Joyce Schmid
California Fires

Forests swell and shrink,
shape-shifting in the smoky breath
of flames holed up in hollow trees,
the sky in pain, inflamed; red sun, red moon,
weird-yellow sky.
No rain. Smoke blown away by wind,

the very wind that spreads the fire.
We’re given darkness to protect us,
only darkness,
like the shadow of an asteroid six miles wide
preparing dust and stones and trees
and cars and factories and condominiums
to burst in blizzards blazing over us,
erasing us.

You ask me why I sit inside,
door closed to everything I love,
as if computer screens
were windows on eternity and I
were trying to climb through.
The sun is almost down, you say, not gone,
Open out your arms, embrace the wind.
Embrace the wind?
The wind?
The fire-starter, devil wind?

AuthorsName

Joyce Schmid‘s recent work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, Worcester Review, Newtown Literary, San Antonio Review, and other journals and anthologies. She lives with her husband of over half a century in Palo Alto, California.

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Chad Parenteau
Resistance Tankas, Reel 12

Hilary Clinton Jesus Tanka

Hilary Clinton—
(No, good fucking God please no!)
Hilary Clinton—
(no, no, no, not this again!)
Hilary Clinton—(please stop!)

William Barr Jesus Tanka

William Bar Jesus,
when asked by [name redacted]
Are you [redacted]?
looked up to [redacted] and
answered [redacted] [redacted].

Rudy Giuliani Jesus Tanka, Take Four

Rudy G. Jesus
hasn’t been seen in a while.
His one miracle
is to walk between the drops
of America’s shitstorm.

Elizabeth Warren Jesus Tanka

Liz Warren Jesus
fell so short on followers,
she had to fill in
for both victim and savior
of her own stoning.

Bernie Sanders Jesus Tanka

When it’s all over,
Bernie Sanders Jesus needs
no nails for the cross.
His straw body hangs nicely,
comes back down, four years later.

Joe Biden Jesus Tanka

Joe Biden Jesus
(Wait, we’re really doing this?
Are you sure? Okay!)
Joe Biden Jesus is…here.
That’s all we’re sure of right now.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule, and Résonance. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine and hosts the venerable Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Michael H. Levin
Troy

We could imagine nothing pleasanter than to spend all of our lives digging for relics of the past.
—Heinrich Schliemann

When they crashed through the palace
the iron chests were empty.
It was all fatal illusion,
words, only words – the small
bronze-age fortress far from Mycenae
grown huge through tales told;
betrayal, greed, prideful ambition
enlarged by rhetoric,
tall gods and goddesses
gliding disguised through battle
deflecting spears, guiding them,
shedding bright ichor for
chosen-up sides. Plunder
soon scattered in quarrels
and blood-soaked revenge.

Where are the phoenix-faced breastplate
the greaves clasped with silver
those thickets of ash shafts
the horsetail-plumed helmet
that Hector once wore?
Where the thousand black ships,
the throngs of wandering dead?

What floats in our air
from that long, troubled decade –
plague, rage, endless siege –
are scenes set in mental stained glass:
The lithe joyful daughter, lured
by promise of marriage, limp
on an altar in Aulis so her father
might sail. An aged king, fifty sons
shades or soon to be, come cloaked
alone to seek his heir’s
mangled body for burial.
Achilles and Patroclus
coolly caressing
each other’s doomed flesh.

Perhaps that’s the moral:
love, just love, for all its fraught twists
and sad endings, is the sole
godlike strand of us—transcendent
in passion or comradeship
conserving what honor
flawed selves may possess.

Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Falcons (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. Online at michaellevinpoetry.com and twopianosplayingforlife.org.

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Michael S. Glaser
An Odyssey

Addicted as I am to the clamoring falsettos
of siren songs,

I remain grateful for the company
of those who see me as I am,

who bind me to the mast of my better self
that I might honor the journey of my heart

toward a legacy I am still trying to understand
so that I might claim my own small part.

Michael S. Glaser is the author of seven poetry collections and the editor of three anthologies. With Kevin Young, he co-edited The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 (BOA Editions, 2012). Glaser is a professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, where he received the Dodge Endowed Award for Excellence in Teaching. He served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004 through 2009. More at michaelsglaser.com.

