Barbara Reynolds
The Allegation: 1991, 2018

Peaking from her lips
like a solitary drop
from an unfiltered faucet,
a limpid bold bead
trembling on the brink
of pronouncement,
it plunges, pursued
by a brackish surge
that swallows it whole.

Barbara Reynolds teaches and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking and is an adjunct professor at Lesley University’s Graduate School of Education. Her poems have appeared in Avocet, Weekly Avocet, What Rough Beast, and are forthcoming in the Muddy River Poetry Review.
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Quintin Collins
Angry While Black

I would like my anger to live in the world as your anger does. Reasonably, with expectations that it doesn’t make me who I am.
—Hanif Abdurraqib

The day after Charlottesville, where white supremacists marched
through America yet again, when I heard there were good people
on all sides, you told me I was too angry. You told me
I was taking it too seriously and needed to relax
when neo-Nazi flags and tiki torches bobbled in procession.
When racism lockstepped on my social media timelines,
you didn’t know white boys chased my mother to bus stops,
pelted her with rocks. You didn’t know another one slung
nigger out a car window once when I walked into work.

I say this plainly: With opportunity, they would shoot me
in the face. Don’t you dare try to silence me

when daily, I am cornered. I will elevate my voice
until every room edge has felt my echoes. I will churn
the tornado in my mouth until it scrapes this country clean.

Quintin Collins has works that have appeared or are forthcoming in Threshold, Glass Mountain, Eclectica, Transition, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program, Quintin is a managing editor at a digital marketing agency, where he publishes writing craft blogs. If Quintin were to have one extravagance, it would be a personal sommelier to give him wine pairings for books.

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Thomas Brush
OUTTAKES

Take out the dirty clouds, forget the missed connections,
Who was early, who was late doesn’t matter any more
Than the shame of the god of make-believe who brought us
Here where we don’t want to be, waiting for another take
On this sagging sound stage of rust and regret, repeating lines
As weightless as the smoke shrouding the wooden horizon, under cover
Of the last green sky, last lure of oblivion,
Last heart-shaped birthmark, sometimes
Red, sometimes bruise blue,
That we carry like a guilty secret, like a director’s cut,
A rehearsal for this life
Or the next.

Thomas Brush has published in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Tar River Poetry, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His books, all from Lynx House Press, are GOD’S LAUGHTER, August 2018, OPEN HEART, 2015, and LAST NIGHT, winner of the Lynx House Prize, in 2012.

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Chad Parenteau
Tom Brady Jesus

Tom Brady Jesus
lauded the last supper
as a team effort.

Tom Brady Jesus
holds balls soft enough
to not give him stigmata.

Tom Brady Jesus
can’t be our savior
if he keeps passing on the cross.

Tom Brady Jesus
wants one more time
in the temples, one more ring
from the moneylenders.

Tom Brady Jesus
wants you to keep his
prayers to ourselves
in his gridiron chapel.

Tom Brady Jesus
wants you to stand
for all four quarters.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus, released in 2013 by FootHills Publishing. His work has appeared in Tell-Tale Inklings, What Rough Beast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Heather Truett
Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood
wrapped in police tape.
Her body’s a crime scene.

Little Red went for one
little walk and the Wolf
caught her, of course.

Little bruises on her neck,
gray fur under her fingernails,
and one cop says,

“Little girls shouldn’t be dressed
so provocatively. Did you see
the color of that velvet cape?”

Little drops of blood trickle
from the wolf’s broken nose,
and he threatens to press charges.

“Little Red attacked me,” he says.
“I’m not really all that bad a beast.
I come from a very good family.”

Little baseball players on trophies
in a case behind the wolf when he
is interviewed. Think about his future.

Little tears ballooning on her face,
and that red cape was a waving invitation,
the girl a bullfighter with no prize.

Little Red wrapped in a blanket, tucked
inside a hospital room, all alone, while
the world decides the wolf is her victim.

Heather Truett is a writer, a mother, and a somewhat heretical pastor’s wife. Her credits include: The Mom Egg, Vine Leaves Literary, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Panoply Zine, and the Young Adult Review Network.

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Mary Honaker
THE KAVANAUGH DEBATE

The woman dissects herself carefully,
picks each jellied trauma out with tweezers,
arranges them on a table, labels them.

“I know this is hard to see,” she says,
“For years, I didn’t want to show you.
But I promise this is important.”

All across the country women feel the scalpel,
feel their bodies pried open
and held open with a vise: pulsing

within them the nights they’d forgotten,
promised themselves didn’t matter,
promised their husbands they’d gotten over.

I shouldn’t have to tell you this hurts.
Numb faced, their bodies open bird cages,
the women slog through the days.

