3:AM Magazine

what’s rightly mine / the scorched-earth philosophy
of a journey
//
all around
   the fields are feeling
the tug
of being pulled up new sap in the veins

the menu is highly recommended

By Iain Britton.

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A man sees a blue light in the window.
He pushes a lever. It looks like a lever.

Some dogs run from a hole.
Some dogs run from a hole in the wall.

This is how we meet.

By Patrick Norris.

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A blind faith takes hold as the hormonal and schizophrenic October envelops the city with dense fog that regularly steams my windows,

Hinting at the heat of creation that stews of late within these beach side walls,

Alternating with breezes that blow wood slats from my gate,

So that with blustery trees in the front yard spilling leaves on my laptop, I blissfully pound the literary keys…

By Kimberly Cooper Nichols.

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idk if there is metaphor that can
catch the beautiful and
pornographic disjoint
i’m trying to grab so instead
i’ll admit i’m thinking about your
dick. there is no word to
describe the hand of a poet
clutching at a cartridge pen
 for the first time.

By Sian S. Rathore.

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The white lady is able to see facts.
My mother owned a good deal.
This evening I am completed, not glad. Not.
The beginnings of a coded reference – an argument.
Mother closing always her bedroom.
Close. Your face in morning.
Afterwards, little action.
Ma, are you serial? Well, a few.

By Sophie Collins.

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I think this man is sending me texts tonight because he wants to have sex
but I’m tired, plus I ignored him earlier and I do

want to say no and I do
want to tell you that this guy wants to fuck me,

right now, while you’re doing whatever in your
apartment or at a party, and I am just reading

silk and silent words marching like ghosts in bed
waiting for a text from you talking about how

this afternoon we saw each other

By Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin.

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Paper lightning dances above our heads
as the snow lays a white sheet over the face
of the kami’s mirror hall.
Clap for the attention of this harvest god,
who I cannot picture, except as black smoke
pressing itself coldly upon the earth.

六

Fukuoka: your brother laughed off my guidebook
with its lurid spread of tattooed flesh,
but when I shot a Nakasu alley
you hissed Yakuza!
recoiling from the negative burn
of a sharked-out Lincoln cruising the red light.

By Andy Barritt.

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all Bombardier. And that’s just the low-hanging fruit.
Submit all doubts to nail-clippings analyst.
The virtual party was weakening against the yen,
one squeeze of lemon away from those brutal
cycle lanes. [Cf Upper Chorlton Rd.] Only DJs know
how tough it is whoring at Morrisons
sacrificing Nectar points. buttery biscuit base
was an algorhythm for the circumference of Superdry.
I wouldn’t want to knowingly understate
how uninterested I am. The conditions are close
to being met in most flecks of chilled parmesan foam.

By Gareth Twose.

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Back home after a nomad summer to the tune of Hells Angels on Main Street as the spotlights of helicopters probe alleys outside,

The teapot screams at nine p.m. with two hours of drawing left ahead as I sit wide-eyed amidst an illustration ink coma,

At 39, my impending old age is rendering me more French romantic then punk rock…

By Kimberly Cooper Nichols.

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My core sense here is to defeat the old chestnut of “inspiration” — a romantic reliance on the muse, whoever she, he or it is meant to be. I tell my students: poetry is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Thinking on this (& trying to find a way of putting it I haven’t already used, as this is something that comes up again & again) & not finding one immediately, I turn away from the work under hand & pick up a book— I’m writing this on the TGV between Paris and Bordeaux — the “light reading” I picked up in Paris yesterday after getting in from New York, this year’s Philippe Sollers’ “novel” called L’éclaircie, which I started reading into during the past night’s jet-lag insomnia hours, & this is what I immediately come across now, here, on the train: “Mallarmé tells how in the morning Manet would throw himself with fury upon his canvases, ‘as if he had never painted.’ A capital notation: one has never written anything, painted anything, composed anything, the spontaneous act belongs to the pure present, always new, without past.”

In the 94th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Luxembourger poet Pierre Joris.

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