Irene Cooper
Site

In basements
we wrenched lungs

of laundry detergent
and soot
Look

there’s no sense
now

wagging our
forked livers
at our shame

and its con-
stituents

(the joists of us
warp under
the weight

clarity we carry
like a pane of

glass between us
filmed soapy

and slipped
through baby
fingers)

we salvaged
the frame

let’s rest
our gaze on
some open field

Irene Cooper’s poems have appeared in the Oregon Poetry Association anthology, Verseweavers, as well as in Indolent Books’ anthology, Poems in the Aftermath, on the online project What Rough Beast, in The Feminist Wire, and in Utterance: A Journal. She is a freelance copywriter and essayist, fledgling novelist, and co-editor of The Stay Project, which explores and encourages artistic impulse in the current political moment.

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Austin Davis
The 2nd Civil War

I’m sitting on my best friend’s girlfriend’s couch
in that weird place between drunk and sober
where I’ve drank too much to say I’m tipsy
but not enough to be throwing couch cushions.

Maybe I forgot to take any anxiety pills
this morning, or maybe my imagination
is even more alive after a couple beers,
but I feel like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Stop Dave. Stop Dave. I am afraid. I am afraid Dave.”

Everyone is dancing, pushing each other into lamps and walls,
and I’m staring at the door, waiting for a murderous clown
to knock and offer us pizza like that old SNL skit with the landshark,
except in this version he’d probably be holding a gun from Walmart.

Drake would drop from the room. Shirtless Dan
would burp a couple times and fall to the kitchen floor.
The red solo cups would lose their capitalist glow
and the horror movie clown would announce to the whole party

that Trump had just signed off on The Purge
by blasting us all to oblivion us until all that’s left
is the slam of the front door, the step of boots on concrete,
a soft wheeze as our lungs fill with blood,
and the last bottle spilling all over the carpet.

Maybe I just need to sleep it off.
Maybe it’s time to go to bed. Maybe
I’ll wake up tomorrow morning
with a headache and an intense craving
for kung pao chicken. Or maybe
I’ll blink and all my friends will be dead.

Austin Davis is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist from Mesa, Arizona. Austin’s poetry has been widely published in literary journals and magazines, both in print and online. Most recently, Austin’s work can be found in Pif Magazine, Ink in Thirds, Folded Word, The Poetry Shed, In Between Hangovers, One Sentence Poems, and Tuck Magazine. Austin’s first chapbook, The Moon and Her Ocean, was published in 2017 by Fowlpox Press. Cloudy Days, Still Nights, Austin’s first full length book of poetry, was published in May, 2018 from Moran Press.

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Jane McPhetres-Johnson
THE OTHER POEM: 2016
The Brexit, The Donald, & The Dreamers
Today they say our world
markets are in free-fall and
the union has broken apart
because the leavers voted
to leave and the remainders
united in loss. Leaving is
catching on, uncoupling is
all the rage, while the winners
actually believe they can
put everything back again
between the faded lines and
just as it was when the reds
were red, the whites white
and the bluebloods undiluted
by those who muddy the pure
and muddle the words, work
for nothing at jobs we don’t
want until they’re the ones on
top. The remainders. The voters
to leave. The other others out.

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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Joyce Schmid
Shriek

Suddenly, I hear the scream of a small animal
the cat has caught and dragged off by the neck—

the squirrel who used to eat our apricots and run
in circles round the fruitless mulberry.

Who could understand the last despair of animals?
Tell your senator it’s time to vote

against the fisherman who throws the fish back in,
its mouth still bleeding. The fisherman believes

he’s merciful. And yet the state of nature is so natural.
Imagine if a fish could scream. Who could understand?

What is the translation of a scream?

Joyce Schmid‘s recent work has appeared in Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Riverfeet Press Anthology, and other journals and anthologies. Joyce has live in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of over half a century.

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Rodney Terich Leonard
Oaken in the Midst: Bleak Update to Mr. Baldwin

Between sleet & hydrangeas
oaken in the midst.
James Arthur Baldwin—
woolen & cashmere
clarity & contradiction.

Ascot for attic work,
lotion upon the ashen,
Jimmy—
his hoot & language,
our maestro, mood & message.

Bleak update—
Systolic: America’s Bleeding Noon—
He swung & hit again.
His cash is middle-named John & hood:
May 1, 1989: New York Daily News
$85,000 full-page headline

“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.
BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
(Concerning The Central Park Five
Exonerated in 2014):
Maybe hate is what we need
if we’re gonna get something done.
To know well the beginning….

The scurrying & collisions—
This White House is dyspeptic.
A Youngstown woman oh no’s!:
He talks off the cuff like us. I’m tired of
suave and polished. I want my country back!

