Liz Ahl
Defending the Constitution

After such a stink of a week,
spent mostly trapped inside
anxiety’s humid closet, sweating
and sorting out actual threats
from the hot but temporary blast
and bombast of empty rhetoric,
we needed to flood our home
with other scents. The cozy tang of
18 hour overnight slow-cooker stock
conjured from the saved chicken bones,
and vegetable trimmings. The gingery
perfume of West African peanut soup.
The smoky paprika and vinegar
wafting off the all-day pork shoulder
until we couldn’t stand it any more and
dove in. At the airports, lawyers
and protestors carried on with the good work
that called them: defending the Constitution,
loving the neighbor, shouting the truth,
while up here in the woods, we cooked
and ate, stored and saved, shoring up
our own constitutions, fortified and braced
ourselves for the next week back at work.

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds, forthcoming in 2017 from Hobblebush Books. She has written four chapbooks: Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, both from Seven Kitchens Press in 2012 (the latter as part of the “Summer Kitchen” series); Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), which received the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader’s Choice” in Poetry Award in 2011; and  A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration, Atlanta Review, Able Muse, Measure, Cutthroat, and Rappahannock Review.

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Judson Evans
Ring of Gyges

Gyges chanced to turn the stone of the ring on his finger inward, toward the palm of his hand. Instantly he became invisible.
—Plato, The Republic

Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism
—Ta-Neshisi Coates

for Mitzi Okou

I want to write about the shootings, the fear,
and I want to write about the Ring of Gyges,
the unearthed feeling in the gut, a fiberglass
submarine dry-docked in the gravel of the gas station.

I want to write about what happens in the interval
between the mask of terrified and mask of the terrible.
As the explorer of the cave finds the giant’s buried body
like an internal organ cast up into light

and snaps off a finger for the marvelous ring,
or the way wreckers of drowned ships
pry a body apart for a bill clip, anesthetized by the distinction of
pallor, the violated distance,

I want to unscript the dissection, a cop feeling the levitation
of a badge, the way added silver lessens
the gravity, The Ring of Gyges placed for the first time
on a finger, the twisted bezel, eye-scan technology,

and that long-ago moment behind the A&P store
divided by a wall, that first omnipotence
of seeing the other without being seen, the mother and handsome
dutiful son carrying hampers of white clothes

from the Laundromat, the refuse heap
all around me, rotting tomatoes and cabbage,
which I flung, saw splatter because I could,
and ran for hours, chased in and out of alleys,

I want to write about the teeter-totter
rhythm, the slip, the ship, the shape of power,
heads or tails of a spinning dime: the nimbus
bent between shapes and shades.

Not every cop feels lighter by the weight
of a gun falling under the spell
of the invisible, by motion of the spin distorted
draw of motion, two sides of the shield.

The cop with a loaded gun approaching the boy
with black water pistol, the discoverer of a ring tests
the safety of numbness, safety of
numbers—nimbus moment’s open flame,

infantile ring of being safe if not seen, the cop behind
the badge, the convex of the shield, bronze body beaten
thin but impenetrable, both feet planted on car hood,
firing through the windshield, not

proximity but range. But what if the shield were flipped,
vacuum-cast concavity, windpipe and belly, between impulse
and injury? Blind, the camouflaged place is called, built
to the body’s vulnerability. The fleshed out stillness

of the object stopped, prey-object, the drained-of-prayer
subject running from the car, shots in the back that follow, tagged, tasered,
it. The couple in the front seat executed again and
again, the turn that can’t be taken back, the names

of children’s games taken by torturers: swing, waterboard, or submarine,
A nickel ride or drone’s impacted distance. Childhood
memory putting on the cloak of invisibility deemed
colorless, the first dream of freedom minus risk,

its weightless, print-less tracks, its destructive wake,
as a child steals Beatle cards from a case in the candy
or jams the handle of the pistachio machine in the Laundromat
to fill his pockets to the ripped lining with absence

of surveillance. I want to write about the chance
in what is seen, the choice in what is
of vision. I want to write about pulling you back
drunk outside the gay bar going after the cop roughing up

the queer kid, your conviction/ my compliance.
What are you looking at? The force contained in who asks
the question? How it’s possible to entertain an optical illusion,
aura of spinning dime, the flip side, the submarine called

