Marc J. Sheehan
Our Pilot Announces the Beginning of our Descent

even though we’ve already felt and heard
the adjustment of the wing flaps nosing
the airplane down through cumulus toward
the landing strip, that anti-dragway on which
we will de-accelerate as quickly as the laws
of physics and the tolerances of various
metals allow. And now a combination
of restlessness and anticipation take hold—
an air-borne virus that begins with a single
passenger turning off her halo, closing
her mystery and getting ready to leave her seat.
Below, the ground starts rising toward us.
For those of us who live here, we begin
to recognize landmarks, like those arteries
the city uses to pump itself out to the exurbs.
We feel a pang of something—not guilt, although
guilt always pangs—but a sense of descending
into a past that is no longer the past,
but some unprepared-for present. Think of
that dream in which you understand
your graduation depends on a class
you skipped all semester. It’s always History,
and the final exam takes place right now. Although
maybe we’ve mis-heard. Maybe we’re beginning
our dissent. Maybe we are about to start
a new Eden with our refusal to jostle each other
just to be one step closer when the exit
whooshes open and we make our way
calmly as cattle toward the terminal.
Or maybe, rules be damned, we’ll unfold our wings
and erase all the wrong answers we penciled in
like appointments we never intended to keep.
Maybe we’ll vote for someone sane next time.
Now, the airport tower and our cares and concerns
rush toward us at an alarming rate until
the jet slows and ends our little hiatus.
We stop. Seatbelts unclasp with the sound
of dozens of metal cicadas awakening.
Aisle-seat passengers retrieve carry-ons
while the rest of us stand uncomfortably below
the overhead bins, stooped from the weight
our lack of ascension has placed on our backs,
while the pilot wishes us the best of luck
on reaching our final destinations.

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
A Daughter Returns

Brown nose in the blackberry flowers of June
muscled flanks
lifted forefoot curves the ribs move beneath fur

Trees in green wedding gowns hide her angry father,
birds dirge their only trill
over and again in the age of guns and mass shootings

In the short time I watch she’s worked her way
half across the yard driven by hunger, lifting each weed
like a cross toward the white sky

that may symbolize purity.
I see the grave, the abscess, the sinkhole
where she fell after the change.

Scree eases its stones across the rocky lip that hides Snow Lake
where swans of frost glide Berlin rivers
and skaters wearing yarn coats clasp hands in pas de deux.

The girl-woman breaks away,
twirls the second smallest matryoshka from its wood.
Before she disappears it is essential

to capture the ritual of grooming
the way our brown eyes met across a distance of old glass
forged from Santorini sand

and our mutual awareness of predation by men

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
Trespassing

Tonight I stepped over low-slung
barbed wire because I wanted trees.
This land has a deed and the name
on that deed is not mine.

This is okay because I am white

*

lights pale as moon and bright
as sun produce no warmth.
Maybe they are the sun and moon
at once, and this is why

they never track across the silver sky
and never set. I sleep on ground
harder than any earth. It holds the cold
but not my elbows, shoulders, knees.

I wake bruised because I am brown

*

earth is mine, and I can sit beneath
the pine and count the dropped cones.
Who can say I cannot touch
this fallen tree, crumbled under moss?

I climb through the iron bars
of gates to stray through daisies
and fleabane. Today I found
a mountain laurel aflower

in the midst of nothing tended
to by a hand. I pulled a limb
close to my face to face the flower:
we are pink and white, pink and white

*

guards shove more children
into the already crowded cage.
There is no longer room to lie down.
The child who edges close to me

has dried snot on her upper lip.
One boy likes to loop his fingers
through the fencing’s lattice.
“I want mama,” he repeats.

Some guards swat his fingers with batons
but he is quick as a lizard, drawing back.
If asked Mama’s name, he says “Mama” again,
confused. “Mama,” he insists. The guards laugh

because no-name Mama is brown

*

bark crumbles from the leafless tree.
I am the body of the earth, I am a bee
in clover I step over, I am the deer
who shimmies her head, all

walk-like-an-Egyptian, and I
shimmy mine back. She huffs
and high-steps into the black woods
waving the banner of her tail, white

*

as the flour tortillas I dream of.
My belly is so angry even my throat
is filled with bees. Sometimes I cry
a little but not much because my body

is as dry as a little brown leaf.
A guard batons the ringing fencing
as he sings, “Shut up, Maria,”
even though Maria is not my name.

