J.D. Isip
Carmelitos Ever After

Every night, every time the bank account is empty,
it calls to me, its many voices who lived and died there
in the cold concrete tombs, lined with the finest
layaway treasures of Welfare Queens and Ghetto Kings
forever fanning themselves on the porch
calling innumerable children
back to the fold

Can you believe anyone ever wanted to live in the projects?
It broke ground in 1939, fifty acres, 67 buildings
with thick cement walls in case Long Beach became
the next Pearl Harbor which never happened
but we sent our Japanese to the camps anyway.

Come home, little children! Come home! The chorus:
Mother May Bell Moses, selling Styrofoam cups of frozen
Kool-Aid, her twin girls glaring down at you if you ain’t
got a dime you ain’t gonna get what they have, a drink
in the SoCal sun, a line of barefoot hoodrats
bouncing from foot to foot, double-dutching
in place, still there, Come home!

Carmelitos Housing Development—lovers of the poor—
offered mostly black families, and us,
shelter with indoor toilets and bathtubs
hard-won luxuries lauded by the NAACP as a win
for poor souls looking for a better life

I dream myself the first ghetto mutant, a telekinetic, able
to burn it all down, hands outstretched blasting those walls
lifting the May Twins into the stratosphere, creating a vortex
to swallow the hood up whole, every last dealer, boombox,
the bread man selling diabetes pies for twice their worth,
“This is not the promised land!” I say, every time I wake up
and find it part of me.

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Suzanne Verrall
Doomsday

while the people were indoors
avoiding contagion
a kangaroo hopped
through the empty city streets
dolphins re-entered
the clearing river waters and
two giant pandas
mated

how quickly it all goes
to pot I thought
pouring boiling water
on my two-minute noodles
and how easily
it would never strike midnight
with no one around
to wind the clock

—Submitted on 05/05/2020

Suzanne Verrall lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her flash fiction, essays and poetry appear in Atlas and Alice, Flash Frontier, Archer Magazine, Lip Magazine, Poetry NZ Yearbook, and other journals. Online at suzanneverrall.com.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Hasnain Ali Syed
Brown

I am not just brown

I am where
The glow of melanin meets
The shine of pearl white
An intersection of culture
An unparalleled sight

I have a history of resilience
But don’t mistake me for weak
I have scared off your soldiery
Toppled Kingdoms, so to speak

My valor knows no boundaries
Undaunted is my audacity
I am not just bodily strong
I’ll win you with my sagacity

If you happen to keep the view
That you can easily take me down
Then I am sorry, you are misguided
I think you’ve never fought a Brown

We’ve been kings, we’ve been soldiers
We’ve been refugees with no means
But what we have never been is desolate
It is just not present in our genes

You can close the doors of opportunities
Right in our faces in hour of need
But remember there is an Omnipotent
And He won’t care for color or creed

He is benevolent for all his Creation,
He is the one who made me Brown
So I embrace it like a Gift from Him
And wear it proudly like a crown

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

J.D. Isip
Archangel

for Pete

The best of us had gorgeous golden hair, impish dimples,
soft, enormous wings, and kind eyes, left his Daddy’s
church in middle Tennessee to be the youngest pastor
with a podcast, hipster band, sun-touched skin peaking
out from his chest tight pearl snap, three snaps undone,

Let the mutants sit right next to the righteous, preached
for all of us to let up a little, even when they lost the baby
he kept smiling, tears dripping from his boyish cheeks
to a tiny soul patch, the beginning of what would be
a full goatee, a beard, a total transformation

Came with no warning, the techno-organic infection already
cording his pink skin into a hue more blue and metallic,
reading about his own life falling apart, the divorce, losing
the boys except on weekends, turned his eyes red at the corners
and then red altogether, seeing the world for the first time

Like most of us always saw it, on fire with shame and hatred,
emails and handwritten letters heavy with stones and curses,
all his supple feathers strewn behind him, limbs once lithe
and nimble drag him through a town he created, a steeple
at its center, a long line of trucks and mini-vans rolling into

Sunday morning worship months later, most of us stopped
going, felt the threat of damnation and Apocalypse acutely,
as if letting our guard down welcomed this destruction,
as if we maybe always believed the wild-eyed First Purifier
who correlated our genes and lives to hurricanes and tornadoes

But I only saw one mutant do that and he called himself
Archangel, spread his new wings armed with sharp feathers,
thwip, thwip, the tongues of each accuser nailed by tiny knives,
stayed by their own awe, every new generation of judges
stands before the camera crews, swears, “We never saw it coming.”

