Margo Davis
Rupture

Why make memories
when every incident in my head
plays 
	  not exactly 

how I see things 
but precise and unique in the way 
my world is 
		   solely mine, 

defined by what 
makes me both sigh and laugh at  
crass disaster 
		       befalling Daphnia, 

a common water flea 
unable to resist Utricularia, 
a swaying lush  
		         water flower 

that flaunts its rapture
to imprison naïve prey. Daphnia probes 
with antennae 
		        and digests

her dilemma. Eaten 
by an acidic rootless flytrap, 
a commoner,
		     Bladderwort. 

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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Jenna Goldsmith
Poem on the morning after Toni Morrison’s death

On this morning
all poets have one thing in common
and that is that we are poets.
And we have another thing in common
and that is we are writing
poems about Toni Morrison.

We write in coffeeshops
and kitchens and
cars and beds and bedrooms
and classrooms
writing about the life
and death of Toni Morrison.
And what Toni Morrison taught us
in our writerly lives and
personal lives and professional
lives and political lives
and our lives as citizens
and our lives as Americans
and that those are
really the same thing
and that is another thing
Toni Morrison teaches us.

Toni Morrison of the two-name club.

Hear my poem of clichés about Toni Morrison.
Beloved amongst us
writer and reader
what if cliché means consensus?
As in everybody.
As in who amongst us can deny
this black woman
this woman
this writer
this thinker
this life
as of complete consequence?

On this morning
I join the ranks of every other poet
writing about Toni Morrison.
Every poem will likely be called
what this poem is called which is
“Poem on the morning after Toni Morrison’s death.”

I don’t want this poem
to be novel
with a novel title
and a novel theme
and a novel volta.
For this morning
I join the ranks of every other poet
who is writing a poem about Toni Morrison.
I want my poem to be like every other poem
on the morning after Toni Morrison’s death.
The title will be the same and
the volta will be Toni Morrison’s life.

You see
this poem
which every other poet
is writing about Toni Morrison
doesn’t say much

it doesn’t know much.

Jenna Goldsmith is the author of the poetry chapbook Genesis near the river, (blush books, 2019). Her work has appeared in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, New Delta Review, Utterance, and The Waggle, among other venues. She is the interim program lead for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at OSU Cascades. She lives in Bend, Ore.

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Adam Malinowski
Antique

Most days there’s just no use in getting up
breaking snowy banks crystal
forms on the edge of breath
shapes of money wood crutches
my Discover statement eating baby
coral in a field of automotive flowers
My neck aches falling asleep
in your breasts blankets
a plate of hot eggs and bacon
hash and rye
circulating at the edge of memory
I want to taste snow melting
in the lapels of your peacoat
the fangs of greenbacks hollow
-ed out inside crescent moons
Love sinking in the river
reassembled
& citronella lamps for block parties
A bird governing two, three, four
or more sexes governing spheres
of heartbreak
and the goose a big red hair
a momentary gain sitting on your
aching chest lashes tongues kisses
toys under little cloth afghans
sleeping crescent moons reel
-to-reel walk us thru the art
& winds of what has been.

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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Marc J. Sheehan
Outside White Cloud, Michigan

Someone has built a merry-go-round that
doesn’t go-round. The fiberglass horses
are impaled on rods and connected to
a central May Pole by ribbons or streamers.
Instead of stable or midway, this static
attraction is fenced in by some pre-fab
out-buildings leased as storage units,
and just down the road is a used-car lot
sporting a suspect collection of sedans.
What’s stored in the units and why the horses
keep their pole positions is a mystery,
while none of the used-car lot’s vehicles
will be anyone’s get-away. A few
of the immobile ponies’ satiny
tethers have succumbed to the elements,
and swirl idly in the wind like flagless
prayers for a circus to magically appear
and pitch its welcoming, avaricious tents.

Marc J. Sheehan is the author of Dissenting Opinion from the Committee for the Beatitudes (Etchings Press, 2019), a collection of flash prose pieces. His poetry collection, Limits to the Salutary Effects of Upper-Midwestern Melancholy, won the Split Rock Review 2016 poetry chapbook competition. His earlier poetry collections include Vengeful Hymns (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize, and Greatest Hits (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 1998). Sheehan served for many years as the communications officer for Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, and lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.