Exposed in a previous gale,
Texas legalized “same-sex” love:
Rachel and Nadine
Nesta and DaShawn. Still,

The unleavened sides of poet & poem
thin my stride & pen,
like PrEP-era barebacking
or another ominous trend.

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
LIFE ON MARS

Our Curiosity has found organic molecules on Mars,
the building blocks of life, in a crater lake on Mars.

An app on my phone confirms the fiery light
among the stars, the dying and already-dead, is Mars.

But the pre-dawn moon’s a thin, white blade, the firmament
as lonely as its ever been. That tiny flame is Mars.

I once lived on a street named for Mars, the god of war.
Each night, another yellow window blazed with rage, on Mars.

And the other day, Jesus waved a red ball cap as his jacked-up truck
sped past, now that Main street’s changed its name to Mars.

Humankind, let’s build another ark and sail to that red orb
as soon as science tells us we can live on Mars.

Yes, in time we’ll wreck that, too, and then the next frontier
we colonize. Because we’re all children of the war god, Mars.

But scientists have discovered in the russet Martian dirt,
not proof of life just yet, but something carbon-based, on Mars.

And this candlelight before the day breaks into shards, a bit of hope
is what I need right now, even if it has to come from Mars.

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
Mineralogy

Stibnite is where we get antimony
On earth, the crystals grow thin and clustered
Blue, if blue were colorless

Something like a dawn sky
Where the sun is not yellow, the sky is not blue
But raw sense talks to rational thought
Is scolded by emotional understanding and
Everyone comes to an unexpected conclusion
As the birds make swells of sound, their
Chirps swarm like bees moving hives.

I do not know how they make the decision to leave home
Or if it falls alone on the queen
It seems useful to ask
In case we ever become bees.

Shot into the sky and detonated
Antimony sparkles, reflecting fire,
Falls in arcs and sizzles until darkness reasserts.
We all sit on our blankets
Staring up and trusting
The show will stir things in us—
Like joy and wonder and I am not there
So I go to the museum and hunt
For the mineral, staring into the imperfect mirror
And take what I can get.

Call me when you find America
It’s hard to maintain
Sanity, hope, gravity, clean water, good boundaries
Under these conditions.
Am I devoted to a thing
Or the elements stripped from it
Until dichotomy itself is meaningless?

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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Katie Hartsock
Inaugural

Because we once consulted birds—in flight,
or a stomach sliced to show the ropes of words
its entrails spoke, or cacophonic chords
some lark sang, silhouetted in a pine

or strangled by a snake—on matters close
to the republic’s heart, and because those men
who took small knives to altars or hacked heaven
with their eyes were known as augurs, robed

in airy offices of augury,
the beginnings of things with futures bright and fair
we call inaugurations. The name declares
the omens good, assumes that we agree

they should be so, ignores whole histories
of auspices bad to the bone, when birds said “don’t.”
This too is old. The sacred chickens of ancient Rome
could thwart the will of senators, high priests,

and generals, depending how they ate
their scattered grains on divination days.
To refuse food was disapproval; to graze,
a nod of consent. In later years, if the state

could not endure a no, it was simple
to starve those hens, and get the go-ahead.
We don’t deny ourselves, don’t admit to bed
any love that’s too obedient.

Will you listen, and decode that cock’s gold crowing?
The hawk hunched by your bedroom window knows

you’ve made shit up to suit your purpose,
called the vault of evils that hoards hope hopeless.

Katie Hartsock is the author of the poetry collection Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse Press, 2016). Her work has most recently appeared in Ecotone, Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. She is an assistant professor of English at Oakland University, and lives in Ferndale, Michigan, with her husband, toddler son, and a new baby forthcoming this fall.

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Desiree Morales
Calpurnia in Tejas

Two thousand children
in the tented desert.
By then you’re past
tense. Hysterical
is a word that sometimes
gets used here.
Listen, I read about minority stress
and frankly they should call
them micro-murders.
I tell my heart to behave.
Amygdala sharpens a knife.
Listen, there are already
mass graves in Tejas, unearthed
years before this panic. By the time
it’s the truth the truth
is already ashes in your mouth.
I tell my heart—but you can’t force
the heart.
Amygdala on a short leash.
How long before—Listen.
What you fear will happen has
already happened. I didn’t
want to be right, but
here we are.

Desiree Morales‘s work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Truck: I35 Creativity Corridor, and Conflict of Interest. She is a poet and educator living in Austin, Texas.

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J.Bradley
The Ribcage Recognizes Patterns and Yet Keeps Ignoring Them

Love is a circle, you say
as this week’s want caresses
one neck after the other.

You wait for him to sleep
before you skitter into his bathroom.
You catalog his faults, plan
for the right escape, the one
where you are a corpse
waiting for the right kiss
to reanimate you.

J. Bradley is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbooks Neil (Five Quarterly, 2015) and No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He received his MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.

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