Do It the Hard Way or the Easy Way

You know you’re in hot water when
You see them prep the slaughter pen.
But is this turbulence you find
A trick of night, a sleight of mind?
What of rain, and what of flowers?
Bubble jets in midnight hours?
Enemies can’t force your dance;
Your anomie was made in France.
Yours the joy and yours the gain
Unless you pick the door of pain.
Of all the powers granted you,
Chief is choosing what you’ll do.
Fight with Uzis? Lounge with floozies?
Via Crucis or Jacuzzis?

 

Tucker Lieberman recently published a memoir of hallucination, Bad Fire, and he has fantasy forthcoming in The Great Trans-Universal Bike Ride anthology. You can find his poems in recent issues of Marias at Sampaguitas, little dog, Esthetic Apostle, The Conclusion, Déraciné, Neologism, and Defenestration, and you can hear him on the Robot Eunuchs episode of the Stories We Tell Our Robots podcast. He and his husband, the science fiction writer Arturo Serrano, live in Bogotá, Colombia.

Bill Wolak has just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense with Ekstasis Editions. His collages have appeared recently in Naked in New Hope 2018, The 2019 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Poetic Illusion, The Riverside Gallery, Hackensack, NJ, the 2019 Dirty Show in Detroit, 2018 The Rochester Erotic Arts Festival, and The 2018 Montreal Erotic Art Festival.