Susan Craig
TRAUMA

The drama
unfolding, Little-
Big-Man pontificates
turtled, bespectacled: We will confirm
him, it’s all a smear, while she steels
for another assault, all the suited
assailing her story, digging for
memory glitches. As if
she would seek this, as if she would
welcome the world’s violation,
new swimsuit straps snapped,
tender mouth smothered by
men’s drunken thrust, weight
of them crushing her crushing
her body remembers,
escaping.

Susan Craig has spent her career in design and communications. She is a native South Carolinian and poet whose work has been featured in Kakalak, Mom Egg Review, and regional journals The Collective I, Fall Lines, and Jasper. Her manuscript was a semi-finalist in the 2018 Quill’s Edge chapbook contest. Three times her poems have been chosen for Columbia Poet Laureate Ed Madden’s public transit initiatives. She is a passionate mother of two adult sons and loves walking with her husband in the Congaree Swamp in silence. She enjoys lengthy discourse with her dog Charlie.

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Heather Truett
Pretender

Honduras and America are similar women.
They just don’t dress themselves the same.
Honduras paints her body fierce.
America chooses neutral shades.

They just don’t dress themselves the same.
The U.S. borrows her mother’s pearls.
America chooses neutral shades.
Honduras wears rivets on leather.

The U. S. borrows her mother’s pearls.
America looks like the safest dream.
Honduras wears rivets on leather.
Both women are likely to kill you.

America looks like the safest dream.
That makes her more dangerous to me.
Both women are likely to kill you,
But only one pretends you are free.

Heather Truett is a writer, a mother, and a somewhat heretical pastor’s wife. Her credits include: The Mom Egg, Vine Leaves Literary, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Panoply Zine, and the Young Adult Review Network.

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Pamela Sumners
MARIE ANTOINETTE GETS ALL GAYED-UP AT THE SUPREME COURT

Now, Supreme Court, I will use my outdoor voice for choices
you made for me. You see, I want to have my cake and eat
it too. I want layers and layers and layers, gooey butterscotch
and groom’s cake, too, and I want a pediment love topping
it all. I want it to read, in sediment, “Equal Justice Under Law.”

I want my big gay wedding cake decorated in piggish, lardy florets,
one for every corner, and I want it to be so huge that Texas women
seeking the heavens by their hair will have a handy subterfuge.

I want a cake so layered that Stonehenge and Stonewall are there.
I want a cake that has a stolen verse of Leviticus curse, and just
more Texas hair. I want a cake with pictures of Jerry Falwell, either
Jr. or Sr.—I don’t much care and hey, well I’d prefer neither.
I want a big, gorgeous ee cummings mudluscious sound of you
putting your hand in mine when finally, I get to marry you after 30 years.

We had no cake.

We had to take the chance we could, at the city hall, while the window
was still open. But I’d like my reception, my gooey-butter cake, and
I will still eat cake, whether the Supremes likes it or fights it. I’m hungry.

Pamela Sumners is a civil rights and constitutional lawyer with a special interest in religion and speech law. As a native Alabamian, she has litigated against Roy Moore, Alabama Governor Fob James, Jay Sekulow, and Bill Pryor and can vividly describe their hairlines. Her first love, however, is poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Streetlight (third-place winner), Mudlark, Snakeskin, UCity Review, New Verse News, Tahoma Review, Third Wednesday, BACOPA, California Quarterly, Loch Raven Review, and Blue Unicorn. She lives in St. Louis with her wife, teenage son, two lazy geriatric dogs, and a puppy who thinks his name is “Dammit.”

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Sarah Caulfield
Kamakura

I had a dream last night where I met Trump, I hear him say, three steps ahead of me
In a heatwave. It was awesome. It’s a word reserved for the Sistine Chapel, maybe, or
Rollercoasters, or a backflip. There is nothing lost in translation. The red of his cap is stark,
The color of a memorial wall in Berlin, the unspooling of names over red paint.
The resemblance stops there.
The greenery is bright, oil-heavy in the rising sun. It glows, kryptonite, whenever I close
my
eyes.
I think of my grandmother, giving me a picture of her favorite saint for safeguarding. I
think of
Photographs of confiscated rosary beads, torn out of hands at borders.
I look it up later, to make sure:
Awesome: to inspire awe. Awe: a feeling of reverence, apprehension, or fear.
We all answer to something. I have to hope we all answer to something.
I make sure I am not alone with him for the rest of the trip.

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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Barbara Reynolds
The Allegation: 1991, 2018

Peaking from her lips
like a solitary drop
from an unfiltered faucet,
a limpid bold bead
trembling on the brink
of pronouncement,
it plunges, pursued
by a brackish surge
that swallows it whole.

