Kathryn Smith
American Girl

A dead snake, a note from a torture victim,
and a car driven intentionally

into a crowd. The celebrity posts
a selfie. This whole world is a bad

joke. The company reveals the next
Doll of the Year as the pageant announces

the wrong Miss Universe,
Miss Colombia bowing as last year’s winner

lifts the crown from her head. The giant
sea squid’s caught on camera. Everywhere,

such weight. Tell me
more. Give the catalogued bones

another once-over; they may be
someone else’s, lost royalty, key

to our existence. We are, after
all, still here.

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
Snapshot, 1992

Before permanence touched the reach of memory,
when I was barely tall enough for adult kneecaps,

there is a picture of you placing me on the kitchen table
wiping frosting from my mouth.

I am giggling, all baby teeth and bare gums.

You still have hair,
still young and kind,

still some variation of healthy.
Then I imagine you were invincible.

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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Jennifer Fossenbell
Our Parts Add Up to an Unpronounceable Name

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

Jennifer Fossenbell has co-translated two collections of Vietnamese poetry (Wild Under the Sky by Huu Thinh and The Human Field by Tran Quang Quy) and co-edited an anthology of writing about Hanoi (Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi). Her poems have been published in China and the U.S., most recently in Bad Code (a Beijing exhibition), Posit, Spittoon Literary Journal, Small Po[r]tions, AJAR, Yes Poetry, and Black Warrior Review. She lives in Beijing, where she works as a news editor.

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Jonathan McGregor
Poem to Cheyenne Mountain

What sleeps inside you, beast,
your ridgeback spines
pricked for an apocalypse?

The Broadmoor—the dragon’s horde.

We’ve always lived like this:
huddling fire in a cave,
painting danger on the walls.

Editor’s Note: Cheyenne Mountain, a three-peaked mountain southwest of downtown Colorado Springs, contains the underground operations center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), built during the Cold War to monitor North American airspace for missile launches and Soviet military aircraft. The Broadmoor hotel sits at the base of the mountain. It opened in 1918 and later expanded to include conference, sports, and spa buildings, as well as a luxury ski lodge. It is frequented by heads of state, prominent athletes and other celebrities.

Jonathan McGregor‘s poems have appeared in Ruminate Magazine and The Curator. He lives in Colorado Springs, CO, where he teaches writing and literature.

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Jon D. Lee
Oculus

The posts weren’t set in concrete, so the fence shifted
With the suck and swell of wet soil, worked the latch against
Itself & froze the gate. So too the bathroom tiles
That buckled underfoot, or slipped the walls and shattered
In the tub. Better: the townsfolk who drowned half-
Asleep when the mortar failed the buttresses, and the dam
Crumbled, and the lake rushed the morning valley.

It didn’t matter, since the gate was rarely used, the cracked
Tub porcelain hardly abrades the heel. The pickets make
A better lattice for the lilacs; tile sherds can be
Repurposed into tabletop mosaics, held in place with grout
And resin. And now that the river’s been restored,
Duckweed & purple loosestrife line the banks,
And reed canary grass rushes the mountains.

But once, two thousand years ago, we capped a temple
With an unsupported concrete dome one hundred forty-two
Feet across. No bolts or rebar—just aggregate & mortar,
Ash & water. So we learned to vary the structure, see
Where the walls could be thinned. How to coffer the surface
For beauty & weight. How to leave the apex open: an oculus
For light & rain. When we stand beneath it even today, its lens
Becomes our own.

Editor’s Note: The building the poem refers to is the Pantheon in Rome. Built in about the year 125, its dome remains the world’s largest unreinforced concrete structures of its kind, measuring some 142 feet in diameter, the same distance as the height from the ground to the dome’s central oculus.

Jon D. Lee is the author of three books, including An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape Our Perceptions of Disease, and These Around Us. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review, Oregon Literary Review, Clover, and Hobble Creek Review, as well as in the anthology Follow The Thread. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University, and a PhD in Folklore. Lee teaches at Suffolk University and Stonehill College, and spends his spare time with his wife and children.

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Day Merrill
Jonesing for January

So they say this is Christmas
or perhaps a late Hanukkah,
the gift delivered as it was by a Jewish lawyer.
A gift of betrayal in the end,
which is what all autocrats reap in the end.

Of course, this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is end of the beginning and the beginning of
the frustrating middle, like that long, slaggy post-holiday gap
with nothing to look forward to for months.

This middle-born in the wee hours of November 7
(and dragged out for weeks like Orthodox Christmas)
marked not a New Year (that will come)
so much as a Solstice:
that moment we turned our faces toward the future,
lighting a single candle (we dare not call it hope)
rather than just cursing the darkness.