*

I am of the earth and the earth is of me.
When I climb the gate the neighbors
look away because I am white.
When I cross the river on Papa’s back

the river is mine and the earth on each
side. I am of the white man
who takes me from Papa’s arms:
we both cry. I am of the countless eyes

that look away because I am brown.
I walk to and fro over the deeded earth,
the lawed and coded earth, because
I am of the earth and it is mine.

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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Michael H. Levin
Vampyr

(After Keats)

Why do you quake
and clench your teeth
good sir—spring’s here,
and green’s the heath

gorse flowers bloom
bright warblers call
a thrush flutes clear
notes over all

yet shivering
you stare as one
who cannot see
and stumble clumsily.

This fever’s not
to season true—
pray tell, what may
be plaguing you?

***
I dreamed last night
a fearful scene:
cold seas rose up
but boiled with steam

and in their midst
a figure stood
with fiery hair
coat caked with mud

both fat and tall
he stalked the land
demanding fealty
out of hand

and bellowed that
he was the One
at volumes great
enough to stun—

had come to bring
a new age in
where greed roams free
and hate just grins.

About him forms
much lesser bowed
and chorused their
small praise-songs loud

discarding oaths
and pledges past
for fear; or gain
they thought would last.

They trampled on
the vineyards; on
that place where laws
are stored: foregone

restraint or shame
displaced by
winning at all costs.

While he with yawps
glared round for those
who might dissent
and palmed bright coins

behind his back
and christened lies
as stone-cut fact.

And when I dared
to differ—was attacked.
He seized me with
one paw (a dainty snack)

and stuffed me in
then swole me down
and laughed to feel
me wriggling whole.

Now ask you why
I walk in night,
breathe heavy when
May air blows light?

I’ve seen the shadow
End of Days, where
harmony has died
brute grievances collide

and courtiers
stand by slyly
hungry-eyed

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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Dana Trupa
Milk Moon

Painted in metallic gold, this stone

has two drawn faces on it – a woman’s to the right

facing east

her infant’s to the left
facing west

On the Greek isle of Chios, the first spark was set.
Roaring wildfires, over four months.

They pillaged, looted, and raped.
Islander women committed
suicide, infanticide

by jumping off cliffs

to save their babes

their souls

from barbarous Turks.

War churned like souring milk and spilt from their breasts.

This milk-rock, sprouting inside your gut,
feels the massacre born into it, too –

this is not what it feels like to be at war
with the infant you might carry

from the piston of bad choices,
or incest—

but close.

Poems by Dana Trupa have appeared or are forthcoming in Red Cedar Review, S is for Sentence, and The Bangalore Review.

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Adam Malinowski
Cities #2

People pouring out into streets beautiful maneuvers my heart dances
amidst crystalizing rallies selling coordinated attacks for personal rapture
as gold prices spike and the body faces head-first into a river
of air conditioners across television country ozone getting patchy like cork
lying next to yellow hydrants the pipes yet to be replaced smoke falling like little paper trails
in a cold cabin grey, red and blue cars swoosh by rickshaws on a white sand beach
we fled the island on the Davison westbound trash blowing in our faces feet wet and slushy
as an outhouse craters into Earth pennies rustle in my denim pockets a collapsed convex
mirror beginning to fade as this melodrama cascades into ponds and carillons cry
over gorges forming new milieus as the moon burns a hole thru our atmospheric ambient
subterfuge like little hourglasses playing xylophones with comrades as work-cranes
come crashing down upon an avalanche of goods on the other side of a pool-house
fanning our muscles in wind-soaked centuries—which begin to disappear. We begin
to look a little more like Venus as larks and oceans reach their haunted capacity
crates roll back to shore on massive waves floating trash our flotilla sinks
off the Bay of Bengal fighting off new orphans a symphonic band
of rare Earth minerals whipped up on the peaks of K2 flowers grow above
my commie’s grave no more arms no more coups we have settled at last
on roses and opalite placed into cold hands as the moon follows us
thru caves filled with termites and dung places where moss no longer grows
in this house an incomprehensible music sings
to folks descending into paradise each movement resembling the last months
go by imagining what life could have been champagnes uncork bras unlatch epic
circulations of atmospheric carbon plunder us feeling like the Mars rover
on this somnolent barge as we make our movements toward new war
new eyes fresh light on the slope bees buzzing in cropfields a waterfall
pours over this dead city as a chorus of heathenistic conches sing
to a darkened sea and unknown song pours forth—the sky ignites our flag
& guns big as flowers
tear down the waning moon.

