Jessica Ramer
The Iceman’s Route

Lorenzo drops a block into a bin
Beneath an icebox using two-foot tongs—
Head bent to hear the latest bulletin.

Mechanics decorate their bays with pin-
Ups showing movie idols in sarongs;
Lorenzo drops a block into a bin.

Denise, a war bride, dabs wrists with “My Sin,”
Protects her pedicure with rubber thongs,
Head bent to hear the latest bulletin.

Bandanaed women flee the factory din
Engulfing them. Two blocks past shuffling throngs,
Lorenzo drops a block into a bin.

He cannot sleep without two shots of gin,
Eats breakfast to the Andrews Sisters’ songs—
Head bent to hear the latest bulletin.

Announcers tell him tanks surround Berlin;
His son storms Mainz—where Ike says he belongs.
Lorenzo drops a block into a bin—
And strains to hear the latest bulletin.

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

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Ed Madden
Something to Declare
11 July 2018

after William Stafford

Trump is overseas this week, all bluster and lies,
but we’re reading William Stafford in a chilly classroom
and trying to write about where we live now, and how.

Important people gather around a big table,
and we sit at our little desks. Sachi talks about what it means
to declare something when you cross a border.

Back home, I know my cat is dying. She’ll amble
stiffly to the door when I return, her blind eyes
wide and bright with what she can’t see.

They say that history is going on somewhere.
Zoe describes her story as a scrap of paper swept
by the wind, litter snagged in a tree.

This is only a little report from a summer arts camp,
where Makenna and Maya and Eva and Micah are writing
about their small, rich lives. We’re here. You can find us here.

Ed Madden is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ark (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), a memoir in verse about caring for his father in his last months of living with cancer; and the chapbook, So they can sing, winner of the 2016 Robin Becker Poetry Prize from Seven Kitchens Press. Madden is the director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC.

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Cody Walker
Three Short Poems

1. Goalposts

Collusion, but not conspiracy.
Conspiracy, but not treason.
Treason, but not murder on Fifth Avenue.
Murder on Fifth Avenue, but just to prove a hypothesis.

2. Mad Outside Review

He thought he saw a Fucking Moron
Try his hand at Twitter:
He looked again, and found it was
The Moron’s Babysitter.
“Who, Mick Mulvaney? Fox & Friends?
This country’s in the shitter.”

3. Sum of All Fears

Bolton’s a chickenhawk. Trump’s a sociopath.
You do the math.

Cody Walker‘s most recent poetry collection is The Trumpiad (Waywiser, 2017). (The book doubles as an ACLU fundraiser.) He’s also the author of two earlier collections: The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). His work appears in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007). He teaches English at the University of Michigan and co-directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Ovine

We were sheep.
Your wool felt good against mine.
Close proximity. Moving as a clump
of warm breath spongy thick-coats. Followers.
A flock of followers; we went where directed.
Together; en masse.

Didn’t realize what happened at the periphery
of our group. How it was being trimmed.
The ones on the outside, the un-able,
falling off by the wayside.

The directors knew this. They kept us
moving grazing feeding sleeping.
They grew fat, living off our herd,
shearing off the undesirable. And we
didn’t even know. We just kept moving.
Grazing feeding sleeping.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, as well as in several anthologies. Her poem “Taking a Knee” will appear in The Poetry Box’s Poeming Pigeon Sports issue in Spring 2019. Also forthcoming is a collection with her group, 4th Friday Poets (Hobblebush). Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.

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Alana Hayes
I have a lot of anxiety

about sitting in movie theaters.

Probably because it’s a big dark box
that can fit too many people in it,
and all the exits live in the corners of the room,
trying not to be too obvious,
trying not to take too much attention,
but the only thing I can focus on is how they aren’t close enough.

Probably because I have this recurring nightmare
where a man walks into a movie theater
and starts firing off shots
just because he can.

I’ve had this nightmare about
337 times this year.

White man walks into a movie theater…
what’s he carrying? Have you heard this one?
Then you know the punchline.
Gun.

Gun goes off in a movie theater,
but we don’t call it terrorism.
Why not?!
Because I’m in terror.

The lights begin to dim,
I’ve been waiting to see Mary Poppins return for months.

My dad turns to me and smiles.
I look at him and try to calculate
all the ways I could get us both out of that dark box
safely, if a gun goes off.

I try not to imagine what failing would look like,
but I do anyway.
That’s how anxiety works.

I think about telling him how scared I am
like maybe he still has the power to chase all the monsters away,
Just like he did when I was little and he would tuck me into bed at night,
but I smile instead and turn back to the screen.

…and this is terror.
I’m trying to focus on the screen,
but my heart feels like it wants to pop right out of my chest,
and I can’t breathe.
I keep shifting around in my chair, trying to get all the nervous energy out.

…and, sometimes, when I’m out at the movies with friends
I text my parents, right before the movie starts,
and tell them, I love you.
Just in case it’s my last chance.

The Poet Writes: My name is Alana Hayes. I’m 24 years old and am a graduate of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I received a BA in English Literature and another in Women and Gender Studies. Most of my poetry revolves around themes of Judaism, feminism, and social justice issues. This particular piece focuses on the problem of gun control and mass shootings in America. Follow her on Instagram @womanasriot.

