Jane McPhetres-Johnson
WATCHING THINGS UNFOLD

Folding laundry, napkins, whooping cranes
saving paper bags in slow folded meditation
fold a poem in pleats from its top to be told
where thinking ends and poetry unfolds.

Fold as shelter to bring sheep, hollow among
hills, place where we belong. See rivers ribbon
fold on fold. So lava flowed, now stone is cold
in hardened folds. Doeskin, thin, so softly folds.

Fold diapers to fit babies folded to fit wombs
cribs, laps, arms enfold. In red, black, rusty gold
behold big unearthed earthen pots to hold old
bones in fetal folds, along with stories long untold.

Daily the world’s worst fears unfold. Protections
fold. Farms, schools, clinics fold. Dreamers fold
in pray-er mode in airless packed conveyor holds.
Copy-catenated crimes we scold in centerfolds.

Our dreams fooled, our nightmares foaled, our
demons we had hidden in deep mental folds, now
faceless identical dolls unfold so paper-thin, so
folioed, they hold each other’s tiny hands in folds.

Jane McPhetres Johnson was born, raised, and educated on the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, migrated north to the Wyoming Big Horns, and recently landed on the eastern side of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. She completed the Goddard MFA under the care of Stephen Dobyns and Thomas Lux the same week her younger son was born, named him Ben Jo(h)nson, then dreamed up programming for public libraries until she finally got arrested at the George W. Bush White House and quit her library work to look for a more effective, affective voice. Always she has practiced the 3 Rs––Reading, wRiting, and Revision–– but seldom has taken the next alphabetical leap to Submission. Recently, however, her poems are venturing out to become verbal expressions of the Munch-kin “Scream” in the face of militarism, exploitation, and the sad insanity of corporate lemmingism. Her poem “Growing up beside the Continental Divide” was first published on Indolent Book’s series What Rough Beast, March 4, 2017, and then went to Washington in the “Not My Prez” anthology.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Virginia Barrett
Sailing to D.C.

In the sea of these blind
eyes the lying boats
launch: a race across
albatross-skies. What is

vision aimed at the horizon
line? Earth is an orb of
surging insight—the waves
of justice weep. All this talk

thick with salt; drop these
sails . . . the tangled
rigging fails. Shinny
up the mast to sight

our land.

Virginia Barrett’s books of poetry include Between Looking (forthcoming, 2019 from Finishing Line Press), Crossing Haight, and I Just Wear My Wings. Barrett is the editor of two anthologies of contemporary San Francisco poets including OCCUPY SF—poems from the movement. Her work has most recently appeared in the Writer’s Chronicle, Narrative, Roar: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People, Ekphrastic Review, Weaving the Terrain (Dos Gatos Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). She received a 2017 writer’s residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, NM. Her chapbook, Stars By Any Other Name, was a semi-finalist for the Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press, 2017. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Quintin Collins
The Data Says America Burns

The data slithered through the umbilical cord. It breached
the placenta, foretold floods of misfortune in the amniotic fluid.
Kicking and screaming, the data met light. My mother

swaddled a decimal point latched to her breast, infant body
cupped like a comma curved between digits. When I was a toddler,
the data dismantled an electrical outlet. It was curious how the world worked.
Older data knew already, so it burned Los Angeles for five days
while I said my first sentences. The data started counting

and stopped when I was six. My grandfather smoked cigarettes
until statistics smothered his lungs with tumors. This time, Florida

went up in flames. One summer evening, everything black
but security lights, the data struck a match, lit a cigar,
and handed it to my father. My mother
said it was a gift from friends at my birth. The data
spiraled from the glowing tip like smoke, my father a shadow

in the dark. In school, teachers warned about the data.
Some students already had mouths full of percent signs. Their tongues
clicked like tickers. When I met those kids on the wrong block
on the wrong day, the data kept a knee on my spine. Cincinnati smoldered,

and then America crackled on a jet fuel bonfire.
Wasn’t it always embers? Wasn’t it always Oakland?
The data thought so and slipped a few figures

into my palm when I turned twenty-one: Florida incinerated
again, the flames found new kindling, crawled from Ferguson to Cleveland
to New York to North Charleston to Baltimore to Waller County to Falcon Heights.
One in every, two in every, three in every, four in every—the data

spilled tens and hundreds and thousands and millions into streets.
At twenty-seven, I talked with my wife about counting down from nine,
and a statistic said, “Remember, I rode shotgun when cops stopped you

in Chicago.” In California, a new blaze sparked in Sacramento,
and I tried to tally the tip of each flame.

