Hobo Camp Review

Hobo Camp Review -- Issue 12, Winter 2011

2012-01-01T13:11:00.001-06:00

Editor's Note

Review of Jason Ryberg and Joshua Rizer's Down, Down and Away

Editor's Note

2012-01-01T13:06:00.002-06:00

Yeah, it’s not 2011 anymore, but here’s the Winter 2011 Issue, fashionably late to a fault. It’s a shorter issue regardless of the fact that we received far more submissions than ever before. This isn’t to say the submissions were not of high-quality, but I really wanted to raise the bar and only allow the poems that could survive round after round of stringent cuts, and so we have a mere nine poems by five poets, all of them classic Hobo Camp pieces. I turned away a batch of good poems because I wanted to post only my absolute favorite poems that rolled in this fall. I hope you enjoy them too.

I also have a review of Jason Ryberg/Joshua Rizer’s collection Down, Down and Away, a must have book for anyone who has enjoyed the kind of poetry we aim to display in HCR.

That’s all folks, short and sweet. Stay warm, stay true, and I’ll see you down the road…

James H Duncan

Review of Jason Ryberg and Joshua Rizer's "Down, Down and Away"

2012-01-01T13:05:00.000-06:00

After reading his joint collection with Joshua Rizer titled Down, Down and Away, it’s clear that Jason Ryberg writes from “the bottom of the deep, murky gravel pit of [his] gut, down among the bottles and bones, the scuttled cars and sunken rowboats … in the oily dark of this forgotten underworld”—words pulled from his own poem, “STILL-LIFE WITH CATFISH, JAMES BROWN, DRAGON AND FREIGHT TRAIN.” With clever asides and sardonic quips throughout his poetry, Ryberg delivers a stream of stories through a skidrow lens that are humorous, harsh, and staggeringly candid. And don’t let the word “skidrow” lead you to the conclusion that he’s some clichéd hack who discovered Bukowski three months ago in an Intro to Poetry course at UCLA and now thinks drinking PBR with well whiskey makes one a professional “dirty old man.” The small press world is rife with such suckling sycophants, and these two couldn’t be any further from that horde of pretenders. The poetry of Joshua Rizer and Jason Ryberg reads as smooth as top-shelf scotch while still landing degenerate punches in a left-right-uppercut combo that left me floored by their aggravated honesty and dire damnation of “industries razing themselves in tail eating commerce,” to quote Rizer’s poem, “poorly stocked.” The collection is a massive middle-finger to the Catch-22 expectations thrust upon us by a society demanding we sacrifice our blood, guts, sweat, and soul in return for tinker toys, poison, and half-hearted American dreams that long ago turned into nightmares. There’s also a simplicity to the work, such as Ryberg’s suggestion (in his poem “A BETTER IDEA”) to sit outside in a rusty, old lawn chair and idle away the hours with a beer as the world spins onward—a needed moment to recharge that is often overlooked in this too-fast world. I liked the conversational tone in many of the poems, and even the poems that began to feel a little long for my taste usually ended well enough to make the journey worth my while The book itself is a handsome piece of craftwork with excellent paper stock, a professional layout, and features cover art by Rizer—a cunning depiction of the artists as two superheroes in a down-and-out world, which, so far as I’m concerned, they are. I’ve been a fan of Ryberg’s writing for a long time, and not only did this collection reaffirm my faith in his poetry, but it introduced me to Rizer’s work as well. It’s like walking in to your favorite bar and discovering it’s two-for-one all night long. That’s a tab you don’t close. Get this book in your hands as soon as you can. You won’t regret it.

Review by James H Duncan.

Michael Grover

2012-01-01T12:58:00.000-06:00

Occupying The Time

Yesterday occupying wall street
Tomorrow occupying Toledo
As they occupy entire countries
they would like to occupy the World

Well wall street is occupied
I hear they're complaining on TV
That people can't get into restaurants
Oh the tragedy
Well I don't watch TV
So I would have to hear about it

& who's agenda shall we follow
Surely not our own
& we can't afford a good lawyer
Who shall step up
& speak for the ninety-nine percent
Will the pretty, hip spokesperson
Please stand up
Who's gonna look out for the people's needs

Careful of the change you ask for
Change is such a vague random word
Makes a great political slogan
Tomorrow is columbus day
That raping conquistador son of a bitch
I hear there will be classes tomorrow
On how to meditate & levitate on out of here
Plus classes on spiritual warfare
& other oxymorons

But tomorrow is my laundry day
I have to go to the grocery store
To buy crackers for the pot of soup I cooked
Plus I have a tenant meeting
Tomorrow night
Plus I just don't want to occupy anything
It's such an ugly word
It's such an ugly world

Confessions Of An american Outlaw #144
(Transmissions For Vincent Van Gogh)

Van Gogh dead at thirty-seven
Obscure artist,
mentally ill
They say the height of his madness
Was the height of his creativity
Drugs & art consume you
I know
He puts a gun to his chest
One last painting
Splattered red

They call him brilliant these days
He never heard it
He never saw
The money exchanged
For his work these days
He puts a gun to his chest
Bang . . .

Michael D. Grover is a Florida born poet. As a wanderer he's traveled and lived all over the country.
He currently lives in Toledo, Ohio. His work has appeared all over the literary underground. Michael currently is a resident artist at the Collingwood Art Center in Toledo where he hosts a monthly reading. He runs the Covert Press. His newest chapbook "Counter Revolutionary Poems" is available on Unadorned Press. His first full length book A Shotgun Does The Trick will be out in early 2012 on Tainted Coffee Press. Michael is the current head poetry editor at www.redfez.net.

Peycho Kanev

2012-01-01T12:56:00.000-06:00

Small revenge

I don’t care about the metrics, the iambus
and the rhymes - I have read the classics and then
I’ve put them back on their dusty shelves:
we write about something that comes from the guts
and the nails as the flowers outside
explode…
The poetry, can I say that I don’t care?
I prefer to drink alone in this room in front of
one candle
as the shadows in the corners sits and show us
their ugly faces;
ah, I know that the words are greater that we thought
and we will fall in their holes,
we will spill ourselves like ink upon the Chaucer’s paper:
let me be myself while I read the classics,
let me be afraid in airplanes,
let me be bored in churches,
let me be silent before the tigers in my blood:
these words are too tuff for us to misspend them
just like the big boys during their time.
The rivers are flowing through me
and I burn like matchstick lighted by the words
of all Shakespeares …
And today I am closer to insanity,
I am watching the black birds on the wires,
waiting for our degradation,
for our small defeat while we walk upon the land of
Dylan and Frost, especially on the thin ice
of Frost…
…find me one small torch,
not too big, just big enough to set this night on fire
and I can hear outside the young girls laugh,
never heard about the hunger of Villon or the madness of Pound,
please feed me so well and I’ll never again use their words,
let me find a little warmth,
allow me to find my sunflowers
shaking in the wind
and under the sun
and the God of the Word not Death.

Questions

On the street,
the grizzled, bygone Time
stops me and asks:
“What are you carrying in these bags?”
I slowly stretch out my hands
and say:
“In this – happiness,
and in this one – sorrow!”
“Give me this one,”
He points with staring eyes and
grabs it with His predatory hands,
and I reach to my back pocket
for the knife.

Peycho Kanev is the Editor In Chief of Kanev Books. His poems have appeared in more than 500 literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, The Monongahela Review, Steam Ticket, Midwest Literary Review, Third Wednesday, The Cleveland Review, Loch Raven Review, In Posse Review, The Penwood Review, Mascara Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. In 2009 his short story collection Walking Through Walls and in April 2010 his poetry collection American Notebooks both were published in

Bulgaria

. His poetry collection Bone Silence was released in September 2010 by Desperanto, NY. A new collection of his poetry, titled Requiem for One Night, will be published by Desperanto in 2012.

http://www.kanevbooks.com

Dylan Mitchell

2012-01-01T12:54:00.001-06:00

A SUNRISE SHOULDN'T SOUND LIKE THIS

The noise was not within: The trees outside
were startled awake, by the menacing
sounds of mangled streets and broken blocks,
as numbered trucks and cranes destroyed the calm
face of a deserted boulevard at dawn.
I could hear their thunderous advance,
as I abandoned sleep, and stumbled toward
the open window. Man-made progression
was happening outside. The machines moved
like angry animals, eating silence whole.

BIRTHDAY LETTER

Fall is almost over.
Last night
(although you condemned it),
I read Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters,
and liked it a lot.
After I'd finished,
the soft rain returned,
gently bringing me back
to the hard place I'd escaped from:
I am mending. I am mending.
Yesterday, a kind
stranger spoke to me in the market,
and I did not turn away.
I'm beginning to see it was you.
The old crushed season is almost over;
I'll no longer mourn its early passing.

Dylan Mitchell's poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. His most recent book is, 100 Men I Have Slept With (And Other Poems). It is available on Amazon.com. Several of his poems, essays, and book reviews can be had for free online: www.roughpoet.blogspot.com. He lives alone in Portland, Oregon.

Raymond Keen

2012-01-01T12:53:00.009-06:00

Letter to Maligulea

Dear Mali,
It seems like
just yesterday that we spoke,
mi pequena anarchista.

The deer
from the pampas
are still eating
your rations.
The food I left
at the table
didn’t excite them
much. They still
romp and play.

We continue
to sew the parachutes.
It’s taking much longer
than expected. Your suggestion
that we let our prisoners
fix their airplanes
and get themselves
out of here without taking
the still torn parachutes
was a good one
because they’ve left,
and are no longer
a worry to us.

