Jessica Ramer
Mash Note to Dostoyevsky

Turgenev called you the nastiest
Christian he had ever met.
Critics despised your pious
submission, not knowing
our prisons are coiling gyri,
the very stuff of God.
We must submit.
At the Siberian katorgi,
floggers plied their trade, spoke,
voices choking, of their calling,
swallowed saliva as other men do
when talking about cunt.
Flayed by Siberian hell and divine
epileptic ecstasy, you had no skin,
throbbed like a five-foot abscess
of interictal irritability.
Yet, I loved you after your first
twelve sentences, studied Russian
to roll your words over my tongue,
created dialogues for us because
you knew. You knew.

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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Freesia McKee
Asylum Cento

Love has no borders | We Are One | Where is your <3? | Shame! |
We love you | Amor | Side with love | No Estas Solo |

Free the kids | Free the children | Keep Families United | Reunite families now | 
Stop for-Profit Prisons | Close the Camps | Stop the Torture | Don’t Look Away |

Seeking asylum is legal | Free the asylum seekers | Let my people go | 
We are better than this | No more families torn apart | Silencio Es Muerte | No More Bull |

Jailing Children | UnAmerican | Are these American family values? | Inhumane |
This is not America | One Human Family | Abolish ICE | Don’t Look Away |

Children over concentration camps | El Amor No Tiene Fronteras | Inhumane/Immoral/Illegal |
“We sleep on a cement bench.” —Boy, age 8 | Some are my age or younger |

I am an Immigrant | Jesus was a refugee | 
No ICE Raids | ICE | Chinga La Migra | Don’t Look Away |

We are better than this | Are we better than this? | When Will This End? |
Yes, I Do Fucking Care | Give the Children Back | Only monsters keep children in cages |

Never again is now | Never again is now | Never again is now | Never again is now |
The Opposite of Love is Indifference | Classrooms, Not Cages | Don’t Look Away |

Author’s Note: This poem is composed of protest sign slogans from the July 12th, 2019 #LightsforLiberty demonstration outside of the for-profit Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Florida. Most of the children imprisoned in Homestead have parents or sponsors awaiting their release.

Freesia McKee is the author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, Bone Bouquet, Flyway, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Online at freesiamckee.com

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Julien Berman
Lost

When in the course of my many events
I stumble far from the pack

Like the fathers of America
I panic, agonizing over each step forward.

The King’s last breath goodbye to the one being lost
Is a sultry blessing;

It splits the metal shackle tying the colony down.
And lets America explore passion.

But it is also a curse; America’s becoming lacks purpose
And thus she is prone to rambling

And so, getting lost has two meanings, don’t you see?
The only difference is that one is intentional.

But is that really a difference?
Aren’t they both purposeful?

When I escape the chains tying me to my family
I am lost to them, but I am not lost.

I fall under the first definition
Reveling in my newfound opportunity and agency

When I stumble off into the woods sometime by accident,
I am lost to my world, but I am not lost.

I fall under the second definition,
Exalting in my rambling reverie.

So you see, neither definition actually defines the word lost
Simply the state of being apart.

That brings us to the word found;
Is the state of being found in opposition to being lost?

Is it running back to where you were before?
No, that’s just returning, and so you mustn’t have been lost.

Is it waiting for another one to see you?
No, what if you are metaphysically lost?

To me, it’s all a question of want.
Do I want to be found?

So please tell me:
How do I know if I am lost, and how do I know if I am found?
And after,

Is the nation lost?
Will it ever be found?

Julien Berman is I am a junior at Georgetown Day School. His poetry and short stories have won Gold and Silver awards in the national Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards in 2017-19, and his poetry won the 2019 Jaclyn Miller Poetry Competition sponsored by The bWord Works, in Washington, DC. He has also been a classical violinist since the age of 3, and he recently won the 2019 Cogen Concerto Competition in Washington, DC.

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Chad Parenteau
Kurdish Jesus Tanka

Kurdish Jesus
never fought at Normandy.
Kurdish Jesus can’t
perform miracles while he’s dead,
so he’ll sit out World War Three.

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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Melinda Thomsen
Carl Schurz Park by the East River

The wingspan of the gull
circling the park and river
must measure six feet.

I expect it will land, but it turns
and flies farther north. Meanwhile,
a sparrow hops under the railing

and pauses with a glance
at the water before jumping
into air with a chirp

and a multitude of strokes
to reach a tree near the promenade.
No wonder I never see sparrows

flying over the East River
or kayaks paddling down it,
for it demands serious strength.

One flap will take a gull
a quarter mile. For the less
well endowed, it takes so much

to move ten yards. The seagull
lifts up and down on air currents
forty stories high. Below it,

a little girl in a stroller trails soap
bubbles with a swoop of her hand.
They float upward as she releases

another flock of filmy globes
reflecting a rainbow-edged world,
which we dare not touch.