Barbara Reynolds teaches and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking and is an adjunct professor at Lesley University’s Graduate School of Education. Her poems have appeared in Avocet, Weekly Avocet, What Rough Beast, and are forthcoming in the Muddy River Poetry Review.
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Quintin Collins
Angry While Black

I would like my anger to live in the world as your anger does. Reasonably, with expectations that it doesn’t make me who I am.
—Hanif Abdurraqib

The day after Charlottesville, where white supremacists marched
through America yet again, when I heard there were good people
on all sides, you told me I was too angry. You told me
I was taking it too seriously and needed to relax
when neo-Nazi flags and tiki torches bobbled in procession.
When racism lockstepped on my social media timelines,
you didn’t know white boys chased my mother to bus stops,
pelted her with rocks. You didn’t know another one slung
nigger out a car window once when I walked into work.

I say this plainly: With opportunity, they would shoot me
in the face. Don’t you dare try to silence me

when daily, I am cornered. I will elevate my voice
until every room edge has felt my echoes. I will churn
the tornado in my mouth until it scrapes this country clean.

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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Thomas Brush
OUTTAKES

Take out the dirty clouds, forget the missed connections,
Who was early, who was late doesn’t matter any more
Than the shame of the god of make-believe who brought us
Here where we don’t want to be, waiting for another take
On this sagging sound stage of rust and regret, repeating lines
As weightless as the smoke shrouding the wooden horizon, under cover
Of the last green sky, last lure of oblivion,
Last heart-shaped birthmark, sometimes
Red, sometimes bruise blue,
That we carry like a guilty secret, like a director’s cut,
A rehearsal for this life
Or the next.

Thomas Brush has published in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Tar River Poetry, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His books, all from Lynx House Press, are GOD’S LAUGHTER, August 2018, OPEN HEART, 2015, and LAST NIGHT, winner of the Lynx House Prize, in 2012.

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Chad Parenteau
Tom Brady Jesus

Tom Brady Jesus
lauded the last supper
as a team effort.

Tom Brady Jesus
holds balls soft enough
to not give him stigmata.

Tom Brady Jesus
can’t be our savior
if he keeps passing on the cross.

Tom Brady Jesus
wants one more time
in the temples, one more ring
from the moneylenders.

Tom Brady Jesus
wants you to keep his
prayers to ourselves
in his gridiron chapel.

Tom Brady Jesus
wants you to stand
for all four quarters.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus, released in 2013 by FootHills Publishing. His work has appeared in Tell-Tale Inklings, 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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Heather Truett
Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood
wrapped in police tape.
Her body’s a crime scene.

Little Red went for one
little walk and the Wolf
caught her, of course.

Little bruises on her neck,
gray fur under her fingernails,
and one cop says,

“Little girls shouldn’t be dressed
so provocatively. Did you see
the color of that velvet cape?”

Little drops of blood trickle
from the wolf’s broken nose,
and he threatens to press charges.

“Little Red attacked me,” he says.
“I’m not really all that bad a beast.
I come from a very good family.”

Little baseball players on trophies
in a case behind the wolf when he
is interviewed. Think about his future.

Little tears ballooning on her face,
and that red cape was a waving invitation,
the girl a bullfighter with no prize.

Little Red wrapped in a blanket, tucked
inside a hospital room, all alone, while
the world decides the wolf is her victim.

Heather Truett is a writer, a mother, and a somewhat heretical pastor’s wife. Her credits include: The Mom Egg, Vine Leaves Literary, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Panoply Zine, and the Young Adult Review Network.

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Mary Honaker
THE KAVANAUGH DEBATE

The woman dissects herself carefully,
picks each jellied trauma out with tweezers,
arranges them on a table, labels them.

“I know this is hard to see,” she says,
“For years, I didn’t want to show you.
But I promise this is important.”

All across the country women feel the scalpel,
feel their bodies pried open
and held open with a vise: pulsing

within them the nights they’d forgotten,
promised themselves didn’t matter,
promised their husbands they’d gotten over.

I shouldn’t have to tell you this hurts.
Numb faced, their bodies open bird cages,
the women slog through the days.

Some men are afraid. They see these adult faces
and are curveballed back into their youth,
slam into the event like a ball in a mitt,

dust flying up at the force of impact.
They see her face, elven in its youth, and see
these grown grotesque pageants of living death,

and they do the math. Some of them will point and laugh,
howling, saying, “What a weak display! What a lie!”
These words insert new pins in the tacked-down

lumps of flesh. They write new labels over the old, pin them
all over the first woman, but every woman feels
the stick. Days go on like this.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Lake, and elsewhere. Mary Ann holds a BA in philosophy from West Virginia University, a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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