Carla Drysdale
Elegy for Leonard Cohen

Tonight the moon leans closer than it’s been since 1948.
You were 14 then and tilted at longing. I wasn’t born yet.

Hey, you missed the election of a fascist in the U.S.A.
You wouldn’t be surprised. You’d write a song for guitar,

of stars and bars, bloody and blue. Guess what
the president-elect says? He agrees with Howard

Stern—that women like me are best in bed because
they were abused as kids. They’re wild

and hungry for love. Shame we never met
but you were shoveling snow at your mountain hut

when I was still a crazy slut willing to be used for love.
Maybe we’ll meet in another life. Say, in half a million

years. Until then we’ll call you up on the Ouija board
and look for you in the next super moon.

Carla Drysdale is the author of the poetry collections Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Spiraling, Public Pool, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, LIT, Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, Global City Review, and Literary Mama, among other journals, and in the anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. In May, 2014 she was awarded PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize for her poem, “Inheritance.” Born in London, Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France. To learn more, visit www.carladrysdale.com.

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Terence Degnan
the first law

if we
are going to be

in these bodies
he said

we will need some laws
some laws!

said the other
good! some order for being

in these bodies
who will make sure we keep them

I can
said a third

who will write them
or are we just explorers

asked a fourth
should we study the chimpanzee

the wolf
the fish, the thunderstorm

we should study ourselves
said this first

I would like to stay in these bodies
said the second

for how long
asked the third

I will protect us from leaving them
I will ensure, said the fourth

we will not behave
as the thunderstorm behaves

(without order)
surely we are not as wicked

not as hungry corrected the first
starved, the second chimed in

let us begin
this lawmaking over lunch

said the first
placing more than his share

on his plate

Terence Degnan is the author of Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016) and The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave (Sock Monkey Press, 2012). His work has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Other Herald, and The OWS Poetry Anthology, as well as in the anthology, My Apocalypse (Sock Monkey Press, 2012). His two spoken word albums, BC (2008) and Calling Shotgun (2010) can be found on iTunes and Spotify.

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Karen Hildebrand
Leaf Cutter Ants Without the Rain Forest

We pour from the train like burnt sienna
and flow through the valley of boxes stacked
on boxes, this stairway made of workers
in cubicles, our blood sugar bouncing. Email
rolls in like thunder. It squeaks more than
shakes. The stroke is a bell. Hunky, hunky,
won’t you draw me a line. Don’t prick me,
I beg as we climb single file, delivering tweets
at night, the light cut to a thin purple dash.

Karen Hildebrand‘s work has appeared in many journals, including Poet Lore, Fourteen Hills, Meridian, Blue Mesa Review, The Journal, G. W. Review and WomenArts Quarterly. Her poems have also appeared in anthologies published by great weather for MEDIA and A Gathering of the Tribes. Her poems were adapted for a play, The Old In and Out, produced by Three Rooms Press.

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Tom Daley
The Culpables

In the horror of their toys,
they have thinned their chances.

Each cloud now a spigot
bereft of cold.

Sunspot surgery
the latest diversion.

Eyes knitted thin
as poison ivy.

The smell of everything
caked into haloes.

Every hill turned to dune
that melts in the sixty-year storm.

Nobody wants to lose
their candy wrappers,

their polished apples,
their rights to a shiny siesta.

Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Hacks: Ten Years on Grub Street (Random House, 2007); Poets for Haiti (Yileen Press, 2010); The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013); and Luminous Echoes (Into the Void, 2017). He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.

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Claire Cuccio
get dirty | come clean

I have hands.
As do you.
How shall we use them?

Head.
bump against | put together

Shoulders.
shrug off | stand on

Knees.
bring to | bend down

Toes.
tread upon | dip into

Eyes.
spy in suspicion | seek with compassion

Ears.
tune out | listen up

Mouth.
shoot off | soften up

Nose.
smell out fear | smell the roses

Fingers.
press & poke | smooth & stroke

Feet.
squash & stomp | dance & vote

Tongue.
slip & bite | sample & savor

I have hands.
And if you do too,
how will you use them?

build & create.

Claire Cuccio‘s poems circulate mostly among her friends. Her essays and reviews on the paper and print culture of Japan and China have appeared in Museum Anthropology Review and on the website of The Journal of Modern Craft. She is currently based in Washington, DC.