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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J.P. White
The Old Fairytales Are Best

Lots of small cloaked figures at war with tomorrow.
A few giants standing outside the whisper cave.
Too many stray dogs fed on smoke.
Justice bought and sold for an ear of corn.
Casualties in every chapter.
Just a sliver of chance
Our hero will reach the high ridge
Where all things are possible with a feather.
Meanwhile, the king shivers
with speculations and conclusions.
He spends what little time he has left
Lashing out at rivals,
Then he feeds more meat to the lions
To quiet the many scandals and betrayals
That greet him when he wakes.
Everything is broken and crying out.
Most endings are not understood
On the first reading or the second.

J.P. White is the author of the poetry collections The Sleeper at the Party (Defined Providence Press, 2001), The Salt Hour (The University of Illinois Press, 2001), The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator’s Garden (Holy Cow Press, 1988), and In Pursuit of Wings (Panache Books, 1978). His essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a BA from New College (1973), an MA from Colorado State University (1977), and an MFA from Vermont College (1990). He lives on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis.

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Jason Labbe
Map of May 20

My frontal lobe roams the lowest
forest of the Valley. The door
almost opened itself. I blame the white

stone hidden deep in my inside
pocket, though my jacket’s in tatters,
unwearable, left on the floor

of somewhere I don’t want to live anymore.
The hottest day is this one. I blame
the thin shine of sweat on my bare arms

and the light black hair clouding my tattoos.
I am rusting out like a Ford
abandoned in brush off the fire road,

and I blame the mosquito I would slap
if I could kill anything, directly,
if I could answer a yes or no question

with anything but the least oblique
adverb my white stone struggles to conjure.
You ask, if we were teleported to a quiet

room far from trees at their present height
and the Housatonic at its current depth,
would you grow a shade garden

under my tallest interior maples?
Recklessly says my spade, my shovel,
the sparkling loam I turn over.

Jason Labbe is the author of Spleen Elegy (BlazeVOX, 2017), and his poems and prose have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Boston Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, American Book Review, Poetry, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He lives in Bethany, Conn.

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Kathleen Hellen
now! the ark

He’d not got far—that one, pushing everything
he had in a cart in Giant’s lot, the rain-on-his-parade
that was his graduation. Hey, he said, as if I might
have saved him, but I was bucketing and bailing,
the skyspit thrashing at our knees, rising to the planking
of the jiggered trees, the rivers jumping banks, swiping
steering, the wrecks of pickups, SUVs stalling in the quick
charybdis wire-weeding, lapping at the riprapped, sandbagged
causeways, the puddled upside-down on islands of the world
and everywhere the sinking feeling we had failed the coasts
from Hampton Roads to Ganges, the rest was mythical.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin (Saddle Road Press, 2018); Umberto’s Night (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2012), winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize; and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Pentimento (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in journals including American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and others, as well as in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017). Visit kathleenhellen.com .

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Dion O’Reilly
Dick and Jane’s Dad

All day, Father stuffed dead grass into bags, pruned
shrubs into mouse shapes. Changed deadbolts,
deodorized garbage cans, dragged dirty tools
across the oily khaki of his pants.
Weekends, he inhabited a secret rental with a round mirror,
closets stuffed with corsets and hat boxes, stiletto
heels lining the Linoleum.
He leaned over his arsenal of witchy dust and kohl.
Poppy-red lip gloss and Aquanet.
Turned his painted décolletage toward the light and sobbed,
never convinced of his beauty. He couldn’t pass
as Dick and Jane’s mother, walk down the shady
sidewalk in a shirtdress waving to the neighbors.

He hated any signs of softness in his son.
From the beginning, kept him from
princess stories, tittie milk, lap sitting.
Threw baseball gloves in his face. Took him to the range.
Nowadays Dick, old enough for social security,
likes to huff dental gas and wash down
kratom with a cocktail. Tells Jane he’s damaged
all the way to his bleached-out DNA.

This seems like a simple story.
Father loved Dick enough to try to kill
the woman who lived inside them both.
Then he stowed his own wayward heart
like a mistress in a condo—nothing but
a wet bar for company—
where he shows up once a week
and bruises her good, smears her harlot lipstick
across his face. Her face. His face.

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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