sea And the birds of the air And the goats of the tree
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