Judith Skillman
White Bicycle, For Drew

in memory of Sarah Tucker, January 12, 2006

It was a hit and run.
It was a black Honda at Polk
and Geary, and she died seven hours later
at San Francisco General. 9:45 am.
Her last word, Hey
was caught by witnesses,
and this detail they chose
to run in the journal.

A man co-opted her roadside shrine,
marked by a white bicycle
and flowers. You said you couldn’t
mourn there because
this time the reaper
took the form of transvestite.

A large black man in heels
wearing a dress and wig,
his broken teeth—
(they haunt you like
a night terror)—
his broken teeth
spilled hate on MLK day—

Hey mofo, suck me dry shorty
I bought this girl flowers
seventy dollars worth…

Take a good look
at the place where she lay
waiting for the ambulance,
wanting yet not wanting to die.
(Was she conscious? Warm?
Cold? Bleeding internally?
Did she wear a helmet?)

You’ve told me
there’s no place left
to grieve in the city.
Not a two by two
square of asphalt,
not a plot without a madman.

Do you know
the color of her hair?
You said they all called her Tucker.
A few years ago
you helped her in the computer lab.
There was no crystal ball.
If so you could have said
Don’t ride your bike
On the night of January 12, 2006,
and she’d have stared at you
like you were as crazy
as the schizoid
who took over her shrine.

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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Melinda Thomsen
Free Birds

Things just couldn’t be the same.
—Lynyrd Skynard

A cardinal skirted upon the edge
of a marble fountain in Athens, Ohio

His flaming tail feathers flared
to the water beat as he bent to sip.

Suddenly, he dashed from the park,
leaving the four tiered spray net behind.

When a shopping center in Rome closed,
dozens of freed ring necked parakeets

found refuge in nearby Caffarella Park.
These exotics chatter, flash lime pinions,

and breed in the holes of trunks. Move
over, pigeons, for the neon urban birds.

See the monk parakeets thriving in haystack
nests on utility poles in Brooklyn?

Birding tourists snap away at these fancier
airport shipping crate escapees.

Even when the Pope released two
Doves of Peace from the Apostolic Palace,

the faithful cheered until a seagull swooped
down, and pinned one dove to a wall.

A hooded crow trapped the other
on a window sill, and pecked it ruthlessly.

Downy flanks and small frames signaled
easy prey, but by flapping arched wings

these two wrangled from claws,
leaving bloodied beaks gnashing.

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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Dion O’Reilly
Dogs

Curled in hot dust, muzzles tucked under tails,
skin flicking flies, we see them lying close
at the feet of Vietnam vets who stand
on meridians with bent cardboard signs.

Scattered like fallen pigeons in the noonday heat,
streetwise pit bulls in studded collars guard
the addicted as they sleep.

The demands of the anxious, the accusations
hurled at the unblinking sky—
none of it fazes them— warm-eyed they gaze up
at the ones who keep them.

Maybe there was a time we loved like that,
before monuments and wheat, wheels, and fire,
before we wanted a separate power held
in our pink-skinned palms.

When we walked on padded paws in packs, tracking
meat to feed-on side by side, sat together
through solstice nights, howling at the bad moon.

Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.

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Kris Beaver
Convenience

We pray during commercials,
if we think of it in time,
batch cook on Sundays,
prepare to eat God’s bounty
for the week ahead.
We read bible stories on the toilet,
hum a two minute hymn
when brushing our teeth.
Multitasking is a way to worship,
to squeeze faith into the day
wherever it might fit. Not that
everyone is busy. Some are just
easily distracted and still searching
for shortcuts into a better afterlife.
Now that I’ve stopped watching
the news I have more hope
and hours left here or in heaven.

Kris Beaver’s poems have appeared in ERGO! (the literary magazine of Seattle’s esteemed and venerable Bumbershoot music and arts festival), Spindrift, Rattle, and The Fox Poetry Box in St. Charles, Illinois, among other places in print, online, and in public space. Beaver holds a BA in English from Whitman College and an MEd in curriculum and instruction from Lesley University. A retired elementary teacher, she now lives and writes poetry in the sublime Pacific Northwest.

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Ana Fores Tamayo
Las azucenas

No tengo lengua para hablar
el ronroneo que cae de las cabezas
en roturas blancas,
quebradas,
negreadas con el reflejo entreabierto del espejo,
lánguido en su eterna soledad.

Arbitraria yo me quedo,
llena y desolada,
sentenciada y llorando,
desorientada en el llegar de más allá
que nunca llega,
y que termina al comenzar.

¿Y que me importan
las palabras
de los dioses encogidos
en esas aguas turbulentas
de ese mismo ciclo otro,
el deseo del infinito abismal
de la obsoleta nada,
de la noche enigmática,
retornada,
como el día de mañana?

Es entonces que maltratan
las espinas de la sangre envenenada,
que terminan los murmurios
del silencio repugnante,
aunque el cielo no recoja,
con sus azucenas,
los pétalos que se caen aislados,
como lágrimas
en la tierra de un dolor sutil.

Day Lilies

An interpretation, not a translation
(because translation is never poetry)

I have no tongue to speak
the purr of falling heads
in waxen ruptures, splintered black,
ajar with the reflection of a mirror,
languid in its eternal solitude.

I stay arbitrary,
full yet desolate,
Sentenced, weeping,
Clueless while reaching a beyond
that never comes,
ending only when it does begin.

What does it matter to me—
Those words
of gods
who lie shrunken
in those storm-tossed waters
of that same yet other cycle,
of that desire for abysmal finite
of that nowhere obsolete,
the enigmatic night,
returned again,
just like tomorrow?

