J.D. Isip
Archangel

for Pete

The best of us had gorgeous golden hair, impish dimples,
soft, enormous wings, and kind eyes, left his Daddy’s
church in middle Tennessee to be the youngest pastor
with a podcast, hipster band, sun-touched skin peaking
out from his chest tight pearl snap, three snaps undone,

Let the mutants sit right next to the righteous, preached
for all of us to let up a little, even when they lost the baby
he kept smiling, tears dripping from his boyish cheeks
to a tiny soul patch, the beginning of what would be
a full goatee, a beard, a total transformation

Came with no warning, the techno-organic infection already
cording his pink skin into a hue more blue and metallic,
reading about his own life falling apart, the divorce, losing
the boys except on weekends, turned his eyes red at the corners
and then red altogether, seeing the world for the first time

Like most of us always saw it, on fire with shame and hatred,
emails and handwritten letters heavy with stones and curses,
all his supple feathers strewn behind him, limbs once lithe
and nimble drag him through a town he created, a steeple
at its center, a long line of trucks and mini-vans rolling into

Sunday morning worship months later, most of us stopped
going, felt the threat of damnation and Apocalypse acutely,
as if letting our guard down welcomed this destruction,
as if we maybe always believed the wild-eyed First Purifier
who correlated our genes and lives to hurricanes and tornadoes

But I only saw one mutant do that and he called himself
Archangel, spread his new wings armed with sharp feathers,
thwip, thwip, the tongues of each accuser nailed by tiny knives,
stayed by their own awe, every new generation of judges
stands before the camera crews, swears, “We never saw it coming.”

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

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Isabel Duque
Ticking Time Bomb

Tick,
Treading on a snake that is already broken,
The feeling of withdraw.
The chaos normal, consumption normal, with all
The clamor, cacophony, teeth.
Bang.

A Dream vision peppered with Death,
Clinical isolation, and chained feet. Rattle.

The humbling warmth of a cup full, the intoxicating crevices of a lover,
The cracking of a spine, the uninhibited cackle of a dear friend, the
Light streaming in through dressed branches from a lapis lazuli afternoon.
Hiss.

The eye knows where the sun dances,
And the moon bathes naked.
The hand tinkers away at wood, gathers herbs and grain, and makes bellies full.
The mind swirls in the ebbs of canyons,
Looking for a desert flower, when it really hungers for
A supple horizon, that simply recedes.
Thump, thump, thump.

Ah, the Heart.
It is relentless in its ache,
With its bloody chambers, its avenues a raging river,
Expanding,
Contracting,
Wearing down stone. Gushing wild, raving mad and all-pervading.
Piercing and permeating Mundis. Reaching.
Until—
Stillness, silence.

Tock, rustle, whisper,
The shedding of Matter,
Inhabiting the lightness of a new skin,
The bounce of every scale reverberating during the dance
Across the warm, rust colored Earth.
The wind cleanses the taut, long body,
The birth of being.
Aum.

—Submitted on 05/05/2020

Isabel Duque writes: Daughter of Little Havana, trying to bewitch with letters, pictures, music and movement. Always seeking rhythm, ritual and the heart’s fire.

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Milton P. Ehrlich
Quarantined

Buried underground
in my sarcophagus
wrapped in stone
I worry about 1,089
poems I’ve left behind
that needed revisions.
It wasn’t my intention
to reveal all the faults
of every friend I ever had
or ridicule the hypocrisies
of wise men I got to know.
Clutching a bag of diamonds,
Catherine de Medici knocks
on my stone overcoat, and
invites me to join her in an
escape plan that might allow us
to fix the anarchy of the world.

—Submitted on 05/04/2020

Milton P. Ehrlich is a psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. His poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, and other journals.

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Hasnain Ali Syed
Reputation

It’ll be nice to
Walk in a room
And not have
To fight with
An army of
Preconceived
Opinions
Not look at
An entire gallery
Of my distorted pictures
Painted by someone
Else’s paintbrush
Not be judged before
Even saying anything
It’ll be nice to
Someday outrun
That report on me
And
Enter the room first
Shutting the door close
From the inside
On the reputation
That otherwise always
Precedes me

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

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Cheryl Caesar
Sheltering Places

after Jobim

A box. A bed.
A house. A home.
It’s the shelter that waits
when you’re living alone.

A coat. A bag.
A phone. A Mac.
It’s your coffeeshop space
with the wall at your back.

It’s a carrel that’s lined
with graffiti you know.
It’s the stall where you hide
when there’s nowhere to go.

It’s the wind in your hair.
It’s the sun in your face.
It’s a nest in the bush.
It’s a sheltering place.

A skin. A cell.
A tent. A tarp.
It’s a chamber to hold
every beat of your heart.

A here. A there.
A me, a you.
At the end of the day
we are all passing through.

—Submitted on 05/13/2020

Cheryl Caesar is the author of Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (Thurston Howl Publications, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Blue Nib, Prachya Review, Panoply, Light, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon
I miss the way

for Robert

your chin rests on my head,
when we hug, say hello—
sixteen years ago
I welcomed you, a tiny bairn
snug in my daughter’s arms.

I miss your sharp, enquiring mind
with question after question,
your accounts of the many books you’ve read
and your hunger for more. Far more.

I miss your crinkled smiled-up eyes
and your shy-delivered jokes,
your kitchen disco with your sister
when washing dishes, iPod full blast.

