Margo Davis
Disappeared

Their glances dart
then return for one of us. Smart
men, quick, who see through
an imperfection. We draw them in
with a limp, stray eye, weak limb
on an otherwise lean

body whose ill-fitting
clothing camouflage our worth.
These men with x-ray

hunger move right in.
Who doesn’t need to be
wanted? Sought out by men

wanted too, by many,
for many things. Mysterious men
with nothing to lose. They know

women want spotless union.
Wanted men courting the less-than’s.
Acne? Come on in.

Orphaned? Feel at home
in an embrace, firm, unflinching.
There’s no going back

after headiness erases
reflection and warmth disarms
our stretch. We snuggle,

feeling safe, before we
comprehend we cannot alter
what will soon alter us.

They will stain us
in unexpected ways as we give
up, give in, loosening

a gloomy heart, liver,
functioning kidney. These men
market essential parts.

Margo‘s more recent poems have appeared in The Fourth River, Ekphrastic Review, Misfit, and Light, and the Houston Chronicle (Fall). Recent anthology publications include Enchantment of the Ordinary (December), Of Burgers and Ballrooms, Untameable City, numerous Texas Poetry Calendars, and Echoes of the Cordillera. A Pushcart nominee awash in Republican mindsets, Margo thrives on closely observing film, photos, and natural settings. She’s known for eavesdropping.

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Deborah Wanzer
Op-ed

Alive in the crazed and cracked bones of these united
states, in the sawed-off aftermath of one more killing,

in the unveiled images illuminating our very hands,
in the spooked words that rear up, crush, then gallop

off, nostrils flaring with the smell of gunpower. Alive in
the bodies, long concealed, their dark bones knitting

silently on the back stairwell, in the stories of brassy
welts that crawl like worms down the backside of

of history, in the bare-faced ink running from the
whiteness of the page. Alive, in the children, quenched

with unmemorized milk—for their soft ivory bones.

Deborah Wanzer is a Clinical Social Worker.

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Walter Holland
Dybbuks

Once I wore a white lab jacket and complained about caseloads
and the old aged, tottering and frail with canes or wheelchairs.

They would enter anxious for my examination, my treatment,
my young , impatient hands. Sometimes they seemed

like children to me, reduced to babbling, or whispering softly
their reminiscences: a 1920’s Europe they saw on a childhood

vacation; a brother or father killed in a World War. And then
there were those with numbers tattooed to their skin,

who shared their stories of detention and panic, of the terrible
efficiency of men and boxcars and smokestacks and the dark,

cold, lethal look of Dr. Mengele’s eyes, who by a mere grin or
simple gesture decided if one would survive; his harsh, clinical,

split-second decision based on nothing more than a perverse
science based on body mass, age, birth status or fitness to perform

hard labor. Choosing those suitable for his experiments, his studies
of human endurance, the effects of altitude, drug dosage, poisons

and the purposeful infliction of massive wounds. What’s happened
to them? Men and women who raised children with names like

Rebecca and Aaron, who founded Altman’s and Bloomingdale’s,
and pledged their allegiance to their newly adopted democratic country.

Walter Holland, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry including 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). He collaborated on the book and lyrics for a musical based on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which was staged at the 2017 Florida Festival of New Musicals. Some of his poetry credits include: Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, Rhino, Hazmat, The Cimarron Review, and About Place Journal. He lives in New York City. He writes reviews for Pleiades and Lambdaliterary.org. Follow him at: walterhollandwriter.com

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Maximilian Heinegg
Signs in the Bay

I have no illusions about these neighbors,
who have seen enough of me
to smash my windows, & salute
the armies as they pass.

But eighteen months in, I ease no better
into the fantasy where I burn
down their houses, sink their boats, smash
their windows, cinder their doors

to satisfy a rage once unfamiliar —
now a muscle memory at each sign
designed in red to do just this, does —
because my cause, my cause is just.

Maximilian Heinegg‘s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Free State Review, Sweet Tree Review, Misfit Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry. Additionally, he is a singer-songwriter and recording artist. He live sand teach English in the public schools of Medford, MA.

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Marc Sheehan
August, 2018

Ceiling fans spin.
Beach towels and swimsuits
drape themselves over porch rails.

Pre-dawn lightening flickers
along the horizon, but brings
neither rain nor thunder.

Even watered lawns turn brown—
mowed finally on the Ides
clippings barely half-fill the bag.

Somehow, you have managed to keep
the flowerbox pansies alive,
though they droop down

like fuchsia from a hanging basket.
Along the festival parade route
flags and bunting remain

long after the clown band has clomped off.

Marc J. Sheehan is the author of two full-length poetry collections —— Greatest Hits (New Issues Press) and Vengeful Hymns (Ashland Poetry Press), and a chapbook of poems, Limits to the Salutary Effects of Upper Midwestern Melancholy (Split Rock Review). He has published stories, poems, essays and reviews in numerous literary magazines including Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His flash fiction has been featured on NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction series as well as on the program Selected Shorts. He lives in Grand Haven, Michigan.

