CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
You Have To Be Wealthy In Order To Be Great

You Have To Be Wealthy In Order To Be Great

I like to tell people it’s hard to get rich,
but it’s even harder to fill your body cavity
with golf balls and sell them to foreign
heads of state at exorbitant prices. It all
depends on alignment of dimples, learning
to hold clubs in your mouth without
chewing. You don’t get wealthy by accident.
It’s takes a lot of grit to flatter someone
on Monday, and then on Tuesday, feed them
to the cylindrical grinding machine I keep
in my luxury penthouse suite. That’s how I
achieved greatness. First, I’m rich. Second,
I’m entirely coated in plutonium. Third,
I’ve accumulated quite a collection of slightly
used penny loafers which I sell for very
reasonable prices at the Penny Loafers
Emporium. Come on down! Off I-34 by
the Shoney’s. My brother owns that Shoney’s.
He says kids under 5 eat free. Every Christmas
at Mother’s I try to tell him: no one eats free.

CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World. Recent work appears in The Arkansas Review, Contrary, and Barrelhouse. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com
and, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven

Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press, and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” -New York Times) of Washington, D.C.

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Rodney Terich Leonard
Concessions

“Sorry, Miss Jackson”
—Outkast

Defeat is personal;
limber hallelujahs
lift heavy burdens.

Eyes, fit for purple & further trough
gaze unravel—
sheep headed to a bad market.

Hillary, hurt sister,
where haven’t we been?
Amid unwelcome wind

slow grind & two-step
let us slide electric & salsa
drop-it & wobble while we wail.

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
ALLEGIANCE

The windows of the bank tower mirror us,
bodies elongated like shadows, moving
uptown with the current. At the stoplight, a hawk

emerges from the dark corridor between apartment
buildings, alights on an overflowing bin. The trash
collectors have been on strike for three weeks.

From behind dark sunglasses, I gaze on the faces
of the street people as they pass, their need held out
like empty cans. His cardboard folded up in one hand,

white mermaid cup in the other, a man crosses
the street, makes his way to his island. Today, the sign
might say Vietnam Vet or Anything Helps. Under his flannel,

he probably wears a black t-shirt with the word Jesus.
The other night in my car, waiting for the green arrow,
the same guy ambled toward me, silent but for that white

word afloat in the dark, and I knew, because James Taylor
had just sung that very name, that my luck would turn around
if only I could find something to give before the light changed.

And the pair walking toward me now, his downcast eyes, a cigarette
caught in her spidery lips, yank my mind back to a childhood
cul-de-sac, our neighbors a young mom and her gawky,

learning-disabled kid, the tender way they had with each other
its own language, their small house an island of refuge in a world
not built for either of them. Remembering this, I want not to fail

another small, critical test. I stop, dive into my purse,
come up with just one crumpled bill, hold out my offering.
But they’ve already gone past. The foot traffic surges

around me as if I’m an island against progress,
an ocean of sunglasses mirroring a lost woman waving
the little green flag of her country at half-mast.

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
Red Barns

There was a time before paint.
Oil and iron mixed will shield

Wood from weather.

Iron on its own was strength at too high a price;
Oil worked tenderly into thirsty planks
Lent vulnerability and endurance but
No protection. No one thing withstands
Time, sun, wind but in combination –

Barns turn red, blood dries black,
Best to rust in layer after layer

We paint them now, and it looks
The same but nothing is
Built with the same conviction
That we will pass these on to our children.

Gardens are planted by people who have faith in the future
But there are those who bank on seeding
Their own harvest and harvesters and would rather salt the earth
Than feed an unimaginable future

I woke up one morning in Ohio farmland and the fog
Was too thick to see the driveway, much less the road;
Where do you come from, to feel like this in the face of the uncanny?

I don’t understand you,
The fear lodged in you like shrapnel
Working its way ever closer to your heart.

In the time before barns themselves
Old men planted trees
Not to shape the future but to repay the past.

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
The Gall

Don’t do it, a voice goads
in the tragedies,
but they do.

It could have been as simple
as not walking on a carpet,
not putting on a coat.

