Dionne Custer Edwards
After War, The Peace Will Be Worse


After the bombs gather blood and treasure,
stew of limbs and howl, rhetoric unravels

in at least a dozen different languages.
The lengthening strife hollows out rock

and neighbor, buzz to brittle purr.
It took civil war to whittle down city

to bone. Collapse warm breath into exile,
unravel a trail of echoes and smoke.

It took bombs to scribble all kinds of sword
and chatter, all kinds of matter and gut punch.

What will we do with more rapid flash and spray,
more rubble and flame, more blow and ghosts?

Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer and educator working at The Wexner Center for the Arts. She created Pages, an art and writing program for high school students. She has a BA in English, Ohio State University and MA in Creative Writing and Arts Education, Antioch University. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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Kazimieras M. Campe

Late-night breaking news ̶
Spring fires March on Twitter.
April is worried.

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

He lives in Maryland.

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Sam Collier
The Daughters Go

Before you can count to one
hundred we are out the door, our long
toes claw mud, our knees split seams,

we crash from here our mouths
full of biting. No fairytale can hold us
in its quiet tower now. We’ve all grown up

and turned to witches. That sharp
and sure. That fond of wicked beaked
birds, murderous cats, the curl of smoke

a chimney in the wood makes.
Once we sang sweetness for the moon
faced boys; we even liked to listen to

their games of war and money.
To dream something coastal, something
green. We brushed our hair, we studied

courts and commerce, we slept.
Turns out what broke the spell was
stories. A boy staring, masked in dust,

a hundred children trapped in fire,
a baby wreathed in saltfoam, clutching
death. Like ancient divinations coming true,

the stories came for us. Now we go,
muscled and read, our wits and knuckles
honed. We know how lies can lure and gold

can vanish. If a girl’s belly
is slate where strangers scratch out
their beliefs, we have the bile and the teeth,

we have the law, the holy. If
a man’s dark shoulderblade is thieved
of breath, if even as he runs his blood

is stolen, if a woman traveling
is captured on the road, and dies
in prison, if boys buy sweets at night

and die in the grass, if bankers
poison rivers and soldiers empty
houses and kings anoint themselves,

we must kiss ourselves
awake. Bloody our hands on stones
of this castle. Carry our blades to the rooms

of our fathers. Enlist
their battled arms. Call up captains;
bid them turn the ships. Find the weather

wizards in their fortress;
counter their ocean-boiling curse.
Look: our mothers labor in the fields, their hands

are two thirds full of shadow,
the sun’s gone down, the sky’s gone blue
with ache. We run to tell them, tell them, tell them

Sam Collier is a playwright and poet originally from Washington, D.C. and currently dividing time between Chicago and northern Michigan. Sam’s poems have appeared in Sixfold, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Puritan, Mortar Magazine, Liminal Stories Magazine, Prompt Press, and Guernica. She is the 2017-19 Writer in Residence with the National Writers Series of Traverse City. Sam holds an MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa, where she was the 2015-16 Provost’s Visiting Writer in playwriting.

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Shana Ross
Privilege

Overheard, a father to son:
I’ve never let you win

That’s not the kind of Dad I am;
When you win, it really means something.
That’s important.

Of course, sometimes we change the rules,
To give you a better chance.

And I said nothing, because in line at Starbucks
Is not the place for confrontations.

Take this in deeply: the worst person in this story is me.

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.

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Heather Truett
Upon Eve’s Return

There is no hope left since Pandora lost her key.
There will be six days of uncreation.
I’m going to shatter your world to grow my garden again.

Adam burnt the sky to cinders in my name.
I will kiss his flaming face and bury him at sea.
There is no hope left since Pandora lost her key.

I’m wearing skin and velvet to start this Armageddon.
I’ll build a boat from Adam’s bones.
I’m going to shatter your world to grow my garden again.

Each blade of grass will stab a heart.
The foamy waves sacrifice to me.
There is no hope left since Pandora lost her key.

I’ll cross the tempest and battle the gods.
Eden will remember my fingers and feet.
I’m going to shatter your world to grow my garden again.

You do not deserve the flesh of this place.
Your leader’s a shepherd that slaughters his sheep.
There is no hope left since Pandora lost her key.
I’m going to shatter your world to grow my garden again.

Heather is a hill born Kentucky girl living down south in Mississippi. Her credits include: The Mom Egg, Vine Leaves Literary, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Forge, Panoply Zine, and the Young Adult Review Network. She is represented by Amy Tipton of Signature Literary.

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Donald Mangum
A. D. 2025

Eras end. Countries collapse. Democracies die. Wars begin. It happens
everywhere. It could happen here. It has happened here. It could happen again.
Ben Mathis-Lilley, “Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: 10 Minutes Till Midnight,” Slate
The center did not hold. However, the Gross National Product continues to rise.
Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Earth continues to unwind. The wind
spins, pummels,
sends forth seeds.
The sky continues to speak.
The dead carry on. After all,

we are professionals. While even the worst
lose conviction,
studies continue to show,
speakers pace,
inquire, nod wide-eyed
knowing smiles.
Laughter is still required.
Data drift,
fall like ash. The tide
recedes, hesitates,
moves.

