John Emil Vincent
The hour between wolf and dog

In the near future there are no lapels, barely collars.

And clouds don’t look like anything but clouds.

If hunger woke you, reason armed you, panic set you on beasts, logic made fire, habit spun the spit, rigor cut bite-sized chunks, fame chewed, history swallowed, now: wisdom requires you starved.

A sinking ragdoll clutching its child.

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 1)

Life with/in a form better      Than no      Form     I can riff make a ditty      To which I can  sing      Better yet to dance to      Move      Shake this only body this      Old bones old teeth arteries      Old veins      Twist      Around in the casket of my bod      Like vines I’m the fruit of my loom      Make      Wine with me or      Dine me then wind me up      Blow me away with the wind      Of your diaphragm      Do you think      You’d ever be able      to do I’m not      A little girl you know no      little woman      I was once a little a small a tiny infant      Even tinier was I in my mother’s womb      At one point I was no doubt just a cell      Or two did I love myself then so infinitesimal      Almost nonexistent yet I did even then      I know it’s so I was there somewhere in      The cask the casket of my mother’s bod      Su cuerpo cuero quiero mi vida      I want my life I love my life 

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

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
Why I Forgot the Story of the Dead Child at Tioga Pass and my Okie Heritage

The ascent alone could stop a heart. Shale
shards raining down hillsides in a slow slide.
Have I ever told you, my heart can’t make
it up a climb that steep? Especially,
wearing this dress of gravity and time.
Especially, during a super bloom:
all those blue-eyed forget-me-nots staring back.
Especially, driving a Model T.
Because the getting there was so dusted,
choked. The land had folded. Everything
packed and loaded, strapped into the back
of the tin car like a lost circus. Because
she was alive when they left Oklahoma.
Because she was a twin: entangled in
another’s life in a constrictor knot.
Because her eyes were blue as glacier-melt
lakes. Because what could they have done with her
seven-year-old body once she went deep and cold.
Because I’ve built my family’s stories out
of make-shift shacks. Blankets tacked to walls, flapping
tongues in the wind. Because the granite walls
of the Sierra-Nevada mountains
rose to meet them once they made the ascent.
Because she became a blue moth, a barn swallow
sewing the sky shut at twilight,
a constellation that blurred
into the swift current of the Milky
Way. Because I never learned to untie
the knot that held what we’d carried up.
Never learned to dive deep into that want.

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
Sole Tattoo

Military brass ordered the airman shipped out—away from plum wine and hot sake, women walking three steps behind men, prostitutes cheap enough for an NCO to afford—to Korea, combat in a frozen peninsula. Before deployment, a military photographer snapped his death photo, one released to hometown papers if mortar fire hit the fortification he crouched behind.
It showed a thin-faced man dressed in Air Force blue, lips bowed in a hesitant smile.

In a tattoo parlor abutting the road leading to Misawa Air Base, a local artist inked O+ on his left bicep even though Leviticus, and his father forbid tattooing. He never saw Korea—he was posted instead to San Antonio—but always saw his lettered bicep whenever he showered, changed, or looked in the mirror. Maybe that is why, even when incoherent with alcohol, he always wore long-sleeved shirts.

ferrocyanide
vowel blue as glacial ice:
Near-war’s souvenir.

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

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Korbin Jones
meaning revelation or unveiling.

the air’s sole purpose: to fuel the roaring that tumbles down
the mountainside. yet the parrotlet can still be heard, so we stop
our running. turn and face this wall of flames. listen to the peeling
of organs, of meat from corpse by vultures: homeless, too—
and starving, pecking at the blisters on my arms, my ashened hair,
at the holes in my jeans, my tender knees. we lie down. tear off
our soot-covered clothes so we can lie in its path. moaning with
the blaze, licking one another as the flames lick us, too, stealing flesh
from bone until we are just two skeletons rattling in a mockery of sex.
this is nothing new to us. the vultures have long gone, and we
are consumed by the end—only fragments remaining.

