Katie Hartsock
The Gall

Don’t do it, a voice goads
in the tragedies,
but they do.

It could have been as simple
as not walking on a carpet,
not putting on a coat.

Agamemnon crushes purple raiments,
dyed with spiny murex from the sea,
a path of splendor Clytemnestra

lays before his feet,
saying don’t overthink it,
my lord. My homecoming king.

Deianeira sees the girl
her husband has brought home
and anoints Hercules’ robe

with long-dried clots of blood and black gall
a blue-balled centaur gave her
as he died from the hero’s arrow.

A love-charm, he’d said,
for him. Just in case,
pretty face. She sends the garment off, posthaste,

then sees the tuft of wool from a rich-fleeced sheep
she’d wiped it down with
crumble into wine-red foam, seething.

Theseus is all man
the way he thinks a man should be,
but the mysteries

reverse him, dressed in a dress
and rouge and a wig, swinging his hips
to decapitation. Buyer be wearing

a god’s revenge, big as teased hair.
And the princess,
the princess of Corinth,

she wants Jason’s ex and kids kicked out.
Medea sends the children
with a gift, a finely woven robe

and diadem of beaten gold,
all darkened by the arts
of her old world.

Before the princess puts them on,
before she admires herself thus attired and the dear
loveliness of her legs

in the mirror, before the flames invade
her flesh falling
off like pitch from a pine torch,

before she begs her sceptered father to do something
and her fire sticks to him
like horror’s own glue,

before they die together
like ivy suckered to a log
and the messenger observes

that the rich
might be lucky but guess what
they’re never blessed,

before all that,
she accepts the offered present
from the cake stand of the children’s hands.

She smiles, pleased as Medea
said she would be, and releases both boys
from that morning’s decree, sentencing them to exile.

They can stay.
Jason hugs all three. Go say goodbye forever
to your mother, now. She’s packing to leave.

Note:
I wrote this poem after Melania Trump visited children separated from their parents at the border in June 2018; as she boarded the plane, the back of her coat read, “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?” It got me thinking about instances in Greek tragedy when someone wore something they definitely shouldn’t have.

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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Alexis Quinlan
A few of the words

Here’s some language: sweet land, liberty.
Here’s a location we call mine. The mind.

Here’s a famous river in the back of the lot
just past the original song. Rocky banks

risky slope. Follow it north, pilgrim,
to where it runs at a trickle. Keep

going. The philosopher calls nationalism
irrational – sweet land sweet song –

but they made a word for it.

Here’s more: map, theft, savage.
Rage at the geographer, sweet. Here’s

a graveyard round which our freedom rings.
One day we’ll know what has happened.

Sweet sweet land. We will know again (mind)
(mine). Mighty is the word for that river,

ours. We will leap into its sparkling, easy
bobbing to its source, called Lake Itasca,

a name engineered to sound Indian
by way of Latin—veritas, caput.

Whose truth, whose head? Kaput.
We will change the name.

Note:
The lake regarded as the headwaters of the Mississippi
was known as Omashkoozo-zaagai’igan (Elk Lake) in Ojibwe.
In 1832, Henry Schoolcraft renamed it Lake Itasca by
combining Veritas (L.) truth and Caput (L.) head.

((((a name a white guy coined to sound Indian

Alexis Quinlan‘s most recent poetry chapbook, an admission, is a warning against the value of our conclusions [Exit Strata/The Operating System 2013] comprises a series of interventions on and responses to Freud’s essay, “Mourning and Melancholia.” More poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Drunken Boat, Rhino, Tinderbox, Juked, and Madison Review. She works as an adjunct English teacher at Fordham University.

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Sean Mahoney
On the Luxury of Saying What I Feel

Bumblebee sipping from one Morning Glory before moving on…

It’s after Mother’s Day and I shudder at what we’ve let happen
to the country she grew up in. We let skin create graft and free
pass and monopoly. We allowed for collateral distraction
as entertainment. We created mergers and corporate personages.
Easy ‘cop’ outs. Comfortable lobby spume. We fettered our private
lives and socialized our pains and aches. We walked, cautiously,
just to the store across the street while someone remained at home
wondering if they would ever see us alive again. We swallowed

Trimmed branches of a super seedy lemon variety with large…

the echo and the chamber. We swallowed truths and forgot how
to regurgitate. And the bitter pills we suppositoried, believing
their eventual dissolution would spare our throats the anguish
of shock and awe. We believed sophomorically treaty and pact
wrought in the sweat of people created brotherhoods. We believed
that arrangements were what sets of parents had with each other

Barbs, and finches darting up to the roof out front behind blinds…

and that that was their business. We would never raise an eyebrow
at the sanctity of their union, the profundity of their labor. And we
never leveled as a dis the fact that ‘she persisted’; for that is indeed
what mom did – literally for years – as well as in the grander scheme
and in refutation of troll-bait memes where mom inhabited the role
as protector of all her babes, using climate and warming as weapons.

And pane of the dining room window and all jiggles on the face…

We allowed for human beings being shot by itch or polemical
inner intuition. We allowed for our ovaries to be manipulated
and tokenized and for our testicles to generally create that special
kind of chaos boys routinely swine in. What carries this country for-
ward with its arrogant swagger? And what if, by writing any or all
of me, a retooled AUMF S.J. 59 enables this one or the next in another

Of the water in the vase holding a single, bare stemmed peach rose…

2 years to spin me away in dark ‘detention’ indefinitely? This is not
my mom’s country. This land is colder. Much colder. More vacuous
with bubbles, less nutrient-nourishing womb. But mom finds pockets,
tiny isles, and perhaps that is enough for now she says rocking me asleep.

