Walter Holland
What Say You?

Where is Burroughs with his hashish stare, watching the hustlers
in Times Square as he blows smoke-rings

and discusses the mad trippy verse of Rimbaud, or that
pot-headed Baudelaire; talking on the radio

of frequencies from aliens that ruminate through the vast
effluvia of the ethereal stars?

Corso ranting like a street-bum jester, smirking at marriage
and praising the Bomb—naming the chakras and

yelling prophesies, bedding whomever he pleases, obsessed
over spreading his onanistic seed

while desperate Allen fixates on getting laid, or sucking
Cassady’s cock in flagrante delicto,

as Carolyn comes into the room—what say you of the fucked-up abuses
of Uncle Sam, of blatant government

bullshit, this meltdown on a trash heap of lies, the Establishment’s
kowtow to a new fascist order—Moloch with his

greedy tax-cutting grin? What say you to this whiny fraternity of White men
and their gun-happy, race-baiting army

of the 1%? Would you chant and dance like some Krishna freak, reciting
your pacifist prayers, calling for a new

peoples’ insurrection, another Blake-crazed, weed-fueled, beatified, holy-shit-shocker of a say-you-want-a-revolution revolution?

Walter Holland, PhD, is the author of three books of poetry: A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and Circuit(Chelsea Station Editions, 2010) as well as a novel, The March (Masquerade Books, 1996 and Chelsea Station Editions 2011). His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, HazMat, Redivider, Rhino, and other journals and anthologies. He writes book reviews for LambdaLiterary.org and Pleiades. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com.

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Marjorie Moorhead
In for a Fight

The rule of law; the rule of law.
Nobody is above The Rule of Law.
Sounds like children’s sing-along song.
One you’d clap hands together to
or jump rope swinging in on the beat,
rhythmically smacking pavement under feet.

“The rule of law” we say with awe,
“applies to all”. Short and tall; colors any hue;
red, white, ecru. In our country, no one is above it.
We believe this to be true.

What then, to be done,
when a rat’s taken control of the helm?
Sinking ship, course set due crash-ward;
ideals sold out; government run back-assward?
Yes, we’re horrified. But, is it surprising?
Fall asleep at the wheel; things run amok.

The rule of law; the rule of law.
We took it for granted. Nobody gave a cluck.
Now, the fox rules our henhouse. We’re chickens all,
and could be in for the fight of our lives,
making sure sacred pillars don’t fall.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, as well as in several anthologies. Her poem “Taking a Knee” will appear in The Poetry Box’s Poeming Pigeon Sports issue in Spring 2019. Also forthcoming is a collection with her group, 4th Friday Poets (Hobblebush). Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.

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Lisa DeSiro
I’m a Girl. What’s your superpower?

said a familiar voice when I opened the front door a crack in answer to loud knocking. She stood there on the porch, arms akimbo, peering through the screen at me: Wonder Woman. My heart a-flutter, I stuttered Would you like to come in? We sat in the parlor. Over cookies & tea she explained her reason for canvassing the neighborhood: voter registration. Strike a blow to the patriarchy! she urged. The future is female! She was handing out souvenir wristbands. I accepted a pair, put them on. Before saying goodbye, she asked again about my superpower. I knew it, then: I’m a Girl, too.

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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Cody Walker
Three Short Poems

1. Trump, to Melania

“Honey, we’re outta money.”

She whispers something inaudible and goes
out of the room. Her voice grows brittler.

She’s speaking to shadows.

He’s not Hitler, he’s not Hitler. . . 

2. [Editor’s Note]

Mike Pence?
I’m on the fence.
On the one hand, he’s a smugly pious, small-minded, humorless toady.
On the other [No, no—we got it. Thanks, Cody!]

3. James Comey,

you know me,
know my need
to believe that someone peed
on someone. I’m in bad shape,
my brother; I need the tape.

