Ronald J. Pelias
When the Struggle Stops

You throw your hands up as if there’s nothing
you can do. You accept the given order.
You refuse to discuss politics. You
doubt if there’s any truth to the lies you
hear, if you should trust the never-ending
news. You wonder if all politicians
are morally corrupt, if both parties
are the same. You don’t vote. You are afraid
of what comes next, but fall into consent,
bury yourself in dead silence, protect
what you have. When you bite your tongue, it no
longer bleeds. Here, you suffer from comfort.

Ronald J. Pelias‘ most recent books, Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing (Left Coast Press/Routledge), If the Truth Be Told (Sense Publications), and Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life (Routledge), call upon the poetic as a research strategy. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Midwest Poetry Review, Coal City Review, Poetry East, and Negative Capability.

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Rose Willow
Capitalism

My knees tremble at the threat
of a consumer collapse.
I chuckle as the president fiddles
while the planet burns.

I won’t go easy.
I promise messy
when I fall.

Rose Willow lives and writes near the Salish Sea on the west coast of Canada. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines including, Ascent Aspirations, Portal, Spring, SoftCartel, The Society, and Transitions.

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Shana Ross
Numbers 13:17

Well, Moses ain’t Jesus but
Here we are at the border
Tug of war
Fought over razor sharp scripture

Go on into the hill country and see
What kind of country is this
Are the people who dwell here
Strong or weak? Few or many?
Is the country good or bad?

Every gedanken was in vain. We asked ourselves
What we would have done in different times
A failure of imagination. It seems obvious,
When you watch Star Wars, the rebels are the good guys.
It’s a trap. Honest to god, these people
Think the Empire sounds great, no speck of irony.
You cannot underestimate the power of that darkness.

I bargain for my home.
For only ten good men, there must be something worth saving.

But Moses said: see.
What are the fortifications?
Walls speak louder than words.
Walls tell you whether the country is good or bad
Walls tell you whether a people are weak or strong
Something there is that does not love —

What we have now is children in cages.
One man cannot be reproached for fleeing
Do not look back do not look

I sacrifice much in the witnessing.
I cannot turn away.

Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with a BA and MBA from Yale University. Her writing career has been dormant for 18 years for reasons both practical and best discussed in therapy. This decade, her work has been published in Anapest Journal, SHANTIH Journal, and Writers Resist.

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Alexis Quinlan
Motherland

Mother was a party girl—volunteered
for Dems, loved her U.S. history—and
I’m sort of a party girl, and yesterday
at a get-out-the-vote phone bank
I spotted her across the room for a split—
just a quick—the old ugliness dropped
away. She must’ve rotted by now, the witch,
but this year friends bring her up. How
she drew us near to argue, debate,
to rap on her principles, her America.
But any fine idea can veer off the path,
a child astray, blue-white disappointment.

She snuck into my wedding, too. I spied her
in back of the church, skulking among
my dearest at rehearsal. She wore
a green dress she liked at the end, silky sheen,
polyester, maybe we buried her in it.
Still trying to glom onto my fun.
She mostly adored my boyfriends, history
majors like her, who shared her politics, knew
her facts. Everyone’s smarter than me.
And now this husband reads the entire
Times every morning, rises early for the job.

One anniversary, during one of the years
we didn’t mention it, his daughters were
teasing him about the past, as they like to do.
They brought up his rowdy mothers-in-law—
his ex had two moms—and he said, I have
another mother-in-law I wish I’d met.
His young women didn’t like that, but I did.

Because I know just how it would be
(for a while): the three of us talking—
or five of us, why not?—
late into the night on these nights,
reviewing news, weighing data,
arguing for the same side
for our principles, our party, our great
lake of story, America.

Alexis Quinlan‘s most recent poetry chapbook, an admission, is a warning against the value of our conclusions [Exit Strata/The Operating System 2013] comprises a series of interventions on and responses to Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” More poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Drunken Boat, Rhino, Tinderbox, Juked, and Madison Review. She works as an adjunct English teacher at Fordham University.

