Sanjana Nair
Will Love Be Better This Year or Devoid

I want this body
to want less
The plunder of a nation,
a capsule swallowed, without
consideration. A blame, an addiction.
I understand
how a person
can become an entire country,
an imperial loss.
And desire
isn’t in my organs
these days,
though hunger is.
How hungry, fat and fed,
is it fair to be?
Yes, the ocean needs purging,
but do I really want to reminisce
about the moment my hip knew
how to find your mouth, seaside?
All these small conquests;
oh, the lost continents—

Sanjana Nair’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, and The Equalizer. In a prior lifetime, she was part of a performative series in NYC named Emofru and The Lady Apple. Her collaboration between poet and composer was performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater as well as featured on NPR’s Soundcheck. Nair lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

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Josh Nicolaisen
Upon I.C.E. Raiding a Fresh Mark Meat Packing Plant

The plant’s executives got no jail time
but lost underpaid, undocumented
workers—just some tools of the trade. No fines.
“They are animals!” their president said.
Putting down parts of animals butchered,
quickly culled like the fresh meat they packed,
inspected and dissected and stickered
and stamped, strictly sorted to be shipped back.
Their labels read Country of Origin—
Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico,
Nicaraguan, Cuban, Dominican—
trays packaged on cool shelves, set to go,
waiting to be consumed, eaten, chewed through,
in lands that are no more what they once knew.

Josh Nicolaisen has taught English in both public and private schools for more than ten years and spends the summers as a caretaker on Squam Lake’s historic Chocorua (Church) Island. He and his wife, Sara, live in New Hampshire with their daughters, Grace and Azalea.

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John Stanizzi
Walking into a Dreamed City with My Love

When the state spat
we considered
jumping from the rusted bridge
onto the devoted ice
surging in huge obedient formation

I have since thought about that day
with its broad draperies of snow
fragrant and confusing
amid the hidden kingdoms
their bells on fire
their shadows inconceivable

My heart folded
rolled into a dream pattern
before what had tried to hold us back
had time to invade our eyes
blaspheme our ears
waste our day

No I recall
we were focused on
mysterious interruptions
featherless bones in the chill air
spires emerging from the fog
demented menaces horrendous
relentless in their desire to pierce the sky
and let all that dark
bleed through
as we tried to escape the city
the state

John L. Stanizzi is author of the full-length collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts (), Sleepwalking(), Dance Against the Wall (), After the Bell(), Hallelujah Time!(), and High Tide – Ebb Tide(). His poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, and many others. Stanizzi teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT, and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.

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Kathryn Smith
At the World’s End

Gulls pry mussels at the hinge. Their shells
grow useless, tangled in bladderwrack and dead
man’s bootlaces. Hoofprints in sand but no sight
of the deer. River otters wrestle in the shallows,
bare their teeth. When did the world begin cleaving?
Urchins probe with ink-bright spines. They have
no eyes; they’ll take in anything. The otters’ claws
aren’t native here, poised to shred the gulls
for any scrap of meat. I would watch
them do it. At the hinge of the world,
it’s lope or swoop or scuttle. Pretty soon now,
the tide will stop this rise and fall. In that calm
before, I’ll place pebbles on my tongue
for the brine. Chew kelp berries, the rind.

Kathryn Smith is the author of Book of Exodus (Scablands Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in such publications as Redivider, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, Carve Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, and Rock & Sling. She lives is Spokane, WA, and is the recipient of a grant from the Spokane Arts Fund.

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I.S. Jones
Night Baptism

1. Equinox

My mother calls her guardian angels out of her palms. They spill from her mouth in splinters of fire. It is almost 11 & the clock resets its face to let the dark hour pour over us. Restless spirits pull themselves from the vain tooth of darkness, but my mother casts them in a coconut. Says they confuse the meat & milk for a woman’s body. We ride to the end of the neighborhood. Cross the street. Pours holy water over & chants seven jehovahs to the wind. She puts a white veil over my face. Cracks the coconut’s skull & tells me to run: “You are not allowed on this side of the street anymore. Or else they’ll follow you home”.

2. Solstice

We pray into a basin of salt & water / this is how we mimic the ocean / in the bible jesus casts angry spirit to a gathering of pigs / says they confuse the pigs for human flesh / this is why we don’t invite into our body that which the faceless rage calls home / Mother opens the sink & out comes small howls / covers our heads in white sheets for prayer / this make us into ghosts / bends candle fire / asks for angels to come in our midst / opens us for delivery / fills us with water & howls / white sheets wander the night

I.S. Jones is an American-Nigerian poet, educator, and music journalist from Southern California by way of New York. She is a fellow with BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, Callaloo, and is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole. Jones is Assistant Editor at Voicemail Poetry as well as Managing Editor at Dead End Hip Hop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Harpoon Review, The Blueshift Journal, SunDog Lit, Matador Review, great weather for MEDIA, The Offing, Anomalous Press, The Shade Journal, Puerto Del Sol, Nat.Brut, and elsewhere.

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John Maurer
Deleriant

To preserve the complex formatting of this poem, we are presenting it in PDF format. Click here to access the document.

