Linera Lucas
Apparently

unpacking is necessary,
not starting crème fraîche in a glass jar,

setting bread to rise,
chopping cabbage for ginger orange coleslaw,

planting white lace kale in the red pots flanking the steps,
sending edits for a friend’s poem,

making a collage from old
(what other kind could there be) National Geographics,

pausing with the dog to direct strangers to the pond,
checking the parsley seedlings,

scrubbing the sink,
ordering copper and scarlet witch hazels—

none is sufficient.
Boxes must be opened & contents sorted,

cardboard flattened and driven to recycling
before it is a productive day.

Linera Lucas’ poetry has appeared in Clover, Elohi Gadugi, PageBoy Magazine, Museum of Northwest Art, Spillway, and other journals. She holds a BA from Reed College and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Lucas has taught at Hugo House in Seattle, Washington. Visit her online at lineralucas.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.

Cheryl Caesar
Mistress Goop and Her New Candle, “It Smells Like My Vagina”

For $75, tax and shipping, buyers can smell her vagina.
You have to be young, blond, thin and rich to respectably sell your vagina.

Sure, given a room and a landline, you can earn 25 cents a minute
Supplying a throaty voice and tales for it to tell, your vagina.

Or open it up to the camera’s eye, just for the cash that’s in it,
$100 a day for the varied pastel of your vagina.

But Paltrow thinks beyond sight and sound, and she knows how to spin it:
Cocktails of cervical fluid, a light Zinfandel from her vagina.

Only touch remains to exploit, and her trademark sex doll will win it,
As Gwyneth provides the formula Goop, the gel for its vagina.

Cheryl Caesar‘s poems have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Cream and Crimson, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk, The Stay Project, What Rough Beast, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka; and other poetry in Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply, Dormiveglia, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Black Coffee Review, The Wild Word, Q/A Poetry, Ariel Chart, Credo Espoir, Bleached Butterfly and Beautiful Cadaver. 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.

Billy Clem
From a Displaced Person

Dear Madame or Sir,

They found us, their torches blazing
blue and yellow, beacons in a white air
writing a story you’d know on sight.

Patrol arrived in boots and hats, large, heavy,
the likes of which we’d never seen before,
almost comically serious, if a little late.

But, this was never the risk we were told:
it was pre-ordained, like viruses traveling
the night and transferring unknown to you

and, at once, you’re no longer yourself
but something running from a fever pitched
as high as possible, naked and not dreaming

someplace you won’t be taken. I write
this note to you from my bed—
what passes today as my bed—

pillow less, blanket less stone,
a palimpsest of stories too terrifying
to recover if they could be uncovered

and known by so small a man as myself,
so insignificant as to need—
I am in your hands, lined as they are

by labor, maybe love, loss certainly,
hence you’re reading this in a place
where anything is possible.

Please, do what you can
for my wife and children
I am yours, sincerely,

Billy Clem’s work has appeared in Great River Review, Vox Populi, The New Verse News, Counterexample Poetics, Moon City Review, and Elder Mountain. He teaches composition, multicultural literatures, and women’s and gender studies outside Chicago.

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.

Ute Carson
Secret Anniversaries

There is something different in every aching heart:
Awareness of death
as when a butterfly landed in the palm of my hand,
wings heavy, baked by heat, failing.
Awareness of failure
as when, betting all my money on that spotted horse,
my fortune seeped through my fingers like sand.
Awareness of loss
as when I stormed into the night fog
after a blustery quarrel with my partner,
her words icy darts, “I don’t love you anymore.”

There is something different in every jubilant heart:
Dawning of love
as when through flickering candlelight
sparks ignite in recognition and we are on fire.
Dawning of beauty
as when breastmilk sweet as honey
becomes an amber river
that nourishes new life.
Dawning of freedom
as when there is no longer the need
to place feelings under a bell jar
but to let them shine.

When the last anniversary dawns on the horizon
I hope to celebrate with few regrets but
much gratitude for a wondrous ride!

Ute Carson is the author of the poetry collections Just A Few Feathers (PlainView Press, 2011), Folding Washing (Willet Press, 2013) and Reflections: New and Selected Poems (Plain View Press, 2018), as well as two novels, a novella, and numerous essays and short stories. Born in the Polish city of Koszalin, Carson fled her native city during World War II, settling in Germany before coming to the United States in 1962. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband. They have three daughters, six grandchildren, a horse and a number of cats.

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.

Deborah Bacharach
Surely Goodness and Mercy

At mom’s death bed, I ask
the minister for the twenty-third psalm.
I want the King James version
yeah, lo.

I don’t know about faith,
God’s protection. Mom was sort of done
with them too, but I
want to hear the words flicker and glow.
The minister starts:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want I forget the rest of the words.
The minister forgets.
When he forgets, I forget. All my breath
is in Mom’s lungs inching its way
to her heart just one more time. I can’t

reach for my phone shoved in with the crumpled up
parking lot receipts, granola wrappers, hair ties
I towed in and out as if that could
empty the days of drudgery.