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Judith Skillman
From Your Own Filthy Mouth

Come curses, cries of the medievalist’s
rack stuck up your spine, waiting to pull
you into another form. Grandmother?
Daughter? Girl who had the knife flashed at her

in hallways of the first interracial school?
You hear a fish spit into a toilet,
see the adze in the mirror hung over
a row of off white porcelain sinks. You

turn to let out a belch from inside the whale,
you weep against the walls
of an obsidian belly
where once a tiny maggot bred

from sperm and egg performed meiosis.
Sway on a stalk, usher in another
smooth-skinned creature for whom
you’ll perform the rites of spring, old mother f’er.

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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Mary Ann Honaker
Pierced Septum

after the film Audrie & Daisy

After she was raped, the girl’s clothes
turned dark and loose. Her blonde hair

bled black, which she couldn’t cover fully
with her charcoal cap. Even this

wasn’t sufficient for the nighttime
pouring out of her: it tainted her bedroom,

the pictures she scrawled in a sketchpad,
even the air around her as she breathed.

She was a black hole in reverse,
an infinite density of darkness spilling

outwards, outwards. I don’t know
what happened to her little giggles,

light as butterflies. She grew spiky
piercings from her once gentle face.

“The boys went on with their lives,
they graduated, they’re going to college,

they’re making something of themselves.
The girl?” The sheriff shrugs. And smiles.

She has a septum piercing, a crescent
with two sharp spikes pointing down.

It says, Don’t even try to kiss me.
It’s an ugliness only the right man

will be able to see around.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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Dion O’Reilly
Ode to the Dog

It’s been millennia.
This love of stick and chase.
Pack love. Love of wild meat
Run down and flame blackened.
Warmth of fire,
The way we lay together
At the line between flickering heat and fear,
Your dirty fur held close
Against our naked skin.

Forty-thousand years, they say,
Since you came to our aid,
Wiping out the Neanderthal,
Thinning their game,
Grafting four-legged speed
To the guile of our strange brains.
Forty-thousand years side-by-side
Since you left your wild
Brother wolf for us.

We see that sometimes
When you forget who you are—
Snap at a kitten or clamp your teeth
Around the jeaned thigh of a stranger.
Or we notice in your fulsome eyes
What you’ve lost
When you slink into shame,
Accept choke chains and neglect.

And don’t we also pay a price?
Our human lifespans so much longer—
We must watch the same old friend,
One by one, die a different death.

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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Cheryl Caesar
A tribute to photographers

I don’t do selfies.
The outstretched arms, the long sticks
recall the image

of the damned in hell:
long spoons attached to their hands,
they can’t eat. They starve.

Meanwhile in heaven,
strapped onto the same long spoons,
folks feed each other.

This is what you do.
Open your lens on the beauty
Of your friends. Feed them
on your loving gaze.

Poems by Cheryl Caesar have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Agony Opera, Cream and Crimson, Total Eclipse, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply Winedrunk Sidewalk, Agony Opera, and Prachya, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She lives in East Lansing and teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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Margo Davis
Ecstasy

I wrap thumbtacks in white bread
and swig milk whole. Jawbreaker wrappers
still crinkle all the way down.
I cannonball them in rapid succession
then sooth my burning tongue with crocus petals
and desiccated spider. When someone
discards a box of nails, I say, why not. Why lie
down if one never sleeps. I soak them in olive oil, drink,
bury a few in hot dogs. I ingest the boxful,
then pogo to the hardware for shotgun shells, no gun
intended. I like their peppery taste on
white potatoes those half-baked nights so carefree
in the yard when a wild hare up my arson
heart signals to the spheres, eager to
act with or without. Oh Warlord,
how I want to take this in, ingest every
bloated bit. Pry open my chest.

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
Barbarian

Notre Dame burns & it’s April
long after rain and roads and countries
under pavilions arctic gulls speak
to a sun hardly remaining
tho my seasons do not yet feel
smoke billows from the television
old ghosts and proteins
recovered from factories drones
photograph Paris what bliss!
securing Europe’s perimeter
live embers motivate me
reaching from the harbor
to the cape laying down new
supply lines and over the river
bridges are jammed the Metro
shuts down eternally carbonized
forests appear a fresh dawn
O we are far from your world
tho you’d be pleased to know
that the city burns pleasantly
plains of diamonds
villages and flames will still be felt
icicles, legumes, musics, and chocolates
under halcyon blazes flotillas dancing
like chevrons do on pretty little t-shirt
yards fond of volcanoes rising to the pavilion
of your chest
arriving against the stars.

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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