—Submitted on 04/30/2020

J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Isabel Duque
Ticking Time Bomb

Tick,
Treading on a snake that is already broken,
The feeling of withdraw.
The chaos normal, consumption normal, with all
The clamor, cacophony, teeth.
Bang.

A Dream vision peppered with Death,
Clinical isolation, and chained feet. Rattle.

The humbling warmth of a cup full, the intoxicating crevices of a lover,
The cracking of a spine, the uninhibited cackle of a dear friend, the
Light streaming in through dressed branches from a lapis lazuli afternoon.
Hiss.

The eye knows where the sun dances,
And the moon bathes naked.
The hand tinkers away at wood, gathers herbs and grain, and makes bellies full.
The mind swirls in the ebbs of canyons,
Looking for a desert flower, when it really hungers for
A supple horizon, that simply recedes.
Thump, thump, thump.

Ah, the Heart.
It is relentless in its ache,
With its bloody chambers, its avenues a raging river,
Expanding,
Contracting,
Wearing down stone. Gushing wild, raving mad and all-pervading.
Piercing and permeating Mundis. Reaching.
Until—
Stillness, silence.

Tock, rustle, whisper,
The shedding of Matter,
Inhabiting the lightness of a new skin,
The bounce of every scale reverberating during the dance
Across the warm, rust colored Earth.
The wind cleanses the taut, long body,
The birth of being.
Aum.

—Submitted on 05/05/2020

Isabel Duque writes: Daughter of Little Havana, trying to bewitch with letters, pictures, music and movement. Always seeking rhythm, ritual and the heart’s fire.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Milton P. Ehrlich
Quarantined

Buried underground
in my sarcophagus
wrapped in stone
I worry about 1,089
poems I’ve left behind
that needed revisions.
It wasn’t my intention
to reveal all the faults
of every friend I ever had
or ridicule the hypocrisies
of wise men I got to know.
Clutching a bag of diamonds,
Catherine de Medici knocks
on my stone overcoat, and
invites me to join her in an
escape plan that might allow us
to fix the anarchy of the world.

—Submitted on 05/04/2020

Milton P. Ehrlich is a psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. His poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, and other journals.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Hasnain Ali Syed
Reputation

It’ll be nice to
Walk in a room
And not have
To fight with
An army of
Preconceived
Opinions
Not look at
An entire gallery
Of my distorted pictures
Painted by someone
Else’s paintbrush
Not be judged before
Even saying anything
It’ll be nice to
Someday outrun
That report on me
And
Enter the room first
Shutting the door close
From the inside
On the reputation
That otherwise always
Precedes me

—Submitted on 06/28/2020

Hasnain Ali Syed was born in Sialkot, Pakistan, and moved to Lahore to study medicine, graduating with a medical degree from Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed al Nahyan Medical College. He lives in Lahore with his family.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Cheryl Caesar
Sheltering Places

after Jobim

A box. A bed.
A house. A home.
It’s the shelter that waits
when you’re living alone.

A coat. A bag.
A phone. A Mac.
It’s your coffeeshop space
with the wall at your back.

It’s a carrel that’s lined
with graffiti you know.
It’s the stall where you hide
when there’s nowhere to go.

It’s the wind in your hair.
It’s the sun in your face.
It’s a nest in the bush.
It’s a sheltering place.

A skin. A cell.
A tent. A tarp.
It’s a chamber to hold
every beat of your heart.

A here. A there.
A me, a you.
At the end of the day
we are all passing through.

—Submitted on 05/13/2020

Cheryl Caesar is the author of Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (Thurston Howl Publications, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The Blue Nib, Prachya Review, Panoply, Light, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon
I miss the way

for Robert

your chin rests on my head,
when we hug, say hello—
sixteen years ago
I welcomed you, a tiny bairn
snug in my daughter’s arms.

I miss your sharp, enquiring mind
with question after question,
your accounts of the many books you’ve read
and your hunger for more. Far more.

I miss your crinkled smiled-up eyes
and your shy-delivered jokes,
your kitchen disco with your sister
when washing dishes, iPod full blast.

I miss your pantomimes with George,
your daemon ginger cat. Robert,
I miss all that—

but it will all be there again,
one day we’ll laugh out loud
as it all comes back.

—Submitted on 05/04/2020

Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon is the author of Cerddi Bach (Hedgehog Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Porridge, The Blue Nib, Mookychick, Poethead, The Galway Review, and other journals. Ceinwen holds an MA in creative writing from Newcastle University, and lives near Newcastle upon Tyne.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.