Cover Charge. By Linda Kleinbub

 Broken souls gather

buy the two-drink minimum,

look for romantic remedies.

Your advice was

Don’t write about life

write about art.

I say, Paint me black

splatter your pigment

on my wedding dress.

You’re a beer-soaked barroom,

I’m an engagement ring

lost on the floor.

We Fred Astaire tap dance

in the curb’s holy water.

Your kisses were jewels,

dope bought on the Lower East Side.

We crawl out of abandoned squats,

you say you speak fiction-

your heart is exposed,

I tell true stories,

you are forewarned.

Photo by Arthur Kaye

Linda Kleinbub is the host of the monthly Fahrenheit Open Mic, the founder of Pen Pal Poets and the curator of a summer reading series at 6BC Community Garden. She received her MFA from The New School. Some of her work has appeared in The New York Observer, The Brooklyn Rail, The Best American Poetry Blog, Yahoo! Beauty, First Literary Review-East, and multiple anthologies. Her first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming from A Gathering of Tribes Press / A Fly by Night Press.