Laredo by John Doyle

Hell underwhelms those in love
with fire, brimstone, 

five-cent trash-can attorneys, 
those stealing patents from hometown inventors,

rubbing nickels on dreams made from twine.
A child in the Badlands struck oil 

chasing rabbits to the point 
where the river choked in mud, 

Satan nearly crushed in the tongue-dry cracks 
upstream.

We spent an hour at Martinez's grave,
smoked cigars, struck flint on stone. 

I was disappointed when the drag queens turned out to be women, 
I asked Satan to give my money back -

he was polite,
didn’t leave me a penny short

 John Doyle became a Mod again in the summer of 2017 to fight off his impending mid-life crisis; whether this has been a success remains to be seen. He has has two collections published to date, A Stirring at Dusk in 2017, and Songs for Boys Called Wendell Gomez in 2018, both on PSKI's Porch.

He is based in Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. All he asks is that you leave your guns at the door and tie up your horses before your enter.

An Infinitely Meaningless Poem by Ethan Goffman

As the old song goes, “nothing is real”

but how can nothing be real when it’s the absence of something?

Set theory says
there is an infinity of infinities
but I say
there are no infinities
no infinity plus one;
since infinity cannot exist in the first place
and cannot even be conceived
it is impossible to add one to it.

There are zero infinities
not just because infinity doesn’t exist,
but because zero does not exist.
In reality
there are zero zeros.

In this way
zero and infinity are the same
sweet nothings in the human soul
and the minds of mathematicians.

How many mathematicians you ask?
A countable number
a number that exists
something, not nothing.

Nothing is not real
not unreal
not surreal
simply not
but not even not, since “not” is just another way
of expressing zero.

Still, for us humans
nothing is something
so much more consequential 
than infinity.
 
I have no money
zero
nothing.

When you are broke
nothing is everything.

Ethan Goffman accidentally became a poet by

tagging along with his wife, the far more talented, harder working, and

prettier Marianne Szlyk, to poetry workshops. He is still not sure how or why,

but somehow Kelsay Books has recently published his first volume of

poetry, Words

for Things Left Unsaid.