Amanda J. Forrester
Dearly Beloved

Let us now kill
each other with blades
we bled to wield.
We shall kill
the women we love
yes, love
and kill them with our words, laws
I will call my father and he will
be pleased.
My mother will be pleased if
he is pleased.
She will accept our blades—obedient
to her vows
to his rule

and we shall be free

to ban together for our own
sake, the sake
of our children, though
half will be murdered as they sleep, wake
to see their funerals online.

in time

they will inherit our blades
that murdered them, turning
toward each other with blood
in their eyes

yes, let us now proceed
and lift our inked blades

and cast our ballots.

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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Bev Fesharaki
Tantrum

We’ve a toddler in the White House,
Orange play dough in his hair,
Not hiding under daddy’s desk
But sitting in his chair.

Tweeting to a shutdown
Silver spoon still in his lips,
In a silly, stomping tirade
Giving federal workers tips.

He says “Offer to your landlord,
Say, ‘I will do repairs
So that I won’t be evicted
I will fix your broken stairs.’”

“Call all the folks who love you
And ask to borrow money.
Make your voice sound extra soothing
They’ll say, ‘Sure, I’ll help you honey.’”

Our president needs barriers
To prove to us his power
He wants to cage our border
So that all newcomers cower.

At the risk of losing voters
He won’t consider a concession,
And he’s told so many falsehoods
That he needs to face confession.

We’ve a toddler in the White House
We’re embarrassed to admit.
Careful leaders, oh, please surface
Before he throws another fit.

Poems by Bev Fesharaki haven appeared in So to Speak, Moria, 3Elements Review,  and in the online exhibition Poets on the Coast 2014 on the Museum of Northwest Art website, as well as in the anthology, Women Writing: On the Edge of Dark and Light (Pilgrim Spirit Communications, 2015), featuring the work of the Catharine Place Poets in Tacoma, Washington. She lives and writes by the water in Mukilteo, Washington.

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Chad Parenteau
Escaped to Paris

July 4th aftermath, in a hotel
I’ll never spell by myself,

expatriate from our patriots
still drunk from five Superbowls.

And the bombs chasing us off
were only holiday based, aimless.

I’m Steve Martin chanting
omelette au fromage to myself

until a waiter comes to my room
to force a cheese covered shoe on me.

I search for soufflé in lobby vendors,
breaking euros at the bar. Its serveur

speaks my language perfectly,
making me feel less at home.

What if my passport declares
that this is where I belong?

I rehearse my role as shell-shocked exile
who can’t recognize his own name spoken back.

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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Zoe Canner
the dreamers are out in the suburbs

pouring onto
these streets
chanting
let us stay here
let us stay here
they look down
at the sun
through view-finders
watching the
weeping leaves
mark pavement
in a crescent shimmy
and this is the only
home they know

Zoe Canner is an angry, anti-racist, 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivor. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Naugatuck River Review, The Laurel Review, and Arcturus of the Chicago Review of Books. She is an alumna of CalArts, Directors Lab West, and The Home School. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance.

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Amy Gordon
Need Less to Say

A thimble is required to use a needle.
Poverty keeps you under its thumb.
Holes in your socks, darn them with a needle.
Darn them, the needy.
They’re always needing something.
Dirty needles, lose them in a haystack.
It is easier for a camel to pass through
the eye of a needle than a rich man
to enter the kingdom of God.
Rich men need poor men to use needles.
The eye of a needle cannot see.
The eyes close
when the needle pierces skin.

Hope more, not less.
Use needles to mend holes,
to become whole.

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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Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 9)

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

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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Lindsay Costello
Real Day

I usually describe it as a brick on my face
Or on my lungs
But it is the smell of fire on patriotic days,
All around.

I walked to the drugstore
And noted every single flower
And felt nothing,
My whole warm body weighted
By nothing.

The quiet cavity
Of my chest,
Soldered.

There are two spiders here, sleeping on the cusp of a drain
I’m waiting for the right time
To kill them both.

Poems by Lindsay Costello have appeared in Rue Scribe and SUSAN / THE JOURNAL. Her art criticism has appeared in Art Practical and 60 Inch Center. Costello holds a BFA in crafts from Oregon College of Art and Craft, where her thesis analyzed the conceptual intersections between poetry and weaving. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Yvonne An
Superhero Family

My daddy is a flying superman!
All the time,
he has his fists clenched,
and his legs straight
—getting ready for combat!
He even has his pretty sidekick,
who comes every day to
wrap him in a white fight suit.
My dad never opens his hands
and never kneels down.
Because he is not a coward.

My mommy is a busy chef!
Inside her fanny pack, she has
one hundred plastic packets.
Of tiny rubber gloves.
She must’ve been so busy!
It was 3 AM; her clothes
had gotten soiled.
But she came back with her thick
wallet, oh and she gave me
free allowance!