Depraved Heart, buoyant by its unanchored freedom, held
for questioning, held for cursing, find only the poverty
of the projection that won’t unfold from the silver nimbus
as the moon is called half or full or a man shackled becomes

handcuffs, seat belts, earplugs. I don’t want to write
about the woman hanged in her cell, the victim of a car
crash crawling toward help, shot through, unshielded.
I want to write about the broken ring, the evacuated

space of a sacred circle where jurors sit,
not the spun dime but the two bars of gold,
competition in the crowd for the straightest verdict,
not The Ring of Gyges as a parable, but

the paradox of our bodies held against us, opaque,
canted toward the light, not The Tale of Gyges, but the dialogue
that follows—the pause, the risk, the difference  of
justice: submersible, pigment-less, yet legible.

Judson Evans‘s poems have appeared most recently in Volt, 1913: a journal of forms, Cutbank, and Laurel Review. His haibun have appeared in a number of anthologies of the form, including Journeys 2017: An Anthology of International Haibun (CreateSpace, 2017), edited by Angelee Deodhar, and Journey to the Interior: American Versions of Haibun (Tuttle Publishing, 1998), edited by Bruce Ross. He is Director of Liberal Arts and teaches courses on utopian societies, ancient Greek literature, and Japanese poetry at The Boston Conservatory. He was chosen as an Academy of American Poets emerging poet by John Yau (2007) and won the Philip Booth Poetry Prize from Salt Hill (2103).

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Stephen Hollaway
Orientation

We have been here before: standing on our head
to reorient ourselves, feet unwilling
to accept nothing as their base, our brains
filling with blood, our core exhausted;
we fall on the tumbling mats we tried to make
our ceiling. On them we sit crossways
as if we knew how to meditate,
as if we could breathe deep of unreality
and find fantastic peace, our minds
flipping our vision upside down
so we can function in the gravity
of the situation.
We have lost
elections before and senseless wars,
times of jokers and fools and monstrous liars.
We try to remember the world did not end,
we are still here, there were always
the possible kindnesses, bread broken together,
talk of what was and might still be.
And yet we tire when we see the trend,
hopes frittered away, justice denied.
We sang, once, as if the kingdom had come,
as if we had grown into a new humanity,
but more than once the disappointment came—
not just in leaders but in ourselves the people.
We wrapped our bodies around the rock as it rolled
down the mountain once again, stopping
with our faces low, peering at that peak
where righteousness and mercy surely dwell,
after every tumble less sure than the last.

Stephen Hollaway is a pastor writing from an island thirteen miles out to sea from Rhode Island. This is not far enough away from America.

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Melinda Thomsen
Multi-Layered Chocolate Cake at Mar-a-Lago

“He was eating his cake,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Xi, “and he was silent.”

The three layered chocolate cake
sports a white chocolate sign
that says TRUMP. It rests on a dollop

of white chocolate icing. So, if you order
the cake, you must read TRUMP before
you pick it off and fling it on the floor.

If you eat even one smidge of that white
chocolate diamond TRUMP sign, you swallow
hubris, ignorance, and shallowness whole.

What happens next? Amnesia takes over.
You forget you launched 59 tomahawk
missiles at Syria. You brag they went

to Iraq. You blank on the North Korean
dictator’s name who you just insulted
that morning. That intoxicating confection

of cocoa, eggs, and butter with whipped,
creamy cherry frosting dabbed between
each layer will lobotomize you. Delicious

dark chocolate Ghirardelli icing over
the top reflects only you, a pearl couched
in a blue point oyster, your world.

Dessert permeates your mind. Fingers
of sugar wrest whatever humanity
is left in your brain and rain paranoia

through out room in TRUMP platelets.
Those hardened candies skitter endlessly
under chairs and across neighboring tables.

You order more slices. You shoot TRUMP
signs off faster. You turn into a wood chipper
shooting TRUMP pieces everywhere you can.

People start staring at you as horror creeps
across their faces in a slow march, drained
by hunger and exhaustion, as they remember.

Melinda Thomsen is the author of the chapbooks Naming Rights (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and  Field Rations (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in Heliotrope, Poetry East, Big City Lit, New York Quarterly, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems, Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews, and Token Entry: New York City Subway Poems.

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