Michael H. Levin
Baghdad Nights

We gave them all our dreams—the magic carpet, the Arabian Nights. They used them for Disney films and brought us their tanks and their snipers.
—Aziz Hassan, Iraqi poet (February 2016)

Night shimmies along the Street of Books
over flat rooftops that promise relief
from crushing heat, disrupted
intermittently by bursts
of small-arms fire.

Aladdin’s dream—that magic swirl of hope
where chance aligns and fortunes fall from trees,
once graspable in blue-tiled mosques
and arching passageways—is now consigned to
splintered palms, dry rubble piles.

His name was Allah-Din; but magic
comes obscured these days—small expectations
mixed with dust. What rises is uncertainty.
Each alley has gone blind. The nomad moon
hangs motionless, resigned.

Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. See michaellevinpoetry.com.

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Judith Skillman
Because of the Holocaust

I jump from the train. The Japanese
are reclaiming their island. My grandmother
carries her satchel. I lose a package.
My shoes disappear beneath a seat.
The interrogators board and begin
to ask. In the sky a sign of welcome
comes from Schwarzenegger.
The fist spells welcome in many
languages. I recall my husband sleeping
in a box.

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 & Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Cimarron Review, Zyzzyva, We Refugees, and elsewhere. Visit judithskillman.com.

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Thomas Brush
An Ossuary

Nothing greets me
At the door. No one
Walks toward me. Not even the rain.

There is no sound. Only the sunburnt
Grass rising from my childhood. That leaves
Without a trace.

There are no more surprises. The shadow
Of someone’s hand crosses the wall
Above my bed. Night after night.

Until I’m left with what’s needed.
An ossuary. A closed book.
A yearning.

A rehearsal
For forever.

Thomas Brush is the author, most recently, of God’s Laughter (2018), Open Heart (2015) and Last Night (2012, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize). all from Lynx House Press. His poems have appeared in Fine Madness, Indiana Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Tar River Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Seattle, Wash. 

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Dion O’Reilly
Why Did I Call My Pig?

I watched my mother call her,
I watched my sister too.
My father chased her.
They tried to round her up,
but my piebald oinker was quick,
her squeals greasing the air.

My huge baby, companion
on aimless teenage days
when I balanced on the fencepost,
listening to her belly-deep rumble,
scratched with a stick her itchy,
thick-skinned back.

The butcher with a rifle,
stood impatient by his Chevy truck
its hook and chain ready
to haul the limp sow up,
to scrape the skin and slice the stomach
in a thin red line, the bowels spilling
glazy as moonstones.

Forgive me. To show off my small power,
I called her—the one she loved—
and she came running.

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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Joyce Schmid
Birdsong

The mockingbird
that used to sing
a medley
of its favorite
blackbirds, finches,
wrens and sparrows
through the night
now sounds
the klaxon of a car alarm
to warn us: Wake up!
thieves are breaking in
and taking
what you never
knew you had.

Poems by Joyce Schmid have appeared in Poetry Daily, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.

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Margo Davis
Sunday Worship

Ray says something about honor
and quiet, here on Bayou Lafourche,
only I can’t hear him for the whirr
of the motor. He must have read my face
for he pantomimes, what what?
I want to tell him there’s no sport in
tricking catfish into gill nets, no grace,
but I know this to be trawling
for trouble. Ray worries the waters
among stumps he insists all look alike.
Above swamp fog, a blue heron lifts
then glides above cattails before
easing me onto safer ground.

Poems by Margo Davis have appeared in Ekphrastic Review, Ocotillo Review, The Fourth River, Misfit, Light, Houston Chronicle, and San Antonio Express, among others. Her work has appeared in several anthologies including Enchantment of the Ordinary (Mutabilis Press, 2019), edited by John Gorman; Echoes of the Cordillera: Attitudes and Latitudes Along the Great Divide (Museum of the Big Bend, 2018), edited by Lucy Griffith and Sandi Stromberg; and Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press, 2015), edited by Sandi Stromberg. 