It is then that I mistreat
the thorns of poisoned blood,
ending the murmurs of
emetic silence,
but the sky does not collect—
with day lilies—
the petals that begin to fall
like tears,
in the land of subtle pain.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: This poem previously appeared in Literary Yard. What Rough Beast does not generally post previously published work, but what started out as a faux pas blossomed into a thrupple, and we’re sticking with it.

Poems by Ana Fores Tamayo have appeared in Acentos Review, The Raving Press, Rigorous, Chaleur Magazine, Memoir, Poxo Press, Chachalaca Review, The Evansville Review, K’in, Laurel Review, Down in the Dirt, Twist in Time, Selcouth Station, and Fron//tera, as well as in the anthologies Poets Facing The Wall (The Raving Press, 2018), edited by Gabriel H. Sanchez, and The Spirit It Travels: An Anthology of Transcendent Poetry (Cosmographia Books, 2019), edited by Nina Alvarez. Her photography has appeared in journals and has been exhibited in shows, often displayed along with her poetry.

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Cami Zinzi O’Brien
President Non Sequitur

I’m not going to lie
this poem is writing itself.

I’ll say it with great respect.
She’s not my type

used to be what you told that girl in high school
when you weren’t interested in dating her.

That just shows that when you get good ratings
you can say anything.

Anything? Yes. Anything:
I want to make a deal that works,

so let’s not make it.
And let’s not make sense

while we’re not making the deal
that works.

I thought being President would be easier than my old life.
You mean, the old life

when you golfed all the time
and abused women?

I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist.
I think that would be, maybe, going too far.

You are correct.
Now you have gone too far.

I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay,
but I am a traditionalist.

Even farther.
I will build a great wall—

and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.
I don’t believe you.

One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace.
Good people don’t go into government.

Finally, you are making some sense.
It’s freezing and snowing in New York

—we need global warming!
Spoke too soon.

And when you’re talking about an atmosphere,
oceans are very small.

Way too soon.
Eventually we’re going to get something done

and it’s going to be really, really good.
Thank God.

I was starting to get nervous.

Cami Zinzi O’Brien is the author of A Welcome Roughness (All Rivers Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Tryst, FutureCycle Poetry, The Pelham Quarterly, and 2 Horatio, as well as in the anthology Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word (Sunbelt Publications, 2009), edited by by Donna J. Watson, Michelle Sierra, and Lucia Gbaya-Kanga. A high school English teacher for the past 20 years, O’Brien lives in Darien, Conn.

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J.I. Kleinberg
Five Visual Poems

‭

Note from the artist/poet: These visual poems are from an ongoing series of collages built from phrases created unintentionally through the accident of magazine page design. Each chunk of text (roughly the equivalent of a poetic line) is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax. The text is not altered and includes no attributable phrases. The lines of each collage are sourced from different magazines.

J.I. Kleinberg is an artist, poet, and freelance writer whose found poems have appeared in Diagram, Heavy Feather Review, Rise Up Review, The Tishman Review, Hedgerow, Otoliths, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs most days at The Poetry Department.

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Judith Skillman
Fear and Trembling

The Flicker sings greensickness greensickness
When you surprise it from a branch
Beside the river. Nietzsche’s no longer
Sane, carted off to the asylum with ravings.
The sun doubles as a sun lamp
Beneath which you shower in hot water
As the hour passes, less and less
Your intimate. Quail forage for seeds
In your back, their quick beaks moving
Everywhere at once in hurry scurry,
back and forth, crests bobbing
As if royalty visited this wet place.
Leaves! The yellowing of that instinct
For summer, its glimpse of turquoise heaven.
Insects move into memory—you
Must live with ill health now, and autumn.
Because of the fall obsession and compulsion
Entwine thought. Each new braid proves
You’re a master, and on your skin blooms
A rash. Angry spots flare. Is it all for this—
The soul’s staircase lengthening—the ladder
Leading down?

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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Melinda Thomsen
Washing Dishes

As my mother left
her kitchen, she stashed
latex gloves in her purse

then spun toward me,
a whirligig glaring,
Are you single because

your father sexually
abused you growing up?
Water scalded my hands.

Her refrigerator stank
of rancid meat, soured milk
and rot in crisper drawers.

I focused on rising suds,
letting the faucet run
steam up the window until

plates nestled to dry.
To get her help, I brought
my mother to my session.

The therapist asked her,
Don’t you see how much
you are hurting your daughter?

My mother didn’t answer.
I kept scraping dregs
off spatulas, lipstick

from mugs, and dumping
muck down drains, but each
year led me toward this:

a view of squirrels darting
up pines as I turn on our tap
and reach for a sponge.

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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Hokis
Vulgata

puzzle, puzzle
go away
come again another day

breath
stare there, at the
table, at the

last piece
left, it is all on me

as waiting turns to covet
I say goodbye to infantile-
inoculated crimes

no more fetal
position, I am
born
My life
Your life
The circle of life

It is not up to His’ word
It is not VULGA\r\TA

it is my right-to-life
it is my t\HYMN\e

Hokis is a first generation American of Armenian decent, adopted by an American Family. Ze channels zir trauma-inoculated mistrust in humanity and love for puzzles into unfolding poems. Ze has worked as community organizer, high school teacher, and body-centered mindfulness coach. Poems by Hokis have appeared in Caustic Frolic, Heather Derr-Smith’s website, Line Rider Press, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, For Women Who Roar, and is forthcoming in the Indie Blu(e) anthology This is What Love Looks Like: Poetry by Women Smitten with Women, and the Paragon Press Conversation Issue on Politics, Snollygoster.

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