Devon Balwit
Fast at Both Ends

It must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake.
—Herman Melville

Scoot your knees as far away from mine as you please; this
still won’t stop us from touching. Our situation
is almost as bad as the conjoined. Yank the rug out from one of
us, and the other falls. Poison your well, and mine
gives bitter water. No one was
thinking. No one considered what ifs. Now, the
man in front plummets, and each of us slides. The situation
couldn’t be direr. Of
course, we scrabble to undo the knots, but already we are unbalanced, every
second borrowed. Now do you feel mortal
terror? And what of our legacy? That
we must cobble together as we hurtle: the fate of everyone that breathes.

Devon Balwit‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Almagre Review, The Stillwater Review, The Tule Review, Red Earth Review, The Free State Review, and Eunoia Review. She writes and teaches in Portland.

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Lisa DeSiro
Going through Customs after the Travel Ban

The moving multitude of our bodies collectively forms a single body.
The moving multitude of our bodies collectively forms a single body.
Snaking back and forth between stanchions and stretched barrier belts.
Snaking back and forth between stanchions and stretched barrier belts.

We are a procession. Like letters and words in lines of poetry. Verses.
We are a procession. Like letters and words in lines of poetry. Verses.
The metaphor is of plowing rows in a field, turning (vertere = to turn).
The metaphor is of plowing rows in a field, turning (vertere = to turn).

Much diversity in this conglomeration of faces, figures, shapes, sizes.
Much diversity in this conglomeration of faces, figures, shapes, sizes.
But those in closest proximity become familiar upon repeated passing.
But those in closest proximity become familiar upon repeated passing.

The black man; the Asian family; the young woman wearing a hijab.
The black man; the Asian family; the young woman wearing a hijab.
The blond teenager with tattoos; the middle-aged white obese couple.
The blond teenager with tattoos; the middle-aged white obese couple.

Uniformed officials guide us, pointing the way. We are questioned.
Uniformed officials guide us, pointing the way. We are questioned.
We are searched, scanned. Some get stamped approval to pass through.
We are searched, scanned. Some get stamped approval to pass through.

Those allowed to enter are greeted by crowds, cheers, banners & balloons.
Those allowed to enter are greeted by crowds, cheers, banners & balloons.
Lawyers hold up signs (Free Legal Help) and a pair of police officers watch.
Lawyers hold up signs (Free Legal Help) and a pair of police officers watch.

 
 
Lisa DeSiro is the author of the chapbook Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, June 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Commonthought, Friends Journal, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and other journals.  Along with her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Lisa has degrees from Binghamton University, Boston Conservatory, and Longy School of Music. She works as a production and editorial assistant for C.P.E. Bach: The Complete Works and is an accomplished pianist.

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Ina Roy-Faderman
Path of Totality

In August
the sun will disappear.
Science promises—
the moon’s shadow
nictitating west to east,
the sun winked away.

I wish I were an unbeliever—
or rather, someone for whom
simple belief in coming darkness
is a matter of faith,
or rather, of lack of faith.

A simple, clean,
unanswerable split between black and white,
as clear as the edge of the moon
and the brilliance of star shine
around it.

Who knew
facts could be so hard,
and unyielding?
Like galls—ugly but unwanted
protectors of trees from internal enemies—
I cannot ignore them.

As I am, I am doomed
to see metaphors
in the sudden quieting of the birds,
two minutes of cold like a gash
in the late summer air,
sudden darkness
where once was light.

Ina Roy-Faderman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2017), and elsewhere. Recent honors include Outstanding Poem (Richmond Anthology of Poetry) and a 2018 Pushcart Prize nomination. A native Nebraskan of Bengali heritage, Ina teaches bioethics for Oregon State University, is a fiction editor for Rivet Journal, and is the librarian at a school for gifted children. Further information can be found at inafelltoearth.com.

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Nate Maxson
Trinity, April 1st

Visiting the Trinity Site on April Fools’ Day
There’s a carnival atmosphere
Hot dogs and mushroom cloud t-shirts on sale at kiosks
Tourists with cameras pose in front of a Fat Man bomb casing on a truck bed

The black monument built in 1965,
An igneous obelisk on ground zero
When I touch it
It’s like a splinter between possible earths

I remember one summer
My brother and I lit fireworks and one fell on its side and went off in the fields
A ring of fire in the yellow pasture grass and then: out
A brief and frightening illumination
Our dark miracle
Was this what the scientists felt?
This relief that they had not set the sky on fire forever?

