Aimee Pozorski
Elroy, Arizona

Testimony of Yeni Gonzalez, a migrant from Guatemala, recalled by Annie Correal for the New York Times

She said that they all slept very little,
and they lost track
of what time of day it was.

They said the lights were always on, and sometimes
they’d be startled to learn that it was
1 p.m. when
they thought that it was the
dead of night, and vice versa.

They were living in this kind of perpetual
twilight. Some of the mothers
were fasting, as a sort of
sacrifice or a way to
supplicate so
God might have mercy on them
and reunite them
with their
children.

She said that at the
beginning, there had been
children among them, and
slowly, there were no
children left.

They would give
them soup, this sort of runny
soup, at 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Sometimes
she wouldn’t eat it at all, and
she couldn’t get the food down, and
she would just take one or two spoonfuls as if it was
medicine. When
she couldn’t eat the soup anymore
she asked an agent or a guard if
she could have a cookie or a cracker.
And he said to her
“No, those are for the
children.”

And she felt that was a small
cruelty, given that there were no
children there anymore.

Author’s Note: This is wholly a found poem—with inserted line breaks and reorganization—taken from the article “My Whole Heart Is There,” by Annie Correal in The New York Times (July 3, 2018).

Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English and Director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University, where she teaches contemporary literature and trauma theory. She has written monographs and edited collections on Philip Roth, 9/11 Literature, and HIV/AIDS representation. Her poems have appeared in Paper Nautilus, the Helix, and other journals. She lives in New Britain, CT.

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Miriam Sagan
Untitled

rapable…
I must be a woman

although the goddess Tara
attained enlightenment
she didn’t change bodies

so I’m
two things at once

female form
empty

the bones of the Miocene
dance with stars
marking every
mammalian joint

if there is a mouse here
I haven’t seen it yet

just a little girl
with pigtails
drawing on pavement

here at the end of an age
here at the end

Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of  the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

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Robbie Gamble
Emonie

Why she died is a mystery.
Why she had at least three different aliases and two social security numbers is a mystery.
Why her red blood cells sometimes curled up like tacos to clog her vessels, and
sometimes did not, is a mystery.
How she was able to remain gracious and thoughtful while twisting with pain, is a
mystery.
How she kept track of her prenatal appointments while turnstiling in and out
of the hospital with sickle-cell crises, is a mystery.
Why she chose at the last minute to deliver in a different hospital is a mystery.
What went so suddenly wrong in the hours after she called the shelter to say that she and
her baby boy were doing great, is a mystery.
The whereabouts of her babydaddy is a mystery.
Who will step up to embrace her son, and foster him and sculpt his character, is a
mystery.
How her spark will continue to glow in him, is a mystery.
How we all get up each day and carry on is a mystery.

Robbie Gamble’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Naugatuck River Review, Slipstream, and Poet Lore. He works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Devon Balwit
You Get What You Get

Somewhere between sweeping up dog hair and collecting
balled socks and underwear

from beneath dressers, between taking out the trash
and trimming the overgrown hedge,

between worrying about whether you can afford any college
your kids get into and why one’s socket hurts

a week after extraction, between obsessing about your party
dwindled to a single couple

and your realizing that the dog you love is not the dog
that will witness your dying,

you get news of an acquaintance’s poem, accepted
into Ploughshares, and you remember

Matthew 13:12, Whoever has will be given more,
and they will have an abundance.

Whoever does not have, even what they have
will be taken from them,

and you, an atheist, think, yes, certainly
it is like that.

Devon Balwit is the author of A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Poets Reading the News, The NewVerse News, The Ekphrastic Review, Peacock Journal, and more. For more of her poetry, reviews, collections, and chapbooks, visit her website, devonbalwitpoet.

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John Emil Vincent
Lest ye be

Benjamin Franklin invented the glass armonica. An instrument credited with supernatural powers by soundtracks to this day. It replicates a spit-wet finger running a glass-rim. An “unplugged theramin” really.

Glasses originally, for amateurs, sipped of their wine or topped off for each tone. The glass armonica does this in an orderly, sober, professional sort of way.

As if a bunch of monkeys in livery in ranks parading perfectly for some diminutive demagogue also dressed in a livery-themed outfit—but with a better, more severe, hat. Also, however, despite his confidence, and hat,

a monkey.

