Michael Vander Does
The Hand You Can Shake

the lips you can kiss,
kiss.

the note you can play
play

the joy or sorrow you can share
share

we need these moments
in the midst of madness and mayhem
we need these moments

we do not know
which 13-year-old’s hand
we may never shake
what notes he may never hear
whose lips he may never kiss
we do not know
whose heart may shine
or be broken

we do not know
whose eyes may never again
never never never
never again
see a flower
break a fast

just when things seem just when things seem like just when things seem like they might like they might like they might be getting better might might might be getting a little better (not this year, but maybe last—or the year before Ferguson—or the day I got health insurance—or the night Obama was elected) a hand reaches from the dank swamp of bigotry and grabs your foot grabs your ass grabs your money grabs a gun and its vile voice bubbles up and bursts in most putrid of bubbles bursts into songs of yesteryear as it tries to steal our music to cover its covers of Dixie and Deutschland—hatred draped in images of home that never were, draped in a misdreamed malformed past of strange trees with strange fruit, draped in flags and sheets and homilies, draped in simpering tolerance and lies bigger than the universe, draped in our tears, bizarrely able to drape itself in murder and rape as if these things were acceptable—as if bathroom laws and standing for the flag and whose god? and immigration were real issues instead of a way of creating otherness as if in America in an alley a white boy with a bb gun would be gunned down as if as if as if

as if

The shot you can take
don’t

Hear this poem performed by the poet to the accompaniment of The JazzPoetry Ensemble.

Michael Vander Does is a JazzPoet and filmmaker from Columbus, Ohio. His poems have appeared in Croton Review, Negative Capability, Istanbul Literary Review, Carbon Culture Review, and Tryst, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Cap City Poets:Columbus & Central Ohio’s Best Known, Read, and Requested Poets (Pudding House Publications, 2008), edited by Steve Abbott, Connie Willett Everett, Rose Smith. He performs trombone and poetry with The JazzPoetry Ensemble. He has received awards from the Ohio Arts Council and The Puffin Foundation West. Online at makejazznotwar.org

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Bruce Robinson
The Indolence of Blessings

Everywhere is war
—Bob Marley

We felt blessed, and wrote
no poems, no odes nor anthems,
no paeans no praise, no epithalamiums,
no hymns or hosannas,

well, here and there an alleluia,
for then was a time when iambs could be counted,
and even counted on, and our continents
seemed to make some kind of sense.

It’s not that I’m asking for a coda,
hold on now, think about it now,
the sullen détente of power, the jealous
light, the clustered delusion of stars

But now a threnody seems lazy.
Now we’ve got work to do.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Mobius, Pangyrus, Spectrum, The Menteur, Common Ground, Connecticut River Review, and The Maynard. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Mark Fleckenstein
Two Sonnets Inspired by “Rising, Falling, Hovering” by C.D. Wright

An Experimental Sonnet for Trump’s America

This is no time for poetry, words dressed for dancing, awaiting the orchestra.
This is no time for light resembling a heart attack.
This is no time for to panic, to tempt wrists to play bloody.
This is no time for right or wrong, induced arguments, plastic bags.
This is no time for imagining, stalling, starting, wondering how air is made.
This is no time for trees, giving both birth and abortion.
This is no time for misspelled remarks, U turns, memorizing disappearing light.
This is no time for assumptions, understandings, strangling soft beliefs.
This is no time for all the hands needed to build a city, a bridge, a week.
This is no time for numbers, looking for an unknown address, absent any light.
This is no time for painting pain neutral colors, memory, forgetting, starting over.
This is no time for surprises, shock and awe, the expectations for stars.
This is no time for joking, it’s expensive, and only understood told backwards.
This is no time for poetry, words dressed for dancing, awaiting the orchestra.