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Adam Malinowski
Spectacular Politics

Pigs will not go gently into the night. We rot, brine, & riot within plantation wire—cement and bone, lit up
on the crooked asphalt. Dazed eyes like leaded nights are dangerous resources, blighted and burned.
O soldier! please welcome our parade thru sewers, moldy streets & airport security. Shot dead in the Grand
Tetons, members of the #Resistance pile up like mountains of trash, Dunkin Donuts & spilled motor oil.
Intoxicated laboratories of fish scales, stem cells, OxyContin & crystal meth fed to federal workers &
Honduran housekeepers keep us afloat. Shot in the head during a protest by the sea. Blood spills from your
rotting mouth.

Poems by Adam Malinowski have appeared in  Poets Reading the News, Philosophical Idiot, and in Mirage #5/Period(ical) #6. They hold an MA in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University, live in Detroit, and facilitate a poetry workshop at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Mich.

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Michael H. Levin
Martini Eves

I think more now of those dead:

the slim sax-playing therapist with
his perceptive spouse—my parents’
neighbors in late life and nearby graves

the glinting black-caped architect
wax-moustached and just north of crazed
by standards of the day, who built
curved structures and would blast walls
unpredictably with baritones

ex-Reds who strolled in trailing wives near
twice their size, to wander through my preteen
home among attentive brokers,
G-men, flacks for unknown causes
and mysterious mills, beside the limber
couple who learned cha-cha first
and taught them all.

Martini eves where I, half up the stairs,
watched elders in pressed suits and cocktail gowns
put drinks and cigarettes aside to twirl
across our blue pile rug in Latin time
to spinning forty-fives. Just folks: a
comfortable group ascending on a
Fifties tide, as though in pantomime.

Yet in that crowd were some who carried hunger
far past seventh grade, and some who worked three jobs
to grasp degrees, and veterans of the Bulge or
Lawyers Guild; and some who proud as kings
refused to testify.
Dance nights, astonishing
and rare, when I joined awkwardly the slinky
glides of those who carved their profiles, deeper
than they knew, in smoky air.

Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. See michaellevinpoetry.com.

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Katie Bickham
How Long Does it Take to Make Nine People?

Do we count the sex? The thrills and come-cries
and the counting days and blue lines,
maybe a miscarriage, maybe a fluke or two
before we got all nine here at once?

We should count the nipples, cracked and still
produced at every nighttime whine, the seconds
ticking down on microwaves as fathers
warmed the milk and shared the load.

We should count the teeth.
The lost ones under pillows, the crumpled bills
that paid for them, the ones that grew back in,
the wisdom teeth, the wisdom it all took.

The three-two-one before his mother watched
him drop, gripping the rollercoaster’s hand bar,
before her father lit the bottle rocket on the 4th,
before the boy closed his eyes and jumped into the deep end.

I like to think how long it took to ferment the grapes
the barley, hops to make the drinks that were their firsts,
the hundreds of years it took the acorns to make trees
that shaded their yards, that freckled them with leaves.

It takes ten thousand years to weave the blanket
of a soul, much less of nine. Imagine the billions
of rolls of the dice for the lucky break of an ancestor, a cell,
an egg, a ship, a roll in the hay, a meeting in the hall.

How long does it take to make nine people?
It doesn’t matter. Because no one was keeping count.
Because no one can remake them. Because it took less
than a minute to kill them all.

Katie Bickham is the author of Mouths Open to Name Her (LSU Press, 2019) and The Belle Mar (Pleiades, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Rattle, Pleiades, The Southern Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Bickham has won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award, the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and The New Millennium Poetry Prize. She lives in Shreveport, La.

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Chad Parenteau
Jeffrey Epstein Jesus Tanka

Air hisses with praise
for Jeffrey Epstein Jesus
who died for his sins
so that Hillary Clinton
could inherit them, stand trial.

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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