Lynn McGee

Crush, 7

You are polite as a cadet. I hear your boots
on concrete in the garage — you talk hands-free,
arriving home, and three times zones over,
I unlock my door, revved up as a migrating
bird, wings limp at my sides. I drop my coat,
scarf, bag, and everything I am known for —
my efficiency, my lucidity — slides off like mud
on sandals left out in rain and emerging
clean, when the storm has passed.

Crush, 8

It’s not as simple as the contrast of you street boxing
a neighborhood guy when you were ten — falling
to the sidewalk and jumping back up — while
my sister and I, in a suburb of red brick houses,
perfected our walk with a book on our heads.
It’s not as simple as a Venn diagram revealing
that sliver where we overlap — and yet
that narrow margin glints like a waning moon,
and I am standing outside on a dark night
flinging pheromones, looking up.

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two  award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by Rusty Rose and Marc Rosen. With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.

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J.P. White
Late Hour Concession to the Mosquito

In the soggy narrow trench where laughter is infrequent,
Your blood meal appetite is unmatched.
You have killed more people than all the wars
Ever launched by the human tongue.
Your slow misery calling cards are the unmistakable fevers,
Viruses, parasites, and worms scribbled
Into the last letters of soldiers, newly-weds and philosophers.
To stop you, we have siphoned busted levees,
Drained swamps, marshes and sanctuaries,
Unleashed pesticide blooms over golf courses & 7-Elevens,
Radiated reproductive organs under microscopes,
But still your numbers swell beyond all accounting
And here I am inside another week of thunder rain
Down on the noise in my knees praying for the dragonfly,
The only one who can outflank and gobble you,
Praying even though we now know
Its great dragon migrations have been interrupted
And they are no longer seen in some far north places
Where they have always been a sign of the blue-green blur of summer.

J.P. White is the author of the poetry collections The Sleeper at the Party (Defined Providence Press, 2001), The Salt Hour (The University of Illinois Press, 2001), The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator’s Garden (Holy Cow Press, 1988), and In Pursuit of Wings (Panache Books, 1978). His essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a BA from New College (1973), an MA from Colorado State University (1977), and an MFA from Vermont College (1990). He lives on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis.

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Linda Lowe
Refill Day

People with their oxygen tanks lined up along the road. Signs said no gasping no sighing no wishing things were different. Let bygones be bygones, they’re gone, aren’t they? Stop the looking back, stop wondering what’s next. Don’t ask your neighbor, don’t call a friend. No pouting, no pleading. When the truck’s empty, it’s empty. It will slam its doors and roar to life honking. A sound that reminds you of that truck from summer, the one bearing ice cream, back when the air was spiffy and you breathed so deeply you could have dug all the way to China.

Linda Lowe is the author of the chapbook Karmic Negotiations (Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press, 2003), winner of the SPT National Poetry Competition. Her poems and stories have appeared in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Outlook Springs, A Story in 100 Words, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, and Crack the Spine, as well as in the anthology Weatherings (FutureCycle Press, 2015), edited by David Chorlton and Robert S. King. Lowe lives in Southern California with her husband.

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Dion O’Reilly
Accidental Fuck

Zipless. Uncontrollable.
Then you wake
from some sweaty unconscionable
yet somewhat enjoyable
night-time rollick.

You pull into the curve of your husband’s body.
He’s un-roused by your churning, your calling out,
your nighttime prowling
in the flop houses and tittie dives
of your subconscious,

where you do it with your bland colleagues
who wear button-up shirts
lined like pale graph paper,
with your silly-putty students,
your intimidating professor
with his big hands,
padded and seamed like a baseball glove,
or that one time with your transgender cousin.

All their dicks, so enormous
or sometimes, so shiny black,
you can’t refrain from gripping them,
their girth like the flesh handle
of a hammer you keep pounding
on the cruel nail of your need.

The astonishment every time,
the sight of its swelling
its measured intensity
like something born in time lapse.
The goat-like tumescence,
friendly, yet so clearly impersonal.

Maybe you just like how it feels—
after you’ve been taken
by the vortex forbidden —
to wake up, beached on the warm sands of relief
on the Ithaca of commitment,
your husband’s snores
gusting through your hair
like an off-shore wind.

Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in Narrative, New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at various times as a theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher, among other occupations.

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Nicholas Teixeira
Keep Watching to Find Out

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Nicholas Teixeira holds an MFA in creative writing from The City College of New York (where he was an editor of the student-run literary journal, Promethean), and a BA in English from San Francisco State University. His work has appeared in Dream Pop. Teixeira has been a server and tended bar at such noteworthy New York City establishments as 3 Dollar Bill, Phoenix Bar, The Toolbox, Tandem, and Pounds and Ounces.

