Gregg Murray
VOTING SIGN

This guy slides the narrow rods
into the dirt, cocks his head.

He backs up startled, does he worry
someone will see him, someone

who disapproves of his message.
Once it’s in, he backs up a few steps,

looks it up & down like an ex
with whom he’s fucked things up

& now she looks good, feet
firmly in the ground. The red & blue

sign reeks of home job. His beard’s
a home job, dead sagebrush & red

& too full in the neck. Trucker hat,
home job taped along the bill.

STIHL, it says, lawn care equipment,
and she always made him eat

shit about his lawn job, made
him scrub out the grass smell before

he could touch her. She was often
too tired for his hands. Putting

make-up on strangers, she’d say,
the compliments you’ve got to give!

What do you say to make a gal buy
orange eyeshadow? But she could

sell shit to a shithead, a Wednesday
matinee for Schindler’s List.

Wendy Stevenson. He stopped
in his tracks about ten yards from

where he’d put the sign.
She was a goddam Republican

whose old man was a prick.
And it just wasn’t right. All the sign

says is VOTE but still, that woman’s
pops wouldn’t wander dead

into this neighborhood
and she don’t live here either.

Gregg Murray is associate professor of English at Georgia State University, editor-in-chief of Muse/A Journal, and executive editor of Real Pants. He has recent work in Pank, DIAGRAM, New South, Birmingham Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly Review, and Pleiades. Gregg is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and Fanzine. He is the author of “Ceviche”.
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Megan Primrose
Eiderdown

A mist veil keeps the sorrow waiting
as the wind chill shivers the barley
under a starless, moonless, sky.

Tomorrow, a dawn not worth waking for:
the bread, stale, before it’s been proved,
the milk, sour, as it drips from the udder,
the earth parched, before the grassy dew is dry.

But for now, you who sleep slumber sleep
take peace for granted,
hold it as light as a secret
in the mouth of a child.

Megan Primrose is a welsh writer and artist based in Scotland, UK. She tweets @bookbeacon. Find out more: www.meganprimrose.co.uk

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Mike Nichols
Okay, Now Read the Bottom Line for Me

We never saw it coming with our
pupils like pinpricks in response
to the deluge of consumerism.
When the American façade
failed, forcing dilation like
a heartless optometrist,
it was too late.

‘Merica the serfdom snapped
open her eyes, came full awake.

Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in Eastern Idaho. Look for his poetry in Rogue Agent, Scryptic Magazine, Ink&Nebula, Plainsongs Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at mikenicholsauthor.com

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Chad Parenteau
Brett Kavanaugh Jesus

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
has a calendar to mark his time
from child to man,
performing no miracles.

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
blames his inquisition
on Soros and Clinton.
#gomorrahgate

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
demands Heaven’s kingdom
without all the stations.

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
wants us to get started
on his rapturous return
before he ascends.

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
wants every woman
to be a Virgin Mary.

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
wants every man
an impregnating archangel.

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
wants to return to earth
in less than 300 days,
not two-thousand years.

Brett Kavanaugh Jesus
has no time for confessions.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus, released in 2013 by FootHills Publishing. His work has appeared in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, What Rough Beast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Margo Davis
Disappeared

Their glances dart
then return for one of us. Smart
men, quick, who see through
an imperfection. We draw them in
with a limp, stray eye, weak limb
on an otherwise lean

body whose ill-fitting
clothing camouflage our worth.
These men with x-ray

hunger move right in.
Who doesn’t need to be
wanted? Sought out by men

wanted too, by many,
for many things. Mysterious men
with nothing to lose. They know

women want spotless union.
Wanted men courting the less-than’s.
Acne? Come on in.

Orphaned? Feel at home
in an embrace, firm, unflinching.
There’s no going back

after headiness erases
reflection and warmth disarms
our stretch. We snuggle,

feeling safe, before we
comprehend we cannot alter
what will soon alter us.

They will stain us
in unexpected ways as we give
up, give in, loosening

a gloomy heart, liver,
functioning kidney. These men
market essential parts.

Margo‘s more recent poems have appeared in The Fourth River, Ekphrastic Review, Misfit, and Light, and the Houston Chronicle (Fall). Recent anthology publications include Enchantment of the Ordinary (December), Of Burgers and Ballrooms, Untameable City, numerous Texas Poetry Calendars, and Echoes of the Cordillera. A Pushcart nominee awash in Republican mindsets, Margo thrives on closely observing film, photos, and natural settings. She’s known for eavesdropping.