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Jane McPhetres-Johnson
WATCHING THINGS UNFOLD

Folding laundry, napkins, whooping cranes
saving paper bags in slow folded meditation
fold a poem in pleats from its top to be told
where thinking ends and poetry unfolds.

Fold as shelter to bring sheep, hollow among
hills, place where we belong. See rivers ribbon
fold on fold. So lava flowed, now stone is cold
in hardened folds. Doeskin, thin, so softly folds.

Fold diapers to fit babies folded to fit wombs
cribs, laps, arms enfold. In red, black, rusty gold
behold big unearthed earthen pots to hold old
bones in fetal folds, along with stories long untold.

Daily the world’s worst fears unfold. Protections
fold. Farms, schools, clinics fold. Dreamers fold
in pray-er mode in airless packed conveyor holds.
Copy-catenated crimes we scold in centerfolds.

Our dreams fooled, our nightmares foaled, our
demons we had hidden in deep mental folds, now
faceless identical dolls unfold so paper-thin, so
folioed, they hold each other’s tiny hands in folds.

Jane McPhetres Johnson was born, raised, and educated on the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, migrated north to the Wyoming Big Horns, and recently landed on the eastern side of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. She completed the Goddard MFA under the care of Stephen Dobyns and Thomas Lux the same week her younger son was born, named him Ben Jo(h)nson, then dreamed up programming for public libraries until she finally got arrested at the George W. Bush White House and quit her library work to look for a more effective, affective voice. Always she has practiced the 3 Rs––Reading, wRiting, and Revision–– but seldom has taken the next alphabetical leap to Submission. Recently, however, her poems are venturing out to become verbal expressions of the Munch-kin “Scream” in the face of militarism, exploitation, and the sad insanity of corporate lemmingism. Her poem “Growing up beside the Continental Divide” was first published on Indolent Book’s series What Rough Beast, March 4, 2017, and then went to Washington in the “Not My Prez” anthology.

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Virginia Barrett
Sailing to D.C.

In the sea of these blind
eyes the lying boats
launch: a race across
albatross-skies. What is

vision aimed at the horizon
line? Earth is an orb of
surging insight—the waves
of justice weep. All this talk

thick with salt; drop these
sails . . . the tangled
rigging fails. Shinny
up the mast to sight

our land.

Virginia Barrett’s books of poetry include Between Looking (forthcoming, 2019 from Finishing Line Press), Crossing Haight, and I Just Wear My Wings. Barrett is the editor of two anthologies of contemporary San Francisco poets including OCCUPY SF—poems from the movement. Her work has most recently appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Narrative, Roar: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People, Ekphrastic Review, Weaving the Terrain (Dos Gatos Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). She received a 2017 writer’s residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, NM. Her chapbook, Stars By Any Other Name, was a semi-finalist for the Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press, 2017. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Quintin Collins
The Data Says America Burns

The data slithered through the umbilical cord. It breached
the placenta, foretold floods of misfortune in the amniotic fluid.
Kicking and screaming, the data met light. My mother

swaddled a decimal point latched to her breast, infant body
cupped like a comma curved between digits. When I was a toddler,
the data dismantled an electrical outlet. It was curious how the world worked.
Older data knew already, so it burned Los Angeles for five days
while I said my first sentences. The data started counting

and stopped when I was six. My grandfather smoked cigarettes
until statistics smothered his lungs with tumors. This time, Florida

went up in flames. One summer evening, everything black
but security lights, the data struck a match, lit a cigar,
and handed it to my father. My mother
said it was a gift from friends at my birth. The data
spiraled from the glowing tip like smoke, my father a shadow

in the dark. In school, teachers warned about the data.
Some students already had mouths full of percent signs. Their tongues
clicked like tickers. When I met those kids on the wrong block
on the wrong day, the data kept a knee on my spine. Cincinnati smoldered,

and then America crackled on a jet fuel bonfire.
Wasn’t it always embers? Wasn’t it always Oakland?
The data thought so and slipped a few figures

into my palm when I turned twenty-one: Florida incinerated
again, the flames found new kindling, crawled from Ferguson to Cleveland
to New York to North Charleston to Baltimore to Waller County to Falcon Heights.
One in every, two in every, three in every, four in every—the data

spilled tens and hundreds and thousands and millions into streets.
At twenty-seven, I talked with my wife about counting down from nine,
and a statistic said, “Remember, I rode shotgun when cops stopped you

in Chicago.” In California, a new blaze sparked in Sacramento,
and I tried to tally the tip of each flame.