A Near Sonnet With a Line by C.D. Wright

To be ashamed is to be an American.
To be ashamed is to explicate, then fuddle.
To be ashamed is to reverse engineer logic.
To be ashamed is to imagine you’re right in several dimensions.
To be ashamed is to see a razor as a sign of forgiveness.
To be ashamed is a lost bag of hope and misspelled name.
To be ashamed is to believe a mirror’s promises you killed.
To be ashamed is to lose your heart, freed soul, and still live.
To be ashamed is to wear the same skin, bruised and hateful.
To be ashamed is to be a line in the sand, crossed repeatedly.
To be ashamed is to believe truth is the same as power.
To be ashamed is to be a hero for many, many wrong reasons.
To be ashamed is to believe right and wrong are partners.
To be ashamed is to be an American.

Mark Fleckenstein is the author of A Name For Everything (Cervena Barva Press, 2019), Memoir As Conversation (Unsolicited Press, 2019), God Box (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019), Making Up The World (Editions Dedicaces, 2018), I Am I, Drowning Knee Deep (Sticks Press, 2007), and The Memory Of Stars (Sticks Press, 1995), as well as in a number of anthologies. His work has appeared in the journals White Whale Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Sticks, Maryland Poetry Review, Boston Literary Review/BluR, The Little Magazine, Phone-A-Poem, Slant, Cimarron Review, The Worcester Review, Protea Poetry Journal, Cube, On The Edge, The Contemporary Review, Albany Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Fleckenstein holds a BA in English from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. After finishing my MFA, settled in Massachusetts. The father of two daughters, he lives in Maynard, Mass.

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Colin Halloran
A New Colossus

What are the dimensions for a child-sized cage?
How many feet? How many inches?
What is the volume by hate?

How many thoughts and prayers can fit
In a cage?
In a lifeless piece of legislation?

How many daughters drowned
and sons separated.

How many is enough?

How many bodies will it take
to cover her beacon of hope,

that old colossus telling the new lie.

There is no sweetness here
no shelter that’s not forced
no golden door, no sunset gates.

Imprison people—humans—
not lightning.

Narrow mild eyes in harsh command
and turn the world away.

Exile mothers yearning to be free
wretched refuse on our shore.

We are the new colossus
the tempest that tosses
masses from our land.

Colin D. Halloran is a United States Army veteran who documented his experiences in Afghanistan in his memoir-in-verse Shortly Thereafter (Mint Hill Books, 2012), winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. He is also the author of the poetry collection Icarian Flux (Main Street Rag, 2015). His poems, essays, and short stories have been appeared in many publications. When not writing, Halloran leads workshops that seek to promote personal and international healing and reconciliation through writing and the arts.

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Chad Parenteau
Two Timely Tankas from the Resistance, Reel 4

Rudy Giuliani Jesus Tanka, Take Two

Rudy G. Jesus
will have all his stigmata
all around his back.
Not from the cross, but the bus
they’ve thrown him under.

Gordon Sondland Jesus Tanka

It’s a good Friday,
and Gordon Sondland Jesus
sits and shrugs. Aw shucks.
They used up the boards and nails
to crucify the others.

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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Mark Ward
Untitled Tanka and Haiku Sequence

dreamt a starring role
the director gives cold reads
stages discomfort—
the ham hock blushes, offers
wilting slices of itself

body drugged kidnapped
weighted sinking close your eyes—
dawn yawns, hesitates

–

oceanlight shimmers—
squinting as the fluorescent
lights escape their cage

–

the duvet swaddles,
suffocates the day
whose glare, interrogative,
is unwilling, unable
to forgive your flow

festival launch—
the ship’s figurehead unmoors
swan dives to applause

Mark Ward is the author of the chapbooks Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Carcass (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cordite, and Softblow, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels, 2019), edited by Raymond Luczak. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. Online at A Stint in Your Spotlight

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Terence Degnan
Reflections on Your 9th Birthday

I can remember the day
you came home
and broke us the news about
Jolly Old Saint Nick

with no tears in your eyes
no betrayal on your tongue
you had already worked it out
all day you imagined us
sneaking around the winter months
building up the narrative
worrying over
the many thresholds of truth
you’d have to cross in your youth

