Subhaga Crystal Bacon
Praise Song

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
               Yes, there will be singing.
               About the dark times.
                              —Bertolt Brecht

I want to sing about these dark times, call them fulsome—
	dark being all colors—the wood of the ebony tree, 
piano keys, children’s eyes. I want to sing a borrowed
Praise Song for those who sang the Middle Passage
who sang in Hush Harbors, who sang in message.
	My arms ropy and long want to 
	lift the shades on shuttered hearts.

Oh, great loss. Oh, deep fear; let your waters flow. 
I want to hold your beating, your beaten
hearts, your grieving and wronged hearts.
Come on down, let’s go down, down to the river to pray.
Let’s wash ourselves: no more of the good old way.
	I want to sing with the river the way
	rocks make sound from motion.

I want blood to run freely, new blood from old, 
	dark and rich with ancestors, world’s
	first people, the minerals, the star-gold
and soil; the clear, the raging, salt or sweet waters 
before they rose up in wood and canvas and bullets
	before they carried those lives away
	to all the ways of dying.

I want to sing about these dark times, call it fulsome—
	my song, a kind of crying—
	I want to weave a kind of Praise Song:
Oh, my kindred, oh, my brethren, all the old ways
to say beloved, family, familiar. I want to appease
	the killed and the killer. I want to redeem
	the bent knee, release the choke hold.

—Submitted on 01/01/2021

Subhaga Crystal Bacon is the author Blue Hunger (Methow Press, 2020) and Elegy with a Glass of Whisky (BOA Editions, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Bombay Review, River Heron Review, Lavender Review, Humana Obscura, Plum Recruit, and other journals, A cis-gender, queer-identified woman, Bacon lives in Twisp, Wash.

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Srinivas Mandavilli
Winter 2020

The mandevillas clutter
the porch, awkwardly
stand supported by a trellis,
waiting for history to happen.
They rest in pots of peat moss,
need shade like us, get burned
easily by harsh summer news.

We will bring them indoors this winter.
For now, they are happy making
dramatic gestures to the air outside,
waving glossy leaves, and ice pink
flowers announce with their trumpets,
proud of their blooming
in some high desert.

—Submitted on 12/31/2020

Srinivas Mandavilli is the author of Gods in the Foyer (Antrim House, 2016). His poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, Long River Run, Drunken Boat, SNReview, and other journals. Mandavilli attended medical school in India and trained in oncologic pathology in the US. He is chief of pathology and laboratory medicine at Hartford Hospital, and lives in West Hartford with his wife and two daughters.

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Daniel Romo
Conceding

The day after the election votes are still being counted,
and the man walking ten feet to my right whose shoes
look like they’ve seen better decades
has a conversation with himself and with those
who appear to be all the men
he used to be.

Pundits are counting the sums of red and blue states
trying to cast a light the color of layman’s terms,
so we can be at ease with at least
accepting the fate
of our next four years.

The mumbling man says, Gotta’ do better,
and for a moment I wonder if he is speaking of himself
or the nation, and when he yells, To hell with it!
I know our country
is in danger.

There is talk the president won’t vacate his position if
defeated,
and sometimes force is the only way we learn
the control we think we have is a fleeting term
modeled by the manner in which we acquire
loss.

I’m drawn back to the man to my right,
the independent thinker with the size 11 soiled shoes
because our souls, too, bear the filth
of so much tread and mudslinging,
and I wonder if either candidate
will be able to help
any of us at all.

—Submitted on 12/29/2020

Daniel Romo is the author of Apologies in Reverse (FutureCycle Press, 2019), When Kerosene’s Involved (Mojave River Press, 2014), and Romancing Gravity (Silver Birch Press 2013). His poetry and photography can be found in The Los Angeles Review, PANK, Gargoyle, Yemassee, and other journals. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, and he lives and teaches in Long Beach, Calif. More at danielromo.wordpress.com.

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Evan Stephens
Three Poems

Carrying On

Soon, the bars will all close.
Soon, the restaurants will empty.

