Irene Cooper
No-vember

Gas station guy eyes me dead, juts me his peach fuzzed chin before back-handing my card.

Wet and dark, panhandler out Safeway says thanks, you’re the first. Wears a nice Columbia fleece and good boots, easy scavenged in a ski town. I worry he looks too good, but it’s poor that pisses people off.

Old showgirl leaks memory like a cracked pitcher, mourns minstrel shows with father, Young Republicans, the boiled blood of an Irish Dem mother.

Madmen and women froth with victory or grief. I‘d like to excuse myself, but this is my house.

Irene Cooper lives and writes in Oregon.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Peter E. Murphy
The Free Market

The Egg Lady gave birth to an egg.
The Chicken Lady gave birth to a chicken.
Although they worked in different parts
of the same industry, neither recalled

knowing the other. And, in case you’re
wondering, it doesn’t matter which came first.
What matters is that the young egg
and the young chicken became friends.

The egg wasn’t good at getting around,
so the chicken carried it within her.
The chicken wasn’t good at staying still,
so she sat on the egg and was calmed.

When the Shop Man gave birth to a shop,
he invited the chicken and the egg to move in.
Believe me, he said, You can trust me.
Believe me, he said, It’s going to be great.

The Shop Man gave them space on a shelf
where the customers could see them.
Soon the chicken and the egg disappeared,
replaced by another chicken and another egg.

And on. And on.

Some people didn’t notice.
Some people noticed and didn’t mind.
Some people noticed and protested.

I don’t know what the big deal is, said the shop
owner. I am running a business. I am a for-profit
business. I am not hiding from that.

And that was that.

Peter E. Murphy is the author of Stubborn Child, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, Challenges for the Delusional, a book of writing prompts, and four poetry chapbooks. His recent essays and poems appear in The Common, Diode, Guernica, Hawaii Pacific Review, The New Welsh Reader, Rattle, Word Riot and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University. www.peteremurphy.com

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Laura Winberry
#nastywoman: the anatomy of our crowns

is the smell of burning
sugar-sugar oil & sweat

we are tender
rockets burning clover
& hyssop through our abdomens

feral princesses wild & nasty
with love

all the women (in all the world)
are all the rape victims
of my dreams (in my dreams)
they sit
on the other side (of a table trying)
to explain
themselves
to a nodding
(& faceless)
man

our vaginas are not damsels in distress
they mouth the word souf with an f
& sing the triumphant blues

nasty women
licking our pre-wounds before they ooze

pinning up our heart-centers
to push our shoulders back

singing the aria
of dreambabydream

& holding all the damaged
light

Laura Winberry. Graduate of the OSU-Cascades Low-Res MFA Program. Professional cyclocross racer. Booty shaker. Snow eater. Drawer of things.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Vivian Wagner
Post-Election Advice from Four Poets

Emily Dickinson whispered something
oddly capitalized and fragmented
about death and loss, before asking
if I really wanted to risk my browsing privacy by
downloading a Chrome extension that turns
Donald Trump into kittens.

Walt Whitman shouted loudly
about raindrops and universes,
waving an electronic petition
from Change.org in my face,
telling me to sign it or find myself lost.

Theodore Roethke danced drunkenly
in the corner, his beard growing out,
muttering rhetorical questions about the
existential crisis of hacking,
calling Vladimir Putin one smart motherfucker.

Mary Oliver pointed to the sunrise
with its winter pink and orange,
and then said nothing,
waiting for me to speak.

Vivian Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, and other publications. She’s also the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington), and a poetry chapbook, The Village (forthcoming from Aldrich Press). Visit her website at www.vivianwagner.net.

Lynne Viti
Cyber Monday

Dreams of incivility in grocery lines,
on airplanes, captive audiences of
young women, eyes downcast, heads down
while a bully in a black t-shirt castigates them.
Then a dream of riding an old two-cycle engine
Yamaha motorcycle through
a cemetery, I cruise along a gravel road
helmetless and fearless, the road
curves this way and that, till I reach
a dead end, a semicircle of half-built temples,
alabaster, deserted by masons and carpenters.
I head back, to what we still call civilization,
that made by civis, the citizen. My sister,
my girlfriends gather around. We feel fine,
but we’ve got an intestinal infection,
an orange parasitic worm. Here, my doctor says,
handing me a vial of pills. Take as directed,
take with food or milk, take the full course.
Call me in three years if no improvement.

Lynne Viti teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Her poetry chapbook, Baltimore Girls, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in February 2017. Her poems appear most recently in The South Florida Poetry Journal, Little Patuxent Review, Mountain Gazette, Amuse-Bouche, The Paterson Review, Drunk Monkeys, Cultured Vultures, and Right Hand Pointing. She blogs at stillinschool.wordpress.com.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Arielle Greenberg
Untitled

while the news / came I sat in a wooden A-frame / by a creek
with my friends in their bodies / black man / trans man / black queer woman /
bodies blood-smeared by the president / -elect / to mark a coming / smiting
and we wept / I apologized / wept the bullshit useless tears of a white woman but /
I meant them / meant by them I will do the work/ and when they come for you /
I will not be silent / will put my body as a shield in front of yours
and thought about how literally I might do this
(it was most like when my baby died / that sense of loss /)
and walking back in the starflung / I spoke apologies to the furious bird
who has been screaming all week
I am sorry I know I know I am sorry I said to the species
thinking of Standing Rock / then stood in more circles of bodies
then lay in bed and strategized about revolution

o fire-leveled mountain morning of noticing
in which a kind of winning, kind of conceding
has taken out my breakfast / my breath / my belief in self-evident truths

On the 78th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

Arielle Greenberg‘s most recent books are Locally Made Panties, a collection of micro-essays, and Slice, a collection of poems. She lives in Maine and teaches in the community and in the MFA at Oregon State University-Cascades.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Lucinda Marshall
Patriotism Reconsidered

My anthem is the serenade of birds,
sung without regard for map lines
delineating human assumption of dominion
over that which cannot be possessed,
and I will not pledge allegiance to,
or defend a flag of illusory freedom.

