Sarah Caulfield
The Tower Upright

You’re gonna go far, kid. We can all see it, we’ve all got eyes;
We’ll follow you, eyelashes flickering like needles as you duck and weave,
keeping our distance when you slip in the blood.
Go on. A little faster this time, please. A little more coherent this time, please.
We’re enjoying the show. You’re making history by being alive. One more time.
It’s not easy getting ahead. Ignore the corpses underfoot, the curlicue of the
ribs around your
ankles. Think of it as calligraphy. Think of it as motivation. They didn’t want it
as much as you do.
It’s a jungle out there. It’s a battlefield. It’s a rat race.
Don’t worry. That’s just a metaphor. The rats all left this ship long ago. You’re safe here.
You’re gonna go far, kid. You’re gonna be aces.
We just have to get you out of this place.

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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R.J. Keeler
Meaning Has No Matter Outside of Sound
After The Emperor of Ice-Cream
—Wallace Stevens

Strike out sequential consonants,
Waste lorn fricatives, and permit them swage
Any remainders through rusted radiators.
Let heroics meld in solemn somnambulance
As cause for epitaphs written in Esperanto
And pegged to next year’s purposeless sins.
Let metadiscourse and disfluencies abound.
Meaning has no matter outside of sound.
Lay onto the parchment of peaches,
Dense by arrhythmic inclines, those words
Troubling for ears in refuse to connect,
And conspire them to mock epics of size.
If their pseudonyms obtrude, the better
To hide warrior from clown, and forbore.
Let the autotelic message dumbfound.
Meaning has no matter outside of sound.

R.J. Keeler was born St. Paul, Minnesota. He lived in the jungles of Colombia, S.A., up to age twelve. He holds a BS Mathematics from NCSU, an MS Computer Science from UNC, an MBA from UCLA, and a Certificate in Poetry from UW. HE is an Honorman, U.S. Naval Submarine School, and “SS” (Submarine Service) qualified. He was awarded a Vietnam Service Medal, Honorable Discharge. He has received a Whiting Foundation Experimental Grant, and is part of P&W’s Directory of Poets and Writers. He has been published in Ploughshares, VMI Beachcomber, Oak Literay Magazine, Typishly, and Deluge Literary and Arts Journal, among others. R.J. Does not subscribe to the cattle-prod paradigm of poetry. He may tend to melancholy, and believes Humor trumps everything. His collection “Detonation” will be published in December.

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Quintin Collins
Dear White People, Don’t Ask Us How to Stop It

Don’t ask us to undrown / brown faces saltwater-bloated / across the Atlantic. We were born with mouths / full of cotton and police tape. Don’t ask us to speak / wisdom on how to un-Jim Crow our bodies. Our words / ghosted in grandparents asking why / their grandchildren, children asking why their parents / fear them walking in blue / moonlight in too-white neighborhoods. / We’re too busy keeping our skin / from fertilizing gravestones. We’re too occupied / with peeling back our hoods to police / perceptions. Don’t ask us how to undead / those noose-necked. Ask these boughs / how they bowed to bear our bodies. Ask the body / camera playbacks of children chalked-outlined. Ask the immortalized / and memorialized martyrs, Twitter hashtags, protester- / choked traffic that transfigures names / into monuments. Ask nigger / as it toes your tongue’s edge. Ask the melanin / bleached and burned. Ask the skin. Ask ashes / of every black church set ablaze. Ask torches, / Confederate flags, Nazi patch parades in our streets. / Our hands are too caked in coffin splinters to bury / more of these bones. If you still don’t know / how to stop racism, ask yourself.

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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Zoe Canner
the worst in modern history

boldly untrue/beside the point/
fifty-eight and forty-nine are

both horrific/as are five and
one/i am not a counter/formica

smooth yellow tile/tacky granite/
i am not a counter/number of

casualties/any human harming
another human’s body on purpose

is preposterous/the hysterical
rendering of numbers tallied to

get our attention/speaks to an
assumption of complacency with

gun violence and the normalization
of talking points and ad psychology

prevalence/people who kill people
who kill people who kill people

Zoe Canner is an angry, anti-racist, 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivor. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Naugatuck River Review, The Laurel Review, and Arcturus of the Chicago Review of Books. She is an alumna of CalArts, Directors Lab West, and The Home School. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance.

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Robert Crisp
Electorate

“Do you hunger?” the woman clothed in red,
white, and garish blue asked as she churned—
mightily churned, I should say—the cauldron,
the contents of which smelled like dead promises.

I looked at my skeletal frame, impressed once more
by my angles, which suddenly seemed quite American.
“No, I’m fine, thanks,” I said and tipped the ol’ gal
a wink, then a blink, and finally shot her a bird.

The bird squawked, dropped from the clear sky
and plopped into the cauldron, which hissed with glee.
“Too bad it wasn’t a turkey,” the woman wheezed.
“Mr. Ben Franklin would surely have loved that.”

Robert Crisp currently hides out in Savannah, GA, where he where he teaches and keeps strange hours and stranger company. He writes poetry as often as he can. Learn more at www.writingforghosts.com

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David P. Miller
The Parable of the Sower

The teacher said:
A sower went out to sow.
Some seeds fell along the path.
The birds devoured them
and straightway perished, wailing to their bird god.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground.
The rock disintegrated, rasping into a tainted air.
The people came to look where the seeds had fallen.
They found wells of darkness and putrid breath.