Yet this wild archery lawn,
these elephant bones,

this wild strawberry tree,
these rose benches where

we ate our bread and wine—
they will carry on.

Ten days green
in the quarantine,

as the numbers
combed upwards,

always upwards,
enough to make one

invoke Jeffers.
Sitting beside you

at spring tide
at Sandymount—

the sea will carry on.
The canal face,

blushed with swan,
it, too, will carry on.

And now you and I,
on the sunken patio,

in ruined deck chairs
sitting and watching

the sun splash in—
carrying on.

A Low

Things between us
have reached such a low
that I’m drunk at noon
on a Wednesday in October.

But what if I grabbed the sun
for you, shaking it free
from lacy palms of cloud,
and gave it to your greenness?

Would it be enough to fix it?
Or are all these drams
of Scotch just turning out
dreams in the early afternoon?

Little Rainings

The broken symmetries
of the night…
you move,
I move.

You were in the green hill,
chatting with clouds;
I kept a bar open,
wrote you a ditty.

There are little rainings
everywhere tonight.
They slip down into the graves
across the street. It sets the mood.

But I need to get out,
walk the block,
shake this umbilical glass,
join a blind fog.

The moon threatens
to escape its sweater
of noctilucent cloud,
but we’re not looking.

—Submitted on 12/29/2020

Evan Stephens holds a BA from the University of Maryland College Park, and a JD from the Columbus School of Law. An attorney, he splits his time between Washington, DC, and Dublin.

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Steve Wilson
Two Poems

On Uncertainty

Everywhere the weave
between us loosens,
weakens. Threads fray. This

morning, before light,
old fears, familiars—
windows rattled by

sudden thunder, sounds
shaped within darkness—
brought an odd comfort.

Who knows what, in doubt,
may carry us through?</p

Safety

After months of isolation
and fear, I have begun to

shy, instinctively, from friends,
people on the sidewalks,
from my own grown children

no longer welcome inside
the home where they were raised.

I have come to reckon my backyard
is a compound, my chain-link fence
protection from whatever menace

threatens invisible beyond. You
have to wonder, I muse

during another scant afternoon
with the lawn and the birds,
how long will you seek security

in such otherless, darkening,
echoes of space and silence.

—Submitted on 12/25/2020

Steve Wilson is the author of Lose to Find (Finishing Line Press, 2018), The Reaches (Finishing Line Press, 2019), and three other collections. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Georgetown Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, New American Writing, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including O Taste and See: Food Poems (Bottom Dog Press, 2003), Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by Robert Frost (University of Iowa, 2005), Is This Forever or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas, (Greenwillow Books, 2004), and others. Wilson holds a BA from the University of Oklahoma, and an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State. He lives in San Marcos, Tex., where he is a professor of English at Texas State University.

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Jihyuk Han
Three Poems

The Peach Tree

Pandemic—my favorite season
The holidays pass and I am
A young woman again. Only one
Trick-or-treater in 34 years
On Gnarled Hollow
Road. And it was my angry
Neighbor Kal, dressed as
The Angel of
Death. Better to
Think of my first
Love, L and write him
A poem or letter
In the shape of a
Peach, only who knows
How the Old Stump
Would respond?
L, who climbed
The roof of his mail
Truck, for the
Highest peaches—he
Fell 3 months
Ago. But I can still
See him on his tippy-toes.
Reaching up…
Only, no more peaches
And his bag stained with
Blood and dried leaves.

Crushed By This Beauty

6 Feet to the left, the grunts and screams of the Russian tennis player
crack the flat screen. I absorb the insatiable gaze
of the masked passengers waiting
to board the train. Everything moans and churns
Even the creepy bearded guy with his thumb twitch.
Happy but waiting. One could
Murder us all: the high school boy
Texting on his cell phone. Furrowed and grimacing
A small girl punching the air while her mother
Reads the news. All the headlines are uncomfortable, naïve or
Misdirected. Nothing pacifies the girl named Judie
The announcer says he doesn’t love us
Not this moment
Or the next. I was wrong to leave you.
I won’t allow myself the pleasure.
The train of Not Thinking of You never arrives
I am never leaving this station.