I miss your pantomimes with George,
your daemon ginger cat. Robert,
I miss all that—

but it will all be there again,
one day we’ll laugh out loud
as it all comes back.

—Submitted on 05/04/2020

Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon is the author of Cerddi Bach (Hedgehog Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Porridge, The Blue Nib, Mookychick, Poethead, The Galway Review, and other journals. Ceinwen holds an MA in creative writing from Newcastle University, and lives near Newcastle upon Tyne.

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Margot Wizansky
Sheltered

by tupelos, their multiple trunks reaching up like long fingers,
and beyond them, the harbor dazzling

and by the long and empty road
where the highest branches of pines draw a canopy over me

by early spring’s vernal pools, new life hidden in blackness

by herring and indulgent gorgonzola stocked in the fridge

thirty-two cabbage plates on the wall, exactly as my daughter arranged them
and the bead board wall, the steady yellow of it

and the Southwest I painted at twilight, working quickly to record
the sky’s impossible pink

the amaryllis, about to burst after two months’ nearly imperceptible growth

kindness crisscrossing the space between us
and time stretching out silvery with no borders or requirements

your body, like a warm rock, and the constellations of your eyes,
sometimes clear, sometimes foggy.

—Submitted on 05/03/2020

Margot Wizansky edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House (Salt Marsh Pottery Press, 2003), and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains (Salt Marsh Pottery Press, 2005). Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, Moon City Review, Salamander, and The Maine Review.  Recently retired, Wizansky lives in Massachusetts.

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Koss
Space Changes

Dear Max,

Space forever changed when you fled Earth.
Stars once scattered promise, even in their glittery deaths.
Now a frigid constellation arrests the black sky static,
though Luna reflects a light, not yours, nor hers.
In their faux-spring gala, the dead pretend to live again.
“Cosmic” lights flicker / trick the eyes of hangers-on.
The golden gauze between the worlds is gone.
Space on earth has also changed for worse.
When you died, grocery stores devoured me, sucked me in,
as dreams of meals and joy bled dim.
I hollowed in their empty excess,
further voided by pandemic.
Shelves are now bone-bare.
Frantic, scared, the hoarders scrape them clean.
You boarded just in time, Max.
Things are dire here.
They say it started with a single bat.

—Submitted on 06/25/2020

Koss, a writer and visual artist, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, Exquisite Corpse, Diode Poetry, and other journals. Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular.

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Hasnain Ali Syed
Toxic Gallantry

You are Chivalrous
In your mind
You stand tall
So upright
Smoking cigarettes
Without a count
You’re only concerned
With having a good time
You fabricate stories
Based on chronicles
Of your Gallantry
Just to amuse them
Or maybe amuse yourself
Who knows
Everything is about yourself
You play with girls first
And then, their repute
You talk about the encounters
With your girlfriends.
So openly, repeatedly
You’re proud of yourself
For fooling half a dozen girls
At one time
With none knowing the truth
In your circle of men,
Your apprentices
And acquaintances
You gloat about it
But I noticed
I noticed the frown
On your face
The choking
The lowering of the tone
Of your otherwise undaunted voice
When you were asked a question
About your wife
You tried to avoid it
You tried to avert taking her name
Because it makes you vulnerable
You judge all men to think
As polluted as you do and so
You don’t mention her
In any of your stories
You talk about your son,

Sometimes
And how he plays with your gadgets
But never a thing about
Your daughter who had her
First day at school today
You don’t talk about her
You won’t talk about her
Because you are scared
That even though they
Pretend to respect you
The men around you
Will not spare the women
In your life
They will imagine things
All too vile
You know this for sure
Only because
You would too
About another’s daughter
Another’s wife

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

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J.D. Isip
Southern Comfort

Los Angeles does not prepare you for how white the world is outside
of barrios, mangling your Spanish to cashiers in Santa Ana or Hawaiian Gardens,
ghettos, real ghettos where it’s always summer and a Guatemalan baby races
in and out of the cascade of hose water being held by his sister screeching
with delight, both of them in their underwear, both stopping to wave
at a pick up weighed in the back by six sunburnt men coming from or going to
a half-built high rise in downtown Long Beach or some lawn too big
for the Filipino couple in Anaheim Hills who eye them suspiciously
and talk their selves out of the foolishness of tipping gardeners.

The South gets black, they might let a “son” slip out but usually not in the cities,
not in Atlanta or Houston. If you’re black and you’re from the South, you get
the South, even laud the way the food still reminds you of an old auntie who
remembers someone who remembers slavery, praise God for good church folk
who separate like it’s the 50s into the loud black churches and the giant
white churches with big screens and slick Southern sons preaching the good news
and everyone’s “real nice” when they meet you and let you sit on their bench
and, “Heck, just have the whole thing” since it seems they saw a friend
who might confirm whether or not you are, in fact, Iraqi, or Mexican, or a terrorist.

Out here it’s like you see Rome falling and white people losing their damn minds,
literally burning them up on meth or antidepressants because everyone
has bipolar disorder or cracked just a little when the uppity black “Hussein”
brought back the sting of “northern aggression”—they see more and more of us,
the horde of brown, feel ignorant and angry for fumbling the Indian names, Latino
names, names that sound like the Terrorist Watch List, all horseshit names
anyway, some people even ask, “But don’t you have, you know, an American name?”
Thing is, you do. You live here long enough, and you do. You’ll be Charlie or Joe
because it gives them comfort, and you see the guns, and you don’t want no trouble.

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

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