Notes on this Issue:

The poem ‘King’ included in this issue was presented to me a by a homeless man while I was sitting with some friends on the Lil Indie’s patio. He was selling his poems for $5 a piece. I ended up buying two of them. 

The interaction reminded me of a period in my life when I used to work as a head line-cook at a luxury movie theater in South Florida. There were many fun things about the place. I served Tiger Woods a burger patty that I dropped on the floor a few minutes before giving it to him. We had a full theater cleared after two kids fucked in the front row of Wreck-It-Ralph. Some buddies and I used to run a bare-knuckle fight club in the back parking lot. It was a great job with a lot of memorable times, but one my favorite memories was of selling mushrooms to the young busboys. The only currency I accepted was poetry. I’d give them a specific amount of mushrooms, proportional to the quality of their poem. Eventually, the kids began a poetry competition to try and win the largest amount of mushrooms. Some poems were bad, really bad, but some were very good. And, in the years since, I’ve had a couple of them reach out to me to talk about how those competitions got them to see the value of poetry. 

I started this zine one year ago to serve three purposes: 1. To release my work, 2. To release other people’s work, and 3. To encourage people to write or at least appreciate how significant poetry can be. 

Every one of you readers and writers mean very much to me. I hope you all stick around for the plentiful, beautiful, obnoxious, offensive, grotesque, sexual, relatable, self-deprecating, overly dramatic, angsty, loving and pitiful issues to come. 

- W.B.

Second Note: The poem ‘King’ was almost unreadable when I bought it, and the parts that were clear were pretty much incomprehensible. The version of the piece I included later in this issue has been heavily edited.