Michael H. Levin
Harbor of Grace

(Havre de Grace, Maryland)

Green saucer hills
swirl down to sheen
where the river scallops
the Bay. Lines of masts,
white gulls, Canada geese, fence
the scene. Outside those fence lines
mansions built on slave-cut sotweed
picket flat fields in westering light.

That other Havre
long since shed its Grace in waves
of desperate families fleeing swords
and murderous faiths.
Yet this retains the sobriquet.
From Huguenots to Syrians
the tides of refuge washed up here,
a bandbox town that simulated home.

Still migrants all
like those who came before
we reach with mute relief
this problematic shore.

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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James Diaz
The Lonely Crossing

Esmeralda squints into the sun
her mother’s bones rising up
from the darkest river inside her

long nights lost on back roads going nowhere
‘dying things, what they call us’
someone says, in the back of a rusty ford—

she just spits and thinks of all the temporary pens
they make for horses
too old to run the distance
and postcards of places in dreams
and how the flesh is always more tired than the eyes

Chiapas ghost-kids
calling out
for an impossible flint/sized answer
from a never-home-God

over the great white spume
day work / night fugue / waiting / wanting

‘call me gone one more time,’ she thinks but does not say,
‘and I will burn this town down’

‘don’t look at me as if I was already dead
and only you know it,

Goddammit, I know too,
I know too.’

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018). He lives by the simple but true motto that “feelings matter” every shape and size of feeling. He believes that every small act of kindness makes an often unseen but significant difference in someone’s life and hopes that his poems are a small piece of that.

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Adam Malinowski
Devotion

To the yellow vests—divorce him! Turn to murder.
And frozen yogurt. A ransacked Nordstrom’s Rack.
A virus found in a Liberian bat. Bricks for
restless millennials.

To a Galapagos turtle—the buzzing of the hot sun
evaporates us. Pour a drink of herbs, spiced with lemon
—bulldozing Davos.

To my conservative nephew—demon! Orators
of Army fantasies. Tomahawks
directed toward a saintly village.

Myself at 25—a suicide bomber’s mission.

To the spirit of the service-worker—such expert reporters!

Cults, such as Fox, which squander “human life.”
We are whatever where we wander—subject to
Impulse—the overturning of a police wagon. The burning
of a CVS.

Icy TSA. Fat as a fish. Ten months of a red night, my heart pulls amber.
Nuclear shutdown. Release of toxic waste. A tornado.

But then no more.

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
All We Have Left

Whatever else you might think about Christ,
He knew our gender can change over time.
How men can bring a gift after each fresh humbling.
How women can glow when facing stone.
He didn’t care how the body carried itself over the little bridge
Of our short while together.
He kept John close for who he was:
A gender free, non-binary who would know
How to care for Mary after that ugly business at the cross.
Every day someone gets punched in the face, kicked or knifed
Because of who they look like or lie down with at night.
But let’s not forget we already know how this should work.
The one we keep by our side at our last meal
Is the one who might be more woman than man
Or the other way around.
He might be a she or he might be a they who will gather with us
When our skin is no longer needed
And the sky is all we have left to gaze upon when day becomes night.

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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Irene Cooper
loss in HD

awakened to aching florescence i
take note of the bars. wherever i am
my body pretends it’s glad
to see me, surprised at the
natural way i lay open to the tide.
i wake to see that while my brain—pine swept—
dissolved all the salty morsels on its tongue you
prayed for death. i slept out
of kindness and a phobia of disorder o
how will you tell me now i was never your beloved

Irene Cooper’s poems appear online and in print. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University, is a freelance copywriter, facilitates creative writing workshops in Central Oregon, co-edits The Stay Project, and has a novel forthcoming in 2020.

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David P. Miller
Lady Liberty in Photographs

The head, World Fair, Paris, 1878

A bust severed just below the breastbone,
colossal head denoted Monument
de L’Independence, flanked by park benches
poised for Parisian midday slumps.
Men in bowler hats retreat out of her range,
staring stock-still behind a barrier
of bentwood chairs. Others twist
up the spiral stair immured within her,
poke their petite pates through the gaps
below her spiked crown. Skull jewels
for a wrathful deity swathed in shrubbery,
her eyes sunk beneath gathered brows
deep-shadowed on a sunlit afternoon,
beneath a corona of impalements.

The right hand, Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876

Her fist erupted from pond-bank,
loosened to grasp a fire
enlightening the souvenir stand.
Bearded fellers lean and loaf at ease
for the photographer. Two of the curious
have crept upwards through the arm.
Out upon the base of the torch,
they gander the circular view
at the end of the first American century.
Flame grazes their heads.