John Maurer ‘s poetry and fiction have appeared in Claudius Speaks, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Thought Catalog, and many other journals. @JohnPMaurer

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Martin Jon Porter
Streets

The streets
are never narrow
for some –

feeling
finding
new keys scattered on the footpath
every day.

What about those
who walk
the same way
trying to stay
between lines
over sprayed?

Martin Jon is the author of the chapbook Traits (Ginninderra Press, 2016). Recent work can be found in Medusa’s Laugh Press Microtext, Exposition Review’s Flash 405, and The Poeming Pigeon. He is a teacher who lives in Melbourne.

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Caprice Garvin
Friendship Park

On this plaza
bordering
San Diego and Tijuana,

A mother and daughter
Touch fingertips
Through thick steel mesh.

A rustling, like ribbons
Windblown from a child’s hair
Storms up the bars,
Confounding the wall’s height.

Trash undone
By festival-goers hands,
Rises as kites.

The child doesn’t turn
To see carton
Feather into a bird

But sees flight
In her mother’s eyes
And believes it real.

She asks for wings, planes,
A swing to swing
That high.

The steel catches
The light of the sun,
Becomes a river on a kite’s tail,

Saturates the air
With the sound of fingertips
Brushing, like palm leaves,
The underside of grace.

Editor’s Note: Located within the Border Field State Park in California’s San Diego county, the half-acre Friendship Park includes a section of the border fence that divides the US and Mexico.  On the US side, the park was formerly part of the Monument Mesa picnic area, but is now under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security and is heavily monitored by U.S. Border Patrols.

Caprice Garvin writes: I have an M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, but have not been previously published. It took the Trump administration to motivate me to do so.

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Sean Bolton
Abnegation Blues

Here is the hymn of the new credo—

Back to the wall, swallowing bile, later
found dead along the roadside. Carrion
sinner, you will find pride in what you
have become; a stench for the ages.
Beyond what any thought could be done—

could be undone. You stellar decrepitude,
why should we not worship? Finally,
a transubstantiation we can get behind;
about time. Stink you new god in
the corporeality of the other door.
Lead us not into salvation, but deliver us

to the warm maggot breakfast, witness
all vain apathy consume. Mind must
abrade: such is the illusory point of light.
All the exalted shit slides down and out
inevitably. We encounter true selves in
the dross, rise up as filth and discarded.

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.

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Jenna Goldsmith
Restrooms Apologetics

The poems come from publishers and are arranged near Restrooms of the bookstore

In the bookstore the poetry shelves are an arrow that point to Restrooms

If I stand to browse poetry which I do because you have to look closely as poetry spines are thin they require attention

So people browse me on their way to Restrooms

This is a bookstore, after all

The human brain conditioned to read and shit

Take some reading material we say to kids

Do people still read poetry? ask the people in the poetry-Restrooms-parade

It’s dignified to browse the poetry section at the bookstore because it still feels dignified to read and buy poetry in 2018 as we grieve dignity

The bookstore doing its part to pause even the small dignity of reading and buying poetry because Restrooms door is swinging open and shut and sounds emerge okay that’s humans you think have some respect

I’m sorry
Aime Cesaire I’m sorry
Emily Dickinson I’m sorry
Daniel Borzutzky I’m sorry
Andrea Gibson I’m sorry
Charles Bukowski I’m sorry
Jorie Graham I’m sorry
Mary Oliver I’m sorry
Gertrude Stein I’m sorry
Rainer Maria Rilke I’m sorry

Aime Cesaire I’m sorry because I heard her sneeze and you were writing bind me with your vast arms of luminous clay

Emily Dickinson I’m sorry because I heard a metal latch and you were writing The Heart asks Pleasure – First – / And then – Excuse from Pain

Daniel Borzutzky I’m sorry because I heard a sticky gym shoe and you were writing I hear the children of Chicago singing / We live in the blankest of times

Andrea Gibson I’m sorry because I heard a paper towel machine spitting sheets and you were writing I left a poem in your mouth

Charles Bukowski I’m sorry because I heard concurrent flushes and you were writing my typewriter is / tombstone / still

Jorie Graham I’m sorry because I heard an expression and you were writing my / name is day, of day, in day

Mary Oliver I’m sorry because I heard Do people still read poetry? and you were writing Don’t think / I’m not afraid

Gertrude Stein I’m sorry because I heard the toddler spanked and you were writing A cool red rose and a pink cut pink

Rainer Maria Rilke I’m sorry you were writing go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows and I was standing by Restrooms reading poetry spines while they read How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Art of the Deal and Popular Mechanics and What to Expect When You’re Expecting and The Firm and another Tiger Woods biography and Twilight

the weight of a thousand words
bearing down the spine
on the bowels

Jenna Goldsmith‘s writing has been featured in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, New Delta Review, The Waggle, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory. She is the recipient of the inaugural Kentucky Writers Fellowship for innovative poetry from the Baltic Writing Residency. A Great Lakes poet by training and by tendency, she is currently Instructor of Writing in the American Studies Program at Oregon State University Cascades in Bend, OR.

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