Adam Malinowski
Democracy

Uber me to the checkpoint. Telecommunications falling like airplanes, stroke me in this no-fly zone. Sites where language is subtracted, the price of dissent’s bloody hand. Smoking Turkish cigarettes by the airport—on a reconnaissance—my motherfucker drone Amazon doorbell recognized my headshot in Pakistan the Target superstore where erasure creeps up from behind a shelled mirror in the South China Sea privatizing battle “back home.” Science mushroom-clouds perception, Fox and Friends muffles cries. Chromium and leaded pipes exit the barrel of a cop’s Glock 19. The flag our prohibition on Love’s impossible icon, the only logical revolt.

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
History

There is a moment before you cross the threshold
When you wonder if you should have left
Where you were to come here alone.
After you forego familiar rooms memorized in the dark
It’s always later than you think and too early to tell.
It’s always too much or not enough to go on.
It’s always about the woman at the door whose name is
Comfort, Sky, Leah, River Branch or Mary.
I would like to tell you that whatever house I enter, I first say,
Peace to this House, but that would be a lie.
I have brought anger, accusation, sarcasm, memory.
Sometimes I have been so confused on arrival
I have hidden in a back room with a book.
Far from the clink of glasses, I tell myself I want to offer peace
But this wound that calls me back
Keeps me in a new secret place at the back of house,
Where war seems like a better option
Even though nothing ever gets settled and the end is still to come.

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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Terence Degnan
I have no time for the poets

who declare this emerging era
with no sense of accountability

as if the borders will melt
in the rain

and the tanks
will remove their own rivets

and a woman in hijab
simply wandering down a sidewalk

will forget to check her peripheries
in a neighborhood she’s never traversed

if this time is ours
men will have to be struck

after all
and before

are created equal
and replaced with creatures

and we’ll have to do away
with creation

we will have to accept our place
in the spilling evolution

before we abandon our properties
before we begin to share the squares again

before squares can return to us
as meandering meadows

before the winds
are to pass through fields of blades

and the coal can be left
inside the belly of a mountain

someone will have to pull a brick
from our southern wall

and pass a note through
to her neighbor

somebody will have to shred the flags
and sew the strips together

we will have to blend the stars
with the union jacks again

we will have to declare
our independence from old declarations

if we are to make new ones
if we are to accept ourselves

amongst equal creatures
somebody will have to curse the golden altars

someone else will have to walk an elder god
from the church to the temple

I have no time for infancy of thought
when it comes to the emerging world

I haven’t a second of breath
to waste on the waiters

I know the seeds
are eventual

I know the bees
deserve equal opportunity

but I have hands for sowing
I have been handed

the knowledge that accompanies
my right to ancestry

my coat is lined
with surrender flags

its leather was once
the binding of a Bible

my buttons are made from rivets
that once held together wars

Terence Degnan is the author of The Small Plot Beside the Ventriloquist’s Grave (Sock Monkey Press, 2012) and Still Something Rattles (Sock Monkey Press, 2016). His poems have appeared most recently in the journal The New Southerner and in the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), edited by Michael Boughn, Kent Johnson, and Anne Waldman. A recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Poetry Prize from Carnegie Mellon University, Degnan curates and co-hosts the monthly Poets Settlement series in Brooklyn. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

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Gregory Luce
Weldon Kees Walks to the Golden Gate

His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.
—Weldon Kees

Will a heart float
if detached from the body
that carries it? Is the heart
a rock or a balloon?
What happens when
the weight of the body
compresses around it?
How does it leap
into the throat? When
the heart sinks where
does it go? Do you still
have a heart to break?
Could you break it yourself
if you had to?

Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line Press, 2016). In addition to numerous journals, his poems have appeared in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects (CreateSpace, 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries (CreateSpace, 2016). Retired from National Geographic, Luce works as a creative writing instructor for Writopia Lab, and lives in Arlington, Va.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Wishing Well

I threw another stone to
the wishing well today.

A small splash,
but a splash none the less.

It will hit the water
and ripples will radiate

to the edges of that well.
The stone will join others

thrown with intention
and hope.

Today I will focus on the throwing;
the rippling; the intention.

I will find strength in the fact
that I am not alone

taking this action.
The arc of justice is long

but acts of faith are relentless.
Relentless.

Relentless.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Porter House Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies. Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.

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Roy Bentley
Umbrella

It’s, you know, that true love thing.
Divorced but friends. Still pretty tight.
So just fine with being here with me.
At the office of a urologist in Ohio.

If she has a “tell” (that she loves me),
this morning it’s her looking away
before the needle enters my penis,
a needle preamble to an anesthetic.

