Rodney Terich Leonard
Oaken in the Midst: Bleak Update to Mr. Baldwin

Between sleet & hydrangeas
oaken in the midst.
James Arthur Baldwin—
woolen & cashmere
clarity & contradiction.

Ascot for attic work,
lotion upon the ashen,
Jimmy—
his hoot & language,
our maestro, mood & message.

Bleak update—
Systolic: America’s Bleeding Noon—
He swung & hit again.
His cash is middle-named John & hood:
May 1, 1989: New York Daily News
$85,000 full-page headline

“BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.
BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”
(Concerning The Central Park Five
Exonerated in 2014):
Maybe hate is what we need
if we’re gonna get something done.
To know well the beginning….

The scurrying & collisions—
This White House is dyspeptic.
A Youngstown woman oh no’s!:
He talks off the cuff like us. I’m tired of
suave and polished. I want my country back!

Exposed in a previous gale,
Texas legalized “same-sex” love:
Rachel and Nadine
Nesta and DaShawn. Still,

The unleavened sides of poet & poem
thin my stride & pen,
like PrEP-era barebacking
or another ominous trend.

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.

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Jackleen Holton
LIFE ON MARS

Our Curiosity has found organic molecules on Mars,
the building blocks of life, in a crater lake on Mars.

An app on my phone confirms the fiery light
among the stars, the dying and already-dead, is Mars.

But the pre-dawn moon’s a thin, white blade, the firmament
as lonely as its ever been. That tiny flame is Mars.

I once lived on a street named for Mars, the god of war.
Each night, another yellow window blazed with rage, on Mars.

And the other day, Jesus waved a red ball cap as his jacked-up truck
sped past, now that Main street’s changed its name to Mars.

Humankind, let’s build another ark and sail to that red orb
as soon as science tells us we can live on Mars.

Yes, in time we’ll wreck that, too, and then the next frontier
we colonize. Because we’re all children of the war god, Mars.

But scientists have discovered in the russet Martian dirt,
not proof of life just yet, but something carbon-based, on Mars.

And this candlelight before the day breaks into shards, a bit of hope
is what I need right now, even if it has to come from Mars.

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.

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Shana Ross
Mineralogy

Stibnite is where we get antimony
On earth, the crystals grow thin and clustered
Blue, if blue were colorless

Something like a dawn sky
Where the sun is not yellow, the sky is not blue
But raw sense talks to rational thought
Is scolded by emotional understanding and
Everyone comes to an unexpected conclusion
As the birds make swells of sound, their
Chirps swarm like bees moving hives.

I do not know how they make the decision to leave home
Or if it falls alone on the queen
It seems useful to ask
In case we ever become bees.

Shot into the sky and detonated
Antimony sparkles, reflecting fire,
Falls in arcs and sizzles until darkness reasserts.
We all sit on our blankets
Staring up and trusting
The show will stir things in us—
Like joy and wonder and I am not there
So I go to the museum and hunt
For the mineral, staring into the imperfect mirror
And take what I can get.

Call me when you find America
It’s hard to maintain
Sanity, hope, gravity, clean water, good boundaries
Under these conditions.
Am I devoted to a thing
Or the elements stripped from it
Until dichotomy itself is meaningless?

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.

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Katie Hartsock
Inaugural

Because we once consulted birds—in flight,
or a stomach sliced to show the ropes of words
its entrails spoke, or cacophonic chords
some lark sang, silhouetted in a pine

or strangled by a snake—on matters close
to the republic’s heart, and because those men
who took small knives to altars or hacked heaven
with their eyes were known as augurs, robed

in airy offices of augury,
the beginnings of things with futures bright and fair
we call inaugurations. The name declares
the omens good, assumes that we agree

they should be so, ignores whole histories
of auspices bad to the bone, when birds said “don’t.”
This too is old. The sacred chickens of ancient Rome
could thwart the will of senators, high priests,

and generals, depending how they ate
their scattered grains on divination days.
To refuse food was disapproval; to graze,
a nod of consent. In later years, if the state

could not endure a no, it was simple
to starve those hens, and get the go-ahead.
We don’t deny ourselves, don’t admit to bed
any love that’s too obedient.

Will you listen, and decode that cock’s gold crowing?
The hawk hunched by your bedroom window knows

you’ve made shit up to suit your purpose,
called the vault of evils that hoards hope hopeless.

Katie Hartsock is the author of the poetry collection Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse Press, 2016). Her work has most recently appeared in Ecotone, Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. She is an assistant professor of English at Oakland University, and lives in Ferndale, Michigan, with her husband, toddler son, and a new baby forthcoming this fall.

