Pamela Sumners
I-70 West

On five separate billboards
equitably distributed down I-70
to Jeff City where 163 districts
representing cows bloviate
and 34 senators obfuscate
or pontificate depending on
who is the chaplain for the day:

WHEN YOU DIE
WHAT WILL YOU SAY
AT THE PEARLY GATES
WHEN ST. PETER ASKS
DID YOU DEFEND THE UNBORN?

Two miles later, a billboard
double-decker wants to know:
If you die tonight
Heaven or Hell?
And just beneath,
from Chick-Fil-A,
“Tell Em Tha Cows Sent Ya.”

Pamela Sumners is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones (UnCollected Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Loch Raven, Mudlark Posters, New Verse News, Shot Glass Journal, Snakeskin, Streetlight Magazine, Ucity Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology The 64 Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press, 2018), chosen by the editors of The Halcyone literary review. Sumners lives in St. Louis with her family. 

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Maureen Wanket
Muscle

In the present moment of my body
Decaffeinated morning grace
Muscles aching
Well rested but not awake
Soft belly
The babies stretched that but
It was already stretched
The babies gave it taut purpose
And an excuse
Starting from ground zero
Giving birth with no painkillers
Gave me that now I know who God is
Gave me that now
I know who my God is
Suns out Guns out
Oppress this
Or how about try
I am honing my weapon for revolution.

Maureen Wanket is the author of the novels How to Be Manly, The Arrow, and The Ghost Daughter. Her short fiction has appeared in Esopus, Blood and Thunder, Night Train Journal, Gold Man Review, and Scoundrel Time, as well as in the anthologies The Monsters We Forgot: Volume 2 (Soteira Press, 2019), edited by Gabriel Grobler and R.C. Bowman; and The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015), edited by Rosalie Morales Kearns. Wanket works as a teacher and lives in Sacramento, Calif. with her husband and two daughters.

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Priscilla Frake
Towers Want to Fall

Banks want to fail.
Also crops and marriages.
Infections are like tinder,

waiting for any excuse to flare up.
This also goes for tempers
& wars. Guns want to fire

and bombs sit hopefully ticking,
curled around a red spark.
I myself want to burn

all my bridges. Flammable
words are coiled on the tip
of my tongue. Someone

inside my head promises
a world in which I
am limitless, untouchable,

triumphant—
and only patience, that
most trying of virtues,

tiredly tells me
to pull myself
back from the brink.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence (Mutabilis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017), edited by David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman; Enchantment of the Ordinary, (Mutabilis Press, 2019), edited by John Gorman; and Women. Period. (Spinsters Ink, 2008), edited by Julia Watts, Parneshia Jones, Jo Ruby and Elizabeth Slade. Frake lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.

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Shei Sanchez
Leaving Home

Inside my shallow pocket is a small piece of paper
with all of its corners crinkled like my mother’s face
the day before she died, or like mine the evening

I was forced to leave the only place I called home.
This fragile rectangle of a thing is the vessel that holds
my world entire, its shiny surface the cradle for the earth

where I lived and worked like an American.

You carry no papers      they told me.
Since I was a kid      I said.

My parents carried me here, away from an existence
stitched by carefully drawn breaths and nearly empty
pockets. The choice was made before I learned

how to question why leaving one home
for another was better than dying in the hands
of your own kin, people who breathed

the same air and walked the same path.
A choice was made again, before a rule of law
built by men who fear that I am

a threat to their identity,

before I can ever say that the bench I am sleeping
on at this moment is as foreign to me as the language
my parents spoke in furtive whispers and gilded hopes.

I affix my eyes on my little girl, forever fixed
and three years old, on this single shiny photograph
as I lay my body to rest and soul to perish, no longer able

to fight for my right to be treated as a citizen of the world.

Shei Sanchez‘s poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig and Harness Magazine, as well as in the anthology Essentially Athens Ohio: A Celebration of Spoken Word and Fine Art (independently published, 2019), edited by Kari Gunter-Seymour. She holds a BA from New York University, and an MA in teaching from School for International Training in Vermont. Also a fiction writer, Sanchez is Filipina-American and lives in Stewart, Ohio.

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Anna Leah
Feels Like Nineteen

Shivering, stamping, she stood.
She ran.

Not to escape the dawn,
dreading to extend the night.

“There’s nowhere else,” he called.
“Come back.”
“Just to keep the wolf away,” she replied,
“The weather says it feels like nineteen.”

The edge of a new year, 2018,
spoken to by a man too loud.
When her ersatz lover spoke,
her skin shut down
like pipes beginning to freeze that morning.

He was a citadel to himself,
and a stone for her to cling.
The closing year had been buffeted
by winds and change beyond imagine or grip.

Because the world shows its worst earliest.
It makes girls old
and cuts at their aging.

Making penetrable façade of open eyes and reedy thighs,
ripe to the teeth of a lech,
soft under the teeth of a cannibal.

