Elaine Sexton
On Rothko’s “Dark Palette”

The suited guards in the gallery
usher us in. Like mourners we gauge
& weigh our pleasure
as the new climate we live in
grows grim. From this leather-
bound bench I follow the scratched
horizon crossing his canvas, cutting
pigment the color of pavement,
as our palette, our prospects to prosper
grow darker, then dim.

Elaine Sexton is a poet, critic, and teacher. Her most recent collection of poems is Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow, 2015). On the Web at elainesexton.org.

Henry Israeli
Dangerous Thoughts

Many have taken off their white shirts
and are waving them in the air. My eyebrows,
refusing to surrender, fly off like moths into the darkness.
I’ve come so far, I hardly have to talk
or walk anymore. Soon I’ll be able to conduct
my business without leaving my bed. Still,
our very existence is endangered by one lonely rat
chewing on a wire. Turns out nothing so much as the old country
resembles the new country. Turns out there are no ghosts,
just pixelated monsters roaming our homes, our streets,
grinning, mocking, floating between us wherever we go.
It’s all part of an algorithm generated in Tokyo.
They tell me my love for the natural world threatens
the corporate dream of annihilation.
I’ve heard that the most powerful have
secret elevators that can never be found,
that don’t even turn up on GPS, let alone a floor plan.
They don’t need electricity because they run on
pure undiluted ego. I long for the days I was oblivious
as a dandelion. Ever since I woke up on the floor
of a vacant factory I’ve felt myself entangled
in radio waves. I‘m scared of the government’s fear of me
for where do I stand on the most important issues? I don’t stand
for anything, and that’s the point, isn’t it?
It’s 2016, and this is the afterlife.

Henry Israeli’s poetry collections are god’s breath hovering across the waters (Four Way Books: 2016), Praying to the Black Cat (Del Sol: 2010), and New Messiahs (Four Way Books: 2002).

Emily Alexandra Gordon
Bomber

I was tired of trying to fit in.
And I was tired of traveling alone.

I overtipped. I cast my vote.
I was as tolerant as anyone.

Sure, I had things to say,
people to say them to,
but nothing was changing. It got worse
slowly, but one day the ground
was redder than I remembered.

What I can do is burst,
leave shavings of myself
like whittled wood
in the hands of the men who act
without me in mind.

I believe in what comes afterward,
but I keep thinking of the time
just before, when everything I was going to be
will rush forward like the cyclists
in the Tour de France,
standing on their pedals.

Emily Alexandra Gordon’s poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Indie Soleil, HIV Here and Now, and the Toronto Globe & Mail. She lives in Brooklyn.

Francisco-Luis White
In The Mourning

Wake to another day of America,
merciless with stars in her eyes.
Her bosom for the free — market and white men — exposed.
Her faithful court of all stripes circling her alabaster seat, desperate, abuzz.
You can’t help but wonder at the sight of her about limits to redemption.

She has lied so well for so long to herself, to us
and us to her, all wanting to believe in lies older than her name.
Our deaths are sanctioned, we know.
Her foot soldiers stand in blue and blood.
Can’t help but to hope we’re at the cusp of anything but this.

Perhaps it’s because she believes it’s the blood
of Christ she’s washed in that she is forgiven,
that bullets in Black backs, in Black babies are a sacrament.
America’s cup does run over;
can’t help but consider what might be incentive enough for her to change.

If not shame, or fire, or protest is persuasion
it’s doubtful she can be loved patiently into it.
Gifts to her won’t suffice, we know,
as we’ve been taxed, long-suffered and gone without.
One can’t help but imagine now, the ways of doing without Her.

Francisco-Luis White is an Afro-Latinx poet and storyteller living in the District of Columbia.

Nicole Callihan
Dear Gandhi—

You should see
how hungry we’ve become.
Last week, I watched
a man swallow
a woman whole, on live TV,
then belch, and rub his belly.
I sing America the Beautiful
ad nauseam in my head.
Is the belly that is rubbed
contained in the same body
as a heart? Are these words
the only flag I have left to wave?

Nicole Callihan‘s poems have appeared in PANK, Painted Bride Quarterly, PEN America, and as a Poem-a-Day for the Academy of American Poets. Find her on the web at www.nicolecallihan.com.

Risa Denenberg
When empires fail, it’s always

for the greater good
we have survived
on the enamel of the earth’s teeth

cataclysmic events on our watch
filch pints of enamel from the earth
for the greater good

hordes of refugees flood prairies
burst with children begging for a crust
of earth for the greater good

we have foolish faith
that a greater good awaits us
we are probably wrong

perhaps the greater good is humanity’s
extinction, for the good of the earth’s
crust, the enamel of our teeth

empires fail
it has always been so
it may be for the greater good

Risa Denenberg is the author of Whirlwind @ Lesbos (Headmistress Press, 2016), In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2014) and blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) She is a nurse practitioner working in HIV/AIDS care and end-of-life care. Risa is a moderator at The Gazebo, an online poetry board; reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing; and is an editor at Headmistress Press, a publisher of lesbian poetry. She lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington State.

