Patricia Spears Jones
A Haunting

The ghost of John McCain perambulates the oval office—slow circuit day and night.
His embalmed lips sewn shut. The president hears him loud and clear. The president
Hears him day and night. John McCain John McCain John McCain is on his brain.
The president curses this specter. The specter circuits the architectural oval step by step.
An exercise in haunting as the president hears his silence as a possible laughter
The president tries ear wax, the president tries barn fires. The president pulls
Hairs out of his chinny chin chin. The ghost circuits the large man with tiny hands
And tiny heart, those tiny hands ever ready to grab the un-grabbable, to shake
Off the apparition’s dulled medals and myriad wounds; to mock again and again
The name that haunts him John McCain John McCain, John McCain is on Trump’s
Brain.

Patricia Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and seven other collections.  Her plays, commissioned by Mabou Mines, were presented in New York City.  Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, Spears Jones has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NY Community Trust, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. psjones.com.

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Sienna Beard
Life Lessons

Dearest Momma
I remember when you told me
If you can’t say something nice
Don’t say anything at all

I’ve always believed this
So I’ve tried to show respect
To pray for and honor all people
Though sometimes I’ve failed

I remember many times
I spoke kind words about our leaders
Even though I didn’t always agree
With their words and actions

But Momma, it has become so hard
To honor someone who hurts so many
And treats it all like a joke
Like a social media competition

Momma, I can’t do it anymore
I don’t have anything nice to say
So Momma, I can still pray,
But it’s probably best not to speak

Sienna Beard has written articles for Showbiz Cheat Sheet, CUInsight, Art & Society, and iBi. She is an Academic Advisor and adjunct English instructor at Lincoln College in Normal, Illinois.

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Heather Truett
Why Exes Are Exes

Once I stopped my car in the middle of a suburban street.
There was a blue-gray house out the passenger window
when I kissed you, and yes, I was the one
who kissed you. You were sweet, good, younger than me
and, let’s be honest, it was my wild brokenness
and all those times I made out with your brother
that attracted you to me, but I was bound
to break you, drop the carefully constructed image
you made of me and also, we all knew,
I’d probably kiss your brother again.

Now we are grown, and we each found our perfect
someones, and I haven’t thought much about you
in years, but yesterday you ranted your stance on “paid
democratic actors spouting ludicrous nonsense” about
gun control on my Facebook wall, and I had to tell you
not to call people idiots on my page, and here you are again
in my head.

I used to feel sorry for hurting you.

If my kisses had been bullets back then,
you might have been happier to know
I favor gun control.

Heather Truett is a writer, a mother, and a somewhat heretical pastor’s wife. Her credits include: The Mom Egg, Poeming Pigeon, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Panoply Zine, and the Young Adult Review Network.

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J.P. White
Gratitude

After untold damage, we had come into a time of continuous unclarities.

Pilgrimages, protests, floods, fires, repudiation of the immigrant,
Steady assault of prayer and amygdala, quick kitchen kiss of amnesia,
And the over-remembering of everything by small, dutiful machines.
What was our crime? Too much or too little? Or were we simply
Caught in a backstory we couldn’t possibly unwind for one another?
So much had already been lost on the rim of a volcano, it was hard
To tell the smoke from the unquiet gathering and spilling of wind.
It was as if we now tented our ruin under the fallen carcass of a giant
Who had promised to rule his kingdom without the selling of shadow.
Stray dogs and roosters found their voices and seemed happy enough
With how much garbage was now a smorgasbord of impossible delights.
Who could contain all the fear, the confusion, the anticipation of something
Else that would no longer hurt us? I would like to say I helped bridge
This giddy, charred cavity, but I kept my family on the unlit back stairs
Measuring hunger and threat inside the throats of the circling animals.
Doubt propped me up and considerable uncertainty and this other
Unspoken thing carried by a string of children who raced one another
On our jagged street as if the sun were still lit inside the green stem.

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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Gale Acuff
Bright

One day I’ll have to die but I won’t care
then, being dead, if I care at all it
will be about something else, I guess, I
guess what things will be like after eter

-nity but then again maybe God will
have something new for me to do, different
anyway from what I’m used to here, here
where I’m still alive, Earth that is, and at

Sunday School it’s all laid out plainly for
us fourth graders, first we die and our souls
go to God to get judged and if we’ve been
good or probably even better than

good then we dwell in Heaven forever
but if we’ve been bad burn in Hell, also
forever and I’m good with that, I just
hope that there’s something to do over there

besides be an angel and fly around,
I think that I’d rather be a bird, in
Hell maybe I’d get my wish but wouldn’t
be surprised to be an ostrich, emu,

penguin, cassowary, kiwi, or what
-ever fowl won’t fly, and playing the harp’s
no way to get girls and as for singing
hymns I’d rather be an original

Beach Boy and sing about deuce coupes or
gals or surfing and after Sunday School
I confessed to my teacher how I feel
and she took off her glasses and gazed through

them, at what I’m not sure but her naked
eyes reminded me of a kitten’s just
newly and still barely opened and then
she put them back on and said to me Gale,

next Sunday you and your little classmates
will have a new teacher so I panicked
and said All right, ma’am, but what about my
big classmates, then she said I’ve changed my mind

and I said Yes, I guess you saw the light.

