John Martino
Snff-snff!

Something stinks! Who voted?!
I’m just sitting here listening
to VU’s Loaded, skating old school
around my own mental rink.

Who left all of these dishes
submerged in the sink?!
Complaints lodged in triplicate
will be duly noted.

Look at this city whose
name you can’t pronounce
pounded to tears of bone
and dust. Love by a nose,

cries the babe born in squalor.
Bet’cher bottom petro-dollar!
Sweet Jane, ah, sweet, sweet Jane
every time I let the needle drop.

Nothing like a trigger
warning from a cop.
I swear your brain is a bowl
of snap, crackle & pop.

I should tap the top of your skull
with a funnel, tip a pitcher
of whole milk in.
It’s winter. Eastertime, too.

Yours is the face that launched
a thousand shits. I skate away
on razor blades, pushing off
with my left foot, slicing thin lines

of hate across your wide frozen
eyes, each icy, unbereft cheek.
Never trust anyone over thirty
grand. And here is another city

bombed to the brink. Here
are the god thoughts I no longer
think. They form an ossuary
under that pool of square

gray water. Simpler, happier times. . .
Maybe for you, friend. Jesus, Mary
and Joseph take a bow, end
of another childhood show.

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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Aimee Pozorski
National Emergency

At the grocery store,
I hear
two women talking.

One has a Polish accent,
the other, a flag of Mexico pinned to her lapel.

They’re bonding over Boar’s Head cheese.

I see no emergency.

A southeast Asian man asks fondly after his WASP-ish co-worker
who says that she is tired.
“Long Valentine’s night?,” he asks, tentatively.
Was she on a date?

It is the day the president declares a national emergency for his xenophobic wall.

I see no emergency.

Except maybe someone has run out of milk or cheese or bread or is looking for love in the grocery store.

The Atlantic says Americans smile more—
not because we are naive or stupid but
because we are a nation of immigrants
speaking many languages.

The smile is universal—says we are
ok
here.

I see no emergency.

I see people smiling across the aisles.
I see people working to connect.

A lady with purple hair holds the door for me,
assists me with my cart.

I smile at her a flash of optimism
while finding my way out.

Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English and Director of English Graduate Studies at Central CT State University. She has written three academic monographs on the topic of literature and trauma. Her poems have appeared in Bending Genres, Paper Nautilus, and The Helix. She is the incoming co-editor of Philip Roth Studies is a peer-reviewed semiannual journal published by Purdue University Press in cooperation with the Philip Roth Society. 

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Devon Balwit
Make America Mexico Again

my hat says. People can’t
read this twist on white

words on a red hat until so close
their faces already register

condemnation before recomposing.
(This is a blue city after all.)

Why wear it? my son asks,
with a teen’s sensitivity

to disapproval. Good question—
perhaps to know what it’s like

to be depreciated on sight, judged
before a word’s been shared.

When it’s on, I never forget
it’s there. Uncomfortable,

I scan the street for hostility.
But of course, a hat’s removable

and freely-chosen—(Such a quick
return to brotherhood, The joke’s

on me, from those who pass)
—unlike skin.

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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John Emil Vincent
From your lips to Christ’s ears

Like the Feast of the Circumcision, the Feast of the Ass occasions
the election of a Boy Bishop. The less you understand the better
you listen is the undergirding principle.

No one is being taught anything through these rites, not even the
performance of the rituals themselves, since there is no script and
there isn’t even a rudimentary plot or a theme, barely a beginning
and end; rather, worshippers are being confused out of ignorance
and into an ambitious minimalism.

You do them to do them. And the Boy, who is in this case Bishop,
smiles,

he loves not listening.

John Emil Vincent is the author of Excitement Tax (DC Books, 2018), short-listed for the Quebec Writers’ Federation First Book Prize, and Ganymede’s Dog, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press in fall 2019. He has published several books of criticism and is a trained archivist. Vincent lives in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University.