Mi querida Maligulea,
I feel somehow strained
in turning now
to the more personal.
Your last letter convinced me
of your commitment to remain
with the mountain people.
I realize that nothing,
not even coffee or tea,
will deter you.
Of course,
I cannot be objective,
but please know
what I know,
that somehow your work
will not be forgotten,
even though as I write,
it is not even recognized.
We share an affinity
for the tightrope, you know.
As ever,
Fidel

RAYMOND KEEN has recently completed his first volume of poetry, Love Poems for Cannibals. Five of his poems appeared in the July/August 2005 Issue of The American Poetry Review. Since 2010, Raymond’s poems have been accepted for publication by 16 literary journals. Raymond spent three years as a Navy Clinical Psychologist with a year in Vietnam (July 1967-July 1968); the rest as a School Psychologist in the USA and overseas with DOD Schools. He lives with his wife in Sahuarita, Arizona. They have two grown children.

Casey FitzSimons

2012-01-01T12:51:00.000-06:00

Camp Near Point Arena

Tamping the dust, damping the crisp noises
of curling, brittle leaves, fog settles
among trees. There are no crickets, no, and
no mosquitos. Owls are not stirring yet.
A quarter mile from the surf or more and
remembering roar I only hear my body
in minute repair, its process seething over
membranes into bloody fens, searching for
waste depots, at hollows of differing density
knocking. Thudding into mulch, compressing
air, wing-beats like furls of cloak sound,
chew loose earth, and mole to piles the dull
toe-stubbing bumps. Unencountered silence
I’ve made in collusion with the fog,
in primordial instinct myself submerged
with people and dogs. That whelming brings
exhaustion on, launching me to dwell this
anabatic distance from the sea where
only I enforce an isolation, elegant
and voluntary, from everything.

On the Way to Wiesbaden, 1960

We’re on the train
between Bremen, on the North Sea,
and Wiesbaden, on a tributary of the Rhine.
It’s good to be off
the tossing, creaking ship that sits in port
behind us, listing fifteen degrees to starboard.
Fixtures and fittings
in the train’s compartment are even more compact—
cleverer, smaller—than those in the ship’s cabin.
I’m narrowly berthed, rumbling
through bleak and cold, arms gray and tight
to my sides, catapulted towards the Alps. I dream I am
a lifeboat swinging from davits,
a flag-shrouded goldfish shot through a porthole,
a U-boat’s whirring torpedo,
a tailfinned bomb heading for Mainz,
a girl in hiding, hugging her knees.
In the morning I walk the platform stiffly
alongside limping Germans.

Casey FitzSimons’ poetry appears in print and online in The Newport Review, EarthSpeak, The Prose-Poem Project, flashquake, Leveler, and others. She has been a finalist in the River Styx and Writecorner Press poetry competitions. She has collected her works annually in chapbooks, most recently Altering the Lay of Land (2010) and Forgetting My Errand (2009). Casey is an Army brat, having lived in

Brazil

and

Germany

, and derives some content inspiration from moving seventeen times by the age of seventeen. She taught art in San Francisco for many years, publishing her studio drawing book, Serious Drawing, with Prentice Hall, and reviewed many exhibitions for Artweek. She has a master’s degree in Fine Arts from San Jose State University, and is a frequent reader at San Francisco Bay Area venues.

Hobo Camp Review -- Issue 11, Fall 2011

2011-09-25T18:57:00.004-05:00

Editor's Note

Review: Tobi Cogswell's Surface Effects in Winter Wind

Eleanor Leonne Bennett

Editor's Note

2011-09-25T18:45:00.002-05:00

The best thing about autumn is that there are no sure bets. The wind is cool one moment, then heated, then bitter cold as it runs scattershot over the harvest fields, now populated by pickers and spirits alike. The last of the carnivals roll through town, but will it be as we remembered as children? Parties pinpoint every weekend, but who will arrive? We don’t even know what jacket to wear on any given day. Autumn is the elusive and the feral, the beautiful woman with fiery red hair that you catch in the corner of your eye just as she exits the bar door, walking out of your life forever. She’s always in your mind now, what might have been, what you hope for “next time.” With autumn, you always think…“next time” and you have all winter to remember the missed chances. Let’s miss as few as possible this season, shall we? The poets in this issue certainly didn’t miss stopping me short and making me re-read their work. The items featured here weave a subtle, sometimes dark magic into the tedium of life. Like autumn, you never know what poetry will do to you, but I hope these poems give your evening an unexpected twist of sparkle and dust.

Until the cold dead wind calls us into winter, make love to the fall for as long as you can.

James H Duncan

Review: Tobi Cogswell's "Surface Effects in Winter Wind"

2011-09-25T18:44:00.001-05:00

As I began reading the first few poems in Surface Effects in Winter Wind by Tobi Cogswell, I felt the casual solace one gets during a long, aimless period of time spent in a friend’s home, with walks through the cool comfort of nature in the afternoon and busy kitchens and dining room tables in the evening. Cogswell is able to give small castaway moments of home-life a sense of reassuring magic, but she isn’t a one-trick pony. This isn’t poem after poem of a mother, a wife, a lover at ease; the poet peppers the book with hints that this anywhere home tucked away in anytown America isn’t all it appears to be. Later poems highlight lascivious landlords, unhappy families, divorced waitresses, and the kind of broken love that only a deep dive into alcohol and self-inflicted, bed-ridden bouts of desolation can dissolve. Cogswell is able to balance the picturesque with the pain, and her collection tells the complex human story of searching for that balance in our workaday lives.

By James H Duncan

James H Duncan

2011-09-25T18:40:00.000-05:00

Peanut Shells

my heart sags, hangs from the ribs

slumped like Charlie Brown
against his stone wall as
the autumn of our discontent falls
beneath our feet, fat fiery maple leaves
yellow, red, and dead

Lucy, I always knew you’d leave nothing
behind but one-sided love when
you offered your hand
to hold in the frail September rain

and I’m not the only one
slumped here along a wall that goes
forever, and though we know we’ll somehow fail,
Halloween is on the way, a time to reshape
our wavering footsteps,
a time to shrug off the ghost

so I tell my friends as I chamber another blood
red sunset and aim for the heart—

leave your blanket behind; it is always
Sunday where we’re going

For more of James H Duncan's work, visit http://jameshduncan.blogspot.com.

Olivia Kefauver

2011-09-25T18:35:00.001-05:00

Olivia Kefauver recently returned from a trip to India, and after viewing some of the photos she took there, I simply had to publish a few in this issue. These are the sights every wanderer dreams of seeing. I hope you dig them as much as I do.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett

2011-09-25T18:32:00.000-05:00

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic,The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science , Fennel and Fern and Nature's Best Photography.She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian (2010), RSPB Birds(2010) , RSPB Bird Life (2010), Dot Dot Dash (2010 and 2011) ,Alabama Coast (2010) , Alabama Seaport (2010) and NG Kids Magazine (2010).

Jason Ryberg

2011-09-25T18:25:00.004-05:00

A Laughing Matter

Down in Atlanta
de whitefolks got laws
fo to keep all de niggers
from laughin’ outdoors,

Hope to Gawd I may die
if I aint speakin’ truth
make de niggers do deir laughin’
in a telefoam booth.

-Sterling A. Brown

You know, even if this sloppy
under-age kegger/work-camp/
Animal Planet mini-series we call life
isn’t always “a laughing matter,”

it’s probably safe to assume that laughter
is an absolute necessity for facilitating
the fairly standard (and increasingly common) routines
of Just Barely Getting By and Merely Surviving Life

let alone living well (as an end in and of itself
as well as being the best revenge, they say,
against one’s enemies and detractors),

not unlike food and water,
friends, sex and shelter against the elements

and maybe a reasonable goal or objective
or mission statement of some kind to properly
motivate and devote one’s ever-diminishing
(by seconds/by minutes/by hours/by days/
weeks/months/years/decades/holy crap
what happened to all my) time to,

even if you end up modifying and customizing
or completely changing it out and over
-hauling it a couple of times over the winding
obstacle course of your life,

which, who knows, may just end up being
the thing you give yourself over to-

you know, the whole “living how
you want to on your own terms” thing
we’ve all, no doubt, heard so much about
(the laws of man and physics not withstanding),

shaking things up, every now and then,
just because you can and laughing out loud
as much as possible whenever you want
(or absolutely have) to.

I mean what else can you do but giggle
and guffaw your way through some of the ill-advised
back alleys and gloom-shadowed valleys
that life so often leads you (by hook,
nose or cock) through-

the Modern Courtship Ritual, for example,
and all its many protracted emasculations
and demoralizations and exclusive invitations
to dine and drink alone,
late into the night,

or the requisite hand-wringing subservience
and/or cringing, cap-in-hand, supplication
necessary to assuage and evade the wrath
of the world’s various figurines of authority,

or the repeated implosion
of everything you do to try to improve
your socio/sexual/economic situation

and then there’s that near constant gut
-churning anxiety if not full-on existential terror
of being swept up and swallowed or just simply
trampled by what has often been (and maybe
less than charitably) referred to
as the “bewildered heard,”

and, of course, most disturbingly,
the absurd (though very possibly
unavoidable) daily exchange
of body, soul, time and happiness
for some sort of currency
(if not immediacy
or relevancy)

with which to then immediately about-face
and (foolishly) attempt to buy those
very things back.

How can you not help,
sometimes,
but sit right down
wherever you are,
throw your head
and hands back
from the whole
beautiful, tragi-comic,
life-taking absurdity
of it all

and laugh?

