Elizabeth Beck
Basquiat! Radiant child

Haitian-Puerto Rican son
spiritual descendant of the Dutch painter
sharing the same fate
birth after death of your brothers

Vincent signed his canvas
to mimic his brother’s gravestone
you, Jean-Michel, signed SAMO

lower Manhattan your canvas
before encoded text, cartography of your own kind
standing in paint-splattered Armani, brush in hand
resurrecting Nubian slaves as reminders of history (to white liberal feminists)
scraping Gray’s Anatomy collage images
gift from your mother insane inheritance
before heroin resurrected your soul

from legacy of colonial enterprise interwoven
text within your locks transformed into paintings
within the space of only eight years
member of 27 Club not solace enough

chasing the dragon in sunny Los Angeles
to the Ivory coast ending finally
on your ranch in Hawaii
Afro-Atlantic traditional art
not enough to sustain
beyond your friendship
with Andy tragically lost
to the decade
you sought to escape

Elizabeth Beck is the author of Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and insignificant white girl (Evening Street Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in Suisan Valley Review, Kudzu Magazine, Poetica Magazine, Her Limestone Blues Anthology, TRIVIA, Chaffey Review, Evening Street Review, Pluck!, Red River Review, Rusty Nail, and Harvard Education Press, among other journals. Elizabeth lives with her family on a pond in Lexington, Kentucky.

This poem, not previously published, is part of a manuscript of ekphrastic poems entitled Painted Daydreams.

J.S. Watts
The Sunflower

This is my sunflower.
It’s pretty insignificant as sunflowers go.
Even in its pot it’s shorter than me
and I don’t stand so tall.
The seeds an unexpected gift
pressed like words
between the pages of a magazine.
They deserved to be spoken in the sun.
I took a chance,
planted them late
hidden down in the dark
and some took,
fresh feeding for the slugs,
but this one persevered,
flourished on hand-fed water
and produced the promise of a bud.
As the season grew
the promise started to whisper
and then to flower.
Small and unimpressive as it is,
it opened its petals to the sun
and smiled up at me.

J.S.Watts is the author of the poetry collections Cats and Other Myths, Years Ago You Coloured Me, and Songs of Steelyard Sue, all published by Lapwing Publications, and the novels A Darker Moon and Witchlight, both published in the UK and US by Vagabondage Press. J.S. lives and writes in Cambridge in the U.K. Her poetry, reviews and short stories appear in publications in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States and have been broadcast on BBC and Independent Radio. For further details see www.jswatts.co.uk.

Jamie Haddox
Post Diagnosis

The red ribbon pin’s sparkling spire
was a needle he never needed.
Disease thrown against the blue backed
sky, still he pleaded, missing matters
of the distorted day, drowned dreams,
dwelling on what withers without steady
consequence, or common sense.
Is it considered courageous when
the sentence was caught, not dealt?
Angry about always being alone, yet
determined to row the wrong way, against
the crest of the wave, the grain of the
timber, spitting into a spiral that comes
toppling, lunging back
every time. The pain progresses, and he
says prefers the paradox of prognosis
to the faux politeness of people.
Every new low fucked with familiar
frequency shapes the foundation for
being or becoming more capable
of living with this disease.

Jamie Haddox is a writer from Minnesota. She holds a BA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in SunStruck, Haute Dish, Gyroscope, Pretty Owl Poetry, and on the Golden Walkman podcast. In her spare time, Jamie loves engaging in witty banter, Cards Against Humanity, and reading lots of books.

Laura Foley
Two Poems

Gender

In my dream, the seductress
naked from the waist down,
displays her penis, soft
and gray, curved as a shell.
When she enters me,
I aspire to my own androgyny,
like these three women
sitting in the café near me, at ease
in suspenders, crew cuts, tattoos,
which can’t disguise
the cat-like softness of their eyes.

Bob

Flowered dress above my knees, naked legs,
auburn hair sweeping my waist, I’m in love with Bob,
whose lover, Tom, lives upstairs. My flat’s
a railroad tenement, steel door bolted to a metal bar,
junkies camped out in the hall. When Bob fights with Tom,
he moves in with me, plays me Wagner, Tristan und Isolde,
reads his poems, images of sunlight on church steeples,
mornings in a peaceful town; teaches me to cook spaghetti,
whisk a raw egg into it. Sometimes he burns his poems
in the trash. Often drinks cheap red wine by the gallon.
Long nights we stroll the city streets together,
shoulder to shoulder, our strides in synch, unlikely lovers
the year before AIDS crashes in upon us.

Laura Foley is the author of five poetry collections including The Glass Tree (Harbor Mountain Press, 2012), silver winner of Foreword Reviews’ 2012 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for Poetry. Her collection Joy Street (Headmistress Press, 2014) won the Poetry Award from the Bi Writers Association. Her poems have appeared in journals and magazines including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Inquiring Mind, Pulse Magazine, Poetry Nook, Lavender Review, The Mom Egg Review and in the British Aesthetica Magazine. Her poem “Nine Ways of Looking at Light” won First Prize in the National Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy.

These poems appeared in Joy Street.

Ramon Loyola
Touch Me Where It Hurts

Do not touch me there. There was someone who
reveled in my skin, but he’s long gone since
the sins of the fathers permeated
my own veins, my blood, the very essence
of living the life I had not foreseen.

Touch me here, where it hurts like no other,
where the mere flutter of kisses linger
on my neck, reminding me of letters
never sent, of souvenirs I never
took from places I had never been to.