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Deborah Wanzer
Op-ed

Alive in the crazed and cracked bones of these united
states, in the sawed-off aftermath of one more killing,

in the unveiled images illuminating our very hands,
in the spooked words that rear up, crush, then gallop

off, nostrils flaring with the smell of gunpower. Alive in
the bodies, long concealed, their dark bones knitting

silently on the back stairwell, in the stories of brassy
welts that crawl like worms down the backside of

of history, in the bare-faced ink running from the
whiteness of the page. Alive, in the children, quenched

with unmemorized milk—for their soft ivory bones.

Deborah Wanzer is a Clinical Social Worker.

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Walter Holland
Dybbuks

Once I wore a white lab jacket and complained about caseloads
and the old aged, tottering and frail with canes or wheelchairs.

They would enter anxious for my examination, my treatment,
my young , impatient hands. Sometimes they seemed

like children to me, reduced to babbling, or whispering softly
their reminiscences: a 1920’s Europe they saw on a childhood

vacation; a brother or father killed in a World War. And then
there were those with numbers tattooed to their skin,

who shared their stories of detention and panic, of the terrible
efficiency of men and boxcars and smokestacks and the dark,

cold, lethal look of Dr. Mengele’s eyes, who by a mere grin or
simple gesture decided if one would survive; his harsh, clinical,

split-second decision based on nothing more than a perverse
science based on body mass, age, birth status or fitness to perform

hard labor. Choosing those suitable for his experiments, his studies
of human endurance, the effects of altitude, drug dosage, poisons

and the purposeful infliction of massive wounds. What’s happened
to them? Men and women who raised children with names like

Rebecca and Aaron, who founded Altman’s and Bloomingdale’s,
and pledged their allegiance to their newly adopted democratic country.

Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry including A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010) as well as a novel, The March (Masquerade Books, 1996 and Chelsea Station Editions 2011). He collaborated on the book and lyrics for a musical based on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which was staged at the 2017 Florida Festival of New Musicals. Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, Rhino, Hazmat, The Cimarron Review, and About Place Journal. He lives in New York City. He writes reviews for Pleiades and Lambdaliterary.org. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com

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Maximilian Heinegg
Signs in the Bay

I have no illusions about these neighbors,
who have seen enough of me
to smash my windows, & salute
the armies as they pass.

But eighteen months in, I ease no better
into the fantasy where I burn
down their houses, sink their boats, smash
their windows, cinder their doors

to satisfy a rage once unfamiliar —
now a muscle memory at each sign
designed in red to do just this, does —
because my cause, my cause is just.

Maximilian Heinegg‘s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Free State Review, Sweet Tree Review, Misfit Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. Additionally, he is a singer-songwriter and recording artist. He live sand teach English in the public schools of Medford, MA.

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Marc Sheehan
August, 2018

Ceiling fans spin.
Beach towels and swimsuits
drape themselves over porch rails.

Pre-dawn lightening flickers
along the horizon, but brings
neither rain nor thunder.

Even watered lawns turn brown—
mowed finally on the Ides
clippings barely half-fill the bag.

Somehow, you have managed to keep
the flowerbox pansies alive,
though they droop down

like fuchsia from a hanging basket.
Along the festival parade route
flags and bunting remain

long after the clown band has clomped off.

Marc J. Sheehan is the author of two full-length poetry collections —— Greatest Hits (New Issues Press) and Vengeful Hymns (Ashland Poetry Press), and a chapbook of poems, Limits to the Salutary Effects of Upper Midwestern Melancholy (Split Rock Review). He has published stories, poems, essays and reviews in numerous literary magazines including Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His flash fiction has been featured on NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction series as well as on the program Selected Shorts. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.

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Mike Nichols
Marie Antoinette Redux

And the underclasses, used to asking,
How many hours did you get last week?
lug their un-aborted snot-encrusted
waifs to the corporate citadels’ iron gates.
One fat CEO eventually emerges
and pronounces,

Let them eat cake, and binge-
watch their Netflix.

Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in Eastern Idaho. Look for his poetry in Rogue Agent, Scryptic Magazine, Ink&Nebula, Plainsongs Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at mikenicholsauthor.com

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