I remember
cursing the name of that little boy
who couldn’t shoulder the burden on his own
and every time I catch you now
spinning a Christmas yarn
to a classmate in the dark
I feel the pangs of fatherhood
and the pride that comes
from tiny moral victories
from the smallest in your tribe

it wasn’t like the day you found
an old copy of The Diary of Anne Frank
your mother once read
in grade school

the questions were more profound then
Anne’s shoes were far bigger to step into
I had prepared myself
for the Christmas Inquisition
but not Anne’s specific holocaust

which isn’t to say we didn’t have instructions
taped to our window
written in Spanish
detailing the many ways
our neighbors could escape
the threat of being rounded up
and placed in concentration camps
where they would be instructed
to drink from a toilet
where some of them would meet
a similar fate as Anne’s

I had yet to tie the bow
that connects the present
to the past

you hadn’t tasted coffee yet
or anything much harder
your heart was still an unbruised fruit
it had yet to be ignored by the object
of an unrequited crush
but I can vividly recount the look on your face
you gave when you turned the book around
to see Anne’s photograph
where just a few feet away
one of yours was framed
by magnets on the kitchen fridge

the human world is bound to joy and cruelty
maybe they grow specifically
by the existence of one another
I won’t be the last to tell you
that one far outpaces the former
in the timeline of your race

more often than not
it takes more years to die
than it does to pull off a storybook wedding
last kisses are practiced in many hospitals
and they bear more gravity than any firsts
but they’re not mutually exclusive
they’re kisses, after all
and they are planted for a few years
every day at drop off
until they are pushed away
but the planting bears the gravitas
the word itself means to sow hope
in a fertile place

for every plot of ruination
there’s a sliver to fit a camel through
there’s a trap door below the other one
and an ally dressed up like an executioner

what I’m trying to tell you is that
Santa Claus is real
he’s got a beard and all
and wears hiking boots
he visits children in the desert
and every night he leaves them small packages
filled with sandwiches
and a gallon of water

the days he spends locked up for it are long
but he does it because someone once
kissed him in the morning
every day before the school bell rang
before he had a beard and all
someone sowed some hope with that
so when people ask me
how I could ever bring another kid
into a forsaken future
I look to you and think
Anne still needs an attic
some kid is still waking up today
and needs one more gallon of water
to finish her trek across
a barren, foreign desert

the human world is wed to hope and cruelty
good deeds, especially
are flogged for f***ing up a plot
what I’m saying is, be a ruiner
plant kisses on your own daughters
even though the suffering is vast
most of the time it takes longer to die
than it does
to blow out
nine candles on a birthday cake
but every day, someone turns nine
and they are invisibly surrounded by
the folks that made it possible

and what I’m saying is:
be them

Terence Degnan is the author of Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016) and The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave (Sock Monkey Press, 2012). His poems have appeared recently in the journal The New Southerner and in the anthology Resist Much/Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), edited by Michael Boughn, Kent Johnson, and Anne Waldman. Degnan studied poetry at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a Martin Luther King Jr. Poetry Prize. Degnan co-hosts the monthly poetry series “Poets Settlement” in Brooklyn. In 2014, he started the monthly storytelling series entitled “How to Build a Fire” at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn. Degnan leads a writing workshop with poet Jen Fitzgerald. Terence lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Online at terencedegnan.com

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Omayma Khayat
Drawing A Line Across Our Map

You draw your line across the map
tearing countries and cities into segments
too many to count
penetrating mountains and valleys
tumbling scrap to the ground
with your invisible red line
you create clefts in landscapes
while mutilating languages and religions
peoples and cultures into fragments
defining each section in an ideology of blood

