Tim J. Nelson
reaction(s)

the routine is ritual —
getting at the root
is not a truth we want

the radical
is no square root
equations all equal

to the action’s reaction
we love those we must
to let go is to honor dust

the river will go on
to the sea chemical
imbalance from all the greed

the sun gives without
expectation though
some expect more

the oceans provide all
yet not enough to net

those unaware of metaphor
hyperbole might not see
a full reality

react to the reactions
new and recycled distractions

Poems by Tim J. Nelson have appeared in Cholla Needles, Poets’ Ink, Grub Street, and Yes, Poetry. Nelson holds a master’s degree in writing from Towson University. In addition to freelance writing, he teaches college composition in Maryland. Nelson writes essays and reviews for PopMatters.com and South85 Journal.  For more information, visit timjnelson.jimdo.com.

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Susan Landgraf
Uncaged Song

Some days the bird in my ear sings
a song I don’t know the name of. It shuts
out the sirens, the threatening
fathers, crying children, and political rants.

Some days when the bird has flown,
I contend with fears that my children
might die before I do. I can’t shake
the ear bug boring in my brain: When the bough breaks

the cradle…. Those days I go full throttle in my car
for Satchmo, Gioachino Rossini, Billie Holiday
and Sting, my tires humming the road in concert
with the invisible singing bird.

Susan Landgraf is the author of What We Bury Changes the Ground (Tebot Bach, 2017). Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Margie, Nimrod, Bellingham Review, The Laurel Review, and other journals.  She taught at Highline College for 27 years and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

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Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 11)

Editor’s Note: “Find the Form to Love Your Life” is a long poem that we are posting in eleven sections on consecutive Saturdays. Today’s post is the eleventh and final section.

Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet and on the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September poetry feature curated by Patricia Spears Jones.

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Kelly Garriott Waite
Eight Eleven

At the end of the 800s,
a wheeled cart holds two
books which belong to the
poetry section. Both are by
Mary Oliver, who died two
days ago. I think of the 811s
and all the beauty folded into
those books standing side by side,
like soldiers of beauty and love.
With more poetry, I thought,
perhaps there would be less war, but
I wondered whether—with less war,
less tragedy, were the world kinder
and humans less wasteful—the
need for poetry would be less. I guess
what I’m asking is whether poetry
needs tragedy to exist? Can a poet
write about beauty without knowing
ugliness, love without hatred? Do
poets need the thing they despise in
in order to create their work which
will bring some comfort and delight,
like the chocolate syrup that last
week flooded an Arizona highway
when a tanker detached itself from
the truck and spilled its contents
onto the road. For a while we had sweetness
at our border, lovely and delicious and
necessary as poetry. Now, I slip two
volumes from the poetry section
and wait at the checkout. In a few
days, employees wearing headphones
will quietly slip them back where they
belong, neatly ordering this disordered world.

Poems and flash fiction by Kelly Garriott Waite have appeared in The Hopper, Allegro Poetry Review, Belt Magazine, The Woven Tale Press, and bioStories. 

Amanda Forrester
I Fasted for the Flies

No one expected what the wolves would bring.
Houseflies hover, cover the bodies.
When the first kid dies,
to celebrate, they pound the beers.

Peeking out from the sheet
(names removed to protect the guilty)
Do you remember this trend?
It’d be great if you could
stop blaming the dead.

Which side are you on?
The difference
between the sun and a full moon:
one you can walk on,
the other you hide from.

I only want to hide,
not save the world
or even one person. not even me
There is no capturing
a tsunami in a thimble.

I should try a new look, they say.
There are eight things my eyes
are trying to tell me. Eight things
I am running from.

I am not interested in the cause
not anymore –
just the symptoms
and new eyeliner will fix that up.

Forget the past, try something new.
Upload your latest selfie.
Smile.
If only I learned to cry.

Poems by Amanda J. Forrester have appeared or are forthcoming Collective Unrest, the Sandhill Review, and the anthology We Will Not Be Silenced: The Lived Experience of Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault Told Powerfully Through Poetry, Prose, Essay, and Art (Indie Blu[e] Publishing, 2018), edited by Christine E. Ray, Kindra M. Austin, Candice Louisa Daquin, and Rachel Finch. Forrester received her MFA from the University of Tampa. She serves on the executive board of YellowJacket Press and snuggles with her fur babies when she isn’t working long hours as a data analyst at Saint Leo University. Follow her on Twitter @ajforrester75.

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Rachel Ida Buff
Prayer for the Outrage Machine

Outrage is my spine;
It pulls me upright in the morning, draws me to the keyboard,
Drives me into the streets.
I wake in the still hours;
Outrage is my companion.

For the empty classrooms
And those overfilled with children;
For double-dealing judges,
And the houseless man who got a $237 ticket
For living in the park down my street.

Outrage is my spine;
It lifts my head, opens my mouth
And I am talking, explaining, exhorting, declaiming. Reasoning:
to keep from screaming.
Outrage is my voice.

For the creatures that perish in wildfire;
All the people walking to the borders;
For those killed at prayer,
For guns, guns, guns, guns
Everywhere.

Outrage is my spine;
I breathe in and out, unfurling the column of bones.
I pray for the strength
To bend, to attend, to listen, to hear
the soft animal of soul as it curls around me.

Rachel Ida Buff is an immigration historian whose most recent academic book is Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century (Temple UP, 2017). She is also a novelist and writer of creative short prose. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Aeon, The Southern Review, The Minnesota Review, and Jewish Currents, among other journals.

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Alison Landes
New Rule

Pussy grabs
at the air.

