It is a little late, we just found out that the worlds greatest barkeep poet, Russell Streur passed from this place on June 1, 2023. It is a profound loss to all who knew him. Russell was a poet, photographer and publisher. He published two underground poetry sites, The Camel Saloon and The Plum Tree Tavern. The Saloon was published from 2010-2015 https://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/ The Tavern was published from 2015-2023 https://theplumtreetavern.blogspot.com/ His obituary on Legacy is here: Russell was a highly skilled health care fraud investigator, extraordinary poet, baseball historian ..read more

. The Anonymous Signs . A handyman, he’d taken the idea from his neighbor’s kid arrested twenty-three times for graffiti. Though only working with putty and scraper, he would place a finishing whorl on his work in the least visible place, low, against quarter-round molding or the flat horizontal strip that met carpet, appearing like an almost careless mistake in his finish of perfection. . The more expensive the house, the greater the swirl, an imagined sense of getting back at the world for being one of the anonymous, for his rented half-a-duplex with a half-gravel yard where his wife strugg ..read more

. Paper Mines . a neuron fires                 a partial thought a cryptic memory                 the compulsion to write compose                 revise release                 what is the fate of words set into the world                 once printed and bound they are beyond our control                 what hands do they pass ..read more

Standing Stones . i can still smell his shirt when he tramped home from work and slumped down beside us in his chair, lips cracked, shaking cotton fibres from his tusselled hair. . he was like that: never wore a vain hat, or mask to hide the man he was and what he was from himself or anyone else. . he told me my first joke, showed me how to roll a smoke in his thick, stained fingers. oh, how his voice echo lingers sowing moral ethics into politics- . through the night, like Lenin, in reason and fight, making Attlee and Bevan’s lintels bridge the standing stones of Marx and Engels over my yout ..read more

. Flaco the Owl Is Dead . Today I’m leaving Vincenzo. We both adored the freed Eurasian . eagle-owl with huge orange eyes, whose name means skinny in Spanish, . who peeked through high windows, wowed West Side birders with his . rat-catching prowess, six-foot wingspan. Red-eyed, I zip my Samsonite. . Vincenzo loves me but can’t stop slamming doors, calling me stronza— . asshole in English, literally turd. And why am I so sensitive? It’s his . culture, he says. A vandal cut the net, but were we wrong? We cheered him on, . a predator born in captivity, learning to fly. He lived an owl’s life fo ..read more

By Greg Bem Each of us brought along our own signs and our own body to interpret them. (page 5) Javier Peñalosa M.’s new collection of prose poems and verse is about the rivers of Mexico, rivers old and new, their forms as they appear now. It is a book that asks us to remember. Remember the rivers of Mexico, the rivers of the world, the rivers of our lives, those that once flowed and do not anymore, those that may not very much longer. Like poems falling down the page in cascade, torrent, and trickle, some of these rivers were once breaths upon the land, and others may be close to extinguishe ..read more

By Charles Rammelkamp By the end of Diannely Antigua’s heart-wrenching collection, she seems to have reconciled herself to her demons – hence, the “good” part of the Good Monster. But man, getting there is harrowing indeed! The very first poem, sort of a prologue, is titled “Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua” (“This isn’t an apology but rather a confession”), in which she writes to herself, I then took, sixteen years waiting, took a steak knife to your wrists. drew striped doors, and the red entered the room. Once I opened all the pill bottles, left them on the dresser, watched you ..read more

By Alexis David  Death Within Life “Death is a power like any other pull of the earth. The people in the raingear with the cameras want to see it from the inside, from behind, from the dark looking into the light. They want to take its picture, give it size—” –Stanley Plumly On warm summer nights, I think of death. Maybe it is the later darkness. Nine o’clock and the light is only just beginning to fade. Maybe it is the end of summer. The end of the tomatoes growing plump and red. The end of the mint growing furiously throughout the backyard. August comes and then September, foreshadows ..read more

By g emil reutter In this memoir, David Mas Masumoto tackles a difficult time in American history as well as his own family history. Intertwined in this history of family, the imprisonment camps where over 100,000 Japanese Americans were placed following the entry of the United States in WWII. They were incarcerated not because of any crime but due to their appearance even though they were Americans. There were no camps for Italian Americans or German Americans. The internment camps remain a black mark on the history of the United States. The incident occurred before Masumoto was born and tho ..read more

By John Zheng Poetry is a medium for memories through figurative language. Matthew Brennan’s The End of the Road is a collection of memories threading from section to section. As a master raconteur with vivid anecdotes, the poet shares his childhood memories, study abroad, travel, racial empathy, pain and joy of love, time with family, and laments for the dead. His narration reruns the memorable moments that invite readers to enter his imaginary space. “Social Justice” is a recollection of the summer camp where a “husky boy who cuts / in line, then farts as we trudge / uphill on rutted roads ..read more