Agamemnon crushes purple raiments,
dyed with spiny murex from the sea,
a path of splendor Clytemnestra

lays before his feet,
saying don’t overthink it,
my lord. My homecoming king.

Deianeira sees the girl
her husband has brought home
and anoints Hercules’ robe

with long-dried clots of blood and black gall
a blue-balled centaur gave her
as he died from the hero’s arrow.

A love-charm, he’d said,
for him. Just in case,
pretty face. She sends the garment off, posthaste,

then sees the tuft of wool from a rich-fleeced sheep
she’d wiped it down with
crumble into wine-red foam, seething.

Theseus is all man
the way he thinks a man should be,
but the mysteries

reverse him, dressed in a dress
and rouge and a wig, swinging his hips
to decapitation. Buyer be wearing

a god’s revenge, big as teased hair.
And the princess,
the princess of Corinth,

she wants Jason’s ex and kids kicked out.
Medea sends the children
with a gift, a finely woven robe

and diadem of beaten gold,
all darkened by the arts
of her old world.

Before the princess puts them on,
before she admires herself thus attired and the dear
loveliness of her legs

in the mirror, before the flames invade
her flesh falling
off like pitch from a pine torch,

before she begs her sceptered father to do something
and her fire sticks to him
like horror’s own glue,

before they die together
like ivy suckered to a log
and the messenger observes

that the rich
might be lucky but guess what
they’re never blessed,

before all that,
she accepts the offered present
from the cake stand of the children’s hands.

She smiles, pleased as Medea
said she would be, and releases both boys
from that morning’s decree, sentencing them to exile.

They can stay.
Jason hugs all three. Go say goodbye forever
to your mother, now. She’s packing to leave.

Note:
I wrote this poem after Melania Trump visited children separated from their parents at the border in June 2018; as she boarded the plane, the back of her coat read, “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?” It got me thinking about instances in Greek tragedy when someone wore something they definitely shouldn’t have.

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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Alexis Quinlan
A few of the words

Here’s some language: sweet land, liberty.
Here’s a location we call mine. The mind.

Here’s a famous river in the back of the lot
just past the original song. Rocky banks

risky slope. Follow it north, pilgrim,
to where it runs at a trickle. Keep

going. The philosopher calls nationalism
irrational – sweet land sweet song –

but they made a word for it.

Here’s more: map, theft, savage.
Rage at the geographer, sweet. Here’s

a graveyard round which our freedom rings.
One day we’ll know what has happened.

Sweet sweet land. We will know again (mind)
(mine). Mighty is the word for that river,

ours. We will leap into its sparkling, easy
bobbing to its source, called Lake Itasca,

a name engineered to sound Indian
by way of Latin—veritas, caput.

Whose truth, whose head? Kaput.
We will change the name.

Note:
The lake regarded as the headwaters of the Mississippi
was known as Omashkoozo-zaagai’igan (Elk Lake) in Ojibwe.
In 1832, Henry Schoolcraft renamed it Lake Itasca by
combining Veritas (L.) truth and Caput (L.) head.

((((a name a white guy coined to sound Indian

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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Sean Mahoney
On the Luxury of Saying What I Feel

Bumblebee sipping from one Morning Glory before moving on…

It’s after Mother’s Day and I shudder at what we’ve let happen
to the country she grew up in. We let skin create graft and free
pass and monopoly. We allowed for collateral distraction
as entertainment. We created mergers and corporate personages.
Easy ‘cop’ outs. Comfortable lobby spume. We fettered our private
lives and socialized our pains and aches. We walked, cautiously,
just to the store across the street while someone remained at home
wondering if they would ever see us alive again. We swallowed

Trimmed branches of a super seedy lemon variety with large…

the echo and the chamber. We swallowed truths and forgot how
to regurgitate. And the bitter pills we suppositoried, believing
their eventual dissolution would spare our throats the anguish
of shock and awe. We believed sophomorically treaty and pact
wrought in the sweat of people created brotherhoods. We believed
that arrangements were what sets of parents had with each other

Barbs, and finches darting up to the roof out front behind blinds…

and that that was their business. We would never raise an eyebrow
at the sanctity of their union, the profundity of their labor. And we
never leveled as a dis the fact that ‘she persisted’; for that is indeed
what mom did – literally for years – as well as in the grander scheme
and in refutation of troll-bait memes where mom inhabited the role
as protector of all her babes, using climate and warming as weapons.