The nurse says, The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want. Time flows again. We walk with him
all the way through annointest my head with oil
as he had anointed Mom’s body.

Nurses are not supposed to pray
for your son who has cancer or tell you Jesus
will take away your craving. They are not supposed to
say He restoreth my soul.

I’m tired, really tired
walking alone.
I want someone to go before
me and my mother holding
a rod and staff,
a candle.

Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has appeared in the journals Vallum, Poetry Ireland Review, Sweet, and Midwest Quarterly, among others, as well as in the anthologies Jump Start: A Northwest Renaissance Anthology (Steel Toe Books, 2009), edited by Lonny Kaneko, Pat Curran, and Susan Landgraf; A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002), edited by Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, and Micki Reaman; and Sex and Single Girls (Seal Press, 2000), edited by Lee Damsky. Bacharach is a writing tutor in the Seattle. More online at DeborahBacharach.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.

Doug Van Hooser
A live trap

Capturing a skunk creates a problem.
They turn tail and spray dismay.
Such distain leaves a sense of unforgiving,
a scent of arrogance
not capitulation.
This attitude inclines for ridicule,
but is skunk nonchalance.
This abysmal reaction,
dissuades one from a serious discussion
to sort out the skunk’s complaint.
But what allows the skunk to dine and defecate
wherever his self-righteousness saunters,
and blare like a trumpet his dissonant stink<
all thin and thick skin absorbs?
The odor: a dye of words that discolors,
a stain that cannot be dissolved.
A tattoo time does not erase.

Doug Van Hooser‘s poems have appeared in Chariton Review, Split Rock Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, After Hours and Poetry Quarterly, among other journals. His fiction has appeared in Red Earth Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Bending Genres Journal. Van Hooser’s plays have received readings at Chicago Dramatist Theatre and Three Cat Productions. More at dougvanhooser.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.

Pamela Ahlen
Pervasive Invasive

No cultivar
twines the pine,

a weeping misery
needing more than calamine.

The bitchin’ itch
doesn’t come on like a rose,

isn’t pretty as a daisy,
drives some of us crazy

as oily words oozing out
misogynistic throats.

Goats chew it up
[the shiny three-leaf kind]

then poop it out with immunity.
But I ask you, blistered sisters,

what antidote
can eradicate that other creep unlikely to go anytime extinct?

Pamela Ahlen is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in Cider Press Review, The Adirondack Review, Birch Song Anthology among others. She is the program coordinator for Bookstock Literary Festival held each summer in Woodstock, Vermont. Pamela organizes literary events for Osher (Lifelong Education at Dartmouth) and has compiled and edited the Anthology of Poets and Writers: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years at Dartmouth.

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.

Anna Leah
Liberty

On the night they re-elected their dictator,
he climbed me to the top of Freedom
above rallying song of those fueled
by viktory and patriotism and wild unison.
Their dancing may tear this country apart
fueled by forest seed, bloom liquor, and venison
so intoxicated with beating bare chests they move.

Weighed only with power of enchantment and song
soaring in corkscrew gait
he is sure-footed on their shrines.

Chains of change scare him
but not their danger.
He fears losing the liberty of the wind.

Shakily, I reach out to him
buses quivering the railings
shouts riveting the air.

In his trust, I am suspended in calm.

When the daylight clears,
revealing the mountain mantra of green
absorbing this pull of uncertainty

we’ll see the fertility
free from envy of jaundiced regularity
towards life from rocks
and breaks from unease’s rule.

Anna Leah’s poetry has appeared in Panel Magazine (published in Budapest). Her broadcast and print journalism have appeared on PBS, AJ+, and Brut and in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Post, Brokelyn, and other publications. She holds a BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Also a filmmaker, Leah lives in Brooklyn. She posts poetry to Instagram, @ByAnnaLeah.

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.

Dion O’Reilly
Mariana

You have to remember this isn’t your land
it belonged to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours.
—Philip Levine

Why do I drift on memories?
Conjure what I lost, repeat
the loss again and again?

Is it because of a happiness
that rises in me like heat
or fog touched by sun?

It weakens me, invades my skin—

the hope I can hold on
to anything, even my bones.

I heard there was a time when
poets returned to marble tombs
with shovels and axes
to exhume their beloveds—
Emerson’s young bride, two years gone,
held again in his arms.

How many times have I returned
to a mother who savaged me?
Searched for her again and again
in the bodies of men—their eyes,
burnished like hers as she beat me.

Blood prick of a needle, then bliss
while I recut memory’s diamond.

Have you heard of light organs
in creatures who live at such depth,
sunlight refuses to enter?

Luminous glands embed in their skin.
Only in silent darkness, only in the sea,
only in the sting of salt.

Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in Narrative, New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Tupelo Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at various times as a theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher, among other occupations.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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