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Sam Avrett
Springtime in Auburn

Don’t wonder at us old men on a farm
As we load wood then shovel out the truck
Our truck has rust, the wood is ash
Cut from the land before the cold came.

It’s half past five still dark on the farm
First cows get fed then barn gets swept
Then town for supplies then apples pruned
Before the orchard awakes and sap starts to run.

Lights have come on at the town grange
Tonight we join for Black history month
We remember Tubman and the railroad here
Here we remain a country of decency.

All us old men in a February land
We load our stoves against the cold
We run our trucks through the work of time
We join with our neighbors no matter the weather.

Don’t wonder at us old men on a farm
It is late winter and the work will get done.

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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Rose Willow
Dwindling

aromas of cinnamon and nutmeg
mixed with sour milk and mold
linger in mother earth’s pantry
while bedroom life slows

she shuffles around on her axis
takes the last Kleenex, or perhaps
a Scotties, from the last tree
dabs at a tear near her dimple
high on her cheek

lowers onto a rotting wooden bench
and from a sliver of vision
watches the plastic tide roll in

Rose Willow lives and writes near the Salish Sea on the west coast of Canada. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines including Ascent Aspirations, Portal, Spring, SoftCartel, The Society, Horticulture, Saskatchewan History Magazine, and Incline. Willow lives on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.

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Linera Lucas
Apparently

unpacking is necessary,
not starting crème fraîche in a glass jar,

setting bread to rise,
chopping cabbage for ginger orange coleslaw,

planting white lace kale in the red pots flanking the steps,
sending edits for a friend’s poem,

making a collage from old
(what other kind could there be) National Geographics,

pausing with the dog to direct strangers to the pond,
checking the parsley seedlings,

scrubbing the sink,
ordering copper and scarlet witch hazels—

none is sufficient.
Boxes must be opened & contents sorted,

cardboard flattened and driven to recycling
before it is a productive day.

Linera Lucas’ poetry has appeared in Clover, Elohi Gadugi, PageBoy Magazine, Museum of Northwest Art, Spillway, and other journals. She holds a BA from Reed College and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Lucas has taught at Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. Visit her online at lineralucas.com.

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Cheryl Caesar
Mistress Goop and Her New Candle, “It Smells Like My Vagina”

For $75, tax and shipping, buyers can smell her vagina.
You have to be young, blond, thin and rich to respectably sell your vagina.

Sure, given a room and a landline, you can earn 25 cents a minute
Supplying a throaty voice and tales for it to tell, your vagina.

Or open it up to the camera’s eye, just for the cash that’s in it,
$100 a day for the varied pastel of your vagina.

But Paltrow thinks beyond sight and sound, and she knows how to spin it:
Cocktails of cervical fluid, a light Zinfandel from her vagina.

Only touch remains to exploit, and her trademark sex doll will win it,
As Gwyneth provides the formula Goop, the gel for its vagina.

Cheryl Caesar‘s poems have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Cream and Crimson, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk, The Stay Project, What Rough Beast, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka; and other poetry in Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply, Dormiveglia, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Black Coffee Review, The Wild Word, Q/A Poetry, Ariel Chart, Credo Espoir, Bleached Butterfly and Beautiful Cadaver. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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Billy Clem
From a Displaced Person

Dear Madame or Sir,

They found us, their torches blazing
blue and yellow, beacons in a white air
writing a story you’d know on sight.

Patrol arrived in boots and hats, large, heavy,
the likes of which we’d never seen before,
almost comically serious, if a little late.

But, this was never the risk we were told:
it was pre-ordained, like viruses traveling
the night and transferring unknown to you

and, at once, you’re no longer yourself
but something running from a fever pitched
as high as possible, naked and not dreaming

someplace you won’t be taken. I write
this note to you from my bed—
what passes today as my bed—

pillow less, blanket less stone,
a palimpsest of stories too terrifying
to recover if they could be uncovered

and known by so small a man as myself,
so insignificant as to need—
I am in your hands, lined as they are

by labor, maybe love, loss certainly,
hence you’re reading this in a place
where anything is possible.

Please, do what you can
for my wife and children
I am yours, sincerely,

Billy Clem’s work has appeared in Great River Review, Vox Populi, The New Verse News, Counterexample Poetics, Moon City Review, and Elder Mountain. He teaches composition, multicultural literatures, and women’s and gender studies outside Chicago.

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