Jared Pearce
Obesity Epidemic

We gulped all the light we
could glut, shutting down
the shamrocks and spoiling
the apples on their stems.

Particle by particle, wave
after wave, we let in the
dark, believing we were
stuffed impregnable,

yet over the days the ways
crumble into night, bats
take flight, the lightening
bugs die across the great states:

like trying to snatch the ocean
glitter, it runs from hands
and feels like that funerary
emptiness in the chest.

Feeding on the abyss
we trim, slim to despair,
the fine air; then a trickle,
a breath of light might

strike its match on
our tinder, kindling and mocking
what we had and
again what we want.

Jared Pearce is the author of The Annotated Murder of One (Aubade Publishing, 2018). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Coachella Review, Xavier Review, Breadcrumbs, BlazeVOX, and Panoplyzine, among other journals.  Online at jaredpearcepoetry.weebly.com.

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Lynn McGee
Crush, 10

A little girl stabs a giant in the eye and he drops
to his knees, with her still in his fist. The dragons
that should have saved her snap leathery wings
and seem lost, but are looking for their brother,
who’s been gutted and used as the Night King’s
hand puppet. It’s episode three, final season,
Game of Thrones, and I’m rigid with the shock
of these images when I start a Skype with you,
who would not admit to being scared, I’m guessing,
or who would, in fact, not be scared, or who would,
when inhaled down that tunnel toward fear, take
action to deflect it, such as push-ups in the office
with the door locked, carpet close to your face,
shoulders clenched and forearms burning,
breath deep.

Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two  award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by Rusty Rose and Marc Rosen. With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.

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Jessica Ramer
On the Berlin U-Bahn, 1985

When I returned to say my last goodbyes,
My body swaying as the U-Bahn rolled,
I saw a man with prison in his eyes.

He held his dog as if to exorcise
Some desperate sorrow festering unconsoled.
When I returned to say my last goodbyes.

The train pulled in. I left in chilled surprise,
But as the station’s escalator scrolled,
I saw a man with prison in his eyes.

I strolled the Breitscheidplatz, bought Turkish pies,
Pulled my thin jacket close against the cold,
When I returned to say my last goodbyes.

Outside its bombed-out church where scaffolds rise
Like bars, the Savior’s visage in their hold,
I saw a man with prison in his eyes.

Inside that cage, a one-eyed Jesus, wise
But distant, called his lambs into their fold
When I returned to say my last goodbyes
And saw a man with prison in his eyes.

Jessica Ramer is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has appeared in South 85 and The Keats Letters Project. She was a summer 2017 resident at the Alderworks Alaska Writers & Artists Retreat.

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D. Dina Friedman
Rules for Behaving on the Airport Line

Secure the pet ferret the scanner failed to find
snuggled in your undies, ignore the smoke
from the three-ounce tube in the zip-lock bag,
but if they ask, explain: explosive ointments

for your cellular membranes. Let your story
rival skyscrapers, which blaze red alert,
taunting terrorists in a world of rodents. Buy a uniform
and scarlet fishnets; remember

your grandmother’s body-blocking
view as you snuck under the subway turnstile. Consider
how many cells there might be in a single sloughing of skin,
the candy wrapper on the yellow footprint,

as you do what the man orders:
facing the faceless figure, lift your vulnerable arms
and think of Easter—and Patti Smith
exposing her body hair, or your grandmother’s heels

clicking on the Macy’s floor,
as you sat on Santa’s lap, pretending
you were Catholic. Can they really see you
naked inside the plastic box?

D. Dina Friedman is the author of the two young adult novels. Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster, 2006) was recognized as a Notable Book for Older Readers by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and a Best Books for Young Adults nominee by the American Library Association. Playing Dad’s Song (FSG, 2006) was recognized as a Bank Street College of Education Best Book. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Common Ground Review, Lilith, Wordpeace, Pinyon,  Negative Capability, New Plains Review, Steam Ticket, Bloodroot, Inkwell, and Pacific Poetry, among other journals. Friedman holds an MFA from Lesley University. She lives in Hadley, Mass., and teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Pamela Sumners
I-70 West

On five separate billboards
equitably distributed down I-70
to Jeff City where 163 districts
representing cows bloviate
and 34 senators obfuscate
or pontificate depending on
who is the chaplain for the day:

WHEN YOU DIE
WHAT WILL YOU SAY
AT THE PEARLY GATES
WHEN ST. PETER ASKS
DID YOU DEFEND THE UNBORN?

Two miles later, a billboard
double-decker wants to know:
If you die tonight
Heaven or Hell?
And just beneath,
from Chick-Fil-A,
“Tell Em Tha Cows Sent Ya.”

Pamela Sumners is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones (UnCollected Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Bacopa Literary Review, Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Loch Raven, Mudlark Posters, New Verse News, Shot Glass Journal, Snakeskin, Streetlight Magazine, Ucity Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology The 64 Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press, 2018), chosen by the editors of The Halcyone literary review. Sumners lives in St. Louis with her family. 

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Maureen Wanket
Muscle

In the present moment of my body
Decaffeinated morning grace
Muscles aching
Well rested but not awake
Soft belly
The babies stretched that but
It was already stretched
The babies gave it taut purpose
And an excuse
Starting from ground zero
Giving birth with no painkillers
Gave me that now I know who God is
Gave me that now
I know who my God is
Suns out Guns out
Oppress this
Or how about try
I am honing my weapon for revolution.