I have always been a big fan of Jason's Ryberg's work, and I went out of my way to hunt out on of his poems for this issue; he's that damn good. Check out more at http://jasonryberg.blogspot.com/

Mary Shanley

2011-09-25T18:24:00.000-05:00

I Will Return to Chanting

I will return to chanting

a windmill in an empty field

a pioneer drawn to the frontier

a flock of pigeons scatter

in father demo square

i will return to chanting

in the presence of Avalokiteshvara

I have one thousand hands, with eyes

in the center of each palm

and I am always watching out for you

and you are always watching out for me

so let's go outside and play

until it's time to go home

i will return to chanting

western culture all fall down

no hometown

no more ground

western culture all fall down

masks off and everyone in the pool

I will return to chanting

the Mahayana temple upstate

where you served me tea,

your shaved head, yellow robe

a teenage monk.

you mostly live in silence

I mostly live in noise

I will return to chanting

before Scott died

I held his hand and felt

a surge of energy burning

into me like an electric

current and from that moment

Scott forever joined my journey.

two for the price of one

thirty for the price of five

everybody is a crowd now!

Hey! Make way for me

and my crowd!

I will return to chanting

I am only what you think

but I am much more than

I could ever have possibly

have imagined.

Joris Soeding

2011-09-25T18:22:00.002-05:00

As Birth

~for Amanda~

I am fearing intersections for you
this fragile place of your one bed
a long window in the shared room
so I have arrived
with flowers not for graves
yet returned of absent you
in visitations among the half dead
under sheets

You recite the year
the belt in your perfect teeth
prickling those arms (still red)
I have brushed prior
with implications of night
as recently you nodded, faltered
dropping needles into the sea
on recognizable toilets for balance

Whisperings of our summer quietly conquered
stripped to the deaf shrillness of stars
we shall bathe once more
in voices not bodies
where streams lie coiled, strange, untouched
I am still in your forty-four days
this warmed light blue bedside
perhaps lamps along the street remind of I
mountains we have hushed before
tomorrow will not hurt you
I promise

Counting and the Blue Envelope

I have crawled the month to this night. October 28th.
Reddishness in the rendezvous. Or maybe no color to retell.
Leaves, sidewalk, hair, traffic, our german tongues. Then
dark. The dance. And now. And now.

A presidential campaign—in a state never resided more than
hours. Movie previews in solitaire. You are presently the
stranger. We saw Seven in a theatre that no longer exists.
Said first I love yous on a park bench that is gone. So we
danced and as of late I dreamt your welcoming into the dead.
Washing your face, rolled up jeans near the waterfall.
Someone closer to ends.

Ten years and not having drowned. Either one of us. Tonight
almost ridiculous. Bare. Appropriate moon as always.

The letter you wrote. Princess Diana and Mother Theresa
passed. Missing the states. “I’ll see you in October.”

Joris Soeding is the author of the poetry chapbooks Surfaces
Diminished and Trees. Otherness. Instance. Recently, writing
of his appeared in The Poetry Ark Anthology and The
Prose-Poem Project. He is a Senior Editor of Another Chicago
Magazine and the Grade 5/6 Writing Teacher at Philip Rogers
Elementary School in Chicago, where he resides with his
wife, son, and cat.

Daniel Beauregard

2011-09-25T18:19:00.002-05:00

GOD IS GREAT, BEER IS GOOD, AND PEOPLE ARE CRAZY (ON A PLANE TO PANAMA
CITY BEACH, FLORIDA)

I no longer feel the childish need
To look out the window
Of an airplane anymore

Ignoring the clusters of cotton-like
Nimbus wafting through the engines
Steady hum, I read Cernuda
And try not to think of death.

WELL?

Where would you go?
When the night hits, and makes shadows under your eyes.
Would you run somewhere to find the scent of dawn?

To find strange men sleeping on sidewalks
way across the world with night bleedin’ day.

Would you say no
if a poor man asked you for a cigarette
in a different language?

Daniel Beauregard is a 26-year-old writer who was born in Toronto, Canada, and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He went to Georgia State University where he obtained an undergraduate degree in print journalism and now works as a newspaper reporter and writes poetry during his lunch breaks and every other chance he gets. He is a founding member of the Lobster Mobster Poetry Collective and his work has appeared in Riverbabble, Underground Literary Journal and Loose Change Literary Magazine.

Kevin Ridgeway

2011-09-25T18:12:00.000-05:00

Carnival on the Edge of Town

Everything comes
alive in the autumn
not in the green valley springs
as they say
when the animals multiply
but during the harvest
when we get paid
chasing the excitable young women
across the Village Green
with the carnivals glowing
windblown torch paths lighting
shenanigans amidst distant haystacks
and soft pumpkin heads
boggled over by soft human minds
gourds of hard cider leaving film
across allergen numbed upper lips
and hardening to a crust
for cracked shard smiles

The locals know we’re immersed
in the halls of school
carpetbaggers from all corners
of the continent,
they try to scam us
or tell us to cut our hair
the townies are after us
for hitting on their high school
sweethearts with their faint oven buns,
but we were too high
on thunder and lightning
to know better.

the orange red sky
is brewing the
first frosts
that are inhaled by
innocent and wicked minds
let’s put our money
down for a barrel of
hundred-proof quicksand
and shake the branches
of the nearby
forests with our
thirsts and scabbed
fists full of
dead leaf
masterpieces.

***

Northampton Boarding House

In the midst of winter checking in week to week
here in the flophouse of the deranged and unemployable
no smoking inside, bundle up and shiver while
the train burns by and catch an unfortunate exchange
with the housemate with the goblin face, shoveling
powdered snow in exchange for partial rent
“This reminds me of blow”
back to my hundred dollar office
and the fruit flies I’ve named
listening to old man Butch through our shared paper
wall, listening to Bill O’Reilly rant and rave
a knock at his door its Meals on Wheels
drink cheap malts and pass out in ramen noodle adorned
slumber to be awoken by the screams of an upstairs knife fight
another shivering morning smoke, studying the
trail of blood extending past the railroad tracks.
I hope the wife takes me back.

***

Kevin Ridgeway is a writer currently living in his native Southern California, where he resides in a shady bungalow with his girlfriend and their one-eyed cat. Recent and forthcoming publications include Underground Voices, Full of Crow, Red Fez, Gloom Cupboard and Breadcrumb Scabs.

Joe Milford

2011-09-25T18:10:00.000-05:00

A Cobbler Lost in the Badlands

Being that we are the potentiality

of dimensions to come

let us set out to sea

compass-less. Waves and dunes,

latitudes and longitudes.

All of our efforts before

have amounted to the platitudes

of perfecting preservatives.

Even a dead man’s garden

will continue to grow, but

what may grow there is ever

wilder than any human hand

could plant. Fingernails

and manes,

runes and omens.

If there is an All-Knowing Eye,

it shall remain shut until

there is something altogether new

to be dissected.

We were not made

in God’s image;

we were made to wield

his eyesight.

The heart is not an autoclave.

When crossing a river,

we muddy the water.

And here all water is sacred water.

As every celestial body

in the Universe, inscribed into

the Micro and Macro Book of Verses,

corresponds to my own

flesh-encompassed dust,

I walk under stars as proud as a drawn sword.

I am filled by this life

as a well in a rainstorm overflowing

long after the tribe of its diggers

has migrated, been decimated.

The only way to cross the desert

is on foot. And so Hermes on his wings

wore boots.

The mail gets here in time, in time to

requisition a fertile iris,

the last mandala for all of us.

Mandalas for all of us, athapoovidals

petals and eyelashes

dunes and ocean-floors.

Insignias in powder.

Vortices in typhoons.

I was never apprenticed to mending wings, but,

in this wilderness, one must make passage

for all amends.

Joe Milford is the host of The Joe Milford Poetry Show and the co-editor of Scythe Literary Journal. His first book was published by BlazeVox press in 2010 entitled Cracked Altimeter. He is a full-time professor of English and Creative Writing in Georgia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Volt, The Brooklyn Review, CUTTHROAT, 32 Poems, The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Knockout Lit, H_NGM_N, Action, Yes, etc.

Hobo Camp Review -- Issue 10, Summer 2011

2011-06-26T12:19:00.000-05:00

Charles Clifford Brooks III

Barry Napier

Editor's Note

2011-06-26T12:12:00.000-05:00

The summer is no time for sitting around, so this little note o’ mine isn’t going to keep you here for too long. There’s just too much to do—flashy movies on a hot Saturday night, carnival midways abuzz with lights and action, cross-country road trips, drinks out on the town, and there are even some of us who suffer through long nights at work alone. We’re everywhere doing everything in the summer, and I think this issue taps into that energy. There are no reviews, interviews, or special additions in this issue because the summer is all about the moment, living in the now. So check out these amazing writers and let them inspire you to go out there and experience summer in all its sultry, restless glory.

Thanks for dropping by the Camp, and I’ll see you down the road…

James H Duncan

PS: A special thanks to Jeffrey Alfier for the cover photo.

James Valvis

2011-06-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

The Usher

Smile, rip the ticket, point the way to the theater.
Three or four hundred times a day he’d do this.
If there was a crowd, he didn’t smile as much
and he didn’t have to point after the first patrons
because they’d follow each other like lemmings.
Once he got them in, the battle was knocked.
Fifteen minutes of work and then he could read
or walk upstairs and talk to the projectionist.
Later, he’d make an appearance in the theater,
make the kids take their feet off the back of chairs.
Sometimes he would catch someone smoking
and ask them to leave. The funny thing about it
is they listened to him like he was a police officer,
despite wearing a red vest that made him look 12
and dressed up like one of Santa’s little elves.
The movies ended and he smiled some more,
pointed toward the exit door, and herded people
out of the theater and into the mall parking lot.
That was his day. He did that for twenty years.
The day after he killed himself, I took his place.
When I quit a year later, no one knew why.