To each hinge in time, I believe that beneath
Like a reflection on a body of fresh water
The opposite occurred

The black pillar of Trinity
Sits between our once and future burning
And an ever red heap of endless and broken machinery
A puncture wound in the womb of this desert
Junkyard bubbling subconscious below
Christ nailed to a rose
Or a B-52 bomber over Albuquerque
In 1965, the year of the obelisk
Whose copilot accidentally opened the bomb hatch doors
And then had to hold onto the rocket barehanded to keep it from falling out

This is an apocryphal story
The red world
I feel its tremor like a wolf running through smoke
And changing into a bird
And back again
The burning bush
When it decides to sing
Like a concentration of wind
In a childlike falsetto
I want to carve its words onto an iron gate
Set it Dante-like in the atmosphere
Oh red world
Root of aftershocks

Everything after this is just
Showbiz

Nate Maxson is the author of Vaudeville Jihad (Slow Fever publications, 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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Lucinda Marshall
Beautiful Children

The second son tells us that
the first daughter told their daddy
that inasmuch as she herself was a mother,
she was horrified
that chemical weapons
had been used on beautiful children
and so maybe daddy dropped bombs
on Syria to make her feel better
and I wonder if the first daughter
is at all concerned about
the beautiful children we have killed
in Iraq and Afghanistan,
or the little ones who
don’t have potable water in Flint
or the babies who live in
lead paint caked houses in Philadelphia
or the children who have been killed
by guns in their very own homes
and what about the kids in this country
who go to bed hungry at night
or the ones who have been raped and
sexually assaulted
since her father took office
and if so, pray tell,
should we bomb ourselves as well?

Lucinda Marshall‘s poems have appeared in Sediments, One Sentence Poems, Stepping Stones Magazine, Columbia Journal, Poems in the Aftermath (on indolentbooks.com), Poetica Magazine, Haikuniverse, ISLE, and elsewhere. Lucinda co-facilitates the award-winning Teen Writing Club in Gaithersburg, Md. She is a member of the Maryland Writers’ Association and Women, Action, and the Media. She blogs at Reclaiming Medusa.

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Christopher Hennessy
Parrhesia for the First One Hundred Days

Abject amok—smoke-lunged Worm Kings in
bled sod, the cancer-soaked seeds germinate. Hate the
cankered tongue, slickened in rot: easier oil, old trick.
Defection, or defecation. Extrusion, or expulsion. Post-scatological.
Even the eschatological demurs to the one who
flenses a decent dawn from the guessers, grovelers,
gropers, guilty…and the living guests, too. Bone-
hurt, honesty becomes a predator for me, prey for you.
Irradiated whiteness rises, a great iris opens on the horizon.

Janus, we invite, but Iago comes (though
kin to him) and blocks the door.
Limn the end with beginning’s blight, hated
Moor, or hated general, or hated whore.
Nix love, trust, and oath. The twin faces of Janus,
Othello, they stare at us, toward future, toward
past, and we would blame them while
quieting the voice that admits “I am not what I am.”

Reveal reveal unseal reveal relieve: Primeval
snow, slow-falling ash, blinkers all sight. Nights of
teething men, their bibs’ slobber: human grease.
Undoomed from conscience, they consume, down to the
virus, itself a fossil conspirator. Eat your flag,
waste-landers, stand your hollow ground.
Xenomancers at the watchtowers, cast for vultures.
Yoked shades, pace your prison waiting for love to bring you to
zero: the bankrupt good, a borderland…or, if…a gun’s righteous aim.

Christopher Hennessy is the author of  Love-In-Idleness (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2011), a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. His two books of interviews with gay poets are Our Deep Gossip (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), with a foreword by Christopher Bram, and Outside the Lines (University of Michigan Press, 2005). His poems, interviews, and book reviews have appeared in Ploughshares,  American Poetry Review, Verse, Cimarron Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Court Green, OCHO, and Crab Orchard Review. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest and Hope (Benu Press, 2012) edited by Steve Fellner and Phil E. Young; Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience (Squares & Rebels, 2012) edited by Raymond Luczak; Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University Of Akron Press, 2012), edited by Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz; Divining Divas: 100 Gay Men on Their Muses (Lethe Press, 2012), edited by Michael Montlack; and others.

