JD Debris
Tomi, She-Wolf of the GOP

The stereo’s on, she’s sprawled across the mattress
Same two lines of the Anthem stuck on repeat
Rockets red bombs burst
& me down on one knee
Kaepernick-style, between her thighs
In an act of anything but protest

The taser-shock of your pleasure, Tomi
The free speech of your sighs

Let me caress the contours
Of your concealed carry permit
Let me kiss the wetness
Of your American birth certificate
Until my lips are black with ink

The curled toe of your combat boots, Tomi
The crack of your whip

Between petite snakebites
She pulls my curls straight
She drains the almond from my eyes
With the edge of her nail

Your pearl necklace, Tomi
Your flirty little policeman’s hat

Light glows out from her ice-Anglo curtains of hair
They never part, even as she shivers & jolts
Too dark to tell
If that’s a Hello Kitty or an iron cross
Inked above her hip

Your black opera gloves, Tomi
Your innocent hands

Rockets red bombs burst
The sound cuts out: My cue to go
A short walk back to my neighborhood
That still smolders like Watts, post-riot
Whose smoke always dissipates before reaching her window

Your luxury apartment, Tomi
Your hunter’s heart

JD Debris is the author of the chapbook Sparring (Salem State University Press, 2018) and the album Black Market Organs (Simple Truth Records, 2016). Recent work can be found in Apogee and Crab Orchard Review. He is currently a Goldwater Fellow in the MFA program at New York University. His sophomore album, JD Debris Murder Club, will be released in fall 2019. jddebris.bandcamp.com. 

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Jessica Ramer
The Mourner

One of the most stupid myths is that victims become better through their suffering.

When I awaken in the middle of the night,
the first thing I hear is the sound of your
voice as you forced yourself to sound pleased,
trying and failing like a drunk lighting
a cigarette but without the comedy.
Before, I would have lain awake in silent tears,
but now, like the elder in Dostoyevsky’s novel,
I bow before you in silence, forehead on the ground.

The Prostitute

Humiliations are worse than shootings. To beat a man in
front of his children is worse than shooting him.

Stop trying to prove something to me.
You are insulting me.
Do you think by criticizing the prime minister
and the Rebbe that they—whoever “they” are
next time, will say, “He is one of the good ones.
Let him live”? Do you really expect goodness
to count for so much? How many troops does
the Pope have and would he use them to help you?
The answers are none and no. And the old black hat
is dead, so let him rest in peace.

And yet, I remember sitting in an outdoor cafe
before I had hardened myself into the mold
of my new life, as you took the teapot
from my trembling hands and poured for me
as though serving an honored guest.
That is why, although I could never believe in you,
You remain the man my thoughts turn to when I am alone.

To wish you happiness is cruel,
so I wish for you what you can have:
rage that binds your broken voice together
transporting you past barbed wire fences
to good meals and sound sleep.

The Mute Girl

Justice cannot be divided. Either there is justice for everyone or there is justice for no one.

Freed of that gauzy veil of words swaddling sight,
The mute girl sketches the prophet in deft strokes
As he plucks a Beilstein from the unruly heap
of books in his travel bag. Her drawing peels off
intellectual detachment, reveals the prison-cast calm,
shadowed eyes, and that slight asymmetry
beaten into children who have known hunger.
He glances at her drawing: she sees
what he does not as he trims his mustache in the mirror.
He gazes off into the distance and nods, almost imperceptibly.

But this mute girl would hope
The rebbe you despise is right:
May his god in whom you don’t believe
and in whom I don’t believe
send you tumbling back for the joy
it is your task to obtain, to sing in your unbroken
voice and write the poetry stolen from you.

Jessica Ramer is a third-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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John Martino
My Latest Flame

My latest flame lights my fire.
Squad car blazing like a pyre.
She looks at me with a bad desire.
Burning and burning in the widening gyre.

“Smell that acquittal
dipped in blues. A lit
fuse,” she cues. Cops gone
wild. She’s quick to disabuse.
Been raised in a cage
since she was a child.
Still carries the scars
from the first time she smiled.
She tells Death with a badge
to reach for the stars.

My latest flame is shot full of ire.
Incendiary tongue, conflagration choir.
She’s experienced, lets me stand beside her.
Together we watch the fire get higher.

John Martino‘s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, HEArt Online, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and the anthology Envy, Vol. 6 from a 7-volume series on the 7 deadly sins by Pure Slush Books. He has worked as a teacher and tutor of English for 22 years. An avid traveler, Martino currently resides in Hong Kong with his wife, Shelley.

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Jacqueline Jules
The Story of Pastor Niemöller

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a communist.
—Pastor Niemöller

Not me. Not mine.

The pastor thought
when the Nazis came
for the Communists.

He wasn’t one,
so why should he care?

And he wasn’t a Jew
or a priest or
any of those others.

So why should he care?

Seven years in the camps
turned his silence into shame,
knowing when they came for him,
there was no one left to complain.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of three chapbooks, Field Trip to the Museum (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Stronger Than Cleopatra (ELJ Publications, 2014), and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String (Evening Street Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Broome Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Imitation Fruit, among other periodicals. She is also the author of 40 books for young readers. Visit jacquelinejules.com.