James Valvis lives in Washington State. His work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Blip, Front Porch Journal, LA Review, Nimrod, Pank, Pedestal Magazine, Rattle, River Styx, and is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, New York Quarterly, Night Train, Slipstream, and others. His fiction has twice been named a storySouth Notable Story. Red Fez nominated a poem for Best of the Web. His poetry has also been featured in Verse Daily. His poetry collection, How to Say Goodbye, is due out in September 2011.

John Grey

2011-06-26T12:04:00.000-05:00

AT THE FAIR

I saw the chicken with two heads.
It was the hit of the fair.
Imagine being able to cackle to yourself
and actually get a reaction.
Or maybe, on the low slow nights,
knowing there was somebody
with their head permanently on your shoulder.
So what if it was just yourself.
While watching the act,
I figured you decapitate one of
those chicken noggins
and it'd be the first chicken
in history to run around
like a chicken with its head chopped off
and describe the experience.
All through the show,
I could hear someone clucking
it was a fake head glued on.
Well of course a one-headed chicken would say that.

John Grey is an Australian born poet and a US resident since late seventies. He works as a financial systems analyst. Recently published in Xavier Review, White Wall Review and Writer’s Bloc with work upcoming in Poem, Prism International and the Cider Press Review.

Don Kloss

2011-06-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

The Beautician

My grandmother was a hair dresser.
She ran a beauty shop in the basement
of her little suburban rancher.

Lois’ Beauty Parlor-- It had two chairs,
light pink walls, and stank of hair coloring
chemicals. Man, those women loved to talk.

She was in big demand at the funeral homes
because she didn’t mind fixing the hair
of the deceased old ladies, many of whom

were her former customers. When her time
came, she was not afraid, for she had not just
cradled death’s head in her hands,

she had also teased it’s bangs and touched-
up it’s roots.

Be My Supper

You are like a ham bone
to me. I want to throw you
into a pot of hot water
and let you simmer
for a few choice hours
along with the turnips,
carrots, potatoes, kale,
celery and parsley .
Later, I want to spoon
your broth down
my throat with a ladle,
let your juices dribble
out the corner of my
satisfied mouth.
And much later, when
the bowl is near empty
I will sop up what’s left
of you with a thick slice
of crusty French bread.
I’ll go to bed then,
happy, my appetite
for you vanquished.

A Wild Hair

Hey you-
Don’t take me for stupid.
I’m lucid but noosed.
I ride the caboose of eloquence
in a short sleeved shirt,
alive and five-foot-five,
not quite the squirt.
I need evidence of pretense
suggesting past-tense
relegation and deviation,
alleviation from suspense
that comes from a ride
on the fence, buck
frustration, question causation,
TV station, confused nation.
I’ll play the lottery, win some cash,
have a slash, shave my head,
stay in bed, in the shed,
wait to be read, play at dead,
swap my ride, spank my hide
raw from the inside.
Find expandable,
retractable protractable
pterodactyl meat,
prehistoric Spam
on a hot, hot spit,
in a deep dirt pit.
Who wants a piece of it?
I’m up on the inside,
down on the outside-
Searching out clarity,
impossible rarity
no need for charity,
expensive gravity
total depravity
rectal cavity.
Check me out.
Hot damn!
Ram-a-lam!

Don Kloss is a South Jersey poet with strong ties to Ohio and Venus. He has been published in a number of journals including: The Edison Literary Review, US1 Worksheets, Thick With Conviction and Decompression. Don is an avid outdoorsman who believes in the right to bear arms, and the right to arm bears.

Emily Severance

2011-06-26T11:56:00.000-05:00

Albuquerque Bad News

A few cacti may have the tourists fooled, but
the locals have to ingest cat piss drugs to get by.

Are you shooting for the Guinness Record of most
strip malls within a city limit? Most depressing drives in America?
Who chained all these cement blocks to the Sandia’s feet?

Is it the famous Albuquerque box effect that makes me yearn
to spin the wheel and slam my car into the closest box store?

Anything to break the

square mentality

square banality

square finality.

No wonder DWI’s the favored form of recreation
in this land of stalled tumbleweeds.

Emily Severance has a BA from The Residential College at The University of Michigan and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had poems published by Breadcrumb Scabs, Defenestration, and Muddy River Poetry Review. She teaches elementary special education in New Mexico.

Kathleen Sparks

2011-06-26T11:53:00.002-05:00

Queen of the Rails

My date talks about jumping trains, but I’m busy mastering the tentative hop-step-careful-now required to walk the tracks at night. The air smells like tar and grass, and my tongue still tastes like cheap coffee.

“You know,” he says, reaching back for my hand, “if this works out, you could be my Queen of the Rails. We could go anywhere together.”

I imagine what that would mean. A Queen of the Rails, as I see her, would weave feathers into her hair and let the wind whip her face. She’d hunker down in the dark corner of a boxcar, dry and warm in tatty Goodwill layers, and whisper stories to the cargo. She’d move silently through freight yards, and savor the smell of rusting metal on her fingertips.

I could love that.

My date’s hand feels fleshy in mine, but maybe I could get used to that, too. I look at him, with his nice cotton sweater and his carefully trimmed beard, and try to imagine him as my Vagabond King.

A whistle sounds from behind us, and we step down into the grass. The train takes its time in coming, but when it does, it’s like a force of nature hurtling by. So much metal, so much wind, and, everywhere, the roar of momentum. I close my eyes, my breathing shallow, and lose myself in the noise. I am alone there, truly alone, as I can never be in real life. I am both a queen and a vagrant. I am everything.

I am trembling.

And then the train’s gone, rattling on into the night. My skin hums, and the air suddenly seems so empty.

I look at my date, who looks bored, and let go of his hand. I don’t need him to designate me Queen. I step onto the tracks and look at the retreating black shape of the train.

Charlotte Lowe

2011-06-26T11:52:00.000-05:00

The Matter Is

The matter is, our lives
take us driving too slowly down sun-stunned alleys,
gliding over broken glass in our broke-down Impala,
tracing the southside’s old Pachuco face
crevassed with arroyos, cracked asphalt. My hand
touches you, jumps like Spanish, a language I don’t
understand.

Why do we stay in the barrio?
My thumb hitches into your Russian cheekbone.
You are a defector floating softly away like the moon.
Going home from the grocery store in a gypsy cab, milk spoiling,

meat glowing fluorescent green, I cross myself at the red light.
This is my child, our arms, the speedometer is
high and steady as fever.

You’re drunk, give me your hand like money. High, I smooth it out
like dollars. How many clocks,
irons, alarms will we wear out? I roll
out of your arms like groceries.
Why do we live in South Tucson? Didn’t you live here once
with your wife
and it didn’t work out?

Charlotte Lowe is a poet who lives and writes in Patagonia, Arizona. She studied creative writing in the M.F.A. Program at the University of Arizona and most recently at Naropa University. She has worked two careers: poet-in-the-schools and journalist.

Danny Barbare

2011-06-26T11:49:00.002-05:00

The Building, Just an Old Man

The toilet flushes when no one’s there.
The lights glow and sing.
The water fountain hums, shuts up.
The vending machine, the salesman.
A cold soda machine too, that
Does a fancy trick for some change,
And has green blinking eyes.
The steam room puffs and shower drips.
He’s a sauna, a creaking building.
The air conditioner breathes, dust settles.
The ceiling fan wobbles. The
Second finger taps.
When it rains the tin roof goes wild.

Danny P. Barbare works as a custodian at a local Y at night. He has been writing poetry off and on for 30 years. And has been published roughly 500 times in online and print journals. Some of his poetry can be googled under his name.

Charles Clifford Brooks III

2011-06-26T11:47:00.001-05:00

edgy notions

sit up, ladybug! salt-licked skin preserves young love
to endure over lighthouses, state lines,
nina simone’s sad songs.

linen long sleeve shirts still show body art,
damaged wrists, muscles
strained, pushing veins close to flesh;
the last five years
have been barren.

sea life leaps upward, her thighs,
his fingertips
dolphins between breasts shaped like teardrops
pink from sighs & friction.
neptune’s trident
fuses
the two’s pressed sexes.

swells of water crash bedclothes into the corner
where a gibson and thigh-high boots lean
from the previous afternoon.
pages are strewn like sand dollars, ink dried,
splashed with pineapple juice and lipstick.

seagulls squawk at mean children
while a ceiling fan whips hot air
and bad habits outside.
hard world is at a terrific distance, fading now,
farther, farther, farther
until only a stretch of island
is wed to the sky.

it's a flavor of madness,
of strawberries,
of what is.

Charles Clifford Brooks III has been published in The Dead Mule, Eclectica, Gloom Cupboard, The Smoking Poet, Red Fez, vox poetica, Asylum, Otoliths, Contemporary American Voices, Prick of the Spindle and Journal of Liberal Arts and Education. His poetry has been featured on the Joe Milford Poetry Show, Not Your Mother's Poetry Show and the vox poetica’s 15 Minutes of Poetry.

Barry Napier

2011-06-26T11:42:00.001-05:00

How Prayers are Built

The lady standing haggard on the corner
where the avenue meets the night
leans against a lamppost, wishing it had legs
to dance with her, to twirl her in those beautiful circles
best orchestrated in black and white—
to dip and pivot her away from the fact that the only items she owns
are in the soiled canvas bag at her feet:
expired coupons to grocery stores that loom large like nebulae in her mind,
a water-damaged copy of Watership Down that still smells like her father,
and a bookmark with scripture printed on it.