Gale Acuff is the author of three poetry collection published by BrickHouse Press—Buffalo Nickel (2004), The Weight of the World (2006), and The Story of My Lives (2008). His poems have appeared in Ascent, Chiron Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Poem, Adirondack Review, and many other journals.

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Marjorie Maddox
Broken Shell on Rural Road

222 miles from the ocean,
it’s not King Conch or Clam,
Cowrie or Cockle, but turtle—
Eastern Painted or Spotted?
I’m not the one to say—but cracked,
no doubt, by pick-up truck or motorcycle, a direct hit—
though sledge hammer or golf club would do it,
it’s that precise if not premeditated—
the neck untouched, stretched out and arced,
looking for someplace to go, some way to scream
its duck-and-pig screech coming from deep inside
the armored and green just out for a stroll
on a sunny Election Day in Virginia,
no reason to look both ways before crossing
on this unpatrolled barely paved road
across a cow pasture and up to a center
for the arts, where I am writing now
about amphibian intestines flattened
against asphalt and stray stones,
flies gathering even as I type.

Marjorie Maddox is the author of Wives’ Tales (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017); True, False, None of the Above (Cascade Books, 2016); Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock, 2013); Weeknights at the Cathedral (WordTech, 2006); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (WordTech, 2004); Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Publishing, 1994); and several other poetry collections. She lives in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and is a professor of English and creative writing at Lock Haven University. More at marjoriemaddox.com.

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Todd Heldt
Cattle Prod

It’s so bad even the cows are mad.
That was the joke in the nineties
because people love to be scared,
and drunk drivers and Satanists
were passing into passé. I am
sitting in the American-Chinese place
eating happy spicy beef because
the thought of my cheese being swissed
in a decade bothers me less
than being hungry for my three o’clock meeting.
I’m remembering the eighties,
how I’d climb out the window
sometime around midnight,
and wait for Brad to pick me up.
We’d drive out to the farm roads,
pop open a twelve-pack of whatever
we could pay our bum to get us,
and I’d think about the day when I
could write my own rules, do whatever I wanted.
I glance back and forth between
my meal and the clock on the wall.
It tastes okay in the way
that everything tastes like something it isn’t,
and I have this meeting I don’t
want to go to. My coworkers expect
me to say something smart, but I can’t
even tell for sure what I’m eating
or if it will kill me some day.
I try to pick it apart in my mouth,
read the chemicals like Braille on my tongue,
but it feels like everything else.
Rumor was that the devil worshipers all
hung out and sacrificed cats
deep in the fields after midnight.
They tortured them with icepicks
and lawnmowers, but we
found neither dead cats nor bad people.
We drove and drank and every few minutes
one of us would say something wise.
Brad was lame in that he never knew
any parties to go to or girls who would date me,
and no one liked him, either. I would swig
what was left and swim in my thoughts.
Around 4AM we’d drive back home,
kill the engine and lights and he’d coast
down the hill to my house. I’d climb
in my window just before my father’s alarm,
I’d sleep three hours and go to school hungover.
Just like that the cows were taken
to court, and everyone stopped talking about
spongiform encephalitis, as if
some person who was rich as a king
had decided it wasn’t important,
and we must have figured by then
that poison food was no longer
the kind of battle we could win.
It was 2000-something by then, and there
were new wars for new abstractions,
and condos to buy while we still had time,
because real estate had never lost value.
It was about 3:45 when we tried to call it
a night. A fog had rolled in from the fields,
and we were almost out of beer.
My dad would be waking soon, so we
one-eightied the car, and were stopped,
vulnerable among the crickets
and whatever the night might conceal,
our headlights only defining
the prison we thought we were in.
On the next curve a cow darted out of the grey,
almost like it was spooked, and I wondered
as the car slammed it down to the ground
if I’d ever seen a cow run before.
It got up and dragged itself back
into the night. But our front end
was so wrecked we couldn’t drive,
and all there was to do was hurl
the empties out in the fields, hope all
those stories were lies, and sober up
before a cop came along to take us back
home to the disappointment we were used to.
I bought a condo in 2006, because
I still lack the bones to not go along
with whatever stampede they devise.
The lights were shut off, the gas will be next,
and bankruptcy will be all my fault.
My meeting starts in five minutes.
I’m three blocks away, and it has been
four decades of the same kind of grind,
the same fear, the same gimmick:
you can beat me and beat me, and I can’t
do a thing. No matter how I try
to wriggle free, trick my dad, sneak out
the back, cover my tracks, or pretend
the devil isn’t lying in ambush for me,
there’s nothing I can do: the fog rolls in,
the Satanists gather, the lawyers knock,
and even the food is trying to kill me.
I wish there were some sort of lesson
I had learned from the never winning,
the cavalcade of screwups, but all
I can tell you for sure is when
a cow has got your name on it
there is nowhere you can hide.