Patricia Spears Jones
Good bourbon helps

And old songs sung well
By well hung song makers
Ah Leonard Cohen, you must have been
As smooth as the bourbon on my tongue tonight
Before the moon grew larger
And sirens blasted Brooklyn’s avenues
Wave after wave

On the streets of Portland, Denver, Chicago, New York
Detroit,—it feels like a Heat wave!
Combustion and courage—the ardent media watchers
Are loving the chaos they raised for ratings.

But lives are on the line. The “billionaire” and his bride
have entered the White House
But the cameras are off
So, what will the man with the very small hands do?

Martha Reeves full throttle voice could not make any of this
Better. Not the bourbon. Or the street marching. My students
Want him gone from their vision. Funny to think that a hip grandmother
Was more preferable to the young. They know that reality tv is hard work

For seconds of edited tape. This is reel time in real time and the star
Is not equipped to deal with the real world in whatever time is real.

So best to read about a red dwarf that has haunted Detroit since 1701.
American history is full of strange ghosts that linger at corners, near
Minefields, where a bridge meets the street.

Tonight I listen to “everybody knows” and “I am your man”
And remembered why I wanted to run away to join a rock & roll band

Youthful dreams are often conventional and silly, but the man’s sepulchral
Voice-bourbon, whiskey the smoke of tobacco’s sweet lore. Bards are handsome
Are they not?

Ah, two days and we hold ourselves up against the mindful anger
Of the privileged claiming victimhood. It is vengeance they seek, not justice.
It is vengeance they shall reap—their own kind slow dancing an opioid ballet.
Each day a misery held by that spoon and needle routine. Dreamless.

We hear those blasting sirens vibrate the moon.

Patricia Spears Jones is an African American poet, playwright, anthologist and cultural activist who lives in Brooklyn.  She is author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and seven other collections.  Her plays, commissioned by Mabou Mines, were presented in New York City.  She is a recipient of awards from the NEA, NYFA, the NY Community Trust and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a Pushcart Prize winner (finally). www.psjones.com.

Ed Madden
9th November 2016, The Gates

Bert’s up early, bringing in the boxes
from last night’s auction, detritus of someone’s life.
He shows me a painting, a street scene somewhere
in Philadelphia, warm with autumn light.
The table lot went cheap, all art, framed things.
The yard rustles with leaves, the trees shaking
their lives off in the dark—what they’ve been doing
all week, roots sunk deep for what’s to come.

The woman who bid against him told him she just
wanted the frames. That some of them were filled
with sketches, photos of Christo’s ephemeral work
only made his story more beautiful this morning
as he told it, as he unloaded the truck, the walk
brittle and ankle-deep in dead leaves.

Ed Madden is a professor of English and director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. He is also the poet laureate for the City of Columbia, SC. His most recent book is Ark, a memoir in poems about help with his father’s home hospice care in his last months with cancer.

Darienne Dickey
Chivalry Died of Unnatural Causes

The sign read Out of Order
and beside it formed a line of men
inching their way instead
toward the one that read Ladies. Like true gentlemen,
they steered me

to the front, Skip ahead,
but I insisted I’d wait my turn with them because
no, I wasn’t there first,
no, that’s not how equality worked,
no, this is not how any of this works.

Stumbling out, still forcing the prong of his belt
back into the leather strap, he saw me,
stuck his hand out to grab my
arm and said, Get up to the front, miss—
interpreted me pulling away as ungrateful.

Eyes hooded by the gaud of that bright red cap,
beard swirling around his mouth like razor wire,
too close, slicing his tongue as he spoke,
and he spat the blood into my face with the words
Fucking feminist.

I watch this bright red sea ripple in celebration,
imagine it oozing from those vicious sores in his mouth.
Out of Order hangs from Liberty’s torch,
yet I continue to stand in line behind men such
as him as they piss over my seat because

no, I’m not afraid of what they may leave behind.

Darienne Dickey received her B.A. in English Creative Writing, with a minor in Sociology, from Texas A&M University. She works as an Editorial Assistant for Callaloo, a literary and academic journal of African Diaspora arts and letters, and also serves as an Assistant Editor for Bartleby Snopes. She is an alumna of Texas A&M’s Black Box Writers Residency and was awarded the 2016 Charles Gordone Award for Undergraduate Poetry. Her work has appeared in The HIV Here & Now Project, The Eckleburg Project, The Albion Review, and Firewords Quarterly.

Mary Ellen Talley
Election Day

White pearls
around my neck
Red, white and blue pantsuit

My color scheme
is gray next day
Black pearls
around my neck

Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have most recently been published in Typoetic.us and Kaleidoscope as well as in recent anthologies, The Doll Collection, All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood, and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace. Her poetry has received a Pushcart Nomination. She has worked for many years with words and children as a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) in public schools in the state of Washington.