The man that lies bleeding in the ditch
soaking in currents of his own urine
looks into the sky and imagines he sees a tablecloth
that is tattered and bare yet
the stubbornly twinkling stars look like stray bits of salt or bread
that will remind him what taste is like,
waking his tongue to something other than the brown bottle
that cost him $1.69,
an amount he pilfered divinely from the offering plate
with skilled chapped hands
at Wayward Baptist last Tuesday night
as a balding preacher in a black suit spoke in code
of a light offered to everyone that asked for it.

There are spaces between them
that keeps expanding forever—
growing until one end meets the other
and when they touch it is like meeting a stranger
and quickly, dangerously,
falling in love and daring to believe that
every book ever printed has absorbed the scent of someone’s father
and that there is indeed a light for us all, waiting to be claimed
like the pedestrian picked up by the gaunt southern gentleman;
and when he shifts the truck into Drive,
the gears sound like a throat, a ragged voice
and it is saying “Hallelujah.”

Barry has had more than 30 poems and short stories published in print and online. Recent publications include The Pedestal Magazine, The Red Penny Papers, Kaleidotrope, and The Norton Hint Fiction Anthology. He is the author of The Masks of Our Fathers and 13 Broken Nightlights. His first book of poetry, A Mouth for Picket Fences was released by Needfire Poetry in 2010. He is also the author of a new graphic novel, Birdwatching from Mars. He has recently finished up a stint as the guest poetry editor at Inkspill Magazine. You can learn more about him at his blog, www.barrynapierwriting.wordpress.com

Hobo Camp Review -- Issue 9, Spring 2011

2011-04-03T19:47:00.000-05:00

Editor's Note

Review: Kami's Subterranean Redneck Blues

Review: Jeffrey Alfier's Before the Troubadour Exits

Alan Britt -- Winner of HCR's "Big Rock Candy Mountain" Award

Interview with Aleathia Drehmer

Chapbook Review: Kami's "Subterranean Redneck Blues"

2011-04-03T19:35:00.000-05:00

A Review by James H Duncan

One of the greatest compliments I feel you can bestow upon other writers is to tell them that their work made you want to write. For example, I never get too far into one of Kerouac’s books without having to set the book down and type some of my own pomes or throw down some ink into a notebook about a recent road trip adventure. Reading great work that makes you feel electric and emboldened is the most powerful kind of inspiration, and Kami’s recent chapbook, Subterranean Redneck Blues, is just that—powerful inspiration.

Kami weaves rock & roll guitar licks with intense, formative memories from his teenage years—running with half-hearted street gangs, dealing with painful deaths of those close to him, suffering early rejections from the local flock of girls, learning how to sneak a beer, and later, losing sight of sobriety. And whether there is a car stereo blaring, a record player spinning, or if the Sex Pistols are instigating rebellion on the TV, rock & roll has a dominant presence in his works, not only providing a backdrop to his struggle to grow into and deal with manhood, but adding extra layers of poetic meaning.

In “Ýou Really Got Me,” Kami recalls crashing his sister’s birthday party with a friend and playing the new Van Halen record over and over, only to realize that the girls are mightily unimpressed. While his friend tries to placate the girls to get in their good graces (fat chance), Kami grabs his record and leaves, feeling equally undaunted and embarrassed. The Van Halen version of The Kinks' classic, “You Really Got Me,” is a wild animal howl of love and lustful desires—a victory cry of testosterone and sex. However, Kami’s poem juxtaposes the song with his own harsh reality. They really got him, alright, but it’s not where he wants to be.

Kami finds himself in this unsatisfied situation far too often throughout his poems, and while rock & roll is the driving motivator through many of his early memories, it is his savior in the later poems. Unsure about his lover, aware he is an alcoholic, unable to cope with a life spinning out of control, the poems toward the end of Subterranean Redneck Blues reveal a man who made it through the frying pan of teenage angst only to find himself in the fire of adulthood. He listens to old songs over and over, just like his father used to do in an attempt to relive glory days. But in the end, he’s still writing, he’s still on his feet, and he still has a little rock & roll hope coursing through his veins.

Reading Kami’s work was difficult, not because the poems were sub par—they were excellent—but after every three or four poems, I couldn’t help but set down the book and jot down memories from my own teenage years. His work reminded me that there is a huge bank of memories that I have never written about from my own life, misadventures and rock & roll daydreams that helped shape me as a person, just as the poems in Subterranean Redneck Blues shaped Kami. Now, every time I sit down and write a poem about the first record I bought or the first time I snuck out a window to go see a girl, I have to thank Kami.

Kami teaches us that if you can’t shake the past, you may as well crank the memories up to 11 and piss off the neighbors. I can’t recommend his work enough, and like the classic rock albums that I know I’ll never put away, this chapbook will stay in heavy rotation on my bookshelves for a long, long time.

Editor's Note

2011-04-03T19:26:00.000-05:00

Spring’s Gamble: Go All In

Spring is our annual do-over, our chance to re-shuffle the deck, deal ourselves some new cards, and look life in the eye. Will you go all in, or play it safe? Will you bide your time and strategize, or will you rush through your chips with reckless abandon? This is the time of year where we get to make these choices and add to our bank of human experiences—travel, fall in love, commit a minor felony—and use those experiences to write our stories or the stories of those we meet, the places we see, and the characters we concoct. It’s a time to take risks. I think the writers we have in this issue did just that by sending in their work, and I’m proud to have them along for the journey—and trust me, we’re really going places in this, the two-year anniversary issue of Hobo Camp Review.

Jim Davis brings us all the way to the Black Forest in Germany where we wait at the station for W.I. Stoneberger’s “Midnight Train.” Isabel Kestner is staring out across the broken-down “Horizons,” and Nicky Yurcaba is rolling the dice in her spectacular piece, “Gas Pump Ponderings.” Some Hobo Camp veterans are already in the truck and eager to head down the road, including Geordie de Boer, who does a little “Valium Waltz” along “Bullfrog Way,” and Dena Rash Guzman is here again too. She also took the original photo I used and manipulated for the cover of this issue, and I can’t thank her enough for letting me use another of her photos as a cover. I think the magenta hue and the embossed seediness of the Las Vegas street truly embodies the red-hot risks and rewards waiting for all of us this year.

Another special thanks and a big congratulations goes to Alan Britt, the winner of our “Big Rock Candy Mountain Award.” His poem, “Drinking Red Wine and Thinking About Nomenclature,” is rife with the beatific poetry, wino sensibilities, and the traveling spirit we love here at the Camp. He’ll receive a cash prize to send him off into spring with a little walkin’ around money, as well as a bundle of books, including copies of my own Desolation 2 A.M. and Tobi Cogswell’s Hostage Negotiation In Negative-Land. Tobi Cogswell and Jeffrey Alfier were the guest judges of this award, and they have my deepest thanks for helping to make this issue that much more special.

We know spring is the time of rebirth, but we also know this season is fleeting, so I’ll let you get to the poems and stories. I urge you all to get out there and take some risks this year, to gamble on yourself, to double-down and go all in. When the cold winds blow this November and you spend more and more time inside in front of the typer, I hope you’ll have a treasure trove of memories to pull from, starting with the moment you finish reading this and get to the poems in this issue.

Thanks for dropping by the Hobo Camp, and as always, I’ll see you down the road…

James H Duncan

Chapbook Review: Jeffrey Alfier's "Before the Troubadour Exits"

2011-04-03T19:19:00.000-05:00

A Review by James H Duncan

One of my favorite poems has always been “Nirvana,” by Charles Bukowski—the tale of a young man traveling by bus who discovers a café that fills his eyes and heart with a magical comfort otherwise devoid from his down-and-out life. Rather than staying, as his soul tells him to do, the young man climbs aboard the bus and tries not to think about what waits for him down the road. For me, the men and women in Jeffrey Alfier’s poetry walk the same dusty roads and populate the same cafes and bars, but their youth is a gift long spent, and any sense of magic and hope is far behind them...yet not forgotten.

Before the Troubadour Exits is beautiful for its haunting awareness of what was and what may never be again, a rich portrait of yearning painted against a dry and broken canvas. The first two lines of the first poem pull no punches: “The wind comes vagrant from New Mexico/Nothing’s as recent as your ancient past.” Right away, the reader knows damn well what they’re in for—stark, honest reflections that still hurt, and that keep those characters on the move. The poems remind us that our own personal histories serve well as cages, friends, scars, and saviors.

But the southwest stories of drinking, women, and neon lights don’t reek of Bukowski or Fante imitations like far too many “bar” poets do. Alfier’s poems are unique for their grace mixed with grit, and he pays careful attention to place the reader in a world lush with detail. Alfier has been there, has seen every inch of these dark bars and highways, and he isn’t trying to impress you. The worlds in these poems are full of characters that don’t give a damn whether you are there or not because there is too much weight bearing down on them to notice. They have dreams that are slipping away, and they have to hustle for every mile, every buck, and every fleeting moment of love that they can get in their wind-torn lives.

But here’s the catch: you are in these poems. This isn’t fiction, but a reflection of a million unseen fates barreling down upon us like an eighteen-wheeler out of control. As he says in his poem “A Study in South Tucson,” “Jail is not the only type of hard time.” Alfier’s poems may serve as cautionary tales and reminders for us to savor good luck and good love, but should those good times pass and if I find myself sitting in the same worn out cafes found in his chapbook, at least I know I’ll be in good company. Jeffrey Alfier’s Before the Troubadour Exits was a pleasure to read, and it will stay in my traveling rucksack for a very long time.