Other seeds fell upon thorns.
The thorns found the seeds wholesome
for their needs. They ravaged so that
neither vineyards nor wheatfields could be seen.

Other seeds fell on generous soil.
They brought forth their same kind again,
a thousandfold eruption. The sower
rejoiced in his harvest and went again to sow.

The teacher said:
He who has,
let him.

After Matthew 13:1-9

David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published by Červená Barva Press. His poems have recently appeared in Meat for Tea, riverbabble, Nixes Mate Review, Naugatuck River Review, HedgeApple, Gravel, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, DadaBloge, and What Rough Beast, among others. His poem “Kneeling Woman and Dog,” first published in Meat for Tea, was included in the 2015 edition of Best Indie Lit New England. With a background in experimental theater before turning to poetry, David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years. He was a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass., from which he retired in June 2018.

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Sarah Stern
Haigerloch Sisters

We’d visit Selma and Berta on their Catskills farm every summer.
Mom always said, We’re going to Haigerloch.
All these years I thought she made the name up,
but it was another town in the Schwarzwald.
I have a photo of its big yellow sign.

Selma and Berta were from Haigerloch.
Berta’s long gray braids
crowned her head.
Her smile spanned farther than her teeth.

Selma was the quiet sister.
Their house sat crookedly opposite the barn.
The dining room had a heavy
German table, a picture of her husband

and son with Selma’s eyes.
Both shot July 1941 in Theresienstadt.
Berta and Selma must have
had 20 dogs, more cats.

Chicken eggs all over.
Selma milked the cows,
pulling at them efficiently
as she sat on a stool.

We’d pitch a tent on a hilltop, as far
as the station wagon could go.
Make a fire.
Fry eggs in the morning.

The cows were named stars there—
Johnny Carson was an ornery bull.
I remember so much cow shit
and the dogs, yelping, wild in the valley.

Berta fed the calves.
She let me feel their sandpaper
tongues. My whole hand
in their mouths.

Sarah Stern is the author of But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock, 2014), Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and in 2019, We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in many publications, recently in The American Dream, The Man Who Ate His Book: The Best of Ducts.org, Epiphany, Freefall, New Verse News, Rise Up Review, Swim Everyday, Verse Daily and What Rough Beast. She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Poetry Award. She is a Communications Manager at WES. You can see more of her work at www.sarahstern.me.

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Johnson Cheu
To the Street Evangelist

Punishment, curse, fate.
Born disabled, or attained,
thou shall not script me
as sin. Nature or nurture,
life is simply, justly, made.

Johnson Cheu started writing poetry in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. From there, his poetry’s appeared widely in anthologies such as Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, and journals from North American Review to most recently Crab Orchard Review, and Foliate Oak. Other stuff out in the world includes edited film books, and scholarly articles in Popular Culture Studies and Disability Studies.

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Virginia Barrett
Ode to She

she’s not starved                              but dies in need

she’s not beaten                               but is internally bruised

she’s not flogged                              but her wounds fester

she’s not silenced                            but her tongue’s cut out

she’s not choked                              but is strangled

she’s not sacrificed                         but her heart, still beating, is

she’s not raped                                           but is raped

she’s not thrown in the hole       but declines in darkness

she’s not sliced                                 but bleeds

she’s not tied to the rack              but is wrenched apart

she’s not jailed                                            but is captive

she’s not questioned                     but is grilled

she’s not detained                          but is chained

she’s not enslaved                          but is bound

she’s not submerged                     but drowns

she’s not burned                             but writhes inside

she’s not shot at the wall            but falls

she’s not crucified                         but does rise

Virginia Barrett’s books of poetry include Between Looking (forthcoming, 2019 from Finishing Line Press), Crossing Haight, and I Just Wear My Wings. Barrett is the editor of two anthologies of contemporary San Francisco poets including OCCUPY SF—poems from the movement. Her work has most recently appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Narrative, Roar: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People, Ekphrastic Review, Weaving the Terrain (Dos Gatos Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). She received a 2017 writer’s residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, NM. Her chapbook, Stars By Any Other Name, was a semi-finalist for the Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press, 2017. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Quintin Collins
The Mosquito Speaks of Protest

As the sun recedes, we
cluster into funnel clouds. We
pulse toward populations
to take blood. Those who swat us,
cock their spray canisters
to stilt our kin, sterilize our mothers:
We smolder their flesh. We
rise, skyward spirals
to swell twilight. We
disrupt picnics and receptions. We
needle beneath skin.
No citronella torch sentries quell
our protest. No blue lights zap. We
buzz ears with our message. We
mobilize in their neighborhoods. We
chant vibration. Our swarms churn. We
are a throbbing silhouette. We
reverberate for stripped wings,
ladybugs crushed in careless hands,
crickets crumpled beneath boots,
ant colonies scorched with lighter fluid,
butterflies choked in killing jars. We
bite for every pill bug too policed
by fear to unfurl. Let them come
with their OFF! and their bug bombs.
Let them come with their nets
and their body armor. We will meet them
at their baseball games. We will meet them
at their music festivals. We will meet them
at their rooftop bars, their barbecues,
and their July Fourth fireworks. We
gather in their suburbs, their cities, their yards,
and their country clubs. When they see
us coming, fistfuls of shadow at dusk, we
will leave welts for everyone of us
they ever crushed.

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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