Melinda Thomsen is the author of  Naming Rights (Finishing Line Press, ) and Field Rations (Finishing Line Press, ). Her poems have appeared in Stone Coast Review, Tar River Poetry, The Comstock Review, and North Carolina Literary Review, among other journals. She is an advisory editor for Tar River Poetry and teaches composition at Pitt Community College in North Carolina.

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William Ward Butler
Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis

Every morning I take a pill
manufactured by a company

named after a Biblical land
so I can avoid a plague

that zealots say is punishment
for sins I have committed—

so what, who hasn’t defied Leviticus,
who has lived exactly how others expected them to,

why won’t God stop watching me through my webcam
when all the angels are asphyxiating themselves for Jesus,

why do I care what people say about me in brightly-lit churches,
wearing their finest clothes on a holy day?

Yes, I have wanted to be remade in the image of another man.
Yes, I know what history did to those who came before me.

I’m aware the medicine I take daily is the closest I’ve come to prayer:
patented, made for profit, distributed thirty years after the start of a crisis.

If there is an almighty voyeur above us, if they could end suffering
at a moment’s notice, what does it mean that an amoral company did it first?

When I place the pill on my tongue it is nothing like a Eucharist—
it is not a miracle from God, it is proof of God’s absence.

William Ward Butler is a writer and educator from Northern California. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Bodega Magazine, Hobart, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Catamaran Writing Conference, and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. He tweets: @WilliamWButler

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Josh Nicolaisen
Line Dancing in America

In distinct lines we dance among friends,
virtue signal to hand-selected audiences
shoot within safe spaces, sure-footed
and secure to blame and shame.

No trouble within the tribe.
No fighting within the flock.
We preach to choirs, push at open
doors, toot each other’s horns,

scratch each other’s backs,
jerk each other off and around,
shit on the other with love,
love the other through hate.

Hens and roosters squawking around
the barnyard, confident and cocksure,
while just outside the farm’s perimeter
wait eager wolves and foxes.

Josh Nicolaisen has taught English in both public and private schools for more than ten years. He organizes and officiates snowboard and freeski events and is the owner of Old Man Gardening LLC. Josh lives in New Hampshire with his wife, Sara, and their daughters, Grace and Azalea. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in So It Goes, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Writers Resist, as well as in the anthologyThe Poets of New England: Volume 1 (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018), edited by the Underground Writers Association).

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Zoe Canner
Meaningless

I press my eyelids into
the wet cloth. It’s drafty
in here now that you’re
gone. Permission to talk
over women {granted}.
Age is just a name. Sleep
is just a number. Nine
eleven is a teenager
already &I feel far
worse digging deeper
democracy &all that
wavers. Remember that
flag shit. The grasping
when you feel like you
can’t do anything else.
Forced long walk &lung
corruption. I press my
mouth into the wet cloth
&blow hot air, making
sound. Remembering is
my middle name.

Zoe Canner is an angry, anti-racist, 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivor. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in in The Laurel Review, Arcturus of the Chicago Review of Books, Naugatuck River Review, SUSAN / The Journal, Maudlin House, Occulum, Matter, Pouch, Chaleur Magazine, Nailed Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance.

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Deborah Bacharach
The Big Bad Wolf

I used to be a constellation,
lived in the sky, the wolf you saw only
at night and perhaps
I hunted through your dreams,
ripped the throat out of grandma
as she leaned over the tub pressing
dandelion leaves into wine
or maybe that was just tuberculosis,
maybe that was just poverty, or the way
America abandons its poor.

You can’t blame me for every death.
I’m not taking them out in childbirth.
Rape in the basement? You know
the odds. That’s a family friend, family.
That’s the thirteen-year-old boy flipping
the skirt of the eight-year-old cousin
in a red kerchief, set to scrubbing
the back steps, then the front.
I’m not making this up.

I stalk the Wissahickon valley
where the pioneers once stood.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Antigonish Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Cimarron Review, among other journals, and in the anthologies Jump Start: A Northwest Renaissance Anthology (Steel Toe Books, 2009), edited by Lonny Kaneko, Pat Curran, and Susan Landgraf; A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002), edited by Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, Micki Reaman, and Carole Simmons Oles; and Sex and Single Girls: Women Write on Sexuality (Seal Press, 2000), edited by Lee Damsky. She lives in Seattle where she a writing tutor. Online at DeborahBacharach.com

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Judith Skillman
Limbo

It could be the stomach of the whale,
or the white skies of June,
any sick feeling in the gut—
this waiting, scratching off squares
on a calendar page.
It might be a jail cell
with a toilet and cot, the guard
walking past with his gun holstered,
and other inmates cursing,
yowling, screaming like cats.
The whale’s nowhere to be seen,
and Jonah, though he’s confessed,
isn’t thrown overboard,
doesn’t flail green water
nor get swallowed
only to be spat out
for his cliché, specious gratitude.

Judith Skillman is the author of Came Home to Winter (Deerbrook Editions, 2019) and 15 other poetry collections. She has received grants from Artist Trust and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Cimarron Review, Zyzzyva, We Refugees, and elsewhere. Visit judithskillman.com.

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