Do not touch me there, where the wound sits raw,
invisible, unseen and unwelcomed.
To feel it with fingers, with tongue, with skin,
is to memorize its face, acknowledge
its inanity, its absurdity.

Touch me here, where my heart sits quietly
in submission to love and only love.
There is no pain here, no judgment or strife.
The wound does not hurt; it is just as strong
as the desire to touch another’s skin.

Ramon Loyola is a writer of poems, fiction and non-fiction, and is the author of three books of poetry. His writing has appeared in various journals and publications. He lives in Sydney in the company of his own shadow.

This poem is not previously published.

Kathleen Brewin Lewis
Two Poems

Good Friday, Tybee Island

The sun throbs, bleeds down sky,
soaks into the Back River and its marsh.
It halves, slivers, then it is finished,
leaving the air softer,
sadder than before.

Silhouettes cross roseate sky,
brown pelicans come to catch their dinner.
They plunge, one by one, for a fish–
tiny, vacillating, silver–spied from on high
in the gloaming.

Can you see me,
standing on this pier as darkness swells?
Do you hunger for me, as I for you?
Do you mean, at the end of the day,
to fish me out of deep water, to take me,
take me as I am?

And so, September

arrives to straddle the seasons—
parching heat, then spattering rain,
too late to save the corn but in time
to sprout the pumpkin. There will be
plenty of down-to-earth suns to sell
at fall farmers markets, hickory nuts
and collards, cured hams and radishes,
amber jars of honey. Dahlias wrapped
in dampened newsprint; cinnamon-laced pies.
The solstice has been recalled, the equinox
advances. Soon—a heady whiff
of wood smoke. Yellow leaves stunning
the black pond.

Kathleen Brewin Lewis is a Georgia writer and author of two chapbooks, Fluent in Rivers (FutureCycle Press, 2014) and July’s Thick Kingdom (FutureCycle Press, 2015). She has an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State University and is senior editor of Flycatcher. Recent work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, The Tishman Review, and Menacing Hedge. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

“Good Friday, Tybee Island” appeared in The Penwood Review. “And so, September” appeared in Still: The Journal. 

erica gerald mason
Three Poems

never let me go
promise me you
will hold my hand
no matter what
tell me you will
never let me go
how you will see me
in the light and
find me in the dark.

i am
i am fire
i am violets
i am the space
between the stars
i am the stars themselves
i am everything
i am nothing
i am mine
i am yours.

by touch
i stepped into
the inky unknown
ran my hands
along the walls
felt the ridges
and sharp edges
again and again
until the darkness
was nothing but
a figment of
my imagination

Erica Gerald Mason is the author of i am a telescope: science love poetry (Create Space, 2016) and cherry cola (Create Space, 2015). She is the editor of Wanton: Stories of Wonderfully Shameless Women (Create Space, 2014). She lives in Georgia.

These poems appeared in i am a telescope: science love poetry.

Mary Meriam
And

Through summer scorch, be like the trees, breathe,
and through the winter’s cracking freeze, breathe.

You gather fragments scratched on broken glass,
and poets drowned in seven seas breathe.

You find her locked inside, you open doors,
you lift her off her buckled knees, breathe.

A knife of pain may bend you over double,
but hover, swing from your trapeze, breathe.

You grip your breath too tight, now let it fly
free from its cage, and like the bees, breathe.

Marry your lungs and air, let steel become
a sigh, be like a leafy breeze, breathe.

Mary Meriam is the author of The Lillian Trilogy (Headmistress Press, 2015). Her first collection, Conjuring My Leafy Muse (Headmistress Press, 2013), was nominated for the 2015 Poets’ Prize. Her second collection, Girlie Calendar (Headmistress Press, 2014), was selected for the 2016 American Library Association Over the Rainbow List. Her poems have appeared in 12 anthologies, including most recently, Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House, 2015). Poems are published or forthcoming in Literary Imagination, American Life in Poetry, Cimarron Review, Adrienne, Rattle, The New York Times, The Women’s Review of Books, and Prelude.

This poem appeared in The Lillian Trilogy.

Darius Stewart
The Terribly Beautiful

To say this is the story of our lives.
Who is to say there is a story at all?
To be enchanted by a tune—
“Clair de Lune” from Suite Bergamasque—
when we complain moonlight pales
finer features of the disrobed body:
your sinewy muscles, my clumsy limbs.
To endure amaryllis blossoms season after season,
but the fly’s life will last no longer
than the passing of one hour to the next.
To be the river that empties into the gulf,
& the gulf that destroys land
on which our houses are built.
To misunderstand the world we grieve.
To understand the grief.

Darius Stewart is the author of three chapbooks: The Terribly Beautiful (2006), Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He earned an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, and lives in Knoxville, TN with his dog Philip J. “Fry.”

This poem appeared in The Terribly Beautiful.

Renée E. D’Aoust
If Sappho Owned a Dog

but I to you of a white goat, not goat, but brown hound, her arms drop, her knees buckle, she collapses, the hound stands next to her, wagging in a frenzy, licking her face, squeaking, squeaking. Nogod appears. One drop of water—Truffle licks it. Another drop of water—Truffle licks it. And the rain comes down. The killer of rabbits sits on his haunches. He licks the tears, the rain, the waterfall. All burst.

Renée E. D’Aoust’s first book, Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press, 2011) was a ForeWord Reviews “Book of the Year” finalist (memoir category). For more information, please follow Renée @idahobuzzy and visit her website, reneedaoust.com.

This poem appared in Rhino and in the anthology Animal Companions, Animal Doctors, Animal People, Hilde Weisert and Elizabeth Arnold Stone, editors (Ontario Veterinary College).