My brother is a smart runner!
He is so clever that he is
in another country, and with
his buzzing telepathy machine,
he told me,
that to be with him,
I’d have to cross the finish line
and its name was,
Thirty Eighth Parallel.
He said
to be careful of the gunshot
when I start running.

Korean poet Yvonne An has lived in the Philippines her whole life, and is currently a sophomore at the International School Manila. Growing up with the aromas of street food, she spends her days making desserts, playing the piano, and gazing the sky.

J.I. Kleinberg
Ten Visual Poems / Found Word Collages

Note from the artist/poet: These visual poems are from an ongoing series of collages built from phrases created unintentionally through the accident of magazine page design. Each chunk of text (roughly the equivalent of a poetic line) is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax. The text is not altered and includes no attributable phrases. The lines of each collage are sourced from different magazines.

J.I. Kleinberg is an artist, poet, and freelance writer whose found poems have appeared in Diagram, Heavy Feather Review, Rise Up Review, The Tishman Review, Hedgerow, Otoliths, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs most days at The Poetry Department.

Journey Wila McAndrews
Their Dollars vs. Our Cents

No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.
—Robert Reich

money in/ money out/ surge then shortfall/ no government bailouts for the working class/ working poor/ working more/ zero/ sums it up/ 1% profit off our backs/ up against/ their predatory lending walls/ Citi banked on the rich/ food banks for the needy/ tax breaks baked into every loaf of day-old bread/ perverse/ reverse charity/ alms for Kings & Queens/ ill-gotten revenue/ modern-day royalty/ control/ our dismal lives slip-sink/ deeper in debt/ still paying for their subprime sins/ our homes repossessed/

no rainy-day savings/ no shelter from their reign/ terror/ each month our equation the same/ our fears the same/ minuses/ sacrifice/ our necessities and emergencies/ decide/ roof over head or gnawing hunger/ welcome to our Amerikan scream/

work hard/ work harder/ boots and straps aren’t free/ two jobs/ not enough/ can’t buy a way out/ their Amerika built on fees/ we punch their clocks/ their conglomerate sandwiches cost more than our hourly wage/ bet all our bottom dollars/ pay our money and pray/

blade to our throats/ carved by their knife/ stabbed in the back by million-billionaires/ their interest rates/ rent hikes/ we pay with our time-tears-trauma/ our relentless effort and worry/ our can-do attitude/ their won’t do bravado/ our rock bottom funds their bonuses/ their penthouses perched in the sky/ what a view they must have/ our work-a-day lives/ our poverty-row dwellings/ where we count our cents/ their wealth contingent on our nillionaire existence/

call out their greed/ for once/ explain/ their outsized wealth/ our empty hands/ our over-draft accounts/ our assets tax-bracketed into poverty/ their loophole dividends extend to a nirvana of wealth/ built upon wealth/ aided by lobbyists/

our economic inequality/ their wealth-growth/ mindset/ our poverty-death reality/ setting our lives up for failure/ after failure/ after/ all/ in the richest nation in the world/ 99% of us flock to .99 cent stores/ their Dollar Generals strategize in our underprivileged urban-rural landscapes/ their corporate soldiers at war with Amerika’s poor/

where’s their mythical-merciful Savior/ gawd-almighty/ it’s dark as night in their Amerika/ as if/ all the coal was mined out/ nothing to power the light anymore/ bereft/ where the hell is their Christ/ the lip-service patron saint of their fortune doesn’t miracle work for the weak and lowly/ they’re their only gods/ forced to walk among us mere [hu]mans/

they don’t know how the real story goes/ the record of Christians offering hope to the hopeless/ the bread of love instead of an empty plate of retribution/

revolutionary our plight/ resolute our fight/ we won’t give in/ take it/ make it better/ for whatever is left of this earth’s eternity/ in this hell-scape of Amerika/ we will change their climate/ our chance won’t come around again/ to demand dignity/ justice/

freedom from their cruelty/ removing their barriers/ blindfolds/ #MeToo/ reasonable housing and healthcare/ the right to choose/ warmth/ in the time of their frigid madness/ left unchecked/ their narrative won’t change through the ages/ their money in/ our money out/ but our hearts are set towards a different progression/ the deeper we tread/ into their polluted waters/ the more our compassion makes sense

Recent work by Journey Wila McAndrews has appeared in PANK, Appalachian Heritage, The Feminist Wire, and Kudzu Magazine. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Spalding University and an MA in communication from Morehead State University. Journey is completing an MSW at the University of Michigan, where she is a National Community Scholar studying community organization focused on social change through art and literary activism. She lives and writes in both Central Kentucky and the Detroit Metro area.