Barrelhouse Online: The Poetry Issue, edited by Justin Marks

Barrelhouse Online: The Poetry Issue, edited by Justin Marks

Barrelhouse has never done an online poetry issue before. We knew if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right, so we reached out to the man himself, Justin Marks, poet and editor at Birds, LLC, to act as our guest editor. As you’ll see, Justin did not disappoint. The dude assembled an all-star lineup packed with poets we admire. Not only that, but he also wrote a poignant essay on fading youth and fading attention for the music he once loved. We guarantee you’ll have as much fun reading this issue as we did putting it together.

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A Certain Set of Circumstances at a Particular Time, by Justin Marks

A Certain Set of Circumstances at a Particular Time, by Justin Marks

Since I was teenager, I’ve been obsessed with music. When I was 13, Guns-n-Roses released Appetite for Destruction, an album that I listened to every day for at least a year straight, including the day I got drunk for the first time. From there I discovered all kinds of metal bands—Metallica, Suicidal Tendencies, Pantera, the [...]

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Three Poems, by Heather Green

I Can See Through Walls I was forced into paradise, only                  Manzanita brush and citrus trees to numb me. My music was murderous. It killed the longing and closed the wound. What holy voice roared, and who heard?                  If [...]

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Four Poems, by Luke Bloomfield

  Shanghai, 1925 Lost in the woods, third time this week. Fell asleep and woke to a square shaped women nudging me with a shovel. I stood up and brushed the leaves and mud from my suit. She let go of her shovel and shoved a shoe in my pocket. I began to shiver and [...]

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Three Poems, by Eric Amling

Adult Deluxe The computer smashed the social time barrier. Old data fading on old paper. The realistic dreamers; buried in a dragnet of hillsides.  All these diamonds in a stack of diamonds look the same, said a diamond racist. On a waterbed, it’s premier bachelorism.  Conjoined garden hoses spray ghostly rainbows. I yell at the [...]

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Two Poems, by Catherine Theis

Banjo Tune Mine own cock-blossom, let’s canoe out and see the stars milky unfolding. Let’s canoe to where the water bloats the lotus root, where the fish improve their eyesight. At some point, the inky mud covers you. Don’t be afraid. Look, in the bend of that tree, a fire!   Blood in the Food [...]

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Tactile Alphabet, by Ish Klein

(A) Left hand touches the right shoulder. Hand holds the shoulder Varying placement and strength of grasp. (B) Right hand touches the left shoulder. Note differences if differences exist. Replicate activity, note changes in brain wave, head pressure or jaw tension level. (C) Hand over but not touching skin. Maybe you are covered with subtle [...]

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From Future Conversations, by Jeremiah Gould

      This is also the year hallucinations started to get big. Before you could buy them real cheap down in the alleys behind the bodegas. A few bucks got you some sensual explosions, vertigo, dry-mouth. A momentary lapse, then you got on with your life. These new hallucinations, though, are incredibly involved. I [...]

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Pet Book Reviews: The Good Good Pig

This is the sixth post in an ongoing series reviewing pet books.  You can read the previous installments here.   The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood by Sy Montgomery (Ballantine 2005) What do you do when you have a potentially lucrative book deal but no book? Presumably, you start writing and [...]

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Two Poems, by Tristan Tzara, translated by Heather Green

Bifurcation I don’t want to part from you my smile is attached to your body and the kiss of the algae to the rock inside my years I carry a sunny and noisy child no one but you could draw him from his shell like the snail with a fine voice among the grass are [...]

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Three Poems, by Ana Bozicevic

Anxiety of Influence I fell asleep in the snow, and woke up in leaves. Cotillions of them were already out A limo glided by. There was a crane, too yellow, brand of KOMATSU. What does it mean, I asked. The leaf/sun interplay played on. I heard that sleep was a thing of healing so I [...]

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Three Poems, by Sandra Simonds

Because I Have Given Birth As dilation of cervix    is the soul to blame shoot rubber bands   at eggs   like child’s play. This game’s  a guinea pig   made of Venetian glass or a Third Reich contraction    cast in bronze— the sperm of the future   the sperm of the past Western Civ’s Byzantine,   the Red Forest, [...]

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Three Poems, by Megin Jimenez

They Were All Love Stories Even the ones that lasted a matter of minutes. The best are often a matter of a week. But at some point, having cherished the same novel (the one only known to the initiated), or having been intimate with the same album, by the same band, in the end, was [...]

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Three Poems, by Dan Hoy

Waterfront It smells like the sea. I’m staring at the skyline and the sunset hit the water through my phone. It looks like a mushroom cloud. I take a pic and send it to my mom. Some fuckhead brought his acoustic guitar. I took out my headphones so I could listen to nature and have [...]

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Two Poems, by Alexis Orgera

Man Builds a Guitar I heard everything disappearing. I heard you, wind. And I heard you leaving—or wanting to expand like twin coke bottles missing the tiny worlds inside them. [insert noise of grease, a missing syllable’s tin hooks, traction]   The toy piano I can’t shake hear it? and beneath it the steady undifferentiated [...]

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The Legend of Wookieback:  A Feat of Space Exploration, by Matthew Vollmer

The Legend of Wookieback: A Feat of Space Exploration, by Matthew Vollmer

  In January of 1998, when we were twenty-four years old, my friend John Ringhofer and I sat on my bedroom floor with a pair of guitars, a Yamaha keyboard, and a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe storybook cassette, and began to write songs for what would one day become one of Chattanooga, [...]

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