House not mine
body not mine
I belong to men like
I always have.

I am sitting a gay couple’s
house. Their fur children.

I get up. Where the sun hits the window
my pajamas are a pantsuit.
Dogs bark to be let out
of their bodies. Would they catch my blood
in their mouths?

I cannot bleed
in this world. The dirt is too
hard. The paper too
thin. I will call animals
my children, too.
There is no other way.

I turn on the tap,
pop the aluminum bubble,
swallow the pill. I am an hour too early
but later than I can imagine.

Alison Landes is a women’s health nurse and cat mom living in San Francisco. She has appeared nowhere but at the bedside. She writes on the themes of trauma, womanhood, and the moon.

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Tim J. Nelson
(in)finite

When we have hollowed out
the living Earth
the planet scarred with
dead soil

When the smog replaces
the gentle Pacific fog
when the dust and deserts
erase the water and waves

The so-called elites
will retreat not in defeat
to their concrete
stocked and soulless bunkers

They will count and stack
their useless currency
scan and sort digital memories

Creatures in artificial comfort
they will pop
their last few champagne bottles
toast their false victory

Until the generators die
with a lack of supply
In the dark and dank
bootstraps and bodies rot

From self-appointed kings
to extinction’s eternity
this will be all we will be:

negative or positive energy

Poems by Tim J. Nelson have appeared in Cholla Needles, Poets’ Ink, Grub Street, and Yes, Poetry. Nelson holds a master’s degree in writing from Towson University. In addition to freelance writing, he teaches college composition in Maryland. Nelson writes essays and reviews for PopMatters.com and South85 Journal.  For more information, visit timjnelson.jimdo.com.

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Amy Gordon
This Is an Earnest Request

I entreat you, o person,
sitting in front of your computer on a dark night
in a house that isn’t dark but over-lit,
causing strings of hatred to slink
through thick, invisible wires, linking
all of us in a vast web of complicity,
to stop,

else I am compelled, o person,
to sit in front of my computer,
on a bright, sunny day, to ask you to think
why when K. wrote an article
challenging the rollback
of auto emission standards, you felt the need
to tap missiles onto your screen,
project them into her backyard?

In case you need reminding, this is what you wrote:
I feel sorry for your husband.
And are you the same person, o person,
(It’s hard to imagine there is more than one of you)
who said: What sex acts did you have to do
to get your job?

And I say to you, invisible man or woman,
troll or dwarf, elf, or anonymous snowman,
let’s not tweet, you and I,
but rather, meet in a field
lit by the ancient star we call the sun.
Let us meet and look at each other,
and I will ask, How is your daughter?
and you will blink, and I will notice
you have dark, thick eyelashes
and a vulnerable mouth,
and I will say,
Let’s pick all the dandelions in the field that have gone to fuzz,
and then we’ll pull in a deep breath and blow,
watch the dissolution of all those gauzy moons,
the flight of innocent, starry seeds
as life seeks to renew itself,
thereby spawning a thousand suns
on your neighbor’s lawn,
which might take care of your need to be toxic.
Until the Darkness

I am mute
because I don’t know anymore
how to ask
the men in suits
to be kind.

I want to ask them,
Isn’t it difficult
to carry around an axe
day after day?
But I seem to have lost the words.

But when night’s door opens,
I step through,
speak every dialect on earth.
I ask the ants, can you please
rebuild the forests, leaf by leaf?

I want, in the darkness,
to unbend from anger.
Wasn’t there once a time
when to look up and see the stars was enough?

Please, I say to the migrating birds,
the geese who fly at night,
fly where you’ve always flown.

Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for young readers, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014), both works of historical fiction haunted by helpful ghosts. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, Blue Nib, and in the anthology Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2018).

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Judson Evans 
Zebra Prompt

In order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly.
—Amotz and Avishag Zahavi

1. You are writing as prey
to your predator or you are writing as
predator to its prey. This could be a love
poem (or not). This could be political poem (or not).

2. (For instance) You are writing a coded
love poem to a power that could annihilate you
purely through the pressure
of its recognition; that could dissolve you
through its distain in noticing
you not at all…

3. Your poem demands tropes that remain unintelligible
to censors while exposing the false consciousness
of the corrupt regime; that trade
on ambivalence of poetics of praise and blame.

3. Consider the zebra’s markings
as both display and camouflage,
distraction and diatribe.

4. Incorporate one or more
of the following “animal fun facts”:

Zebras stand while sleeping.

Zebras will not breed in captivity.

Zebras have black skin beneath white coats

5. Interpret the unique pattern of the zebra’s (lover’s)
skin. Consider the meanders as mandala.

What are the directions,
the compass points?

6. Incorporate three seemingly
trivial lies that unravel faith
in the communal force of language.

7. (Or) Construct a situation in a few lines
in which the zebra (lover) disappears
in the embrace of the predator (beloved). Invent a myth
of invisibility by which the predator
may compliment its prey.

8. Any statement should
be followed by counter-statement
that only partially negates what came before.

9. In a mulish time when language
will bear what it must, zebra
is the language that won’t domesticate.

Poems by Judson Evans have appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Contemporary Haibun Online, Cleaver Magazine, Interim, and Salt Hill Journal, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies New Smoke: An Anthology of Poetry Inspired by Neo Rauch (Off the Park Press, 2009), Viva La Difference: Poems in Response to Peter Saul (Off the Park Press, 2010), and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by Nicole Eisenman (Off the Park Press, 2012), all edited by John Yau. After a tenure as director of liberal arts for Boston Conservatory from 1988 to 2015, Judson Evans is now a full-time professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

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