Dion O’Reilly
French Kiss

The study…reconstructs the first microbiomes from an extinct hominin species, and hints at intimacy—perhaps kisses—between humans and Neanderthals.
—Ewen Callaway in Nature, March 8, 2017

Of course, I learned it from him
that husky meat-eater downstream,
with his sprung chest and hairy thighs.
Beautiful brute on the other side
of the river, whom I watched in secret
on hot Pleistocene days
as he cared for the elderly,
soothed the wounded and deformed,
protected infants from our packs of wild dogs.

My heart found its raw beginning
the day I saw him toss wildflowers on a grave,
his feet solid on the young earth
as he gripped bluebonnets and dandelions,
a few bruised roses in his beefy fists.

Who cares if he never learned
the finer points of moss eating
or sometimes went cannibal.
Wasn’t he kinder? Gentler
than our gangs of village boys
who returned, riled, from the hunt,
the bloody thighs of megafauna
humped home on their slimy backs.

So I ventured out one night and found him
at the edge of a bonfire’s light, grabbed
the smooth pelt glossing his barrel back,
pulled him to my breasts and tongued him.

I kissed that man from Neander Valley
long and slow, delighted in the clout of his jaw,
the muscled capture of his lips, his fragrant
saliva, thick like some forgotten vintage.

Don’t tell me I’m fetishizing the Other.
I’m through with Homo Sapiens men.
Though my terrible uncles slaughtered
every one of his tribe,
I’ll carry him in my mouth forever.

Dion 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. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Canary Magazine, Spillway, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies, including an upcoming Lambda Literary Anthology.

Amy Gordon
Mooning

Here in Massachusetts, Moon shimmers on the river,
silver all a-quiver, wizard’s coins.
Here moonlight falls, fills gaps between trees,
while on the way to Mexico, Moon illuminates
a family walking along a road.
First comes a small, thin, brown walnut of a man
in a holey sweater, his forehead furrowed into lines.
While he was sleeping, two men killed his brothers.
Grief slows his fingers as he unwraps
the bit of sausage for his wife and child.
Give us, this night, enough light to see
their round faces, their high cheekbones,
the small girl who walks by her mother’s side.
See how her face glows like an innocent moon.

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).

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 8)

Fit in the head and they start to crowd one another into coils of strings      Of long convolutions of head speech words crowding other words almost      Hurting one another the way they must if there’s not space for them to      Be in the same place for long they must be let out to prance to breath      To show off their worthiness to show off their brilliance their sparkle      But not if they can’t be seen all crowded and glopped up together      Like soggy spaghetti over done into a paste let out the voice let it out      To let in the voices the other voices that want to come in be safe from      All that coldness out there you have to have a relation to form and shape      Otherwise it’s a mess and others can’t enjoy like mushy overdone pasta      One pasta for all forever and ever amen one and all one perception leading      Superseding immediately to another content being form being content

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Janlori Goldman
River, River

Hudson, I see you out my window, hunching 
      against your banks, shrouded in cloud—  
please, river, no morose spring, 
      don’t let this be a season of murky water, 
of styrofoam chunks and limp condoms. 

Let frogs rise. Let tourists in kayaks paddle 
      hapless. Bring me one silly seagull 
perched on a piling and I’ll take it 
      as a sign of supple days to come.

My sweetheart coughs in the back room,
      the same cough since January.
People everywhere hacking deep in the lungs—
      on the subway yesterday I gave a dollar 
to a sick woman pleading for change. 
      Isn’t this how to make it right
when the numbers are crushing?
      Maybe I should keep it simple, 
count one by one, two by 
      two, buckle my shoe—

moving with your tide, a passenger ferry chugs by 
      carrying workers to their desks, 
they’ll sign in, stare at a screen, 
      buy a coffee from the cart guy, 
do it all again the next day— rhythm of the suit
      and sensible heel. The hours pass and still 
that wet wool sweater 
      refuses to lift off your water.

Janlori Goldman is the author of Bread from a Stranger’s Oven (White Pine Press, 2017), chosen by Laure-Anne Bosselaar for the 2016 White Pine Press Poetry Prize; and Akhmatova’s Egg (Toadlily Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Mead, Gwarlingo, Connotation Press, Calyx, Gertrude, Mudlark, The Sow’s Ear, Rattle, Contrary, and other journals.