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Rodney Terich Leonard
Aphorism

A bull
will need
his tail
to fan flies
out of his ass
for more than
one summer.

Rodney Terich Leonard is the founder of the Harlem Artists Salon which showcases writers, scholars, musicians and visual artists at various career levels. Mr. Leonard is a poet, essayist and the founder of the R.T. Leonard Salon, a lifestyle and aesthetics consultancy. An independent art dealer, Leonard’s literary works and profiles have been featured in The Red River Review, Margie,The Huffington Post, Callaloo, The New York Times, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys..(edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.q

Jackleen Holton
I TAKE THE FACEBOOK QUIZ: WHICH DEADLY SIN ARE YOU?

which is another waste of perfectly good daylight,
much like the last quiz I took: Which Brady Bunch Character
Are You? When I knew damn well I was Jan,
though the dumb, Jan-like hope that I might, after all, emerge
as Marcia kept me clicking through the inane questions

as brain cells trickled slowly through an invisible hourglass,
just as they do now, as I find myself driven by a secret desire
to be lust, or perhaps wrath. But by question three—
Would I rather watch honey slowly dripping from a waxy comb
or witness two chinchillas fucking?—I know where this is heading.

And the fact I’m even taking this test as opposed to stuffing
hot pockets in my face, listening to Slayer, or fucking,
probably means that, yes, I am sloth. But because I damn well know
that I am sloth, I continue hovering my mouse over the multiple choice
answers while the bills pile up, and those annoying emails

with their little red missiles keep popping onto my screen,
while our democracy trickles away by the minute, and I know I should
be protesting or calling my legislators, or at the very least posting
something in outrage instead of slogging through
these mildly enjoyable inquiries. But yes, I do love

black and white movies that take a fortnight to arrive at a plot twist.
And it goes without saying that the video of a snowy owl
floating on cloud-like ice floes is all I need imagine of heaven,
and I might just watch that again, though the kitchen faucet’s
still dripping as the quiz comes to an end, revealing that, yes, I am sloth.

So I Google sloth, because that’s where this leisurely train is heading,
and I find the soft, brown animal of my deadly sin staring me in the face, a slow
smile playing at the corners of its mouth, the tiniest glimmer of light emanating
from molasses-colored eyes while the hourglass of this trickling-away world
makes only a faintly audible sound like a dripping tap in the background.

Jackleen Holton‘s poems have been published in journals including North American Review, Poet Lore, and RHINO Poetry, online venues such as Rattle’s Poets Respond, Poets Reading the News, and Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, and the anthology Not My President.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Shana Ross
Modern Motherhood

This is not a song of comfort
Only a plain heaviness;
I know you are looking for
Silver linings, hope uncovered.

Not every stone can be polished, turned
Until you find the angle where light flashes.
Some are meant to be swallowed whole
This fact, its implications, the weight of words
Should stay in your belly.

When I meet my son’s teachers
The first question I ask myself
Is whether this person is willing
To die for my child, if it comes to that.

Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with a BA and MBA from Yale University. Her writing career has been dormant for 18 years for reasons both practical and best discussed in therapy. This decade, her work has been published in Anapest Journal, SHANTIH Journal, and Writers Resist.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Irene Cooper
Site

In basements
we wrenched lungs

of laundry detergent
and soot
Look

there’s no sense
now

wagging our
forked livers
at our shame

and its con-
stituents

(the joists of us
warp under
the weight

clarity we carry
like a pane of

glass between us
filmed soapy

and slipped
through baby
fingers)

we salvaged
the frame

let’s rest
our gaze on
some open field

Irene Cooper’s poems have appeared in the Oregon Poetry Association anthology, Verseweavers, as well as in Indolent Books’ anthology, Poems in the Aftermath, on the online project What Rough Beast, in The Feminist Wire, and in Utterance: A Journal. She is a freelance copywriter and essayist, fledgling novelist, and co-editor of The Stay Project, which explores and encourages artistic impulse in the current political moment.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Austin Davis
The 2nd Civil War

I’m sitting on my best friend’s girlfriend’s couch
in that weird place between drunk and sober
where I’ve drank too much to say I’m tipsy
but not enough to be throwing couch cushions.