Interview with Aleathia Drehmer

2011-04-03T19:14:00.000-05:00

Aleathia Drehmer publishes a series called Durable Goods. This portable microzine fascinated me from day one because it is exactly what the traveling artist needs, a little bit of poetic inspiration that can fit in your back pocket. She has been and continues to serve as an editor for numerous publications.

Hobo Camp Review: I’ve always subscribed to the idea that poetry is a moving art, a portable art, which is why Durable Goods is so appealing to me. What inspired you to make a micro-zine rather than an online or full-sized print magazine?

Aleathia Drehmer: Durable Goods started as a sort of reactionary creation to the ending of another editing job in 2009. I was looking to start something on my own, to see if I could manage the entire process alone, and I was greatly interested in the sorts of work I would choose given no restrictions. I chose this format partly because it was comfortable to me in some ways. I wanted to pare down and focus. The driving idea for Durable Goods was to find a way out of the dismal ritual of going to the mailbox only to find bills and junk mail. I really wanted to create something that would go through the mail and maybe rekindle a love for correspondence in this generation of electronic everything. Durable Goods set out to be a pick-me-up that could fit in your back pocket that would be readily available if you needed it. It is difficult to do that with an online publication or a full size magazine. There is something stealth and wonderful about sneaking literature on the boss man’s time.

HCR: Managing a publication, regardless of the size, can be exhausting. It’s a huge commitment of time and will. Do you ever find yourself coming up to an issue and feeling, for whatever reason, like you just don’t have the energy to see it through anymore? What keeps you going?

AD: Oh, Durable Goods is very labor intensive because it is print and it comes out every two weeks. I end up folding over 250 pieces of paper every month and labeling (by hand) a good number of envelopes. Each issue comes with its own quote card, which have to be cut down to size, rubber stamped and then written on. It seems like a daunting task if you think about it, so I try not to think about it. Ha-ha. Despite the work, I have yet to have that feeling of not wanting to move on with it. The energy is always there for it. The folding process itself has become a meditation for me, as most of it is done in the silent hours of my house. The repetition of symmetry is very comforting to me and it gives a great sense of completion each time. What keeps me going are the grateful responses to the work that I am doing with Durable Goods. It is all worth it to know that a poem you published made someone cry, or think about the world differently, or fall in love with a writer they had not read before. I have an amazing group of subscribers that feel like family to me, and an amazing group of editors who are willing to distribute Durable Goods with their own publications. It has brought back a sense of community to writing for me….the idea that we are all in this for the word and the sharing of words. I am invested emotionally in these people.

HCR: I’m not looking for names here, but have you ever published someone just to have a “name” in your ‘zine? Any regrets along the way? Pitfalls you’d advise others to avoid?

AD: I have to say that I never think about acquiring writers like a prized possession gallery. I think everyone has something special to offer at some time in their life, and the great thing about Durable Goods is it makes many folks step out of their comfort zone due to the limited space. The bulk of writers tend to produce poems of a decent length, but this zine makes you find 10-20 great lines and get to the core of what you are trying to say. I am not looking to get famous off this project so having big names to propel me forward has never been my goal. I will say that I was pretty stoked when Annie Menebroker agreed to be in the zine. She is somewhat legendary and I was unsure she would say yes. Her work touches me and I felt happy to be able to share one of her poems in the Translations series. I have not had any regrets while making this zine and it has been one learning experience after another in how to work with the template, manage time and be diplomatic with the work. I have time and space to create exactly the issue I want without regards to what anyone else thinks, and not only is this creatively freeing, but also personally because I have had a problem with speaking my own voice for my entire life. Durable Goods is by invite only and I think this saves me a great amount of stress that comes with having to sift through submissions, do all of those rejections and hurt people’s feelings. I avoid so much drama as well. There is always something positive swirling around this zine that makes me smile. If I had one word of advice it would to keep being inventive and building on your original ideas for your publication, and be open to suggestion.

HCR: Do you think it wise for poets to post unpublished poems on blogs/social networking sites? Is Facebook the new workshop, or just a PR tool?

AD: Posting unpublished poems here and there on Facebook is ok in my opinion because it gives readers a taste of where you are at the moment in your work and keeps your name “out there” in that dervish of a social network, but putting every single poem you write up there seems excessive. Years ago when I first started swimming in the small press sea, Karl Koweski gave me a great piece of advice that he kipped from Algren and it was if you give everything away for free, who is going to buy it. I think this idea is relevant in the sense that at some point you become unpublishable anywhere because what magazine wants to feature something exclusively that you have already shared with the world? Facebook is not the new workshop. I find that most writers do not want any serious crit of their work that will help them elevate their game or move in new directions. Often they are looking for confirmation that their writing still has that “it” factor. I post poems sometimes when I am trying out new forms or new creative directions and I find the silences are more telling to me than 20 people hitting the “like” button. It is a great PR tool and has been vital in getting the word out about books, events, radio programs, and my print and online publications. If used properly it is a great resource.

HCR: What are you reading now, and what are you hoping to read next?

AD: Oh man, I have the plague of reading too many books at once and not finishing most of them. I am in the process of trying to finish off the books I started reading last year. Most recently I finished Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” which I began last year and my nine year old just picked out Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” for me to read….out of 200 possible choices. Hahahaha. I was really dreading it at first, but now I am just in love with it. I am also concurrently reading the biography “A Beautiful Mind” about John Nash. The bedside poetry consists of “Axe Handles” by Gary Snyder, “Before the Troubadour Exits” by Jeffrey C. Alfier, and “Two-Headed Poems” by Margaret Atwood. I am also sifting through a self-help book and a book on Buddhism. As for what is next, I think I might edge towards my go-to guy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

HCR: You and Dan Provost have a joint collection out right now. What do you hope readers take from this collection?

AD: I think this collection is interesting because we produced the bulk of the before we ever met or had any sort of intimate relationship. We knew each other’s work, but we didn’t know each other as people. What this gives the reader is an opening to how two people with very different backgrounds, family histories, and styles of writing can come together and share not only space on the page, but in life. Each of our halves of this book come from times of deep, quiet contemplation when we both sat back and looked at what was going on in the world around us—him in the city, me in the country.

HCR: If you had to pick, would you consider yourself more of a highway hobo or a railroad hobo? Have you ever “roughed it” overnight on the road somewhere?

AD: The whole of my life, until recently, has been spent on the highway. I have been to almost every state in this great country and lived in nearly 20 of them. My life has been a series of blurry journeys, roadside diners, and sneaking into hotel pools in the dead heat of summer when the trip was just unbearable. But in my heart, I have always had a secret desire to ride the rails all across the country. I think the sound and the motion are something you feel deep inside you. It is that unmitigated desire to be out of control of your destiny and being forced to mingle your ideas with the people trapped on the train with you. I have had several trips on the highway where me and my travel partners have roughed it roadside, slept in U-Haul trailers, in soccer fields, and even a few sleep and dash campground events. I think the trip that has always stayed with me was when I was ten years old. My father and I were newly reunited and he wanted to take me to Washington DC for Memorial Day and show me the wall. This was significant for him being a Marine during Viet Nam and he wanted to show me that brotherhood first hand and relate to me the sheer number of men that died. We took a Greyhound there and he had made no plans for hotels or anything. He made the trip as if it was just him and he was used to roughing it. We got off the bus, which was not let off downtown, and it was a torrential spring downpour. We walked for miles and stopped at every hotel along the way, and all were full. Some of the clerks let us sleep upright on the couch awhile to stay out of the rain, while others kicked us to the curb like we were vagrants. In the end, I slept that night on a park bench in front of the White House. It was the last thing I saw before I went to bed and the first thing I saw when I woke up and it shaped the way I looked at this world. It changed everything and it embossed that genetic wanderlust into my core being.

James H Duncan

2011-04-03T19:01:00.000-05:00

Little Mexico

little Mexicali corner house
with your big orange life pouring
out the bay windows
into the garden yard, corner lot,
hidden moon but stick-bench-swing
swaying in the night anyway

you’ve a life your own with no one
in sight, no sounds but a scuffled
shoe, two of them walking down the middle
of the street and pausing to stare
and yearn for swarthy south California
nights where the black big-eyed cats
would slink out of the darkness
to the sound of long-running trains
hollering in the goodbye midnight horizon

but this little paradise house with yellow
tiles lining the patch of kitchen seen
through the window, this house here is
so far away from the heat of the train whistle,
it’s stuck in little nowhere upstate New York
under the somnolent April moon, giving
off the dream-scent of long past nights
never returning, but turning
into another tramp’s wandering wish

James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review. More at http://jameshduncan.blogspot.com/

Maureen Kingston

2011-04-03T18:58:00.000-05:00

Grandpa’s Carved Legacies

We found
two collections
after he died.

The one
we knew
as children

the whittled
wooden
wonders

the jungles

of smiling
giraffes
& monkeys
& pythons

& the other
one--

what
he never
wanted us
to see--

the hobo
nickels
of necessity.

Their bison
bodies
& Indian
heads

re-chiseled

to profiles
of broken
men

worthless

mutilated
coins
of the realm

passing time
in camps

bartering

for bread
for soup

a bed.

Maureen Kingston lives and works in eastern Nebraska. Her poems are forthcoming in the Bicycle Review, Blue Collar Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Hobble Creek Review, Honey Land Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, A Prairie Journal, Red River Review, Rusty Truck, and Sleet Magazine.