We are just dust particles,
remains from a destruction
curated by the hands of your war gods
and like a flame extinguished by a passing wind
sacred places become obsolete
forgotten
hearts become numb
blackened by the disguise
your eyes see only monetary gain and power
while ours see the deceit lying in the midst
of reasoning and logic
too profound for our
backwards and primitive minds to comprehend

You draw your line across the map
Intersecting
Clashing
Dissecting
as if humans from another world
are yours for the taking
are pieces of flesh
that deserve nothing more
than to be placed on metal slabs
and studied
cut into
researched
for the greater of mankind
for the greater good
all the while you make the world
believe that you are
the lesser of the two evils

You draw that line with an unshaken nerve
creating battlefields of rubble
where ancient towns
which existed far before your very existence
crumble into a drunkenness
atop of people who have become nothing
lost in this world with no fate
or culture
no purpose or name
faithless beings
believing in a faith you simply
do not care to truly understand
undermining all the good
for your own faith, that of which is deep rooted
in currency and ignorance
blood and oil
all to remain in power

You draw your invisible line
That line made of red from lacerated bodies of
“Collateral damage”
use that red line to define who we are
you are
they are
comparing and contrasting
placing into columns of superior over inferior
dividing us by the colors of our skin
the language of our tongues
the beliefs in our hearts

And you,
you use those differences
to show the world how wrong we are
and how right you are
and you create fractions of groups
that do your bidding
so your hands seem empty and clean
and your lands seem free and just
yet reality knows no bounds
and the strings being pulled have become frayed
and visible
like your ignorance
like your deceit
yet you draw that line
that invisible line
As you propel
that dagger
deeper
right into our hearts.

Omayma Khayat is an emerging poet living in Brooklyn. She describes herself this way: A Sunday or Transit Poet, I write when I find a few minutes that I can steal away. It could be on a park bench while I watch my child play, on the morning/evening commute on our mostly untrusted and unreliable public transportation system, or late into the night when I should be asleep. Since I am too busy being a mom and working on my career as a project manager in the printing industry, I currently haven’t had any books published, any poems accepted into journals or anthologies (well maybe one). And I’m OK with that—My poetry is meant to be read or heard and I’ve found venues where that is accepted without having a “published” identity—yet.

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Janlori Goldmans
The Atlantic Beach Club, 1982

In memory of Alfonse D’Amato

I wait tables in the bar, no windows in that spot
along the ocean, no wives either, just women

on the side and young ass serving drinks. Leaning over
to replace an empty scotch with a fresh one,

the senator smacks my behind, tucks two twenties
into my pants. His sapphire pinky ring waves me

<away— he trusts I won’t talk, that the platinum beehive
he twiddles next to him is invisible. When he snaps

his fingers for another round, he believes this barmaid
is Sicilian, like the other summer girls.

I knew how to stay chummy with silence before closing
my palm around a diamond earring under his table,

nearly sucked into 2am’s vacuum, flicked out with a swizzle stick—
a secret sparkle I wrapped in a lipsticked napkin.

Janlori Goldman is the author of Bread from a Stranger’s Oven (White Pine Press, 2017), chosen by Laure-Anne Bosselaar for the 2016 White Pine Press Poetry Prize; and Akhmatova’s Egg (Toadlily Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Mead, Gwarlingo, Connotation Press, Calyx, Gertrude, Mudlark, The Sow’s Ear, Rattle, Contrary, and other journals.

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Michele Stepto
Rouen, 30 May 1431

A church of one
as attractive to god’s
attention as a steeple
to lightning burning
with furor
from the top down

oh doomed one
bring us to thought
as you go up in flame
higher and higher
and the ash floats free
of the eddying heat

and drifts now sideways
now back and forth in its
falling
an unending flourish
and sorrowful scripture
of all we have burned

Michele Stepto (with her son Gabriel) is the translator of Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (Beacon Press, 1997), from the original Spanish by Catalina de Erauso. Her work has appeared in Verse-Virtual, Ekphrastic Review, NatureWriting, Mirror Dance, Lacuna Journal, and One Sentence Poems. 

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