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Lydia Cortes
Our Fool

A fool is a fool is a fool is a fool
Foolishly willfully telling the truth

La verdad veritas very Juan Bobo
Bobo in PR means an out of it cretin silly

Zangano drool of a tool one would think
That needs sharpening after for example

How he went and dressed up his pig in
His mama’s Sunday best including her

Most coolio chapeau the one with the veil
& flowers & the feathers when Mami said

Clean up el puerco to take to town ready
And all tidy widy for the sale so he went

And made her up all pretty with his Mamita’s
Reddest lip gloss blushed her fat cheeks

Around her neck he placed his mother’s
Good pearls on her hairy sow’s ears the

Matching earrings till she was pic pretty
He sure knew the art of The Sale no fool he

He just wanted to mess with his Mami no fool
Is a fool is a fool just like the Bard’s fool a

Telling it like it is a fool is a fool is a fool nothing
Like our fool so presidential so fast you’ll never

Believe how fast you’ll cry through the laughter
At his supreme stupidity this fool ours is not a

Fool is not a fool not a truthful revealing fool no
PR Juan Bobo no Bard Fools of The Highest

Order just a lying low life caught small red
Handed in the White House a complete a

Total a hole

Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet and on the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September poetry feature curated by Patricia Spears Jones.

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Antonio Lopez
Quinceañera

For Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos and her daughter Jaqueline

I close my eyes to hear the hems of the
pink dress we swooned over at La Moda Boutique
drag across the concrete pavement
of the Immigration Field Office. I try to tune out
the screams of protestors
chaining themselves to the tires, the tail bumper;
the file of fully armed officers holding their guns;
of my classmates armed in picket frescos of mariposas.

Mamá, I want to hear the clak of tight high heels
that I’ll take off half an hour after putting them on.
My father laughing, “Ustedes mujeres con sus tacones.
¡Se los ponen, y regresan del baile descalsas!”
I close my eyes to see
a ballroom no bigger than a hair salon,
padrinos bickering over who can drink more,
Father Sullivan beginning Mass by
stretching his mouth to say my last name,
“Gar-Sea-Uh.”

Dear amá,
take my hand.
Let’s waltz at this church, to bless our tears.
Please mami, take my hand.
Let’s waltz here.
The padre offered us sanctuary.
They’ll never kick us out here.

I finally open them,
a large white van appears with the words,
“Homeland Security.”

She squeezes my hand again, kneeling to crane her head
inside the dark, cold backseat.
I stare at her through the window’s metal mesh.
She darts her eyes away from the
the flashes of cell phone recordings.
Her eyebrows just done,
face shone from the years of cook orders.

By morning, I must learn public speaking
by stuttering half a dozen cameras.
Estoy desvelada ‘cuz I spent the night before rummaging through freshly baked
clothes, asking myself,
“Is she gonna need this blusa more than my graduation gown?”
The quinceañera reception is this press conference outside the I.C.E. facility.
My chambelanes are the pot-bellied cameramen
that pan to my glasses,
looking for something hopeful.

Cada quien en su posición.
I am here to give my dedications.
“I am here, and I’m gonna keep on fighting
For my mom, for the other families.”

“Yo soy Jacqueline Rayos de García,
The daughter of Guadalupe.”
As my first appearance as a dama,
I decide to scratch the dress
and present myself to the country
in a pink shirt, discount jeans that Mom and I
debated for half an hour at Sears, where she first opened up the topic,
asking me, “What kind of dress you want?”
I said, “The one you think I look prettiest in.”

My mother crosses me in the front of St. Francis Parish
where she dipped me in the baptismal font.
To this day, she still laughs at how
I kept thrashing my feet,
“Ay mi’ja. It drove the padre loco.”
The ceiling hangs above us like the black shawls
old women wear on hot summer days.
“It’s just another check-in mi’ja,” she squeezes my hand,
“Me dejarán antes de la cena.”
She pulls me to kneel together.
Our elbows press on the cold wooden benches.

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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Robbie Gamble
Ars Protectica: A Monosyllabus

Robbie Gamble lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. He recently completed an MFA in poetry at Lesley University. When he is not preoccupied with image and line breaks, he works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston.

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