American poet Rob Plath has published six poetry chapbooks. his first feature collection, a bellyful of anarchy, was released by epic rites press in 2009. comprised of nine monstrous limbs (225 poems) this book is an absolute motherfucker that will leap from your bookshelf and kick the living shit out of every other book in your library. if you buy this momumental collection you better buy yourself a new bookshelf to store the monster, or better yet buy yourself a fucking cage!!

Baudelaire would understand the hole in the ceiling above my tub & the cold stream pissing down through the steam like something from Satan's bladder. The plumbing exposed, the copper elbow pointing down at my skull as if to accuse me of something & the damp, itchy, brown stained insulation like a tuft of fur from a dead carcass in the rain. Baudelaire would understand the black mold spreading like melancholia's acne & its putrid odor caught in my nostrils, warning me that nothing ever gets clean in this world, no matter how much we scrub our skin, or abstain from dousing our soul in wine or setting it in the center of a cloud of hash, we always, always remain poor & unclean down to the sour six foot ditch.

click the overflowing ashtray to view the latest issue.

Submissions must be pasted into an email along with “submission” in the subject line & zapped to rsplath@fastmail.fm Send no more than THREE poems under 30 lines. Nothing longer. No previously published poems. Don’t send some so-so fucking poems that were rejected somewhere else and pawn them off on me “to see what happens.” Just because this isn’t a print magazine or a complex website doesn’t mean it doesn’t have high standards.  Actually, this zine will be highly selective. Keep that in mind.  Please remember to obey the guidelines. If you don’t follow the few simple rules then the editor will delete your email. Also, the editor knows what he likes and if it’s not of his taste then you don’t get in. If he doesn’t like anything then he will publish nothing.

Please note:
The Exuberant Ashtray will be published on an irregular basis. If you don’t like that then find some other place for your poems.

for every time a father flips the dinner table
for every time a wife winds up at a motel
there's a little hobo in my heart
who forever gives the finger to humanity
for every time the cage door in solitary slams shut
for every time the police baton meets a bone
for every time a horse gets beaten in the stall
there's a little hobo in my heart
who forever gives the finger to humanity
for every time a family uses the stove to heat the room
for every time a teenage soldier tries on a prosthetic limb
there's a little hobo in my heart
who forever gives the finger to humanity
for every time the sheriffs put still-warm furniture at the curb
for every time there's an ignored bedpan
there's a little hobo in my heart
who forever gives the finger to humanity
for every time something living is caught in the cross-hairs
for every time the warden signals for the IV to begin dripping
for every time a father breaks his son
there's a little hobo in my heart
who forever gives the finger to humanity
for every time the outsider gets the shit kicked of them by the insider
for every time the repo man on stealthy heels arrives
for every time a city has to shut its lights & sound its sirens
there's a little hobo in my heart
who forever gives the finger to humanity

i
am
my
own
pallbearer

carrying
my
dead
weight
thruout
this
world

over
threshold
after
threshold

stoic yet
hysterical
w/in

i pause
to smoke a
cigarette 

then lift
myself up again

& move on

keep one eye for Rob's collection of un-love poetry - forthcoming from epic rites press.

like
an
overused
vein
on
a
junky

that
defunct
punctured
ribbon

the
heart
collapses
eventually
as
well

&
it's
not
the
last
arrow
from
cupid
that
caused
it

not
the
last
probing

although
it
seems
the
culprit

it's
the
long
line
of
them

entering
that
one
fucking
muscle