Rachel Buff
When the Chancellor Donates his $50,000 Raise to the University

When the chancellor donates his $50,000 raise to the University Food Pantry,
They put out a spread.
It’s delicious. Everyone gathers to eat it.
The shelves are full. Since there is no more food insecurity among students,
They are free to focus on learning.

When the chancellor donates his $50,000 raise to the University Health Center,
People from all over Milwaukee are inspired by this display of generosity. They donate
their services. There is acupuncture, massage, talk therapy and tarot reading; it’s all free.
There are Black and brown, queer and Indigenous, white and Asian American care
providers. Everyone feels better.

When the chancellor donates his $50,000 raise to scholarships,
the Wisconsin Board of Regents is ashamed. They drop tuition rates so low
That a working single mother of three can afford to take a class. (There is free childcare
for students.) She gets her degree, makes it big,
donates extravagantly. Going to college becomes an option for everyone in town.

When the chancellor donates his $50,000 raise to the university,
The money magically multiplies. Suddenly, everyone who makes less,
makes more.

When the chancellor donates his $50,000 raise to the university,
the example of his generosity reminds
faculty and staff across campus that the university is made out of
only love and labor, and that it belongs to everyone, including us.
We dance in our offices and continue the work.

Another University is Possible: it has been there all along.
It hovers in the wings of this cruel austerity:
requiring only courage, only love to take flight.

Rachel Buff is the author of Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992 (University of California Press, 2001) and Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press, 2017). She is a full professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she directs the Cultures and Communities program. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in JEWSCHOOL, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Truthout, and other publications.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Kevin Ramsden
King Ubu’s Web
(An Inter-view with Kenneth)

permission to be problematic
to be
the sound of the words

the weird word things
become hypnotic
like carving stone
you don-t have to worry
words always say something
imaginary solutions to imaginary problems
and ask those hard questions
you know
the internet
genuinely makes the world
smarter
because everyone talks
about everything except the writing
so deal with the chatter
you-re off the hook

but everybody is so hooked
you know
there-s too much to know now

but fish get hungry
there-s not enough oxygen
you-re in trouble
if you have to depend
on ‘pataphysical inquiry
i don-t recommend it
distracted by the wrong things
fictitious and obnoxious
desperate and sad
so you know
i don-t know
i don-t really care
i-m doing
and that-s the kind of thing i-m doing
you know what i mean?

oh
before I forget
there-s a party at the rich collector-s house

Kevin Ramsden is a newly emerging poet whose poetry appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Fine Lines. He is an undergraduate American Studies major and Writing TA at Oregon State University–Cascades in Bend, Oregon, where he recently became a recipient of the university’s 2019 Layman Fellowship.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Tom Driscoll
Border Music

The wind passes by,
taking with it dust and seed.
Nothing is promised.

The desert floor marks
what’s fallen, tells the story
where sky’s mere witness

fails.
Days of blind light,
blessed light, blistering light,
then shattering stars—

Night,
I last held him
then, saying his name, his name
that I pray he keeps.

Tom Driscoll is the author of Odd Numbers (lulu.com, 2017), Instead of Peace (lulu.com, 2015), and Absence Singing (lulu.com, 2013). Earlier, Driscoll published a collection of song lyrics, Songs, For All the Wrong Reasons, and a poetry collection, Allow This Heart and Other Poems. His poems appear in two recent anthologies, Yearning to Breathe Free: Poetry from the Immigrant Community (Moonstone Arts Center, 2019), edited by the Moonstone Arts editorial committee, and Art on the Trails: Marking Territory (Route 7, 2019), with poems selected edited by Zachary Bos, the publisher of Pen & Anvil Press, and the editor of the New England Review of Books. He lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the artist Denise Driscoll.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Lisa DeSiro
So Many Things Come Out of a Woman’s Body

Some of it is exactly the same as for men:
urine & feces, phlegm & earwax, saliva & snot;
blood, when we injure our skin;
tears from our eyes when we cry.

But let us consider

what is specifically female:
the many variations of menstrual fluid
(scarlet, rust, magenta, pink; strands, clots, liquid)
or, for some among us,

babies—human beings!—plus
milk from our breasts to feed them.
Or those horrible mysteries,
miscarriages. Or abortions.

So let us be

not afraid to sing, sing about all these things
produced by women’s bodies,
since we are all
produced by women’s bodies.

Lisa DeSiro is the author of Labor (Nixes Mate, 2018) and Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Blood & Bourbon, Cordella Magazine, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Healing Muse, Mezzo Cammin, Mom Egg Review, The Ocean State Review, Ovunque Siamo, Rattle (Poets Respond), Salamander, Shooter Literary Magazine, Sixfold, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies anthologies Writers Resist: The Anthology (Running Wild Press, 2018), edited by Kit-Bacon Gressitt and Sara Marchant; Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017), edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane. Her poem “In Lieu of Flowers” was a winner in the City of Cambridge 2017 Sidewalk Poetry Contest. Along with her job as production and editorial assistant for C.P.E. Bach: The Complete Works, Lisa is an assistant editor for Indolent Books and a freelance accompanist. Read more about her at thepoetpianist.com.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Susan Craig
Cicadas

Nighttime’s full July glory, screech
deafening. In morning, silence;
empty shells, skins without flesh
clinging to bark, crisp on the sidewalk.
Silver veil of their wings closed,
thoraxes unmoving,
legs brittle.
Last night’s explosion, one throbbing
life; like they rose up, screamed
“I am!” one last time.
Now they’ve vanished,
a voiceless diaspora.