Neighbors

The masked, pantless father is standing on the front walk
The leaves of the Japanese maple—flaming
And the days like drugged up
Passengers nodding off to sleep
While the children are molested by bees

What good is apology?
When it’s gone too far
And the listener’s ears are filled
Not with remorse

No faith in the endless thrown shade. The trees look as if women are hanging
Themselves between the branches. You could be strangled here
You are strangled
Still early summer. Yet to give up
It’s obscene moons, its rope burns and slow willful
Dismantling.

—Submitted on 10/28/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series. 

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Margo Taft Stever
Immigration Policy

—Submitted on 10/27/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Margo Taft Stever is the author of Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019), Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019), The Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015), The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012), Frozen Spring (Mid-List Press, 2002) and Reading the Night Sky (Riverstone Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, Plume, and other journals. Stever is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, NY.

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Liz Ahl
Conjunctions, 2020

We had to drive elsewhere,
out past the snowy screen of pines,
to find enough empty horizon

to have a chance at spotting
Saturn and Jupiter in conjunction—
a meeting both etymology and metaphor

might call conjugal—closer together
than we’d ever seen
or would ever see again, joining

their two lights nearly into one
during the dark year’s deepest darkness.
Before sunset sent us seeking,

two blue jays knocked for several minutes
at the front door with their beaks—
we leaned and listened, unseeing, until

you crept out the basement exit
to see what was tapping, because
we couldn’t from inside and didn’t want

to just open the door in case
whatever waited there was braver
than we were and just came inside,

assuming that a door unlocked
in response to knocking
is an open mouth saying come in.

But they beat it for the tree line as you
approached. A pair of jays, skittish
on one side of the door and us,

a skittish pair on the other, imagining
ridiculous possibilities—rabid
squirrel, miniature Jehovah’s witness.

Of course it was overcast later
when we sought out the shortest day’s
third hidden duo, added that conjunction

to the growing list of things unseen
by our naked eyes in 2020 but still
believed in. We knew they were up there

beyond this cloudy night’s closed door
not because of Christmas or wishing it so,
but because of mathematics

and maybe also because in all that dark
we stared at before driving home
from the edge of the snowy rural airstrip,

we could make out one region of clouds
where a faint smudge betrayed
the lurking, flirting half-moon.

No star or planet strong enough to burn
through that blanket, but the lunar
smudge maybe offered consolation—

even in its blue-black bruising—
the dimmest evidence of light
on the other side.

—Submitted on 12/22/2020

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), Home Economics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016), Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine winner the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. A new chapbook, Song and Scar, is forthcoming in 2021 from No Chair Press. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. Ahl lives in New Hampshire.

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Paul Ruth
Practice Needed

I see my people crying in the sun.
With souls
fraught for fragile justice,
being decided on the broken backs
wanting to find peace,
only seeing the shadow.

Is the division an invention?
Is it a re-imagination?
Or a fate shared in the past of ancestors?
A forever need to be a protestor.

I want to be agreed with and share this common ground,
but I am blinded by where I cannot stand.
I am inspired by aspiration of opportunistic desire,
only to find the invitation thrown away by my own hand.

A creation needing always a little more creating,
a recipe testifying, “salt to taste.”

And yet to see the shadow is to know the sun
and to stare down the sun is not to see the colors.
Look toward the horizon when dusk or dawn
meets shadow to sun. To see the outline.
To see the colors. To see our reflection in an ocean,
a lake, river, stream, muddy puddle of time.

But if the soul cannot bear to bare,
practice at night with the moon, when all is alone
and your world is empty.

—Submitted on 12/22/2020

Paul Ruth is a high school English teacher and adjunct college instructor from the Metro Detroit area. He has written opinion articles on the state of education in Michigan and makes his aphorisms available through his Instagram account @envisionedaphorism. With his human partner, and their Old English Sheepdog Limerick, he produces the Instagram account @limmieslimericks.

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