Bill Prindle
Instead of a Wall

Let us build a road a four-lane maybe
A killer strip that uses our insatiability
Itself to crush those who would cross

Let us call it El Camino de San Francisco
Xavier Cabrini saint of the immigrant
The one who blesses the crossings

Let us ply that road in our conveyances
Four wheelers sixteen wheelers bicycles
Sandals dog carts sorted by sheer size

Let us witness the Salvadorenos the Ticos
The Zapotec Toltec Maya Mulatto piling up
Beside the unlucky bucks possums raccoons

Let us travel all the way west to the Pacific
Peaceable sea where Asiatic refuse washes up
Among driftwood, surfboard, bronze blondes

Let us after all these miles finally stand still
Remembering the beautiful minds vanishing
Light enduring beneath these merciless wheels

Bill Prindle is a Charlottesville poet whose work has appeared in the Tupelo Press anthology Thirty Days, the Echo World magazine, the journal Written River, and the Pennsylvania Review. He has won awards from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and is active in Charlottesville’s Live Poets Society.

Tricia Knoll
Marbled Paper

Current news presents slippery-sliding.
I’m trudging up a sand slope that pulls downwards
as if the round top of a dune is an impossible goal

or like endpapers in antique books, watercolor
pigments mixed with ox gall and dripped in eyedrops
to float until raked as a stir of truth on paper.

Now fly-bys of Ultima Thule, quick reversals
and bomb cyclones, hailstorms, anti-cyclones,
swirls in motion for use as wallpaper, screen-savers.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who lives deep enough in a woods that for moments she escapes what is happening. And every day those moments seem shorter. Her recent collection of poetry How I Learned To Be White received the Gold Prize for Poetry Book Category for Motivational Poetry in the Human Relations Indie Book Prize for 2018. For more poetry, visit triciaknoll.com.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Devon Balwit
The Shapes Money Takes When It Freezes

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
—Margaret Atwood

Money sleeps soundly, secure

in its profusion, hurtling
ever shoreward, like the tide,

turning in fixed orbit

around a density, the molten
core of a flung star, only the slightest

axial tilt marking its seasons,

sitting at the center of small
moons and asteroids, hangers-on

drawn by the chest-puff

of entitlement, the lifted nose, the glances
slicing as down a slalom slope

before pivoting a spray

of ice-crystals that sting the eyes
of the watchers behind the ropes,

you and I.

Devon Balwit is the author of A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Poets Reading the News, The NewVerse News, The Ekphrastic Review, Peacock Journal, and more. For more of her poetry, reviews, collections, and chapbooks, visit her website, devonbalwitpoet.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Sean Bolton
Wassailing

Everything said is its opposite
half, harp-spun: the strange
passion of drawn time. Fast-
falling suppliant, a two-bit
Sunday attrition. On knees,
soft pulpits of undone scarring.

Surface dreams perfection in
divots. Soul is supplement
and mirror remains a dance of
bones. Rise you stone through
carpets of hope and history.

One insomniac dreaming, I
parallel spill to the dead.

Sean Bolton is the author of the chapbook A Passion (Gold Wake Press, 2010). He holds both an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) and a PhD in Literature from Arizona State University. His poems have appeared in Prism International, Mad Hatters’ Review, and Otoliths, among other journals. Bolton teaches in the English Department at Santa Fe College.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Amy Gordon
Monsters

I do not want to see monsters
with their pale faces.
I do not want to see monsters
with their pale faces and ordinary haircuts.
I do not want to see monsters
with their pale faces and ordinary haircuts,
their pudgy fingers holding clipboards.
I do not want to see monsters
with their pale faces and ordinary haircuts,
their pudgy fingers holding clipboards,
pushing needles into children.
I do not want to see monsters
with their pale faces and ordinary haircuts,
their pudgy fingers holding clipboards,
pushing needles into children,
breaking bones because they can.
I do not want to see monsters
disguised as men and women
who look like you, who look like me,
who go home each evening to their gardens,
after pushing faces in the dirt.

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).

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 7)

Wear the sweaters the pants the socks doubled up everything      We had we had on doubled sometimes tripled with the blankets      And the quilts also thrown over our shoulders over our heads      And still we couldn’t stop the chill from entering through the      Fontanel through the  ears through our eyes our skin penetrating      The bone our teeth chattering didn’t matter if it was in English      In Spanish it seemed to us even colder to be subjected the freeze      To the air clouds that we breathed out of our mouths when we      Talked when we opened our mouths clouds of cold air escaped      But we could go nowhere we had to stay till the esteem returned      Got to get this down get it all down cause it’s getting too long in my      Head and it’s getting folded over and twisted one on top of the other      One word added to another and another and these long lines don’t

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.