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Devon Balwit
Baby wants both

to virtue signal and blow
her dog whistle, to deplore
and implore with identical
breaths, to slack-jaw
before canvas and page
yet hold her tongue
at the news’ unspooling.
Baby wants baby and bath water,
the lukewarm and the wail,
arms waving and prayerful,
to dunk her well-meaning
bucket but tip it before
reaching lips. Her tongue’s
the only daintily lapping
what’s left at the rim,
so pink, so precious, so poised.

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.

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Remy Dambron
spaceforce 1

covert room

classified

concealing

operations

contractors

computer screens

satellite delineations

city maps

middle east

mad dog mattis

giving orders

joysticks

drone strikes

security for our borders

poor huddled masses

seeking asylum

marketed as

invasion

prey on their fear

go cavalier

fox indoctrination

war on terror

war on drugs

military supremacy

thousands of bases

purely invasive

mobilizing our

embassies

foreign combatants

armed insurgents

state-sponsored terrorists

strategic missiles

bombing raids

evening news therapists

harmless civilians

innocent children

women families and friends

houses transformed

craters reborn

communities put to an

end

conflict zone

coalition

right-wing strikes

again
intervention

corrupt intention

dictatorship ascends

shootings in church

shootings in school

class remains in session

arm the teachers

guard the preachers

respond with more aggression

blame the democrats

bomb the democrats

incriminate the press

gaslight the nation

inflate his dictation

obstruction of due

process

great neglections

fake elections

high-profile esoterica

puppet masters

tv stars

real

world

america

Remy Dambron is a Portland-based activist and environmentalist. His works have appeared in What Rough Beast, naturewriting.com, and the Veggie Wagon Journal. He has been honored by the Society of Classical Poets for speaking out against human rights violations and is currently working on his first chapbook in political verse denouncing political corruption.

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Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 3)

But why do they love what makes them so loving      So  loveable my funny valiant vale of tears valiant      Valentine you of the strong heart brave heart courage      Mad anger in Spanish also can mean courage like      Want and love having/sharing the same body but      With  different meanings at least two at least I know      I’ve learned so much so much in my addled head I      Can drive myself coo coo like someone who is loco      Loco in the coco loquisimo nothing meaning anything      Like loquacious…someone who talks too much may       Seem mad or selfish or just plain too coo coo      Find the form to be in love with your life      Find the form to be the love of your life      Evoluting the breast pocket pad to telephone      Writing covertly writing openly when others      Are watching or not when you’re your only      Voyeur voyage to the bottom of your soul      To the top of your tippy tip brain by the fontanel

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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Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Ballad of the Russian River in Stop-Time

house on a hill 	skirted by blackberry 

brambles.  	fingers bloodied with juice.  	fear on

it’s haunches 		can’t see a black bear until

it’s too late	river	threading	 around it

The house was three stories		suction tubes in 

walls  became vacuums	pool was cold as hell	

a stone to jump off	instead of a board
	
love spiked in gummy heels	my first barbie	
	
at night space spun a disco ball	star shards 

splinter into	what we forgot	river	

bridged, but far enough	we thought	rain would come

meteorites sing silver-throated	then 

nothing	but void	nothing but	flood		forty 

feet	100 year high water mark	you 

underwater	you can’t hear	time	breathing
	
too many stones	(that buried orchestra)		tumbling past

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the author of Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (WordTech Communications, 2015). Her work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. She was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

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Jessica Ramer
The Last Prophet

To Israel Shahak, of blessed memory—chemist, human rights activist, and Holocaust survivor

When I was a girl, I watched a man—
the ersatz father—as he watched
prison movies: unfortunate women
were stripped of their clothing,
shorn of their hair as he watched,
his voice vibrating with a choking, sexual joy.

But when you came to me, they came to me,
characters, a whole cast of them, women
brought forth by you, clamoring to be heard,
who spoke what I dared not speak myself.

The Mathematician

The more one learns, the happier he becomes.
Not happy, but happier.

In the realm of nothingness,
numbers reign, an anodyne;
in their austere beauty,
eternal truth
revealed in a two-line proof.
It’s easy. See.

The Mystic

I don’t know if God exists, but if he does, it is my duty to oppose him on human rights grounds.

Years I looked for you without knowing you—
among wary-eyed guest workers in Berlin,
indigenas in Guatemala, blank-faced as soldiers
rifles at ready, ordered them off the bus.

When I found you, in a chain restaurant
outside New Britain, tenuous enlightenment
unraveled into soft, dark clots and I stood mute.
The gifts I had brought you seemed intrusive
as a catheter, trivial as a laundry list.
Instead, I gave you the gift of silence.
You gave me a voice, this two-edged thing held close.

Jessica Ramer is a third-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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Jacqueline Jules
First Jew

Really?

She asks, her neck rising,
like a shocked camel.

I’ve never met one before.

A Jew.

Meaning me.

As a child in southern Virginia,
I might as well have been
an animal native to the Middle East
something known, but not seen
in person, except in zoos.

Momma taught me to be cautious.
To never forget
I could be someone’s first Jew.

No kicking. Not ever, not
even if threatened.

Because oddities are always
judged by first impressions.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of three chapbooks, Field Trip to the Museum (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Stronger Than Cleopatra (ELJ Publications, 2014), and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String (Evening Street Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The Broome Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Imitation Fruit, among other periodicals. She is also the author of 40 books for young readers. Visit jacquelinejules.com.

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