A catheter isn’t a torture device—
if the health care worker fitting you
is skilled. This nurse knows her stuff.
Knows about male pride and a penis

turtling. And laughs, wisecracking
there are times that you just want
to hide from the goddamn world.
Anyway, that is something you

don’t count on: how ashamed-
tired you are. And how the fact
of a loved one looking away is
a small mercy. An act of grace

that includes being so distracted
by my suffering she leaves behind
a black, folding umbrella that had
saved us from a late-spring rain.

Roy Bentley is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City (University of Arkansas Press, 2018), winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize; Starlight Taxi (Lynx House, 2013), winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine, 2006), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize; Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books, 1992); and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), winner of the University of Alabama Press Poetry Series Award. His poems have appeared in RATTLE, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, december, North American Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere.

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Chad Parenteau
Nick Sandmann Jesus Tanka

Nick Sandmann Jesus
smiles, not showing either cheek.
His only cross is
his two-planed eyes and smile
never moving either.

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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Ave Jeanne Ventresca
Portrait in Sienna / the beginning of life for American travelers below a sun

this journey began
like any other.

items to survive
were packed
carefully into bags
then wrapped upon our bodies.

limbs initiated steps
with an armor of caution
like the first few drops of rain
headed on a downwards trail
towards
a dry American landscape.

was there someone
who kept watch of our footsteps,
kept a constant lookout
from windows far away?

or was it the shadows
alongside us
who knew for certain
all the ultimate details that lined
the days and nights of our destinies?

we questioned whether the building
in the distance
contained a land of peace, or
was it a land
where war grew
like ivy rapidly over unseen walls?

not a voyager could state an answer
about tomorrow,
no lips could utter
phrases that soothed.

but it became a journey
we felt compelled
to continue.

without hesitation
we walked together
onwards towards some unsure tomorrow.

Ave Jeanne Ventresca (publishing under the name Ave Jeanne) is the author or of, or a contributor to, some 10 poetry books, chapbooks, or broadsides published in the 1980s and 1990s. She lives in Bucks County, Pa.

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Michael H. Levin
Islas Encantadas

(In Darwin’s Galapagos)

A ghost volcanic blast
unlocks the surface of a whitecapped
dolphin sea. Two hundred necklaced islets
rise in time-lapsed spree

uplifted by a molten platform
on the ocean floor—erupt, go dark,
collapse upon themselves; acquire
green mantles and new bursts of seeds;

appear to die then leap to life again,
repeated resurrections born of
warm spring rains.
Sailing due east in geologic time
they make perhaps an inch a year
towards trenched submersion while new
cones rear up behind them,

emblems of an earth alive.
Those first ashore (a churchly mission
bearing crosses) thought surely they had
entered hell: sheer lava cliffs, dark

glistening spews, crevasse-cut flats
crawling with dragons,
crimson crabs, huge
blue-gaze tortoises that tractored
sandy trails. They had keen sight
for faith but none for miracles.
Slate-colored lizards that sneezed salt

to cleanse their blood; tall dandelion trees
that sent trapped water down to shade below;
balloon-necked birds with razor bills
that floated near their cowls – all blindly

or with motions meant to exorcise
flew by. Blinkered by unexamined choice
they saw masked evil in flycatchers
that lighted on one’s hand—malevolence
in flowers turned yellow, adapted to
the menu of the Islands’ bee.
Between the fumaroles, a differently

invested eye might just have glimpsed
the symphony of rise and fall
embodied in these views—
in finches custom-tailored

to their missions in such
merciless terrain or tufa cauldrons
simmering with life, all dancing

to a metronome whose ticks
dwarf human minds. Still under orthodox attack—
reflexive horror at a streaming
which admits no charity and shows

a face more like remorseless
storm surge than accustomed gods—
that vision rests on stepwise method
shaken free of rote. Conditional

as turtle eggs or seal pups
we reprise his browned
laconic notes.

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
At the 9/11 Memorial Observance

An adaptation of Donald Trump’s remarks on September 11, 2017

memory stripes our mettle
with savage resolve

the fuel of purpose
defiant and relentless

then we are breathing fire
given to smoke

we emerge
from rubble

with our darkness
like a storm smoldering

the innocent contained
behind the spark

of an electric fence
they fill anywhere

we hide them
stood in a corner

or ducked under skies
or bound and trudged

solemn in uniform
a long mile

their spirit to break
or burn or vanquish

pursuing some barbaric justice
whatever we need to erase

the fear or weaken her pitch
or keep close who perished

our grief can be destruction
puddles of sorrow

wept to emptiness
then turned to flame

the sear of anguish
black on our soul

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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