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Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 2)

I like      The want the love querer in one word      Takes care of both needs en una palabra      Solamente una vez what the rest of the song      The rest of the lyrics of that Spanish love song      The cut your veins cause I love you more than      My own life brand of love song can you  imagine      Loving so much you’ll kill yourself to prove it      Do I love myself enough to kill myself for that      For that love huh what say you sitting out there      Voyeur of my actions my ramblings my rambling     Rose another type of vine is that what rambling      Means maybe it does in a rose in a rose in a rose      Rambling does that mean it winds itself around      Something strangling it or does rambling mean      To wander away away eventually given enough ramb      To wander to another place even one far far away      Where there you think be other bodies to love      Bodies that love themselves that love their lives       

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
Archive (a Duet)

Mud, feel of silk. Mind can bloom into
anything, plant it deep enough.
Marigolds loll on lollipop heads.
Wind scatters and bends.
[since California is its own muse…]

Raw throated. Storm
grows. Loud as years. Hunger
is something you hold in your hips.
[within pure joy exists a kind of hollow]

Things moving. Anonymity of motion.
Face pressed to glass.
A found light at the tunnel’s edge.
[the weather is not the windows fault]

Words shaved by sparks
danger preserved in the bog of the mind.
What rises, revises, surface.
[Oh the bodies I loved were very tired]

At the fair, at every fair the psychic sits
in a moveable booth behind
skin of lace and fear. Pace sidewalk.
[I was no sad animal graveyard.]

Find night sweats. Sound of owls.
Deconstruction through
a construction of questions.
[and after your research among the transcripts of the institution
what gives you immortal life turns out to be the breath of another person.]

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
Reporting to the Armor Training Center

As our car wound down hills toward the troop train,
He grasped his mother’s hand in mute farewell.
My wife betrayed the peace she hoped to feign

On hearing trumpets at the depot strain
To play God Bless America’s last swell
As our car wound down hills to the troop train.

Veiled hat obscuring brow and bark-grey skein
Of hair, pursed lips white as a sea-scrubbed shell,
My wife betrayed the peace she hoped to feign.

When he came home, we drove, deaf to inane
Tunes sung by soldiers drinking muscatel
As our car wound down hills to the troop train.

Each time she helped him learn to walk again,
His new leg clattering each time he fell,
My wife betrayed the peace she hoped to feign.

Korea: we prayed for its end—in vain—
But sent a second son, knew he could tell,
As our car wound down hills to the troop train,
We both betrayed the peace we hoped to feign.

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

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John Martino
Sure, I’ll Promise You a Rose Garden

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights

spills from my newly widowed ear.

And now, Dick Rose has found me out

and wants to eat my Chanticleer.

A silver fork in each fist, mon fair,

mon sembabble? Maybe first

a game of Scrabble? “Trouble” gets

me double, plus bonus points.

It’s Eat or Be Eaten, Post-industrial

Style. Freedom is recognized necessity.

Asses, asses, walls fall down!

Some things are just too sad to see.

David skating naked as birth

out of the camera onto the screen.

His sculptor’s hands cupped behind him,

one inside the other. Long, cold, lonely

winter. Curses! Tin-foiled again!

Tweedledum and Tweedledummer.

Come, my Dear, let’s Twist once more,

like we did last bummer.

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 City of Sodom

Abraham was not Noah,
content to save his family
while everyone else drowned.

Abraham argued for Sodom.

Is this justice from the Judge
of the world, that the righteous
be dealt the same blow as the guilty?

Abraham bargained.

Will You save Sodom
for 50 innocent lives?

What about 45?

40? 30? 20? 15?

In the end, they settled.

Ten decent souls
could save an entire city.

And Sodom was lacking even that.

A fact to remember
next time I question
if the compassion
of one person counts.

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
The U.N. Climate Report—Meh

Up by another couple degrees, but gradually.
I’m still comfortable. Aren’t you? If not,
adjust the AC. No need to be hot—
at least not inside. As for the reefs, distantly
bleaching, I’m not much of a swimmer,
are you? I’d rather thumb National Geographic
when dealing with the bathic.
As for potable water; that’s why there
are airplanes, to distribute things
where people need them. Don’t be glum.
Think bottled water on pallets, in gallon drums,
flown by Marines through ruddy evenings,
like in the movies. We’re in the Anthropocene.
Cool, no? An era named for human beings

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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