Todd Heldt is the author of Card Tricks for the Starving (Ghost Road Press, 2009). His work has appeared in 2AM Muse, Blast Furnace, Chiron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fear of Monkeys, Gyroscope Review, Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many other journals. Heldt is a librarian in Chicago.

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Caitlin Brown
Southern Hospitality

There was a huge roach in my kitchen
Bigger than I’ve ever seen before.
He didn’t scurry away when I turned on the light
But only after I missed him with the spatula.

Actually
That’s a palmetto bug
You told me helpfully.

But I couldn’t find any insect-killing products
At Walmart
For palmetto bugs.

There was a family in the aisle with me
At midnight
Comparing the prices of laundry detergent.
She wanted the fragrance-free kind
Because Jesus gets rashes.

He was calculating the price per ounce on a piece of paper
She was wearing an ankle monitor
Almost like those anklets the ladies in my neighborhood strap on
To count their steps
When they want to pretend they are athletes.

Jesus was waiting silently, patiently
Much too patiently
For a four-year-old.

Cucaracha
Is the Spanish word for cockroach.
I saw it printed on a lot of the bottles and boxes.

But actually
I had a palmetto bug
You had told me
Helpfully.

In the parking lot
There was a run-away shopping cart
Headed for my car
And a worker sprinting after it
Faster than the ladies in my neighborhood could ever dream of.

When it hit
He screamed
Like a parent losing a child.

I pulled out my phone
to turn on the flashlight
To show him
that there was no damage.

He put up his hands.

The light illuminated the bumper
Of the car next to mine.
It had that license plate
In the vomit-yellow color
With the ominous slogan
And the hissing snake.

As he wrote down his information
Eyes still dripping
On the piece of paper
Supplied by the father of Jesus
Because he didn’t want to touch my phone
And he wouldn’t believe me
When I said it was no big deal
No deal at all
I wondered
If Raid could kill a snake.

But I knew
Because you had told me
Helpfully
That
Actually
I had a palmetto bug.

He was waiting for me
On the lip of the dishwasher
Bigger than anything I had ever seen.
He didn’t flinch when I turned on the light
Spatula in one hand
Raid in the other

I think I emptied half of the can
As a chased him
From the kitchen
To the living room
Screaming
Loud enough to wake the neighborhood ladies
Who pretend to be athletes
Loud enough to match the worker who thought he was going to lose his life
To a run-away shopping cart
Loud enough to make up for the temper tantrum Jesus should have had
At midnight at Walmart
Next to his cuffed mother.

You have been
Very
Helpful.

But
Actually
Just so you know

Palmetto bug

Is just a
Euphemism
For roach.

Caitlin Brown is a political scientist and actress who has thus far only written poetry to let off steam. She holds a BA in drama from Vassar College and a PhD in political science from Georgetown University. She is currently a visiting professor at the College of William & Mary, where she teaches classes on politics in developing countries and political protest.

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Elizabeth Hoyle
Things we can’t clean

The sanitizer stings
in the dry-made cracks
across my knuckles.
I lather it in anyway,
hoping the clean will
seep into my skin.
It doesn’t.
I pump some more, hiss
as it slices through me
yet again.
Any of his germs
are surely gone
yet I can’t
stop.
He’d only touched
my hand, after all.
I’d asked him
not to.
I’ll need to get a new bottle
tomorrow.

Poems and stories by Elizabeth Hoyle have appeared in Oddball Magazine, Peacock Journal, The Wayfarer, DoveTales, and Boned.  She lives in Beckley, West Virginia, where she works as a reference assistant at her local library. She blogs at Entwined in Pages.

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Katie Chicquette Adams
Unnatural Disaster

You are sirens now—you are wails
the crisp report of rapid explosions
replaces your heartbeat.

You are violence repeated, predictable
and unexpected, numbingly shocking,
painfully unsurprising.

You are not a soldier, this is not a
foreign war. We are not mothers
waiting for flags to be handed to us
by somber servants of the greater good.

You are a certain statistic now—you are news;
the calmly somber broadcaster’s description
the final status on your feed.

You have transformed. Last week: a person
moving about this world the best you knew how,
with a life and problems and concerts to attend.

Now: evidence embraced by opposing arguments,
now vapors whose acrid absence
will always make the flagless mothers cry.

Poems and stories by Katie Chicquette Adams have appeared in River + Bay, Mothers Always Write, Heavy Feather Review, The New Verse News, Riggwelter, Poets Reading the News, and on Storycatchers. She is a live storyteller with Storycatchers and works as an English teacher for at-risk young adults at a public alternative high school in Appleton, WI.

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