Long ago, her heart had been eaten,
one too many walks
under hawkish gaze of predators that come out at night.

Before this year would change,
she had resolved to petrify
so she never would.

So storms of sodium could swirl around,
she would steel under grit and old tears,
salt and hormonal debris,
shredded naïveté and sore skin
burnt into never feeling again.

This dark morning was cold, she knew,
she ran to want to try to feel.
Rigorous reality
of warm blood piping after chill
moving under blained flesh

He was right, there was nowhere to go,
on that night that felt nineteen

Too long alone, she’d die
and he had plotted all the shelters.

She jumped and stamped and waited on a new year,
with small hope for a warmer time.

Anna Leah’s poetry has appeared in Panel Magazine (published in Budapest). Her broadcast and print journalism have appeared on PBS, AJ+, and Brut and in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Post, Brokelyn, and other publications. She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Also a filmmaker, Leah lives in Brooklyn. She posts poetry to Instagram, @ByAnnaLeah.

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Rikki Santer
At the Meeting House

after William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 and after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the start of the Senate impeachment trial: We have the votes.

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
hard on for power, wrist deep in the savory
gravy of partisan pie. Articles honed & cast
deep into the well. Logic at full blast,
rhetoric pulsating, then truth tarred & feathered
by Statecraft, taxonomy of hostility, the carnal
musk of four more years. When lust is in the
longing mad in pursuit and in possession so,
joint sessions sour with cardboard comrades,
brackish claims, pungent solicitude.
How to survive the abstraction of nation born
& bred on cruelty & blood, none knows well
to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Capitol’s flag flapping in the gray light of winter.

Rikki Santer is the author In Pearl Broth (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019) as well as six previous poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Margie, Hotel Amerika, The American Journal of Poetry, Slab, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Slipstream, Midwest Review and The Main Street Rag, among other publications. Santer lives in Columbus, Ohio. Online at rikkisanter.com

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Kendra Nuttall
Conviction

We don’t have much in common
except
I wear mittens, your name is Mitt,
we’re both bred from pioneer stock—
both former robots
shuffling our feet
next to invisible
lines.

I became human
in a church pew. I imagine
you did too. I imagine
you prayed to know right
from wrong. I imagine you
prayed for everything to be okay
like everyone always does
when tragedy comes.

It’s cold outside;
that’s a tragedy.
I’ll put on my mittens and pray.

Tomorrow is a new day, Mitt,
you’ll be okay.
We don’t have much in common
except
conviction.

Kendra Nuttall‘s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Maudlin House,  Fearsome Critters, and Eunoia Review, as well as in Utah’s Best Emerging Poets 2019: An Anthology (Z Publishing, 2019). Nuttall holds a BA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Utah Valley University. She lives in Utah with her husband, David, and dog, Belle.

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Paul Ilechko
A Place Without Light

Why borders why box

Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks Bartok in Winter (Flutter Press, 2018) and Graph of Life (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Manhattanville Review, West Trade Review, River River, Otoliths, and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.

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Chad Parenteau
Resistance Tankas, Reel 11

Iowa Caucus Jesus Tanka

Still loading…Please wait…
Iowa Caucus Jesus
gives in record time
last supper and ascension!
Still loading…Please wait…

Pete Buttigieg Jesus Tanka

Glory be on high
for Pete Buttigieg Jesus
has returned to us!
But lo, when did he ascend,
and when was he ever here?!?

Rush Limbaugh Jesus Tanka

Rush Limbaugh Jesus
fights through stigmata in throat,
says it’s easier
to enter Heaven with gold
than with a poor man’s thorn hat.

John Bolton Jesus Tanka, Take Two

John Bolton Jesus
possesses secret tablets
that will show the truth
to everyone at long last.
They are up for pre-order.

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. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Priscilla Frake
Broken Lines

I am broken. My time is broken
into lists and chores, into litanies
of haste and lack. The back of my day
is broken. When I walk, my steps
are broken and I hobble along
in a pencil skirt and stilettos.
If you’re moving through your own broken

days you might know what I mean. You’re breathing
shards and eating what used to be food
but is now scraps of calories.
Your fingers rattle on the keyboard
in staccato bursts, then break off
for incoming missiles. It used to be
an exchange, but now it’s so many flares
and rockets, humming through midnight’s
orange sky. What does it mean
to be broken? This is what I ask
myself, since no one seems likely

to answer. The question itself
is deconstructed in texts
I can’t receive. Did I mention
my phone is broken? Perhaps
some version of the sky is whole
but the earth is damaged
and we keep arguing about how to fix it
with nothing but broken words.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence (Mutabilis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017), edited by David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman; Enchantment of the Ordinary, (Mutabilis Press, 2019), edited by John Gorman; and Women. Period. (Spinsters Ink, 2008), edited by Julia Watts, Parneshia Jones, Jo Ruby and Elizabeth Slade. Frake lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.

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