Some men are afraid. They see these adult faces
and are curveballed back into their youth,
slam into the event like a ball in a mitt,

dust flying up at the force of impact.
They see her face, elven in its youth, and see
these grown grotesque pageants of living death,

and they do the math. Some of them will point and laugh,
howling, saying, “What a weak display! What a lie!”
These words insert new pins in the tacked-down

lumps of flesh. They write new labels over the old, pin them
all over the first woman, but every woman feels
the stick. Days go on like this.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Lake, and elsewhere. Mary Ann holds a BA in philosophy from West Virginia University, a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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Sarah Caulfield
The Tower Upright

You’re gonna go far, kid. We can all see it, we’ve all got eyes;
We’ll follow you, eyelashes flickering like needles as you duck and weave,
keeping our distance when you slip in the blood.
Go on. A little faster this time, please. A little more coherent this time, please.
We’re enjoying the show. You’re making history by being alive. One more time.
It’s not easy getting ahead. Ignore the corpses underfoot, the curlicue of the
ribs around your
ankles. Think of it as calligraphy. Think of it as motivation. They didn’t want it
as much as you do.
It’s a jungle out there. It’s a battlefield. It’s a rat race.
Don’t worry. That’s just a metaphor. The rats all left this ship long ago. You’re safe here.
You’re gonna go far, kid. You’re gonna be aces.
We just have to get you out of this place.

Sarah Caulfield is the author of Spine (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Lavender Review, Voicemail Poems, The Griffin, and The Mays (XXIV). She has lived in the UK, Poland and Germany, and currently lives in Japan.

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R.J. Keeler
Meaning Has No Matter Outside of Sound
After The Emperor of Ice-Cream
—Wallace Stevens

Strike out sequential consonants,
Waste lorn fricatives, and permit them swage
Any remainders through rusted radiators.
Let heroics meld in solemn somnambulance
As cause for epitaphs written in Esperanto
And pegged to next year’s purposeless sins.
Let metadiscourse and disfluencies abound.
Meaning has no matter outside of sound.
Lay onto the parchment of peaches,
Dense by arrhythmic inclines, those words
Troubling for ears in refuse to connect,
And conspire them to mock epics of size.
If their pseudonyms obtrude, the better
To hide warrior from clown, and forbore.
Let the autotelic message dumbfound.
Meaning has no matter outside of sound.

R.J. Keeler was born St. Paul, Minnesota. He lived in the jungles of Colombia, S.A., up to age twelve. He holds a BS Mathematics from NCSU, an MS Computer Science from UNC, an MBA from UCLA, and a Certificate in Poetry from UW. HE is an Honorman, U.S. Naval Submarine School, and “SS” (Submarine Service) qualified. He was awarded a Vietnam Service Medal, Honorable Discharge. He has received a Whiting Foundation Experimental Grant, and is part of P&W’s Directory of Poets and Writers. He has been published in Ploughshares, VMI Beachcomber, Oak Literay Magazine, Typishly, and Deluge Literary and Arts Journal, among others. R.J. Does not subscribe to the cattle-prod paradigm of poetry. He may tend to melancholy, and believes Humor trumps everything. His collection “Detonation” will be published in December.

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Quintin Collins
Dear White People, Don’t Ask Us How to Stop It

Don’t ask us to undrown / brown faces saltwater-bloated / across the Atlantic. We were born with mouths / full of cotton and police tape. Don’t ask us to speak / wisdom on how to un-Jim Crow our bodies. Our words / ghosted in grandparents asking why / their grandchildren, children asking why their parents / fear them walking in blue / moonlight in too-white neighborhoods. / We’re too busy keeping our skin / from fertilizing gravestones. We’re too occupied / with peeling back our hoods to police / perceptions. Don’t ask us how to undead / those noose-necked. Ask these boughs / how they bowed to bear our bodies. Ask the body / camera playbacks of children chalked-outlined. Ask the immortalized / and memorialized martyrs, Twitter hashtags, protester- / choked traffic that transfigures names / into monuments. Ask nigger / as it toes your tongue’s edge. Ask the melanin / bleached and burned. Ask the skin. Ask ashes / of every black church set ablaze. Ask torches, / Confederate flags, Nazi patch parades in our streets. / Our hands are too caked in coffin splinters to bury / more of these bones. If you still don’t know / how to stop racism, ask yourself.

Quintin Collins has works that have appeared or are forthcoming in Threshold, Glass Mountain, Eclectica, Transition, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Solstice MFA program, Quintin is a managing editor at a digital marketing agency, where he publishes writing craft blogs. If Quintin were to have one extravagance, it would be a personal sommelier to give him wine pairings for books.

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Zoe Canner
the worst in modern history

boldly untrue/beside the point/
fifty-eight and forty-nine are

both horrific/as are five and
one/i am not a counter/formica

smooth yellow tile/tacky granite/
i am not a counter/number of

casualties/any human harming
another human’s body on purpose

is preposterous/the hysterical
rendering of numbers tallied to

get our attention/speaks to an
assumption of complacency with

gun violence and the normalization
of talking points and ad psychology

prevalence/people who kill people
who kill people who kill people

Zoe Canner is an angry, anti-racist, 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivor. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Naugatuck River Review, The Laurel Review, and Arcturus of the Chicago Review of Books. She is an alumna of CalArts, Directors Lab West, and The Home School. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance.

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