As the sun greets each day,
I will bravely stand up—against
racism, gendered hate, and xenophobia.

I will join in solidarity
with those who block pipelines
and protest gun violence,
those who feed the hungry
and work to stop the school
to prison pipeline,
and with every person who works
for the common good.

Solemnly I swear not to tolerate
the revision of history to fit
a fraudulent justification for
perpetual war or
wanton destruction of Earth.

This is my oath of citizenship,
because to do anything else is treason.

Lucinda Marshall is an award-winner writer, artist, and activist. Her poems have appeared recently in  Sediments, One Sentence Poems, Stepping Stones Magazine, Columbia Journal, Poetica Magazine, Haikuniverse, and ISLE. Her poem, “The Lilies Were In Bloom” received an Honorable Mention in Climate Crisis: Solutions, a Waterline Writers/Artists as Visionaries galley exhibition at Water Street Studios in Batavia, Ill. The author of numerous essays and articles, she blogs at Reclaiming Medusa. 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.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Samara Golabuk
Electoral Pillage

In the falling down of the year
And the segmentation of society,
Three magical things happened:

First, we bounced on the pavement
of our vitriol, face-first into
the unapologetic wounded.

The hot wind had swept up the tumble
of love and Jesus and the old views
of cabin grandpas and alt-right housewives

who don’t hate the neighbors
but sure can’t stand the negras & the gays not
Knowing Their Place. The monsoon bivouacked

by 3am Tuesday, when hatred got a foothold
with the oligarchy’s gold-lined fingerprints
and smashed up pouts, and foreheads

that chiseled fine china.
Leader of the unfree world, the world
that had its soup upturned into its face by

the monster under the bed, leaping, the one
we thought we outgrew as we Increased
into wiseness and thin-eyed generosity.

We, who never saw it coming.

Second, after the diagnosis came in,
some of us woke up choking
on our sick, dripping tears and

gasping past spasmed throats as we
tried to swallow the masses
that presented. Swing states

hovered in midair. The Age of Aquarius
ran upstream for a while.
Cats barked, and the Cubs,

having won the World Series,
ushered in a time of darkness.
They didn’t mean to.

Nobody did.

Third, In the Eden of paranoia
where all the bodies are buried,
the black soil overturns itself

as if it were full of god’s worms,
the turning boil of compost
rising with its heat, its chemical

burn the sprouts press through,
volunteering up into
the unremarkable sunshine,

a shockingly normal
Wednesday unlike
any other.

Samara Golabuk is a two-time Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strong Verse, The Whistling Fire, Inklette, Peacock Journal, and others. She has two children, works in marketing, and has recently returned to university to complete her BA in Creative Writing.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Ina Roy-Faderman
digging

white and chalky,
the skull of the world,
picked clean by
something much less than—
because you’ve created what’s left:
a hollow bowl for bones.

this is not the work of raw-necked
vultures.
they faded with the last
long drink of water, in the dry valleys
where layers of shale
shift under the weight of sand.

surely someone warned you that blood
will be the first drink to go.
are you afraid that your sacrifice
has been for nothing?
you have sacrificed my child and
my child’s children and the generations
that wither like thornapple pods
until there’s
no seminal drink left, just
dry powder, with nothing left
to stir it back to life.

Ina Roy-Faderman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Surreal Poetics, Inscape, HIV Here & Now, and the Tupelo 30/30 project, among others. Dana Gioia recently named her “Elegy for Water” the outstanding poem of the Richmond Anthology of Poetry. A native Nebraskan of Bengali heritage, she received her formal creative writing training at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. She currently teaches bioethics at Oregon State University, is a fiction editor for Rivet Journal, and works as a school librarian.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.

J. Gay
7. The Lost Penny

(From a series of poems imagining the Major Arcana in a modern Tarot deck)

This card has seen a few revamped visual depictions, the two most popular being the sidewalk in the abandoned city and the grimy dustpan. We have chosen the sidewalk in the abandoned city, as it is both traditional and consistently relevant.

On a crumbling sidewalk next to a potted street sits a bright, burnished penny. It is accompanied by bits of paper and unidentified detritus. There are no other symbols, but the sensation of having forgotten something important, of being watched, tickles the back of your neck. Not necessarily ominous, but the copper taste of anxiety may fill your mouth and nose if you stare at the card too long.

To draw this card means nothing can be done about it. Leave it. Yes, the penny is shiny and new and you just got it as change from the store but the city is abandoned and you don’t know how long the penny had been clutched in your fist when you went running into the afternoon, your eyes wide.

The reversed meaning of this card does not exist. No matter which way you look at it, no from whichever direction you approach, the lost penny is the lost penny. It is not going to be found again. Leave it behind and start afresh.

Fortunate colors: Leave it.
Necessary materials: Leave it.
Ephemeral numbers: Leave it.
Lovely herbs: Leave it.
Remember: Leave it.

J. Gay lives and writes in New Mexico. She was born in Louisiana. Her chapbook “Decomposition” is available from Dancing Girl Press. Visit jgaywriting.com.

SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.