We will still march and rail, rant and post
but mostly we’ll muddle through drift and puddle
in a season of waiting more pregnant than Advent
until we arrive at some sign of Spring.
That is enough, for now. Winter is coming.

Day Merrill’s poems have appeared in The Binnacle, Halcyon Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Poems in the Aftermath, The Journal of Contemporary Rural Social Work, Tin Roof Press and Quick Brown Fox as well as in the Collingwood Public Library Writers Group anthology Musings. After a career as an English teacher and a university administrator, she became a career coach. Raised in New England and a former long-time resident of New York City, Merrill lives on the shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay in Collingwood, Ontario, with her husband and a rescued dog and cat.

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Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios
See Saw Margery Daw

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

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios is the author of the chapbook Special Delivery (Yellow Chair Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in Hollins Critic, Kentucky Review, Form Quarterly, Scissors and Spackle, Folliate Oak, The Binnacle, Poeming Pidgeon Unsplendid and The Edison Review. Her prize-winning chapbook, She is a Professor Emerita from American University, and has spent most of her life performing as a singing artist across Europe and the United States. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Kathryn Smith
Current Event

I went to sleep with dirt
in my pocket and woke
with vines sprouting
at my hip sockets, circling
my thighs. This was bound
to happen one day,
ashes to ashes and all
such rhetoric. The heart
of the matter is no heart
at all: no strings of sinew pumping
no blood. When I die I want
to come back exoskeletal
and hemolymphic. That way,
when someone says, “What,
have you been living under a rock?”
I can say, “Yes!” and say it proudly.
For I have been burrowing
and breaking down the stalks
of dead things. I have been
the meaning of renewal, and what
have you been doing with all
your popular information?
The mainstream
streams fast, and if you only have
four limbs, you’ll sweep away
in the current. An ant is a thing
that buoys, especially when
it’s channeling its true ant-ness,
collectively conscious and bound
by the mandible to more of its kind.
These barbs at the mouth
are good for something.

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
Bed Bug

nothing like waking up / to bedbugs / to remind you / your blood / still comes from a wrathful god / or a petty one / today i crushed the invader / watched its blood / set into a crescent moon / tore the small beast from tusk to tail / its blood some of my blood / its flesh rough / not unlike my own / i killed it / despite its brief rule over my body / i killed it to prove / i wasn’t small myself / despite the truth / that both of our bodies / speak in platelets / red lullabies / how our bodies come alive / mine from an unearthly glow / yours in the heavy night / you roam / your fangs dragging across my skin / i sleep despite invasion / despite the ghosts / making me / into a fun house / i wake to raided skin / a ransacked body / you / did you see me / cower before you / before wrath / a face: one moon with two phases / did you see me / before i sent you packing from yourself / god that i am / how i kneel before You

after Elizabeth Spire’s “The Snail”

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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Jennifer Fossenbell
It’s not about the Man, It’s about the Circumstances That Surround the Man

My fingers smelled like curry
as I watched a one small mongrel humping another
in a grove of trees off Jingmi Lu
Her face was surprisingly placid as she braced herself
and watched the traffic go by

In the taxi, I placed my hands on my lap and felt my stillness
I placed one hand over the other and that hand over my device
I stroked my device and thought about the devastation of nations
I thought about that small dog’s penis and questions of consent
I thought about the differences between the taxi driver and me

I resisted the urge to lift my fingers to my nose
take a whiff of what I had for lunch
I thought about the phrase “a sense of propriety,” mine and his
as he glanced at me in the mirror
I thought about passivity, mine and the dog’s,
and I thought about pride, mine and the nation’s
I thought about what we mean when we say exotic
Millions of my own countrymen are exotic to me now

And whether “exotic” or “erotic” are reciprocal relationships

I looked out the window into clusters of men
inside the groves of trees
and thought about what to do about the devastation
how to gather myself into a small force and apply it somewhere useful
how to bloody and salve, how to lay down, how not to lie down
how to resist the too-quick unburdening

It has to be personal
I looked at my screen and said it out loud:
It has to be personal.

The taxi driver glanced up, jerked his chin to one side
when he saw I wasn’t talking on the phone, embarrassed
by my exotic disclosure
This is just a start, I said to his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

Editor’s Note: This poem originally appeared on the blog Where Is The River. We do not usually post poems that have previously appeared elsewhere, but we did so inadvertently this time, and it’s silly to pull it.

Jennifer Fossenbell has co-translated two collections of Vietnamese poetry (Wild Under the Sky by Huu Thinh and The Human Field by Tran Quang Quy) and co-edited an anthology of writing about Hanoi (Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi). Her poems have been published in China and the U.S., most recently in Bad Code (a Beijing exhibition), Posit, Spittoon Literary Journal, Small Po[r]tions, AJAR, Yes Poetry, and Black Warrior Review. She lives in Beijing, where she works as a news editor.