And pane of the dining room window and all jiggles on the face…

We allowed for human beings being shot by itch or polemical
inner intuition. We allowed for our ovaries to be manipulated
and tokenized and for our testicles to generally create that special
kind of chaos boys routinely swine in. What carries this country for-
ward with its arrogant swagger? And what if, by writing any or all
of me, a retooled AUMF S.J. 59 enables this one or the next in another

Of the water in the vase holding a single, bare stemmed peach rose…

2 years to spin me away in dark ‘detention’ indefinitely? This is not
my mom’s country. This land is colder. Much colder. More vacuous
with bubbles, less nutrient-nourishing womb. But mom finds pockets,
tiny isles, and perhaps that is enough for now she says rocking me asleep.

Bumblebee sipping from one Morning Glory before moving on
Trimmed branches of a super seedy lemon variety with large
Barbs, and finches darting up to the roof out front behind blinds
And glass of the dining room window and all jiggles on the face
Of the water in the vase holding a single, bare stemmed peach rose

An idea of new building,
of scratching one’s way up,
of suffering repeated stings,
is simply not enough love.

Sean J Mahoney lives with his wife, her mother, two Uglydolls, and three dogs in Santa Ana, California. He works in geophysics. He believes in salsa, dark chocolate, and CBD. Sean helped create to the Disability Literature Consortium (www.dislitconsortium.wordpress.com) and co-edited the first 3 volumes of the MS benefit anthology Something On Our Minds.

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Kazimieras M. Campe
Midnight Special

This train trundles in darkness,
heedless of madness riding within.

This one is not bound for glory.
All aboard are not all aboard.

This train runs on unafraid of waking
those asleep in graves by the tracks.

Kazimieras M. Campe is a retired engineer whose poetry has appeared in Potomac Review, Metropolitain, Bitterroot, and Hot Calaloo. He lives in Maryland.

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Laura Page
Sea Kittens

Their feet among the billows, know
That Ocean is a mighty harmonist — Wordsworth

Kittens were washing up on the beach.
I had been thinking in this dream
of something I’d read somewhere about waves,
how many in the sky peel, how few see the shore,
and Wordsworth’s singing ones,
drawing their hips up, begging with the vast depths, speaking
to a lighthouse, or kissing any woman’s bare feet.
I was kneeling when they came, the kittens,
as small and blind as newly born, tabbied with kelp.
I don’t know if I was praying.
I only knew the sea had answered with unseeing, half-
drowned mammals, impossible to rescue.

Laura Page is a poet and artist from the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, The Indianapolis Review, TINGE, and others. Her chapbook, “epithalamium,” was the winner of Sundress Publications’ 2017 chapbook competition. Laura is the editor of the poetry journal, Virga.

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Sarah Caulfield
Service With a Smile

He comes by every afternoon on the dot. The clock turns three and he steps through the door.
He’s slow. We have his order ready by the time he makes it to the counter, but we listen to what
He says anyway. The electronic till beeps. Cash jingles. Exact change. Every time,
I wonder who else he has to talk to, as each day I watch him eat alone
Out of the corner of my eyes. Nearby, I clean tables. Wipe up salt. We never speak.
It’s been, what, five years? More?
I still can’t hear the sound of deep-fat fryers without imagining him —
The quiet of his silhouette, as though cut out of paper and pasted down. Years pass, and
Here I am, trying to write with the idea that no one is listening, even though
I still want them to be listening. I ache for regard. Ambition’s a bitch.
Words melt to putty in my mouth, pinned by my jawbone.
I am waiting to suit someone else. They’re just words.
Can I take your order, sir? I spit them up sour. We are all in the gutter.
I doze. Drowse. Repeat. Wait for morning.
I have fifteen minutes for break. In the car park, I turn my face up to the sky.
And I breathe. Take shape. Let fly.

Sarah Caulfield is the author of Spine (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Lavender Review, Voicemail Poems, The Griffin, and The Mays (XXIV). She has lived in the UK, Poland and Germany, and currently lives in Japan.

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