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
Battle of Punished Woman’s Fork, Kansas, 1878

I ask the lady at the desk
at the state park
what the name means

she says—in eleven years here
no one has asked that question—
but she doesn’t offer any answer

the land
is covered in marks
so too the map

although the soil itself
might just crumble
through our fingers

nothing to tell me
who is Punished Woman
and what was her fate

but is there any
portion of earth
that might not

bear
her name?

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 (1)

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

When words pierce us, we jump back insulted
cry out in single syllables
stoke the kerosene beauty of our animus
growl like dogs over the bones of argument
until
we weary, our appetite for fight sated.

Now the season requires us
to harvest our opinions tight as head cabbage
turn over hard-packed dogma like dirt.

It is messy.
It is tough.

We cut through tropes thick as a man’s arm
let sunlight succor fields of hope
with crops of new perspectives but
the weather will go where it’s summoned.

I’ll sleep with my eyes open.

Ann Chadwell Humphries’s 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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Walter Holland
Dismemberment

is the brutal breaking apart of
tenacious fact, and the dese-
cration of embodied beliefs

found in phrases such as “rule
of law,” “transparency,” “due
process” each necessary to

internally sustain the body politic.
First, removal of the heart may drain
reason, though it cannot evis-

cerate all truth, or dissolve away
the flesh of thinking, or gouge out the clarity of
vision. Shorn words, though severed

from the tongue, and speech, though gutted
from the mouth, can never fully destroy
the evidence found on the printed page.

Walter Holland, PhD, is the author of three books of poetry: A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and Circuit(Chelsea Station Editions, 2010) as well as a novel, The March (Masquerade Books, 1996 and Chelsea Station Editions 2011). His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, HazMat, Redivider, Rhino, and other journals and anthologies. He writes book reviews for LambdaLiterary.org and Pleiades. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com.

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Sam Avrett
Wake to Beavers

When you wake to beavers consider it luck.
That’s what our history might tell.
They’re a river of fortune from ponds and forests,
National blessings to sell.

The Cuyuga and Mohawk exported the beaver,
Wealth can be made from the rats.
We can cull them for meat and perfume and such,
Fur turned to blankets and hats.

We’ve corrupt politicians and unchecked worries.
Wake to the river to tame.
We can harvest our troubles the same as the beavers,
Treat them a resource the same.

If old Massasoit knew, he’d be woke to the river.
Metacom might have won his war.
They’re a river of thieves, and there’s no use for shooting,
The answer’s to trap and store.

We’re Americans still, just industrious beavers,
Making greatness besides.
We can harvest this resource and make revolution.
They steal our forests, trap their hides.

The Poet Writes: Sam Avrett lives in a rural county in upstate New York, with dogs, husband, and a startling amount of canned and preserved food stocked away for the winter.

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Lisa DeSiro
Ceiling without a Star

(after Sylvia Plath’s “Child”)

Think spring. The sky at dusk that particular
shade of deep clear blue on
a particular evening I startled two

rabbits while walking home. The first
crouched still as a statue.
The second quick-bunny-hopped away.

I wanted to touch their soft
ears and paws. The way a child wants
something gentle and warm

held close at bedtime. That sky
stretched itself wide. I imagined it as
the skin of heaven. Or maybe

a tent, a tarp
protecting us and our
little

earth. The moon a bulb
switched on,
our night-light.

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
You Know My Ways

Venus Beach rose in me
as you sank into darker waters
these bones / the winning ticket
how hard we fell
and laughed
and slammed
into shit we couldn’t fix
look at this carbon dating on our hearts
a hundred years of aspen Colorado frost
and who got there first
the lover or the fighter
a great battle
with god-only-knows-what
ghost on the other end of the line this time
would it matter if we knew all these dark things
were coming from us, these hands
these hungry eyes that can’t get enough
haven’t you had enough?
a mother who gave a damn might ask
I was hatched from a moonstone
the river rubbed raw into starlight
I got the details wrong
I tried everything
you saw this light rise and then fall
and no one could warn you of that heavy dip over the bend
you just had see for yourself
how what saves you and breaks you
is sometimes the same goddamn thing.

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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