Addison Bale
Chimera

I am so curious about the guillotine and the spectacle of its function
its member I should say its unthinking blade that I imagine
is silken through howls and howls very blunt to reason
very sharp very sharp for sure. I imagine myself naked on a pedestal
(though I’m not sure that’s standard) if my body would look fiendish
up there. Wriggly. If my dead-duck penis would look dead and silly.
If it would still be an object albeit changed object of sexual potential
or now a tube, a hilarious notion. If my belly would bloat like a dung beetle
before the drop from gas and lonesomeness. If my ass and legs
would be sludged with my body’s new vacancy.
If jerk or slice. Shrivel or stiffen. Growth over between gore
resisting sheen of metal rusting newly eventual rust rust and rust-
colored there they’d watch that thing pool in a bulrush basket.

*

I am so curious about the Marseillaise. To have a deadly sin
and to accept, yes, it will come malaise despite more eyes.
Pleased with fantasies of the ownerless body and a good clean finish
they screech ovation! And, would they? Touch their fingers
to their necks? Prey for their vulnerable parts, for their rubbing
fear of reputations. For prisons. I would have been made
a benign maladie of the brotherly night would have held my own
body into my own arms writing wholly in love wholly a part of
and abandoning embarrassment, penning lastly
the milliner in spite of judgment for a laugh.

Addison Bale‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Wedgie Magazine and the Pomeroy Poets Anthology. He is the founder of the Lit Club at the Light Club poetry reading series in Burlington, VT, and now lives in New York City.

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Nate Maxson
Those Who Favor Fire

—after Robert Frost

It’s an attempt to recreate light
I told you,
The flicked cigarette out the window
Ought to be enough of a common spark to prove my loyalty
I hold with those who favor fire
It’s neither scripture nor rocket science,
To make it as banal as I can:
I hold with those
Whose casual indifference to this limitation
Births a wildfire glowering in deadfall
I hold
The mechanism that crushes the mechanism
And the one beyond that
An endangered species
The expectation of a continuing increase in size
Between my hands, just between you and me
I’ll ask you one more time
What killed the dinosaurs?
A reiteration
A slow drizzle
Or the post-miraculous?
The fire
I hold
I hold

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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Mary B. Moore
Cat Nap

—For My Daughter

Like a thought cloud, gray and white
striped, near Damara’s head,
the cat sleeps, dreaming spotted
kingsnakes and red fox kits
queering the hen herding.
Don’t worry: He won’t eat hens.
He monitors, mothers, broods
them, defending from high-caliber
hawk sites by being seen to be.
His feet twitch in their stripy
fur coil: a bird, metal for bones, scopes
the yard, twin lenses flashing. Crikey,
he’d like to hide. But hen patrol
calls for wisdom, strategy and balls.
He puffs himself up, spiky
like a mine, his tail a pike.
That puts paid to raiders
in his dream of seeming
her hero and ours.
In Damara’s left ear,
his engine purrs.

Mary B. Moore is the author of Flicker (Broadkill River Press, 2016), winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Award; the chapbook Eating the Light (Sable Books, 2016 ); and the poetry collection The Book of Snow (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1998). New  poems are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Poem/Memoir/Story, Unsplendid, Still the Journal, and the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia (Vandalia Press, 2017). She is professor emerita of poetry and Renaissance literature at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.

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Chaun Ballard
My Being-Black Dilemma

My students are learning how to make America. Great. Again?
One says to me (his literature teacher). Yes, I reply, Make America great. Again

and again, he complains, recreates cities, states, river systems, borders on the map.
This isn’t social studies. No, I say, This is context. Now continue making America great. Again

the Civil War is fought, the bloody lesson of a nation burned into youth. I teach them
North vs. South, industry vs. agriculture, but all they hear is “make America great.” Again,

as if somewhere in the South, engaged in battle, a stone-like pupil will emerge, horseless, to say he’s not seeing the connection. Make America great, again

I say to him. This is context. The story is difficult. The views, however visible, complex.
If we are to engage in meaningful dialogue, understand: making America great again

adds substance to the story. We are reading “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and again Peyton Farquhar is to be hanged for the cause: to make America great. Again,

I must take my students through the grueling process of strangulation, how a man’s mind travels even until death, even until America is made great. Again,

I must teach them to pity the plantation owner: “a civilian and student of hanging.” I must teach them to look at the man as a man (not his cause or ideals) to make America great.