Dylan Mitchell

2011-04-03T18:55:00.000-05:00

In The Dark Café

It grows cold out there.
But I didn’t call, I didn’t call
before I ran away from home.
The large hot tea is sweet and good.
I’ve finished my cake, but hunger
for something more. Young people
smile and smoke, and remind me
I am getting old. Too
old for the insane games
he forced me to play at home.
The small voice inside saying:
be careful be careful.
(He watches my window, and
wants me to know. Five days
in a row, shrill messages at dawn,
until I took the phone off the hook.
Now notes on my door. Red
rage bleeding on every page.)

It seems so much saner here.
Two skeletons play chess.
A homeless girl reads The Catcher In The Rye.
The hot waiter dances,
like a young Travolta.
I glance at a poet and become calm and bold
(he counts his long fingers after every line).
I remember a sonnet I wrote in school:
A disconnected phone can’t make you cringe,
and better locks may keep you safe inside.
Because you failed to give back love to love –
the angry ravens watch you from above.
I am far far from home.
I’ve come to this place to think and mend.
These smiling strangers are my only friends.
My stalker’s at home.
It grows colder outside.
I write this poem instead.

Dylan Mitchell's poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. His most recent book is, 100 Men I Have Slept With (And Other Poems). It is available on Amazon.com. Several of his poems, essays, and book reviews can be had for free online: www.roughpoet.blogspot.com. He lives alone in Portland, Oregon.

Lark Beltran

2011-04-03T18:53:00.000-05:00

A Reasonable Facsimile Thereof?

Cyber cannot solve it all.
One needs true distances to tread,
actual and not virtual seas.
A screen is glamorous but dead.

The lure of uninvaded hills,
the cry of loon on sunset lake:
such feeds the soul; an absence of
simplicity engenders ache.

In comradeship around the fire,
filled glasses and shared dreams enthrall.
With living chains, the links are warm;
cyber cannot solve it all.

"Big Rock Candy Mountain" Award Winner -- Alan Britt

2011-04-03T18:51:00.000-05:00

Alan Britt's poem Drinking Red Wine And Thinking About Nomenclature is the winner of our humble, little award, given in honor of HCR's two-year anniversary issue. Judges Tobi Cogswell and Jeffrey Alfier selected this poem out of a group of finalists, feeling it best displayed the spirit of Hobo Camp Review. Alan wins a cash prize and a selection of chapbooks from the judges and the editor. Enjoy the winning poem, and thanks to everyone who submitted work for this issue!

DRINKING RED WINE AND THINKING
ABOUT NOMENCLATURE

The nomenclature is green.

Fireflies ignite
tomato leaves
behind wire cages.

Words resemble lichen
spread across the contoured muscles
of a split-rail fence.

The nomenclature is green.

There’s no use
bribing fate
with a velvet, California cabernet.

Even a Parducci, 1996,
solid red sauvignon
won’t do the trick.

Of course, there’s always
a little graft and greed
when it comes
to the human senses,
those five orphans
left to explore
the universe
on their own.

But, tonight, the nomenclature is green,
and there’s nothing,
absolutely,
positively,
nothing at all
anyone can do
about that!

Alan Britt’s recent books are Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Chicago/Athens/Dublin: 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008. Alan currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University and lives in Reisterstown, Maryland with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Frise and two formally feral cats.

Judges

Jeffrey Alfier is a two-time Pushcart prize nominee, and a nominee for the UK’s Forward Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared recently in Vallum (Canada) and Post Road, with work forthcoming in New York Quarterly. His latest chapbook is Before the Troubadour Exits (2011). His first full-length book of poems, The Wolf Yearling, will be published in 2012, by Pecan Grove Press. He serves as co-editor of San Pedro River Review.

Tobi Cogswell is a two-time Pushcart nominee and co-recipient of the first annual Lois and Marine Robert Warden Poetry Award from Bellowing Ark. Publication credits include Willow Review, Illya’s Honey, Rhino, Slab, Blue Earth Review, Decanto (UK), Red River Review, The Stray Branch, Turbulence (UK), Spilt Milk (UK), Frostwriting (Sweden) and Hobo Camp Review among others, and are forthcoming in Iodine Poetry Journal, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Pinyon Journal, Slipstream and Chiron Review. She has three chapbooks and her full-length poetry collection “Poste Restante” is available from Bellowing Ark Press. She is the co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.sprreview.com).

Isabel Kestner

2011-04-03T18:41:00.000-05:00

Horizons

Back home his horizon
was a wide open promise
of possibility.

But here he cannot even see
where the sun settles behind
the earth.

Here is concrete hundreds
of feet high, here are nights
brighter than days, here
smog and soot hide the sky.

He presses on in the
day-less city earning fair wages
most of which he sends home

where it pays for medicines
and food so his children will
survive watching the wide
open beautiful horizon.

Isabel Kestner is a poet and writer who spent half her life in New Jersey and half in Virginia, making her an odd blend of Southern Woman and Jersey Girl. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications since the age of seventeen. Her first collection of poetry, Strange Things She Heard, was released in December 2009. Her forthcoming second collection, Just Close Your Eyes and Write…100 Poems in 100 Hours, chronicles the poetry and process of writing 100 poems in just 100 hours.

Geordie de Boer

2011-04-03T18:39:00.000-05:00

Bullfrog’s Way

My friend, the bullfrog, more loyal
than a well fed dog
knows the ways of Abraxas, the moth,
and deep warm ponds.

With his many-paned brain,
he feels the world rock
and reel on its cockeyed axis.
It drives him giddy.

Drunk with lust and the dust
from damselfly tails,
he rumbles through the rainy night
down forbidden rails

and over covert bridges. One night
you’ll slight him
with your headlight beams. Don’t
pity him or offer a lift

out of guilt. He’ll give you
short shrift, short your
ignition and then give you a tumble
for your trouble.

The Valium Waltz

Drunk all the time on cheap wine, rotgut
and beer. Sad Kerouac’s dead in the bed
his mother made for him, Brautigan’s put
a bullet through his head, Waits has gone to
gravel like Old Golds and Oldsmobiles
and we’re all doing The Valium
Waltz, though we haven’t a clue
how to hew to three-quarter time now,
and the fiddler’s lost the rosin for
his bow. Vinyl’s making a come-back,
they say, but it still scratches and skips
as we reel to the rhythm of our home-
crafted waltzes and those hard single malts.

Geordie de Boer, a rambler and wrangler of rhyme (internal) lives in Washington (state). He’s been published most recently by Offcourse, Cirque, Heavy Bear, Alba, and Eighty Percent. Visit him at Cockeyed Fits (geedeboer.wordpress.com/).

W.I. Stoneberger

2011-04-03T18:35:00.000-05:00

Midnight Train

Where is that train going ?

Only audible in the quietest hours,
rumbling along the edges of sleep.

Who rides those moonlit rails ?

In dreams, I call out to that engineer,
begging to be taken away
- all the way to the end of the line.

Crow

I heard a sightless song
old black blind blues
tapping your good foot
against the darkness
flapping your sinister wings
like rhythm like time.

Nicky Yurcaba

2011-04-03T18:33:00.000-05:00

*Editor's Note: This poem came with colored text, which was intentional, and I tried to match it as closely as I could here.

Gas Pump Ponderings

she was simply being nice. the dutiful daughter. after all, it was sunday afternoon. the least she could do--her day's good deed--was pumping her parent's gas. shivering in a thin wrangler western shirt. cowboy boots scraping a raised concrete platform where statuesque gas pumps stood.

her mother used to be fairly feisty and independent. the father says the young woman reminds him of how his wife used to be. key phrase--"used to be". because somehow during their twenty-seven years of marriage, her mother lost that independence. that once feisty flame went cold. her mother had forgotten what it was like to even pump her own gas.

she, the twenty-one year old dutiful daughter, felt enslaved at times. little social life. pretty much no dating. destined to make sure her mother and father never had to lift a finger--to cut wood clean house take out trash empty the cats litter box stoke the fireplace. pump gas.

she reaches a point of mental exhaustion. their dependence on her becomes ridiculous. so she vows never to have children. for whatever her lifetime calculates out to, she wants to remain self-sufficient and independent. even if she ends up chained by marriage. she remembers how hard her parents had pushed her--to the point of mental exhaustion--growing up in high school in athletics and she doesn't want to be mother drill sergeant and she knows they're why she prefers the big a--alone.

in some cultures, like a few of the asian ones, she'd be highly respected for her efforts. key word--respected. respect--something she receives little of from her mother. she's simply supposed to be there--voila!--at a snap of their fingers to carry wood clean house empty the cats litter box. pump gas.

she knows she should control her unmouthed complaints. the parental units did not charge her rent. nor did she have to buy groceries though she did sometimes just to be generous. out of her measly two part-time job paychecks she makes her truck payments, pays tuition bills and she spends money at her own free will on guns ammo boots clothes books journals. she pays for her own gas.

if she ever gets married or involved in a serious relationship? highly unlikely. she doesn't know how she'll react to a significant other pumping gas. after doing it for so long on her own, it would be different when it's his truck and he's pumping the gas. will she sit lazily in the passenger seat saying "get me a water" when he opens the driver's door asking if she wants anything? how is it going to be if it comes down to being their truck?

a tad bit of her independence.

stripped away.

succombing to wifely surrender.

as progressive and unchauvanistic as society has become, it might still look odd if the woman pumped gas while her man lounged behind the steering wheel.

throw a child into the scenario. a grown child. a twenty-something young woman still living at home. she pumps the gas. mother sits at the steering wheel. father, in his sunday best, walks into the small country store. to pay cash.

the daughter? she pumps the gas. watches orange digitized numbers slot-machining away. observes a wornout jeep cherokee pulling into the lot. quietly unaware of the driver measuring her up.

and when he exits he is tall forty-ish age is mind over matter--if he don't mind then it don't matter--brown hair blue or green eyes realtree patterned winter coat. walking past her he looks at her. she nods, smiles shyly.

single she is flirtatious with an ever-wandering eye.