Maybe I forgot to take any anxiety pills
this morning, or maybe my imagination
is even more alive after a couple beers,
but I feel like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Stop Dave. Stop Dave. I am afraid. I am afraid Dave.”

Everyone is dancing, pushing each other into lamps and walls,
and I’m staring at the door, waiting for a murderous clown
to knock and offer us pizza like that old SNL skit with the landshark,
except in this version he’d probably be holding a gun from Walmart.

Drake would drop from the room. Shirtless Dan
would burp a couple times and fall to the kitchen floor.
The red solo cups would lose their capitalist glow
and the horror movie clown would announce to the whole party

that Trump had just signed off on The Purge
by blasting us all to oblivion us until all that’s left
is the slam of the front door, the step of boots on concrete,
a soft wheeze as our lungs fill with blood,
and the last bottle spilling all over the carpet.

Maybe I just need to sleep it off.
Maybe it’s time to go to bed. Maybe
I’ll wake up tomorrow morning
with a headache and an intense craving
for kung pao chicken. Or maybe
I’ll blink and all my friends will be dead.

Austin Davis is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist from Mesa, Arizona. Austin’s poetry has been widely published in literary journals and magazines, both in print and online. Most recently, Austin’s work can be found in Pif Magazine, Ink in Thirds, Folded Word, The Poetry Shed, In Between Hangovers, One Sentence Poems, and Tuck Magazine. Austin’s first chapbook, The Moon and Her Ocean, was published in 2017 by Fowlpox Press. Cloudy Days, Still Nights, Austin’s first full length book of poetry, was published in May, 2018 from Moran Press.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Jane McPhetres-Johnson
THE OTHER POEM: 2016
The Brexit, The Donald, & The Dreamers
Today they say our world
markets are in free-fall and
the union has broken apart
because the leavers voted
to leave and the remainders
united in loss. Leaving is
catching on, uncoupling is
all the rage, while the winners
actually believe they can
put everything back again
between the faded lines and
just as it was when the reds
were red, the whites white
and the bluebloods undiluted
by those who muddy the pure
and muddle the words, work
for nothing at jobs we don’t
want until they’re the ones on
top. The remainders. The voters
to leave. The other others out.

Jane McPhetres Johnson was born, raised, and educated on the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, migrated north to the Wyoming Big Horns, and recently landed on the eastern side of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. She completed the Goddard MFA under the care of Stephen Dobyns and Thomas Lux the same week her younger son was born, named him Ben Jo(h)nson, then dreamed up programming for public libraries until she finally got arrested at the George W. Bush White House and quit her library work to look for a more effective, affective voice. Always she has practiced the 3 Rs––Reading, wRiting, and Revision–– but seldom has taken the next alphabetical leap to Submission. Recently, however, her poems are venturing out to become verbal expressions of the Munch-kin “Scream” in the face of militarism, exploitation, and the sad insanity of corporate lemmingism. Her poem “Growing up beside the Continental Divide” was first published on Indolent Book’s series What Rough Beast, March 4, 2017, and then went to Washington in the “Not My Prez” anthology.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Joyce Schmid
Shriek

Suddenly, I hear the scream of a small animal
the cat has caught and dragged off by the neck—

the squirrel who used to eat our apricots and run
in circles round the fruitless mulberry.

Who could understand the last despair of animals?
Tell your senator it’s time to vote

against the fisherman who throws the fish back in,
its mouth still bleeding. The fisherman believes

he’s merciful. And yet the state of nature is so natural.
Imagine if a fish could scream. Who could understand?

What is the translation of a scream?

Joyce Schmid‘s recent work has appeared in Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Riverfeet Press Anthology, and other journals and anthologies. Joyce has live in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of over half a century.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.