We wander, sometimes
pace the river bank,
hands in pockets, drained
of sins. Larkspur waves,
miraculous for an instant.
An odd sensation at the base of the skull is gone
even as it begins.

The unraveling of language continues.
Words clatter
like shells. Bones
of logic trick or amuse. Analysis
is dogged. The evening
swallows the day,

and turning in,
we still pray
our souls be kept, our days
be more than incremental
deaths. And still the world is sung
in the voice of a sparrow.

Donald Mangum’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Mississippi Review, Confrontation, Indiana Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. Donald’s novella, The Roar Beneath, was published in 2016 by Mint Hill Books. Donald is a retired philosophy and English teacher living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

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Amanda Rodriguez
Destroyer of Worlds

Cities are cysts squatting on soil.
Oil pipelines slither under the earth,
Parasites endlessly pumping,
A blood transfusion that
Feeds death.
The gleaming, white unicorn horn
Of glaciers dissolve into myth.

What about the unknowable beasts of the sea?
Shark and whale.
Walrus and manatee.
What about the lush plumage of
Dwindling green forests?
Bees, birds, and butterflies,
Sipping from buds,
Bathing in pollen.

Where is our memorial to the dodo,
That sweet, trusting bird?
To the ancient cypress tree,
Its knobby roots cleansing brackish water?
To the dried-up river,
Where now only lives the
Mournful howls of desert winds?

Every human being is an Oppenheimer.
On our DNA is imprinted,
“Now I am become death,
Destroyer of worlds.”

Amanda Rodriguez is a a queer, first generation Cuban-American and an environmental activist living in Weaverville, NC. Amanda holds an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Amanda’s short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry can be found in Germ Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Mud Season Review, Thoughtful Dog, Rigorous, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Cold Creek Review, Change Seven, The Acentos Review, Label Me Latina/o, Lou Lit Review, Scalawag (upcoming), and NILVX (upcoming).

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Amanda Rodriguez
Shame

Shame isn’t just a word
They chant on
Game of Thrones,
Or something you do
To your dog
When she’s eaten your
Cat’s shit.

Shame is a mummy’s shroud
Of yellowed linen that
Doesn’t wait til death to
Suffocate you.

Shame is a brand
No one wants to buy,
But everyone has stocked up
In their pantry for a rainy
End-of-days.

Amanda Rodriguez is a a queer, first generation Cuban-American and an environmental activist living in Weaverville, NC. Amanda holds an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Amanda’s short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry can be found in Germ Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Mud Season Review, Thoughtful Dog, Rigorous, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Cold Creek Review, Change Seven, The Acentos Review, Label Me Latina/o, Lou Lit Review, Scalawag (upcoming), and NILVX (upcoming).

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Amanda Rodriguez
Slience

I walk around with
Feathers in my mouth.
I must speak like
Pillows and
Down comforters
Because I am
A woman.

Inside
My throat
There is a hard,
Metal key that I’ve
Locked between
My teeth.

I am a conductor,
Alive wire.
What comes out of me,
What flows through me
Could scorch and kill
Or shock back to life.

It is tempting, though,
It is easy, though,
To swallow
This key of
Chaos, of
Truth,

There it will burn blinding
For an instant,
An aborted
Big Bang
Inside
My silence.

Amanda Rodriguez is a a queer, first generation Cuban-American and an environmental activist living in Weaverville, NC. Amanda holds an MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. Amanda’s short fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry can be found in Germ Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Mud Season Review, Thoughtful Dog, Rigorous, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Cold Creek Review, Change Seven, The Acentos Review, Label Me Latina/o, Lou Lit Review, Scalawag (upcoming), and NILVX (upcoming).

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Finnegan Degnan
be humble//sit down.

where the sirens start to sting,
where the liquor tickles,
and pins and needles,
I’ve gone spent on cell division.
the west 4th stop is filled with kids,
standing for dead kids.
goodnight buzzes from a mob
in Washington square,
to peepholes
in Florida,
in Connecticut,
in Chicago,
like telephone
it metamorphoses into a heart blessed
a prayer sent,
and then inevitably a handout.
goodnight,
no matter what it carries with it
does not telephone itself
into a universal ban
of the thing that kills kids.

i don’t know if you’ve ever seen
a deer drop dead before,
but the eyes are the last to go.
I imagine the baby blue windows
of seventeen sons and daughters.
I imagine thirty four
baby blue,
hazel,
green,
brown,
black
windows;
I imagine that they are the last to go,
carrying justice on their backs
like a grave shift.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen
a kid drop dead
i’m not sure if you’ve ever seen
the funeral
i’m not sure if you’ve ever seen
the mother,
but there is no name for one
who buries their own child.

two musics perform an arms race
of louder and louder speakers,
even those preaching peace
automatically split,
and so i stand next to the one
where yesterday’s Pulitzer Prize Winner
spits truth
over sirens and
white-guilt and purgatory
and i nod my head
and listen as the other side
backs away, and the volume lowers.
be humble,
and sit down.

Finnegan Degnan is an 18 year old singer songwriter and a poet who lives in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, New York, with his aunt Melanie, his uncle Terence, and his cousin Lola. He spends most of his time maniacally writing music in his bedroom, and every once in a while, usually on a subway, a poem pops out.

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