Quintin Collins has works that have appeared or are forthcoming in Threshold, Glass Mountain, Eclectica, Transition, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program, Quintin is a managing editor at a digital marketing agency, where he publishes writing craft blogs. If Quintin were to have one extravagance, it would be a personal sommelier to give him wine pairings for books.

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Rodney Terich Leonard
Aphorism

A bull
will need
his tail
to fan flies
out of his ass
for more than
one summer.

Rodney Terich Leonard is the founder of the Harlem Artists Salon which showcases writers, scholars, musicians and visual artists at various career levels. Mr. Leonard is a poet, essayist and the founder of the R.T. Leonard Salon, a lifestyle and aesthetics consultancy. An independent art dealer, Leonard’s literary works and profiles have been featured in The Red River Review, Margie,The Huffington Post, Callaloo, The New York Times, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys..(edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.

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Jackleen Holton
I TAKE THE FACEBOOK QUIZ: WHICH DEADLY SIN ARE YOU?

which is another waste of perfectly good daylight,
much like the last quiz I took: Which Brady Bunch Character
Are You? When I knew damn well I was Jan,
though the dumb, Jan-like hope that I might, after all, emerge
as Marcia kept me clicking through the inane questions

as brain cells trickled slowly through an invisible hourglass,
just as they do now, as I find myself driven by a secret desire
to be lust, or perhaps wrath. But by question three—
Would I rather watch honey slowly dripping from a waxy comb
or witness two chinchillas fucking?—I know where this is heading.

And the fact I’m even taking this test as opposed to stuffing
hot pockets in my face, listening to Slayer, or fucking,
probably means that, yes, I am sloth. But because I damn well know
that I am sloth, I continue hovering my mouse over the multiple choice
answers while the bills pile up, and those annoying emails

with their little red missiles keep popping onto my screen,
while our democracy trickles away by the minute, and I know I should
be protesting or calling my legislators, or at the very least posting
something in outrage instead of slogging through
these mildly enjoyable inquiries. But yes, I do love

black and white movies that take a fortnight to arrive at a plot twist.
And it goes without saying that the video of a snowy owl
floating on cloud-like ice floes is all I need imagine of heaven,
and I might just watch that again, though the kitchen faucet’s
still dripping as the quiz comes to an end, revealing that, yes, I am sloth.

So I Google sloth, because that’s where this leisurely train is heading,
and I find the soft, brown animal of my deadly sin staring me in the face, a slow
smile playing at the corners of its mouth, the tiniest glimmer of light emanating
from molasses-colored eyes while the hourglass of this trickling-away world
makes only a faintly audible sound like a dripping tap in the background.

Jackleen Holton‘s poems have been published in journals including North American Review, Poet Lore, and RHINO Poetry, online venues such as Rattle’s Poets Respond, Poets Reading the News, and Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, and the anthology Not My President.

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Shana Ross
Modern Motherhood

This is not a song of comfort
Only a plain heaviness;
I know you are looking for
Silver linings, hope uncovered.

Not every stone can be polished, turned
Until you find the angle where light flashes.
Some are meant to be swallowed whole
This fact, its implications, the weight of words
Should stay in your belly.

When I meet my son’s teachers
The first question I ask myself
Is whether this person is willing
To die for my child, if it comes to that.

Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with a BA and MBA from Yale University. Her writing career has been dormant for 18 years for reasons both practical and best discussed in therapy. This decade, her work has been published in Anapest Journal, SHANTIH Journal, and Writers Resist.

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