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Jessica Ramer
On a Son Deploying to Korea

Daniel, my son, son,
God knew what he was doing
when he gave children to the young.
Not quite old when you were born,
I was a fat, graying father
mired in memories of the Marne,
hiding behind my closed study door
to escape the sight of you,
your eyes magnified behind thick glasses,
pouring over anthills, termite nests,
“Plays well with others” marked N—
needs improvement—every quarter.

You tried. I know. I winced
whenever I looked out the window:
playing army, you marched out of step;
at bat, you struck out yet again,
head dangling like a hanged man’s,
waiting for teammates to stop yelling.

Grief flogged me into old age
when Emmett returned from Anzio,
leg, eye, and several fingers gone.
I spewed an aged man’s bile,
wished it had been you instead.
Daniel, my son, my son,
forgive an old man’s ire.

Jessica Ramer is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has appeared in South 85 and The Keats Letters Project. She was a summer 2017 resident at the Alderworks Alaska Writers & Artists Retreat.

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Kiran Bhat
A character asked: What is the difference between a character and a sentence?

文字问道：文字跟句子有什么差别？

客燃脑说：
句子好像桥，
文字好像绳。
句子好似蛇，
文字好似虫。
句子是故事，
文字是情节。

客燃脑结论说：它们都引领人到真理。问题更多是你偏向哪个 —— 短时间的剧痛还是长时间的微疼。

A character asked: What is the difference between a character and a sentence?

Kiran responds:
A character is like a rope,
A sentence like a bridge.
One is like a snake,
The other, a mere worm.
One is a story,
The other is the plot.

Kiran concludes: Both the character and the sentence leads to truth. The question is more of which you prefer to take – the shorter one of greater toil, or the longer one of greater ease.

The Mandarin version of this poem appeared in Kiran Speaks (White Elephant Press, 2019).

Kiran Bhat is the author of the poetry collections Autobiografia (Letrame Editorial, 2019) and Kiran Speaks (White Elephant Press, 2019), as well as the Kannada-language travelogue Tirugaatha (Chiranthana Media Solutions, 2019) and the novel We of the Forsaken World (Iguana Books, 2019). He has traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He considers Mumbai his spiritual base, but currently lives in Melbourne.

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David Groff
First Warm Night

The noises insinuate
the urban window
and populate our bed—

low hums like oceans
too far to see,
humans or tires,

sirens dying.
Shrieks too,
soon a scream

we can’t decipher.
Joy or terror.
Side by side we lie

like little gods
immune to most disasters,
trying to have sex

because it’s spring and time,
two hawks along a cornice
athwart their tilting nest.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House Press, 2013), chosen by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award. His book Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002) was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series. He co-edited two anthologies: with Jim Elledge, the Lambda-winning Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); and with Philip Clark, Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books, 2010). His poems have recently appeared on the Best American Poetry blog, in Great River Review, and Prairie Schooner, and at Poem-a-Day (from the Academy of American Poets), as well as in the anthology The Manifesto Project (University of Akron Press, 2017), edited by Rebecca Hazelton and Alan Michael Parker. An independent book editor, he teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.

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Tyler King
Ersatz

Something else is here,

Something isn’t right,

Imposter empires,
Gilded knives and false flags,
Come, let your towers rise

Fill my mouth with wine,
My ears with honey,
My hands with flesh,
My eyes with light,
Petrify me inch by inch,

The feeling hungers to be lived in,
It’s teeth graze my neck,
It sings of blood and prophecy,
Epoch of an age-
Marked by moonlight cataclysm,
Drifts of smoke and drums of war,
The blinds open,
The feeling consumes

This is not my body,
This is a Trojan horse,
Omen of plague,
Biblical negligence,
Genesis of epilogues,
After the credits apology,
Consolation prize,
Fate cut short and luck run dry,
A type of magic nobody believes in,
Some revelations have to be swallowed whole,
Like police lights in the windows at the party,
Or locusts in the skies of Egypt,
You have to realize when you’ve gone too far, and walk away while you can.

Tyler King is an emerging writer whose work has appeared in Sonder Midwest. He lives in Dayton, Ohio, where he is a student at Sinclair Community College.

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Jared Pearce
Gold Medals

When the sun rises, everyone
will be there, cheering it
to the heavens, and all those
who said the dawn would die,
well, they’ll be shamed by them
who knew how cool the sun was
even before it was cool, yet
they’ll retain their administrative
roles, their political stations,
and the hipsters will hold
their sneer and web their aspersions,
foisting their morals on whomever
they dislike—room for everybody
under this cerulean canopy.

Jared Pearce is the author of The Annotated Murder of One (Aubade Publishing, 2018). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Coachella Review, Xavier Review, Breadcrumbs, BlazeVOX, and Panoplyzine, among other journals.  Online at jaredpearcepoetry.weebly.com.

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