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Miriam Sagan
Winter Count

you can start
the story
from the center
spiral out

horses rush
across painted hide
of this year’s war
the power
of just
touching the enemy
with a finger

I’m a girl
I don’t know
how to start
with this
I’m not that girl, still
oh yes
I am

I’m not going to tell you
every terrifying thing
that ever
happened to me

my maternal grandmother
sees the child
next to her trampled to death
by horsemen

what shall we do?
get on a boat
head west
to Ellis Island

horses again
out of Central Asia
red or green
not the blue ones
of dreams

I never drank
anything at a party
I never left
any woman I knew
behind
drunk or asleep

I didn’t wear
a bra
in New York City
and got chased
down a side street
I gave the finger
and ran
really fast

I’m still running
breathless

I promised myself
I’d say
no more than this

I just took a Greyhound bus
west

massacre to massacre
star to star
invisible lines
imaginary borders
what is possessed
what can’t be owned
drawn
on this body
of earth.

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.

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Suzanne Osborne
To the Permian Extinction

Which eliminated 95% of all species

Kudos to the most effective yet.
Wiped clean the slate except
for just a smidge of chalk dust
in the upper right-hand corner
and one imperfect swipe dead center.

Still, that should have been that,
shouldn’t it? Who’d have thought
such meager remnants could reanimate
the pestilential scribble—idle at first,
a notion here, a sketch there, just noodling—
the stylus slowly gathering weight and speed,
pitting the surface as it overwrites, crossing
one way then the other, piling up, spilling
out onto the decaying frame, obliterating sense.

Dip the sponge again,
and this time get it all.
Let no phoenix flare
among the tardigrades.

Suzanne Osborne‘s work has appeared in Neologism, Front Range Review, and District Lit, among other journals and publications. After an early career in theater, a stint in academia, and too many years as a legal secretary, she now lives in Queens and writes poetry.

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Walter Holland
Cryptocracy

It was an age of redaction when truth
was stricken off the page and in a smear

of falsities the real became obscured; and
by repeated swipes, names, dates, deeds,

laws, hopes, and privacies were wholly
blotted out, summarily erased by design.

To obfuscate replaced the call to reason.
A strange time, eclipsing the surety of

principle and scientific proof;

making illegible what’s culpable; indecipherable the logical, concealing what’s deceitful, and constantly parsing what’s left; holding the unclear to the light, while seeking the invisible beneath the deflection; the hard, cold residue of underlying fact, the absence and gaps of misleading syntax so elliptical, insoluble, and masked. A disappearance that blindfolds the mind, like

dissidents gone missing in the black of night
who can’t read what they’re forced to sign.

Walter Holland, PhD, is the author of three books of poetry: A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), and Circuit(Chelsea Station Editions, 2010) as well as a novel, The March (Masquerade Books, 1996 and Chelsea Station Editions 2011). His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, HazMat, Redivider, Rhino, and other journals and anthologies. He writes book reviews for LambdaLiterary.org and Pleiades. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com.

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Lisa DeSiro
Nightmare

In the night, a child steps into the room,
stands beside the bed. Quiet.

Shall I keep a safe distance?

It’s the child I never had, and the room
becomes a cathedral, quiet

Will this vex someone?

and full of children. There is plenty of room
for all of them here. They quietly

Phrase things differently?

cry, these children without bedrooms,
without parents, without the peace & quiet

Use a different tone?

of a safe childhood home. Forced to be room-
mates here instead, they are told: be quiet.

Lisa DeSiro is the author of the poetry collectionsHer publications include Labor (Nixes Mate, 2018) and Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, 2017), as well as several poems in journals and anthologies. She works for a non-profit organization and is an assistant editor for Indolent Books. She is also a freelance accompanist.  Read more at thepoetpianist.com.

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Sylvia Byrne Pollack
The Deaf Woman at the Turn of the Year

The deaf woman stares into the navel of New Year’s Eve, picks out
the lint, tosses it into a pile of confetti, ready for midnight.
She watches from her upstairs window for bursts of red, blue and
white, spinning patterns high in the sky.
She wishes she were close enough to feel the ground shake like that
time in the summer of ’89 when Paris celebrated the 200th
anniversary of their Revolution.
Fireworks thundered, car alarms blared, tens of thousands of citizens
reveled in the streets, spilled into and out of the Metro.
Enthusiasms, unleashed, ran in packs, sank fangs into tourists,
frightened the natives, slobbered.
The deaf woman notices some of the same excessive exuberances in
her own native land, not the effervescence of champagne but
the caustic foam of fomenting lies.
The deaf woman wonders how long until a guillotine is erected on the
National Mall.

Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s work has appeared in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, Clover, and Antiphon, among other journals. She is a recipient of the 2013 Mason’s Road Winter Literary Award, a finalist for the 2014 inaugural Russell Prize, and she was recently named a Jack Straw Writer for 2019. She is currently writing a series of “Deaf Woman Poems” inspired by Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man Poems.”

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