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Mike Nichols
Marie Antoinette Redux

And the underclasses, used to asking,
How many hours did you get last week?
lug their un-aborted snot-encrusted
waifs to the corporate citadels’ iron gates.
One fat CEO eventually emerges
and pronounces,

Let them eat cake, and binge-
watch their Netflix.

Mike L. Nichols is a graduate of Idaho State University and a recipient of the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize. He lives and writes in Eastern Idaho. Look for his poetry in Rogue Agent, Scryptic Magazine, Ink&Nebula, Plainsongs Magazine, and elsewhere. Find more at mikenicholsauthor.com

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Bruce Robinson
Malice in Four Thoughts

They didn’t see it coming
(how could they?)

And then it rained, rained
and we weren’t witness

so we can only surmise
that the days grew shorter

and who’s to say that clocks
could demonstrate a direction

and there was nothing
one could do about it

(which is what we did)

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Mobius, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Panoply, and Pangyrus.

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Marjorie Moorhead
Walking With the Wind

Walking with the wind today
all the Autumn leaves are in play;

whether shake-dancing on their branches,
or dry rustling on the ground.

Those once red, yellow, gold,
now browned;

mixing with pine needles in a brew
mapping out patterns best discerned

from above, by geese who flew by
on their way to southern spots.

A bit like the Haves, who leave behind
the Have Nots for warmer climes

when a chill sets in. Soon, those
havens will be gone. Luxury bungalow

playgrounds swallowed up by swells
and surges. Atlantis created

by consumerist urges.
Walking with the wind today

grey and white bands of cloud in play,
criss crossing a pale blue sky; bright

with the telephone wires lit true,
glittering so beautifully in a spotlight,

displayed in their best light,
as only the sun’s rays can do.

Marjorie Moorhead‘s poetry can be found in the online sites/journals What Rough Beast, HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig. She has poems in two anthologies: A Change of Climate (12/2017, edited by Sam Illingworth and Dan Simpson to benefit The Environmental Justice Foundation), and Birchsong: Poetry Centered in VT, Vol.II (4/2018, edited by Alice Wolf Gilborn, et al. for The Blueline Press). Forthcoming in 2019 is a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, and a collection with 4th Friday Poets (Hobblebush). Marjorie is an AIDS survivor, mother of two, and is nestled in northern New England, near the NH/VT border.
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Margo Davis
Catch me

staring a beat too long
along the nape of her stem-slim neck
at the crimson imprint of his rough hands. I swallow,
slow my pace behind them.
No must be what she had moaned,
no in the face of this hurricane idling, its velocity hovering
along the gulf between them. A gale force grips
what it can
and won’t let go.
In a moment I relive where she stands, his hand, my man’s,
all men’s, gripping my neck
a bit too hard, forceful.
She looks away
to catch her reflection in plate glass, flushing deep as
the stain he has made on her. I feel
light-headed as she studies
her reflection.
What surprised me then, now, how we pretend
that calm will prevail somehow, if only
we weather it.
Our eyes meet in the glass.
No, not this palpable pressure where one hell-bent headwind
could crack all that’s intact. I pull back, swallow,
look down as he swells,
gathering momentum.

Margo‘s more recent poems have appeared in The Fourth River, Ekphrastic Review, Misfit, and Light, and the Houston Chronicle (Fall). Recent anthology publications include Enchantment of the Ordinary (December), Of Burgers and Ballrooms, Untameable City, numerous Texas Poetry Calendars, and Echoes of the Cordillera. A Pushcart nominee awash in Republican mindsets, Margo thrives on closely observing film, photos, and natural settings. She’s known for eavesdropping.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Bruce Robinson
Super Moon

Soon there will be beaujolais nouveau
parties, le beaujolais nouveau
est arrivé, at Bleu Provence (the
moon says so) and we will pair

wine with cheese, now pare
the cheese with data
and we will parse the bullet
we did not dodge and that tracks

its way around a calendar, now
isn’t that just like a moon, no reason
to believe me, not really,
took us long enough, like a celestial

stone that’s had it up to here

<Your connection was interrupted An
internet change was detected>

with its relationship the moon
lumes large tonight, well, happens all the time,
even here in this country where hundreds
of thousands and yes we’re still counting

died so that others could covet property,
was their ardor aspirational,
and those who survived persisted
as did their children, and, all right,

you get the drift, which from all appearances
continues to persist, our tidal messiness,
which, and we shouldn’t like to hear this,
is possibly our strength but tonight

just fails to seem so, even by the light
or, well, despite the light, of a beleaguered moon.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Mobius, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Panoply, and Pangyrus.

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