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William Prindle
Sanctuary

Stomping divots in this ocean of mud
Is like trying to make the earth flat again

And you laugh and I say some people
Are actually trying and not only that but

They would have us unwind the journeys
Of our ancestors across isthmus bridges

Across oceans on ships so tender that
They could not sail even a broad reach

Across rivers and through tunnels at night
Holding hope that some will not be deported

My barn is big enough for six families
At least, enough feet to stomp all the divots

Enough to carry on the farm when I die
Enough for a complete circle around the fire

So let us go out now into the muddy pasture
And ask the horses for those greater hearts

William Prindle’s poems have appeared in The Pennsylvania Review, Written River, The Echo World, The Live Poets Society, and elsewhere. He lives in Fluvanna County, Virginia, with his wife and three horses.

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Anna Ziering
Vision as the Ice Shelf Collapses

First ragheads and the other aliens
Then dark skin on any body up to übermensch
Then the dykes (fuck ’em first) and the faggots (fucked too)
Next any woman left who won’t shut her trap

Then faith then hopes then forests and fields
Then the factories run out of raw materials
And shoppers who with no distractions left
run hot wild into the streets and are flattened

Then the white mattering men
and the children they fathered in foolhardy optimism
by fires by thirst by rising seas

Then the Earth shrunken to one hard
cold kernel from which nothing grows
no hot weeping not even hate
and this will be the only, final safety.

Anna Ziering‘s  poems and reviews have appeared in Skylark Review, 236, The Rumpus, The Slag Review, and other journals. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. A recipient of the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize (2017) and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship (2015), she teaches at the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop.

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Patricia Knoll
April in Northeast Portland

Like the kid who thinks you can dig to China even if the hole fills up with water,
I’m driving through a neighborhood as if this destination isn’t where once
I knew sadness and my memory swamps even the plum blossoms
that have not decided to snow on concrete. Yet.

The song on the radio says the sun is rising on the other side of the world
in a different season than this one, this eruption of bloom which here attests
that the world does want to keep renewing, endlessly maybe with fatigue,
so let the show go on and the ringmen trot out the prancing horses
with the thighs that would make any sprinter push more weights
and jingling little bells that remind me of the sparrows back at feeders.

If you think I was daydreaming of beneficent dawn on that other side of the world,
you’d be wrong. I’m thinking of baby grimaces, Syrian babies dying
from that spray that came while they were napping, dreaming of golden clouds
billowing over buildings and mothers shooing away the flies.

Patricia Knoll‘s poetry collections are Ocean’s Laughter (Aldrich Press, 2015) and Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in dozens of journals nationally and internationally and has earned five Pushcart nominations.

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Gregory Luce
Ode to My Confederate Dead

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood…
—Allen Tate

I don’t own a Confederate flag—
no one, I think, owns one: It owns them.
But I do have Confederate blood.
But what does that mean, blood?

Bloodlines: Do they tell in humans
the way they do in thoroughbreds?

Rivers and oceans of blood spilled for,
under, onto that flag, but some kept flowing
through one tiny channel down four generations
and ended up in my veins, blood that must mean
more than the slightly viscous liquid that circulates
in bodies and runs out red when the skin is cut,
for surely any Confederate blood I received at birth
has long since been replaced, not to mention diluted by
my father’s cold Yankee blood, blood of small farmers,
sailors and whalers, merchants.

Blood carrying salt water, rocky soil, iron ore.

But those two great-great-grandfathers in gray still stand
somewhere back behind me and something connects them
to me so call it blood, call it Confederate blood, and what does
that mean and what do I do about it? Something tells me
the Black Lives Matter button on my favorite jacket
isn’t quite enough. Hit the streets, spill some of it
on the pavement? Let it mix with some untainted?

Remnants of blood shed in world wars.

If the salt of their blood has mixed so much and gone
to sea, if the flood—however malignant its purity—is sealed,
perhaps it’s time for one last look backward down the bloodline
and then a letting go.

Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line, 2016). His poems have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), and Unrequited (CreateSpace 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers (CreateSpace, 2016). Retired from the National Geographic Society, he lives in Arlington, VA. and works as an instructor for Writopia Lab.

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Nate Maxson
Nature Program

The nuclear family
Goes underground
When exhausted
With the winter
To hibernate
In twitching skins
Leftover from the feasting season

The president is on television and the radio
He lullabies to all the bears in fairy tales
He talks to them in their sleep
He promises
A lit match for every leach

(Oh)
I pull my hood tight in the cold
But it’s so lovely in the snow

Dream easy Goldilocks
Mating season approaches

Nate Maxson is the author of Vaudeville Jihad (Slow Fever, 2011), I Wished For A Serpent (Mercury HeartLink, 2012), and The Age Of Jive (CreateSpace, 2014). His poems have appeared in Eunoia, Toe Good, Empty Mirror, and Cultural Weekly, among others. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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