John Emil Vincent is the author of Excitement Tax (DC Books, 2018), short-listed for the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize, and Ganymede’s Dog, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press in fall 2019. He has published several books of criticism and is a trained archivist. Vincent lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University.

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Lisa DeSiro
Pandora Speaks

It wasn’t actually a box. It was a jar.
I found it in the basement, not the attic.
But for the sake of diplomacy, let’s say
the container was given to me by the gods.

You know the narrative: I lifted the lid.
The world was blasted with sickness,
evil, death. The consequences of
curiosity. But hope remained behind,

sealed, saved for later. Surely
that counts for something, cosmically.
And who’s to say the other myth
isn’t the truth, the one in which it’s a man

who commits the flammable act?
Women are always blamed. Consider
Eve, as much a scapegoat as me.
She made from a rib, I from clay.

Hasn’t history shown us again and again:
whether female or male, we are
cyclical in nature. Doing what we’re told
until doing the opposite.

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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James Diaz
The Time Of My Life

Once I was born
And ruined
And so much was lost along the way
like a broken radio I kept my parts intact
even in silence
I waited for signal return
an unlikely kind of wild
like maybe forgiveness is always unearned
and whose hands were first to shatter me
also loved me and so on and so on
is it a god, this thing in my band-aid heart telling me
how to breathe like a bent arrow through luck-shot air
my god, kid, can you believe we made it this far
and you’d like to laugh it off
but no matter, it matters, you look a lot like them
your people, your kin, your kind
they went wild on you, ate you up,
my god, kid, don’t you know you had to come this way
along the riven path
that your bones were already lit and your blaze is beautiful.

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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Cody Walker
Four Short Poems

1. DOJ Website

Your Sessions has expired from inactivity.
Your Sessions has timed out for security purposes while you were away . . . let’s try this again.
Your Sessions has timed out to protect your investigation from unauthorized access.
Please close your investigation and start over.

2. Outtakes from the Piss Tape

Name Trump’s favorite Klansman.

The Grand Whizzer.

Favorite nationality?

European.

Again, so everyone gets it?

European on the bed.

3. Defense Secretaries: A Succession

And James Mattis begat Russ Westbrook, and Russ Westbrook begat a short-order cook, and a short-order cook (who was also a grifter) begat a shapeshifter, and a shapeshifter begat a crumpled ball of paper.

4. Mad Lurch to the Left

He thought he saw Morticia Addams
Snap a pod of peas:
He looked again, and found it was
Impeachment News! I tease.
But jump ahead six months from now—
And pass the popcorn, please.

Cody Walker‘s most recent poetry collection is The Trumpiad (Waywiser, 2017). (The book doubles as an ACLU fundraiser.) He’s also the author of two earlier collections: The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). His work appears in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007). He teaches English at the University of Michigan and co-directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference.

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Miriam Sagan
Nebraska

I pay three dollars
to enter the dusty
overheated room
of the roadside museum

mammoth skeleton
rises huge as the moon
over the eroded striations
of badlands

like driving at night
with a stranger
who must tell the whole
sad story of her life

things are closer
than we realize
or further away

the gift shop
has split your own geodes
and a star map
tacked to the wall

driving through Harrison
I buy two potatoes
and an onion
for soup

from a woman
who doesn’t ask how I am
just clutches a cigarette
steps out onto the porch to smoke.

Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of  the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

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Ann Chadwell Humphries
If We Don’t Risk Anything, Then We’re Just Here (2)

I catch the words and hurl them back. No more feigned
objectivity to seal ourselves apart. When hit,

we jump back insulted, cry out in single syllables,
tend the kerosene beauty of our animus. Pick bare

the bones of argument until our appetite for fight is sated.
Now the season requires us to harvest opinions tight as

head cabbage, turn over dogma and dirt. It is messy.
It is hard. We cut through tropes thick as a man’s arm,

let sunlight succor hope but weather will go where
summoned. We’ll sleep with our eyes open.

Poems by Ann Chadwell Humphries have appeared in Jasper Magazine and on The Comet, the bus system of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority in Richland and Lexington counties in the Columbia metropolitan area of South Carolina (an initiative of Columbia’s inaugural poet laureate, Ed Madden). Winner of a 2017 Into the Fire scholarship from The Sun magazine and recipient of a Jasper Magazine Emerging Voice award, she lives and writes in Columbia, SC.

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