Bumblebee sipping from one Morning Glory before moving on
Trimmed branches of a super seedy lemon variety with large
Barbs, and finches darting up to the roof out front behind blinds
And glass of the dining room window and all jiggles on the face
Of the water in the vase holding a single, bare stemmed peach rose

An idea of new building,
of scratching one’s way up,
of suffering repeated stings,
is simply not enough love.

Sean J Mahoney lives with his wife, her mother, two Uglydolls, and three dogs in Santa Ana, California. He works in geophysics. He believes in salsa, dark chocolate, and CBD. Sean helped create to the Disability Literature Consortium (www.dislitconsortium.wordpress.com) and co-edited the first 3 volumes of the MS benefit anthology Something On Our Minds.

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Kazimieras M. Campe
Midnight Special

This train trundles in darkness,
heedless of madness riding within.

This one is not bound for glory.
All aboard are not all aboard.

This train runs on unafraid of waking
those asleep in graves by the tracks.

Kazimieras M. Campe is a retired engineer whose poetry has appeared in Potomac Review, Metropolitain, Bitterroot, and Hot Calaloo. He lives in Maryland.

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Laura Page
Sea Kittens

Their feet among the billows, know
That Ocean is a mighty harmonist — Wordsworth

Kittens were washing up on the beach.
I had been thinking in this dream
of something I’d read somewhere about waves,
how many in the sky peel, how few see the shore,
and Wordsworth’s singing ones,
drawing their hips up, begging with the vast depths, speaking
to a lighthouse, or kissing any woman’s bare feet.
I was kneeling when they came, the kittens,
as small and blind as newly born, tabbied with kelp.
I don’t know if I was praying.
I only knew the sea had answered with unseeing, half-
drowned mammals, impossible to rescue.

Laura Page is a poet and artist from the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, The Indianapolis Review, TINGE, and others. Her chapbook, “epithalamium,” was the winner of Sundress Publications’ 2017 chapbook competition. Laura is the editor of the poetry journal, Virga.

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Chad Parenteau
Stormy Daniels Jesus

Stormy Daniels Jesus
wants to make a deal
with the authorities.

Stormy Daniels Jesus
really sees herself
in the part of Judas.

Stormy Daniels Jesus
wants the silver
but will not consent
to self-asphyxiation.

Stormy Daniels Jesus
settles for the Magdalene role,
but with less stoning.

Stormy Daniels Jesus
isn’t sacrificing
anything for you.

Stormy Daniels Jesus
would rather you see her next show
than watch her ascend.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as Associate Editor of Oddball Magazine.

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Richard Morrison
Texas

from the shivering possum
to the cowering hawk

the distraught
mother going off on the CNN reporter

the family disappeared
in their van as it’s swept up

and sinks in the dark rising
water there is too much

pain and strife and suffering
for all this innocence

lost unfathomable
mediated terror explodes

forsaken plants bloom
on the chemical horizon

The Poet Writes: This poem, written in response to Hurricane Harvey (but before Maria hit Puerto Rico later in the season), seems to resonate in terms of the larger issues of climate change, environmental deregulation, and the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border.

Richard Morrison’s poems have appeared  in Provincetown Arts and Christopher Street, among other publications. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University (1991) and currently serves as editorial director for Fordham University Press.

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James Diaz
Gunshot Won’t Fix It

my friend takes us down the road in his truck a little too fast
talking about doing himself in

me, I’m still wanting to live

calls me on x-mas eve
says he’s cradling a shotgun
and some dark thoughts
to which I say “I’m coming over,
you shouldn’t be alone right now”,

he’s awful hard on himself
as if getting clean
isn’t in fact one of the bravest things
he’s ever done

I try hard to build him back up
you must have been worn down like this before
to know how much it matters that we at least try
to stop a compromised tree from falling

throw love at least as hard as you’ve thrown hate
when you get that call
say “i’m coming over,”
even if the ride back almost kills you.

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and editor of the forthcoming anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma (Anti-Heroin Chic Press, 2018). In 2016 he founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and Prison/confinement. He resides in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. He has never believed in anything as strongly as he does the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life.

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Lisa DeSiro
Home

What do we mean when we say make yourself at home?
We settle down someplace and then we call that home.

The refugee and immigrant know about home.
Sighting land when lost at sea, they shouted Home!

After a journey miles and miles and miles, let home
be those who welcome us when we get home.

Home is where we most belong, is where we fit. Home
is where the heart is. Do those words hit home,

traveller? Door always open, never shut: home
is the feeling you have nowhere else but home.

Lisa DeSiro is the author of the poetry collectionsHer publications include Labor (Nixes Mate, 2018) and Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, 2017), as well as several poems in journals and anthologies. She works for a non-profit organization and is an assistant editor for Indolent Books. She is also a freelance accompanist.  Read more at thepoetpianist.com.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Medusa’s Broken Sonnet

What is the meta for? I’ve got a blue-
skied view to soothe my brain, days when I look
up from hunch and shuffle of everyday.
Night air punctuated by owls and howls
of packs of coyotes. Moon a sliver—
Limestone under me shifts its weight with shakes
too small to detect and the oaks toss their
Medussan hair—history has its reckonings—
understories stirred up by a hot wind.
Our minds like blown stars, lost decades ago.
Who was Medusa anyway, but a
young girl who was raped, who dared speak out.
The snakes, the murder, that was all just smoke
and mirrors. A way to change the story
to reduce her power. So, reader, the oaks—
when I say they fill my view with green curls
and shadow, there are no serpents a foot.
Those trees stand, command the power that they
could someday burn this whole story down.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the author of Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (WordTech Communications, 2015). Her work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. She was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

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