The face uncrated, verso, Liberty Island, 1885

The Goddess of Democracy’s face stands
inside out in miscellaneous weeds
propped with a tentative wood frame
assortedly knocked together.
We’re naked to her concave shell,
trespassers behind nose and chin
thrust in reverse, her unbroken glare.
Lasered pupils slice the ether regardless
which way her Egyptian gaze faces.
Behind her façade, her skin is black.

David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, forthcoming in 2020) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, poems2go, riverbabble, Nixes Mate Review, The Lily Poetry Review, Peacock Journal, Redheaded Stepchild, Jenny, and others. Miller was a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass., from which he retired in 2018. He lives in Boston. 

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Dion O’Reilly
Okanogan 1980

Half the time, I was high on something
I’d picked out of cowshit in the Skagit
or bought for fifteen bucks from a dodgy stranger.
But that day, nothing but a stack of pancakes,
bleeding blue from blackberries,
bought at a coffee shop in Marblemount.

In a field outside Tonasket, I saw a drum,
big as a trampoline— twelve native men
singing around it. The one named Red
suddenly swelled huge, his face merging
with the Cascades to the west.

He said he’d found an egg in a ground nest,
its cracks caked with yolk. A yellow-bellied
snake curled around it—half dead,
flaking its skin. The thin sound of pipping
within told him Mount St. Helens was about to blow.

The next Sunday, she did, as Jami and I
drove back to Seattle, hot air blowing
through the rolled-down windows. Smell of lemon
and dirt. Scrubby flatlands scraped by ancient glaciers.
Cataclysms, rent valves of the earth, floods—
like a peep show behind a curtain
we were too young to see.

We heard on the radio—Spirit Lake was gone,
half the mountain pulverized. To the eye of the sun
we looked like ants. Displaced,
feelers akimbo, missing what we’d come for.

That night, we slept in a field we thought was empty,
awakened to a train, the roar gaining
on us, thundering up from the dirt
through our bodies—six feet from steel rails,
invisible in the black. The night lit
by a single eye, bright as 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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Michael H. Levin
Museum of African American History

(Basement exhibits, 2016)

This is the lumbar region
of the world—a knotted spine
whose segments radiate pain.
The Middle Passage still casts
shadows here: night sweats, damp fears
still cramped by unseen chains.

How live as property—each
orifice inspected twice a day.
Peremptory gestures that mean
strip, lie mute; mean choked-back screams.
A prohibition unto death
on contact between eyes.

How live as inventory—
lists of half-names tallied
in estates or shuffled out
of pigeonholes and slapped on
barrelheads hint what’s denied.
A stubborn slow migration

north to alien ground, ticked out
in scrapbooked ticket stubs, hints
otherwise. Somehow by bright
church hats or bluesy gospel
tunes, through gnarled dead-ended
passages they made a way

in time laid paths where there were
none; left Egypt’s black despair
behind. Yet hauled stone and hewed
wood still caw. O country, you
know well first sin. Our spiny
serpent wakes, then rises ring-

side from bunched rows of cotton
bolls again. No cure for snakes—
not goshawks, eagle-strikes or prayer—
can last: we’re bound winged angel
to its demon in a whole. Though
dignity acknowledged might

someday repair this one
sciatica of soul.

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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Frances Mac
To March for Life Participants and Pro-Life Leaders

An adaptation of Donald Trump’s remarks on January 19, 2018

life
born is chin
heart
arm
felt
thought

life
unborn is innocent potential
is sign of god
is gift of god
of who picked who
an oath reversed

life
is to wade proud in pain
is tireless movement
is dignity of the here
is baby as love given
is careful in its joy

life
is to gather
to celebrate
to nurse
to cradle
to witness and say yes

life
of the mother
a forgotten miracle
maternity a demand
the womb a home
to rent or violate

life
tens of thousands born
and tens of thousands come
only some are cherished
example of real conscience
of how we choose good stock

Poems by Frances Mac have appeared in Epigraph Magazine, Burnt Pine Magazine, The MacGuffin, and Santa Clara Review. She hails from the Texas Hill Country and currently lives in Washington, DC.

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Chad Parenteau
Taint Michael

Failures follow
leader.

Make it to
golden cell.

Hit low
look upward.

Conquer world
side kicked,

no button
to push.

Flush instead
cycle out,

final act
in view.

Bow head
for camera.

Name drop
God’s name,

hope heavens
hear buzz.

Slate is
bridge length,

blow behind
dead walk.

Pray on
senile savior,

bank on
Bank shot

last minute
on steps.

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 the online journal Oddball Magazine. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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