Poems by Susan Craig have appeared in Kakalak, Mom Egg Review, The Collective I, Fall Lines, and Jasper, among other publications. A graphic designer by trade, she lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Aaron Coleman
In the City of Tenderness and Desperate Promises

Punctured in a soft hour, we tried a new way home
past the pawn shop neon-green with memory. She
came away with me from broken roads. Bird bone
litters tall, forgotten weeds. We paused to try to see

inside each fractured hollow. But hard rain hurried us
as slanted ground that was a risk became a gulch—
silent, tilted heads appeared to pray on a passing city bus,
but eyes lie—Who am I to say that I have seen too much

to trust another stranger? To learn to start over?
The end got here before us. Each footprint deep and flooded
with chemical runoff; technicolor surfaces, but no real border.
Bones don’t float; the birds’ or our own. The route turned

blue and bottomless, but it wasn’t waves and isn’t
water. Just consequence. We wander in wet endless sound
and learn to call it falling—until she says, “This love is a decision
to forget and keep going.” And nothing else. I wonder if we are bound

to drown in chance and mangled maps. Slick with rain, rock moss riots
money-green until tornado-green, churning, like our city’s restless silence.

Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) and the chapbook, St. Trigger, selected by Adrian Matejka for the 2015 Button Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in journals including Boston Review, Callaloo, and The New York Times Magazine. A Fulbright Scholar and Cave Canem Fellow, Aaron is the winner of the American Literary Translators Association’s Jansen Fellowship, the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Contest, and The Cincinnati Review Schiff Award. After completing an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, Aaron is currently there as a PhD student in Comparative Literature studying poetry and translation of the African Diaspora in the Americas.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Sanjana Nair
Girl Before

for the witches

In this version, the sky has gone green.
Thunder serves as warning
of what might strike next.
Each word, an arrow.
Each phrase a naming of what you should be
but are not. Dumb girl, dumb, dumb,
dumb mute child, cut out your tongue—
be done with it already.
The fire, the match, the smell of sulfur
rising work, work, work
cut away sound, silence the scream
amputee, amputate, ampule of hope—
douse the air in the smell of what feeds it:
Dangerous oil of hair, nail of foundling,
limbs of a lover—
remove the shitty smell of sulfur.
Chop, girl, chop, chop.
Shame you will not eat what you bear,
for we all will,
without blinking, without a care—
oh, the hunger I feel in this desolate place—
we sing praise
of that which keeps you dumb,
and sulfur, sulfur, we rise,
we strike the matches:
Burn, girl, burn.
We will claim you.
We will forget your unmarked grave,
dumb girl,
for all that you cannot save
yourself
from us.

Sanjana Nair’s poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, and The Equalizer, among other publications. “The Lady Apple,” her collaboration between poet and composer, was performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater and featured on NPR’s Soundcheck. Nair lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Chad Parenteau
Nancy Pelosi Jesus Tanka

Standing by Hope’s tomb,
Nancy Pelosi Jesus
proclaimed hope come out.
But this was three days ago
and months after hope had died.

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Howard F. Stein
A Good Evening of Theater

Forget the lines—

The only thing
You need to know
About the play
Is whether to exit

Stage left
Or stage right.

Don’t wait for applause—
The audience has already
Long since left.

They wanted to make sure
They never heard you speak.

Howard F. Stein, is author most recently Light and Shadow (Doodle and Peck Publishing, 2018) and Centre and Circumference (Ori Academic Press, 2017). He is poet laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology. He is professor emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, where he taught for nearly 35 years. He is a husband, and a father of one son, Zev, who is an outstanding drummer. His two cats, Luke and Leia, keep him almost constant company and are reputed to help him write poetry.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem, and you value the What Rough Beast series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Jessica Ramer
Outside the Sanctuary City

Stars: jots penned in moonless ink
My footsteps, tittles in shifting ink.

Alone, bedroll unfurled on sand,
I scribble mad woman’s ink.

Dry loaves scrape my palm-leaf basket.
Waterskins crack, spill brackish ink.

Men suck last marrow from my bones,
Lick up stray bits of spongy ink.

The Virgin whispers “Go in peace,”
Words echoing in memory’s ink.

Feet probe toeholds. Sweat and grit
Meld into canary-colored ink.

Lying in half-sleep, hair like cursive,
I fear shedding ink.

Acolytes’ mythologies persist
On vellum traced with gall-nut ink.

Note of grace: galaxies expand,
Write my life in vanishing ink.

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem, and you value the What Rough Beast series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.