Maureen Wanket is the author of the novels How to Be Manly, The Arrow, and The Ghost Daughter. Her short fiction has appeared in Esopus, Blood and Thunder, Night Train Journal, Gold Man Review, and Scoundrel Time, as well as in the anthologies The Monsters We Forgot: Volume 2 (Soteira Press, 2019), edited by Gabriel Grobler and R.C. Bowman; and The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015), edited by Rosalie Morales Kearns. Wanket works as a teacher and lives in Sacramento, Calif. with her husband and two daughters.

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Priscilla Frake
Towers Want to Fall

Banks want to fail.
Also crops and marriages.
Infections are like tinder,

waiting for any excuse to flare up.
This also goes for tempers
& wars. Guns want to fire

and bombs sit hopefully ticking,
curled around a red spark.
I myself want to burn

all my bridges. Flammable
words are coiled on the tip
of my tongue. Someone

inside my head promises
a world in which I
am limitless, untouchable,

triumphant—
and only patience, that
most trying of virtues,

tiredly tells me
to pull myself
back from the brink.

Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence (Mutabilis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017), edited by David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman; Enchantment of the Ordinary, (Mutabilis Press, 2019), edited by John Gorman; and Women. Period. (Spinsters Ink, 2008), edited by Julia Watts, Parneshia Jones, Jo Ruby and Elizabeth Slade. Frake lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.

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Shei Sanchez
Leaving Home

Inside my shallow pocket is a small piece of paper
with all of its corners crinkled like my mother’s face
the day before she died, or like mine the evening

I was forced to leave the only place I called home.
This fragile rectangle of a thing is the vessel that holds
my world entire, its shiny surface the cradle for the earth

where I lived and worked like an American.

You carry no papers      they told me.
Since I was a kid      I said.

My parents carried me here, away from an existence
stitched by carefully drawn breaths and nearly empty
pockets. The choice was made before I learned

how to question why leaving one home
for another was better than dying in the hands
of your own kin, people who breathed

the same air and walked the same path.
A choice was made again, before a rule of law
built by men who fear that I am

a threat to their identity,

before I can ever say that the bench I am sleeping
on at this moment is as foreign to me as the language
my parents spoke in furtive whispers and gilded hopes.

I affix my eyes on my little girl, forever fixed
and three years old, on this single shiny photograph
as I lay my body to rest and soul to perish, no longer able

to fight for my right to be treated as a citizen of the world.

Shei Sanchez‘s poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig and Harness Magazine, as well as in the anthology Essentially Athens Ohio: A Celebration of Spoken Word and Fine Art (independently published, 2019), edited by Kari Gunter-Seymour. She holds a BA from New York University, and an MA in teaching from School for International Training in Vermont. Also a fiction writer, Sanchez is Filipina-American and lives in Stewart, Ohio.

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Anna Leah
Feels Like Nineteen

Shivering, stamping, she stood.
She ran.

Not to escape the dawn,
dreading to extend the night.

“There’s nowhere else,” he called.
“Come back.”
“Just to keep the wolf away,” she replied,
“The weather says it feels like nineteen.”

The edge of a new year, 2018,
spoken to by a man too loud.
When her ersatz lover spoke,
her skin shut down
like pipes beginning to freeze that morning.

He was a citadel to himself,
and a stone for her to cling.
The closing year had been buffeted
by winds and change beyond imagine or grip.

Because the world shows its worst earliest.
It makes girls old
and cuts at their aging.

Making penetrable façade of open eyes and reedy thighs,
ripe to the teeth of a lech,
soft under the teeth of a cannibal.

Long ago, her heart had been eaten,
one too many walks
under hawkish gaze of predators that come out at night.

Before this year would change,
she had resolved to petrify
so she never would.

So storms of sodium could swirl around,
she would steel under grit and old tears,
salt and hormonal debris,
shredded naïveté and sore skin
burnt into never feeling again.

This dark morning was cold, she knew,
she ran to want to try to feel.
Rigorous reality
of warm blood piping after chill
moving under blained flesh

He was right, there was nowhere to go,
on that night that felt nineteen

Too long alone, she’d die
and he had plotted all the shelters.

She jumped and stamped and waited on a new year,
with small hope for a warmer time.

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.

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Rikki Santer
At the Meeting House

after William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 and after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the start of the Senate impeachment trial: We have the votes.

Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
hard on for power, wrist deep in the savory
gravy of partisan pie. Articles honed & cast
deep into the well. Logic at full blast,
rhetoric pulsating, then truth tarred & feathered
by Statecraft, taxonomy of hostility, the carnal
musk of four more years. When lust is in the
longing mad in pursuit and in possession so,
joint sessions sour with cardboard comrades,
brackish claims, pungent solicitude.
How to survive the abstraction of nation born
& bred on cruelty & blood, none knows well
to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Capitol’s flag flapping in the gray light of winter.

Rikki Santer is the author In Pearl Broth (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019) as well as six previous poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Margie, Hotel Amerika, The American Journal of Poetry, Slab, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Slipstream, Midwest Review and The Main Street Rag, among other publications. Santer lives in Columbus, Ohio. Online at rikkisanter.com

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