Chaun Ballard‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Rattle, Rock & Sling, and other literary magazines. Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Bernardino, California, he is currently a student in the MFA Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

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Caitlin Grace McDonnell
The arc of the moral universe

is long, it detours occasionally
down alleyways where bodies
are commerce and water
hoarded. In Atlanta, my teeth
grit against one another at night,
like someone’s building something,
said the man in my bed, picturing
steel and mortar. The doctors
fit me for a guard to save my teeth.
Took three visits to the place
in the mall where I’d wait and
wait then sit while warm wax
embraced my pried open
mouth, dripped down
my throat. When I went
to pick it up, the receptionist
said your insurance
won’t pay. It will be $300.
I don’t have that, I said, and she
took the carefully molded
map that matched only my
mouth and tossed it in the trash.
The arc of the moral universe
is long, but it bends. Like wax
to teeth, like a line of people
around a city block,
it bends.

Caitlin Grace McDonnell is the author of Dreaming the Tree (Belladonna Books, 2003) and Looking for Small Animals (Nauset Press 2012). Her poems, essays and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Salon, Washington Square, Chronogram among others. As a high school student in Boulder she took classes at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, later moving to New York where she attended Bard College and studied with John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach. Caitlin won a grant to study at the Poet’s House in Ireland and was a New York Times Poetry Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She is an English teacher in Brooklyn where she lives with her eight-year-old daughter.

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Robert Carr
Bannon’s Weapon

I’m afraid you’ve missed the point
of my weapon. The hand knit ears
of your pink pussy won’t protect you.

And you, cocksucker, handcuffs pulled
from a dusty box, your chained to fence memento,
will not ACT UP.

I wear you, nylon on a hairy leg, sip a coffee,
wait for brushed silver chairs
to fly through Starbucks windows.

I wait for that clit crusader wearing floppy ears
to soak herself in gasoline and drop
a match.

I wait for you to demonstrate your madness,
to bite my German Shepard.

You know you want to. The point—my weapon
documents your holes. Key that Ford truck idling
in your neighbor’s drive, burn the mini-flag

flying from the antennae.
I will gladly pay for your damage,
replace stripes, the stars. And you.

Robert Carr is the author of the chapbook Amaranth (Indolent Book, 2016). Recent work appears in Assaracus, Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, New Verse News, Pretty Owl Poetry, Radius Literary Magazine, White Stag, and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts, and serves as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Robert is an associate editor at Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press in Brooklyn. His poetry, book reviews, and upcoming events can be found at robertcarr.org.

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Miriam Sagan
Untitled

a great city
I can’t identify
towers to the sun
sprawling
shantytown
where a language
I can’t speak
is spoken
and a woman
carries
a heavy load on her head,
these dead
in particular
meant something
to you, or me,
I can’t weep
equally
it appears
some things
seem more apparently
my relatives
although
the necklace
of teeth
makes me nervous
as well it might,
and did you really think
your enemy
the one
you’ll kill
has no family
the draped woman
finds your bared flesh
confusing
but every veil
can turn
to water
in the eye of God.

Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). winner of  the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

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Antonio Lopez
Mugshot of Cortés

Antonio Lopez‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PEN/America, Acentos Review, Hispanecdotes, Sapelo Square, and Sinking City. His nonfiction has appeared in TeenInk and The Chronicle. Antonio works at the intersections of language, faith, social justice movements, and education. His undergraduate thesis, Spic’ing into Existence, explored the concept of ethnopoetics as people of color’s artistic-political response to regimes of power. Originally from East Palo Alto, California, he is currently pursuing a Master in Fine Arts (poetry) at Rutgers University-Newark.

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Juan Chemes
Preexistent

Today, I thanked every
single piece of flesh
and blood that
you’ve dubbed
a pre-existent

condition.

I praised my blood
my brain cells
my nut, my T-cells
my everything

for pre-existing.

And I assure them
that we will still exist,
long after your
diatribes, your
caprices, long after
you cease to be
this joke, this mistake,
this popular anathema.

Just take it all,
leave us nothing.
but leave

us all.

We’ll still be here
pre-existing
questing
flowing
loving
nutting

and resowing.

Orwellian times
pre-existed us.

Juan Chemes has previously published a poem for the What Rough Beast series. He is currently writing a thesis for his MFA in creative writing at Adelphi University in New York City.

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Dana Trupa
In The Blood of Children

GM won’t use it, rusts its engine parts.
Smells, tastes,
appearances.

Rashes, hair
loss & other problems.
High levels of lead in the blood of children.

They insist its safe.
They say buy a filter.Tell us: use it, drink it, bathe in it.

But it smells like shit, tastes like shit & we feel like shit.

Increase in Legionnaire’s cases—some fatal—
some federal aid—no disaster—
no declaration.

270 pages of emails—debates—state response—
lawsuits—testimonies—panels—investigations—
evidence tampering—news crawlers—

Red tape.

High levels of rhetoric in the blood of children.

Dana Trupa‘s poems are forthcoming in the Red Cedar Review. She was born in Pittsburgh and is a 20-year NYC transplant and recent graduate of Hunter College with a BA in English Literature. She lives and works as a dog whisperer in Manhattan.

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