Korbin Jones is the author of the poetry collection songs for the long night (QueerMojo, April 2019), and the translator from the Spanish of SFO: Pictures and Poetry about San Francisco, a book of poems by Pablo Luque Pinilla with photographs by Jose Luis R. Torrego (Tolsun Books, 2019). His poems, short stories, and personal essays have appeared in a number of journals. Jones graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with degrees in writing/publishing and in Spanish, and is currently pursuing his MFA in Poetry at the University of Kansas. He works as editor-in-chief and head designer for Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal.

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Amy Gordon
A Tune I Keep Hearing

Listen. Behind the dark silence
of the dark, a stubborn tune
persists. The song says oak leaves
are falling. Must fall, diminish,
fade. Does not explain
why every generation generates
a holocaust. But the melody
is there. The song says, Dance.
Can we dance cheek to cheek?
Can we turn the other cheek?
We are dancing in the dark.
How many more mass graves?
Streams are running underground.
Oak leaves rustle beneath my shoes.
The song is sorrow, the song is silver.
Behind dark silence there is never silence.

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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Devon Balwit
The Law Does Not Address This

for Jamel Dunn

It must’ve been the way I flailed,
my herky-jerk recalling their own
embarrassment stumbling down the long
perp-walk between lockers to the bray
of retard! Perhaps my cry for help
conjured the same gurgle as that of the kid
with the thick elastic band tethering
his glasses, the one they were desperate
to be picked before when choosing sides.
I recognized their type of bruise, the steel
grille that padlocks souls even before
their phones peer at me from the banks
of the retention pond. Sad my wife and kids
will see me drown. I know they’ll choke
back wanting to push each in and hold him
under. I hope, instead, they’ll choose
the harder way, to forgive. I am no help—
splashing through each repeat,
making no progress in learning to swim.

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
The Parable of the Talents

A canny householder was to leave for a trip of some duration during which time his servants would see to his estate. To one of his servants, the most dependable, he gave his heart. To the butler, his intellect, and to the boy who shovelled shit he gave his intuition. The seamstress of the house received his brain’s executive function.  Amply arrayed, the householder asked each servant to make a profit of their holdings while he was gone. And if profits there were, so would the servants profit also. Away he went, merrily even, excited to see the results of his experiment. This householder was a bit of a philosopher; this was, recall, back well before philosophy and science split ways.

When he returned, he found the stable boy hung, the butler hacked to pieces, and the man with his heart drowned in a puddle. The seamstress sat in the middle of the gore and giggled, and giggled. She had convinced the heart that the intellect was selling it out to intuition and from there merely moved out of the way. And after all the murder, the heart finished himself off from grief.

She was truly the canniest servant. And as the householder was discoursing on her virtues she split his head open with an ax she had set aside deliberately for that purpose. The seamstress then went on doing what she had always done in a colorless sort of way from that day to the present. And without heart, head, or worry, fashioned clothes for all her dead friends. And they always fit quite exactly, and looked pretty good given the circumstances. Only the householder went without. Only the householder was not tended to in his decay. He was dishonored by dogs and birds and his bones left in a woeful unmarked mess.

His only legacy: this idiot parable.

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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Miriam Sagan
After Mari Sandoz, 1896-1966

her father beats her,
she becomes a writer,
along the upper Niobrara

Crazy Woman Creek,
a place called
Hanging Woman,
“the coming of barbed wire
the walking plow
a curl of smoke
coffee boiling at sundown”

everything
in the universe is round—
sun, moon,
time
except for stone

try this in the first person

Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of  the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The Well Was an Eye

Deep as a secret. Deep in the back woods.
Off-limits. Underneath its rotted wood
cover lived a colony of spiders,
each big as a grown man’s fist, pulsing in
the dark. The well was a secret we were
drawn to: a place to pour out our darkness.
We spoke of bodies we wanted to touch
without knowing where or how. In the back
woods, we were living in the dark, pulsing,
waiting for our new adult skin and hearts
and minds and tits to grow in. And even
though the well offered no bucket, we were
thirsty for its tincture of secret desires.

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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