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Desiree Morales
Calpurnia in Tejas

Two thousand children
in the tented desert.
By then you’re past
tense. Hysterical
is a word that sometimes
gets used here.
Listen, I read about minority stress
and frankly they should call
them micro-murders.
I tell my heart to behave.
Amygdala sharpens a knife.
Listen, there are already
mass graves in Tejas, unearthed
years before this panic. By the time
it’s the truth the truth
is already ashes in your mouth.
I tell my heart—but you can’t force
the heart.
Amygdala on a short leash.
How long before—Listen.
What you fear will happen has
already happened. I didn’t
want to be right, but
here we are.

Desiree Morales‘s work has appeared in What Rough Beast, Truck: I35 Creativity Corridor, and Conflict of Interest. She is a poet and educator living in Austin, Texas.

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J.Bradley
The Ribcage Recognizes Patterns and Yet Keeps Ignoring Them

Love is a circle, you say
as this week’s want caresses
one neck after the other.

You wait for him to sleep
before you skitter into his bathroom.
You catalog his faults, plan
for the right escape, the one
where you are a corpse
waiting for the right kiss
to reanimate you.

J. Bradley is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbooks Neil (Five Quarterly, 2015) and No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He received his MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.

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CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
You Have To Be Wealthy In Order To Be Great

You Have To Be Wealthy In Order To Be Great

I like to tell people it’s hard to get rich,
but it’s even harder to fill your body cavity
with golf balls and sell them to foreign
heads of state at exorbitant prices. It all
depends on alignment of dimples, learning
to hold clubs in your mouth without
chewing. You don’t get wealthy by accident.
It’s takes a lot of grit to flatter someone
on Monday, and then on Tuesday, feed them
to the cylindrical grinding machine I keep
in my luxury penthouse suite. That’s how I
achieved greatness. First, I’m rich. Second,
I’m entirely coated in plutonium. Third,
I’ve accumulated quite a collection of slightly
used penny loafers which I sell for very
reasonable prices at the Penny Loafers
Emporium. Come on down! Off I-34 by
the Shoney’s. My brother owns that Shoney’s.
He says kids under 5 eat free. Every Christmas
at Mother’s I try to tell him: no one eats free.

CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World. Recent work appears in The Arkansas Review, Contrary, and Barrelhouse. He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com
and, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven

Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press, and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” -New York Times) of Washington, D.C.

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Rodney Terich Leonard
Concessions

“Sorry, Miss Jackson”
—Outkast

Defeat is personal;
limber hallelujahs
lift heavy burdens.

Eyes, fit for purple & further trough
gaze unravel—
sheep headed to a bad market.

Hillary, hurt sister,
where haven’t we been?
Amid unwelcome wind

slow grind & two-step
let us slide electric & salsa
drop-it & wobble while we wail.

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.

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Jackleen Holton
ALLEGIANCE

The windows of the bank tower mirror us,
bodies elongated like shadows, moving
uptown with the current. At the stoplight, a hawk

emerges from the dark corridor between apartment
buildings, alights on an overflowing bin. The trash
collectors have been on strike for three weeks.

From behind dark sunglasses, I gaze on the faces
of the street people as they pass, their need held out
like empty cans. His cardboard folded up in one hand,

white mermaid cup in the other, a man crosses
the street, makes his way to his island. Today, the sign
might say Vietnam Vet or Anything Helps. Under his flannel,

he probably wears a black t-shirt with the word Jesus.
The other night in my car, waiting for the green arrow,
the same guy ambled toward me, silent but for that white

word afloat in the dark, and I knew, because James Taylor
had just sung that very name, that my luck would turn around
if only I could find something to give before the light changed.

And the pair walking toward me now, his downcast eyes, a cigarette
caught in her spidery lips, yank my mind back to a childhood
cul-de-sac, our neighbors a young mom and her gawky,

learning-disabled kid, the tender way they had with each other
its own language, their small house an island of refuge in a world
not built for either of them. Remembering this, I want not to fail

another small, critical test. I stop, dive into my purse,
come up with just one crumpled bill, hold out my offering.
But they’ve already gone past. The foot traffic surges

around me as if I’m an island against progress,
an ocean of sunglasses mirroring a lost woman waving
the little green flag of her country at half-mast.

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.

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Shana Ross
Red Barns

There was a time before paint.
Oil and iron mixed will shield

Wood from weather.

Iron on its own was strength at too high a price;
Oil worked tenderly into thirsty planks
Lent vulnerability and endurance but
No protection. No one thing withstands
Time, sun, wind but in combination –

Barns turn red, blood dries black,
Best to rust in layer after layer

We paint them now, and it looks
The same but nothing is
Built with the same conviction
That we will pass these on to our children.

Gardens are planted by people who have faith in the future
But there are those who bank on seeding
Their own harvest and harvesters and would rather salt the earth
Than feed an unimaginable future

I woke up one morning in Ohio farmland and the fog
Was too thick to see the driveway, much less the road;
Where do you come from, to feel like this in the face of the uncanny?

I don’t understand you,
The fear lodged in you like shrapnel
Working its way ever closer to your heart.

In the time before barns themselves
Old men planted trees
Not to shape the future but to repay the past.

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.

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