"hello" he says. she says "hi" in return, turns her head as the pump clicks stop. slowly she returns the nozzle to the pump. taking the vehicle's tethered fuel cap in hand, she tightens it--turning clockwise--onto the chevy equinox's fuel tank.

the man exits the store. just as quickly as he entered. she turns to him. he looks at her.

"have a good day" he says. smiling she offers "you too". coyly, she tries not to let him notice her flirty watchful eye watching him walk away observing his tall figure and handsomely lined face wondering who in her own life he looks like. a stranger she once met at a bank or a store? some older version of an ex-lover?

again, he looks at her, pausing at the jeep cherokee before opening its driver's door. he looks at her, making eye contact from the short distance across the lot. in honest and mutual attraction their eyes meet and she continues smiling.

unabashedly he tells her "keep smiling you have a beautiful smile".

for whatever reason she is shocked. walking through a chilly breeze to the store's outdoor cracked corkboard bulletin she smiles wider glances downward.

"aw thank you" she says. her cheeks flush with embarassment. embarrassed to have shown interest and received it mutually from a much older man in front of her mother. yet she watches him drive off into the horizon's forboding gray yonder heading north on two-laned highway 259--that old hillbilly highway she knew oh so well wondering where he headed. thankful to have had someone lift her quietly saddnened gloomy day infected spirits. dreading taking the trash to the dumpster. believing in the power of a simple smile.

craving a wild cherry wood-tipped swisher sweet cigar.

A 2009 Bridgewater College graduate, Nicky Yurcaba has decided it is better to live life as a rambling poet than a slave to the corporate monster. Her works have appeared in Bridgewater College's "Philomathean", Bluefield College's "Bluestone Review", Mary Baldwin College's "Outrageous Fortune" and the online journal, VoxPoetica. She has work forthcoming in the online magazine "Referential".

Jim Davis

2011-04-03T18:23:00.000-05:00

On the Western Edge of the Black Forest

We sat with our baggage on our laps
as the 4:15 to Freiburg coughed into the station,
smoking and proud, come to take us
where the bell tower was a strong, ticking countenance.
Although I left my effects in the gray room,
we kept on, we drank cold bier
behind green-steel shutters, sunlight dotting the floor.
The clocks were off, the tower’s ochre clockface
was an afterthought
and the water-closet cost two coins, dropped
into a slot. It’s a war turret, a gun tower, you said,
knowing full well we’d be late for the band
squeezing bagpipes in the park. The graffiti art
was dazzling, it was everything at once,
blurred by our motion, and then
nothing as we entered the hill country,
covered in winegrapes. You turned your cheek.
You unwrapped a sandwich on garden bread,
seeds and oat scraps silting your lap,
thin slices of deli-meat between, you peeled back
butcher’s paper to snap one in two and passed me,
as we cut through quiet villas, one half.
You chewed, a crumb at your lip, and stared
out the rolling window, pointed to a place
at the top of an orange hill, and though
I leaned and craned my neck, I could not see.

JIM DAVIS is a graduate of Knox College and now lives, writes and paints in Chicago. His poetry and art have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, The Ante Review, Chiron Review, The Café Review, Red River Review, and Midwest Literary Magazine, among others. In addition to the arts, Jim travels the world as an international semi-professional football player. www.paintstrong.com

Dena Rash Guzman

2011-04-03T18:11:00.000-05:00

smoke over rice paddies

There is no release,
but this image does not require a release.
You're seated quietly beside me in the car, politely
carrying my carrion in your carry-on.
This image nearly is my release: a rush
of rain down the roof of a swanky little hut,
and the love in your eyes as you called me a slut.
I eye the world outside the car’s window,
the horizon waiting down the ribbon of road
rushing under wheels: the driver’s
head is steady and thick with black hair.
He points to the rice harvest with a gangster’s
bejeweled grace: “Smoke over the fields.
Would you like to stop for a photo?”

It’s too late. I’m drawn. The last word is.

Dena Rash Guzman is a Las Vegas born writer and visual artist, and a blowed in the glass, smoke-blowing vagabond. She recently flipped to Shanghai, where she placed first in a spoken word literary event. Her work can be found online, in print and at Powells.com in the book "Party Like It's 1984: Short Stories from the People's Republic of -" She flops on a farm outside Portland, Oregon. She can be reached at dena@haliterature.com

Submission Guidelines

2009-02-13T17:11:00.038-06:00

Please note that as of 2011, Hobo Camp Review is an online-only publication.

What to Submit:

We like travelers, troubadours, and transients of all shapes and sizes, especially those who can spin a good yarn, one with a sense of vagrancy, dark yet jovial and humble in the most outlaw manner possible. While we like to envision Steinbeck, Li Po, McCullers, Bukowski, and Kerouac sitting around a campfire eating hot dogs and beans with a stray dog named Tom Waits wagging his tail at their feet, we don’t want a rehash. We’ve been eating hash here for months and we’re sick of it. Be original. Be honest. Be on the move. We like tales from the road, Beat-ish poems with a little sparkle and a little dust, and stories that sound good by the firelight with the train running somewhere in the distance, but that doesn’t mean that’s all we like. Try us, we’re an easy going lot. We like to laugh, but we’re just as apt to get all sentimental about home. Either way, it’ll be time to move on soon, so nothing too long. Get creative, get entertaining, and get talking.

How to Submit:

1) No simultaneous submissions, and we no longer accept previously published work. We don't want a story we heard already. Give us a new adventure!

2) One submission bindle per issue. (If you don’t know what a bindle is, you haven’t been on the road long enough.) If you send more than one, we read the first and delete the others.

3) Only send one short story, one travel piece, up to 4 poems, and/or up to 4 pieces of artwork/photos per bindle. Regarding fiction: the shorter the better. Also, please be aware that all poems that appear online will be left justified and that special formatting doesn't translate well with the blog format (sadly). Keep this in mind when choosing poems to submit.

4) We'd love to publish guest columns and your reviews, interviews, or opinion pieces. Please query before sending those.

5) NO ATTACHMENTS (artwork ok) unless we ask for it; just copy and paste your text into the body of the bindle. Also, don't just send us links to your work...send us your actual work.

6) No payment for work just yet (we are hobos after all), but we do have random cash prizes and awards.

7) Please allow at least two months to pass before assuming the camp moved on without you. You may query after that. We aim to respond to everyone’s work, regardless of acceptance, so hold tight. If we miss you in the night, our apologies.

8) Title your bindle like so: “Submission – Your Name Here” or “Query – Your Name Here” so we can keep track of everyone’s stake.

9) Include a short bio and any links to your website/blog. Please keep bios BRIEF. We'd like to know a little about you, but we don't want a resume. Also, we reserve the right to shorten bios.

10) For the time being, please send all bindles to hobocampreview [at] hotmail.com.

Legal Notification: Upon publication in Hobo Camp Review, all rights revert to the author. However, Hobo Camp Review reserves the right to publish your submitted material in any future print version of the review. If your work was published in Hobo Camp Review first and is republished elsewhere, please mention us. That's awful kind of ya.

All work displayed at Hobo Camp Review is copyrighted, so don’t get sticky fingers or we’ll turn you in at the next town. We're serious. A hobo with a grudge and a lot of time on his hands isn't something you want to deal with.

Guidelines are subject to change, so check back now and then.

Thanks for stopping by the Camp, and we'll see you on the road…

Meet the Editors

2009-02-13T17:03:00.008-06:00

James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review. A poet and fictionist from New York, he has appeared in dozens of magazines, including Plainsongs, The Homestead Review, Apt, Red Fez, Reed Magazine, Covert Poetics Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Aurorean, Thick With Conviction, Up The Staircase, Slipstream, and 3:AM Magazine. He is the author of five collections of poetry, has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net, and is also a Pushcart Prize nominee. A self-described hobo, he prefers to stick close to diners, used book stores, dive bars, railroad tracks, public parks, and your couch. He is a graduate of Southern Vermont College and fan of classic noir films. Visit http://jameshduncan.blogspot.com/ for more about his work.

Former Co-Editors

Clyde Elliot hails from Salinas, CA. A semi-retired traveling journalist, his travelogues and articles have appeared in newspapers in Burma, Argentina, Napal, Ceylon, Mexico, Wales, Belarus, Corsica, Poland, Jamaica, Morocco, and Zaire. Oddly enough, none of his works have ever been published within the United States since his time as a beat reporter for his college newspaper in Vermont. A self-described hobo, Clyde has actually eaten beans from a can more times than he can remember and always keeps a translated version of Kerouac or Steinbeck in his rucksack so he can read to the locals. A true fact: his great-great-grandfather invented the modern incarnation of toilet paper. You’re welcome.

Samantha Schroeder dabbles in poetry, slaves away at fiction, and currently writes freelance material for a handful of magazines along the eastern seaboard. As a ghostwriter, Samantha has written extensively about the Beat Generation, female poets in the 20th century, and ELL education standards, but sadly cannot take credit for a single word (the cost of paying the bills). A self-described hobo, she will drink you under the table, but won’t help you up once you get there. Them’s the breaks, tiger. She spent one semester at Harvard, but attended no classes.