Kendra Nuttall
Conviction

We don’t have much in common
except
I wear mittens, your name is Mitt,
we’re both bred from pioneer stock—
both former robots
shuffling our feet
next to invisible
lines.

I became human
in a church pew. I imagine
you did too. I imagine
you prayed to know right
from wrong. I imagine you
prayed for everything to be okay
like everyone always does
when tragedy comes.

It’s cold outside;
that’s a tragedy.
I’ll put on my mittens and pray.

Tomorrow is a new day, Mitt,
you’ll be okay.
We don’t have much in common
except
conviction.

Kendra Nuttall‘s work has appeared in Chiron Review, Maudlin House,  Fearsome Critters, and Eunoia Review, as well as in Utah’s Best Emerging Poets 2019: An Anthology (Z Publishing, 2019). Nuttall holds a BA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Utah Valley University. She lives in Utah with her husband, David, and dog, Belle.

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Paul Ilechko
A Place Without Light

Why borders why box

Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks Bartok in Winter (Flutter Press, 2018) and Graph of Life (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in Manhattanville Review, West Trade Review, River River, Otoliths, and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.

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Chad Parenteau
Resistance Tankas, Reel 11

Iowa Caucus Jesus Tanka

Still loading…Please wait…
Iowa Caucus Jesus
gives in record time
last supper and ascension!
Still loading…Please wait…

Pete Buttigieg Jesus Tanka

Glory be on high
for Pete Buttigieg Jesus
has returned to us!
But lo, when did he ascend,
and when was he ever here?!?

Rush Limbaugh Jesus Tanka

Rush Limbaugh Jesus
fights through stigmata in throat,
says it’s easier
to enter Heaven with gold
than with a poor man’s thorn hat.

John Bolton Jesus Tanka, Take Two

John Bolton Jesus
possesses secret tablets
that will show the truth
to everyone at long last.
They are up for pre-order.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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Priscilla Frake
Broken Lines

I am broken. My time is broken
into lists and chores, into litanies
of haste and lack. The back of my day
is broken. When I walk, my steps
are broken and I hobble along
in a pencil skirt and stilettos.
If you’re moving through your own broken

days you might know what I mean. You’re breathing
shards and eating what used to be food
but is now scraps of calories.
Your fingers rattle on the keyboard
in staccato bursts, then break off
for incoming missiles. It used to be
an exchange, but now it’s so many flares
and rockets, humming through midnight’s
orange sky. What does it mean
to be broken? This is what I ask
myself, since no one seems likely

to answer. The question itself
is deconstructed in texts
I can’t receive. Did I mention
my phone is broken? Perhaps
some version of the sky is whole
but the earth is damaged
and we keep arguing about how to fix it
with nothing but broken words.

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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Lynn McGee

Crush, 7

You are polite as a cadet. I hear your boots
on concrete in the garage — you talk hands-free,
arriving home, and three times zones over,
I unlock my door, revved up as a migrating
bird, wings limp at my sides. I drop my coat,
scarf, bag, and everything I am known for —
my efficiency, my lucidity — slides off like mud
on sandals left out in rain and emerging
clean, when the storm has passed.

Crush, 8

It’s not as simple as the contrast of you street boxing
a neighborhood guy when you were ten — falling
to the sidewalk and jumping back up — while
my sister and I, in a suburb of red brick houses,
perfected our walk with a book on our heads.
It’s not as simple as a Venn diagram revealing
that sliver where we overlap — and yet
that narrow margin glints like a waning moon,
and I am standing outside on a dark night
flinging pheromones, looking up.

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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J.P. White
Late Hour Concession to the Mosquito

In the soggy narrow trench where laughter is infrequent,
Your blood meal appetite is unmatched.
You have killed more people than all the wars
Ever launched by the human tongue.
Your slow misery calling cards are the unmistakable fevers,
Viruses, parasites, and worms scribbled
Into the last letters of soldiers, newly-weds and philosophers.
To stop you, we have siphoned busted levees,
Drained swamps, marshes and sanctuaries,
Unleashed pesticide blooms over golf courses & 7-Elevens,
Radiated reproductive organs under microscopes,
But still your numbers swell beyond all accounting
And here I am inside another week of thunder rain
Down on the noise in my knees praying for the dragonfly,
The only one who can outflank and gobble you,
Praying even though we now know
Its great dragon migrations have been interrupted
And they are no longer seen in some far north places
Where they have always been a sign of the blue-green blur of summer.

J.P. White is the author of the poetry collections The Sleeper at the Party (Defined Providence Press, 2001), The Salt Hour (The University of Illinois Press, 2001), The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator’s Garden (Holy Cow Press, 1988), and In Pursuit of Wings (Panache Books, 1978). His essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies. He holds a BA from New College (1973), an MA from Colorado State University (1977), and an MFA from Vermont College (1990). He lives on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis.

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Linda Lowe
Refill Day

People with their oxygen tanks lined up along the road. Signs said no gasping no sighing no wishing things were different. Let bygones be bygones, they’re gone, aren’t they? Stop the looking back, stop wondering what’s next. Don’t ask your neighbor, don’t call a friend. No pouting, no pleading. When the truck’s empty, it’s empty. It will slam its doors and roar to life honking. A sound that reminds you of that truck from summer, the one bearing ice cream, back when the air was spiffy and you breathed so deeply you could have dug all the way to China.

Linda Lowe is the author of the chapbook Karmic Negotiations (Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press, 2003), winner of the SPT National Poetry Competition. Her poems and stories have appeared in Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Outlook Springs, A Story in 100 Words, The New Verse News, Star 82 Review, and Crack the Spine, as well as in the anthology Weatherings (FutureCycle Press, 2015), edited by David Chorlton and Robert S. King. Lowe lives in Southern California with her husband.

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Dion O’Reilly
Accidental Fuck

Zipless. Uncontrollable.
Then you wake
from some sweaty unconscionable
yet somewhat enjoyable
night-time rollick.

You pull into the curve of your husband’s body.
He’s un-roused by your churning, your calling out,
your nighttime prowling
in the flop houses and tittie dives
of your subconscious,

where you do it with your bland colleagues
who wear button-up shirts
lined like pale graph paper,
with your silly-putty students,
your intimidating professor
with his big hands,
padded and seamed like a baseball glove,
or that one time with your transgender cousin.

All their dicks, so enormous
or sometimes, so shiny black,
you can’t refrain from gripping them,
their girth like the flesh handle
of a hammer you keep pounding
on the cruel nail of your need.

The astonishment every time,
the sight of its swelling
its measured intensity
like something born in time lapse.
The goat-like tumescence,
friendly, yet so clearly impersonal.

Maybe you just like how it feels—
after you’ve been taken
by the vortex forbidden —
to wake up, beached on the warm sands of relief
on the Ithaca of commitment,
your husband’s snores
gusting through your hair
like an off-shore wind.

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.

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Nicholas Teixeira
Keep Watching to Find Out

In order to preserve the formatting of the poem in its original manuscript form, we are posting it as a PDF. Click here to launch the PDF.

Nicholas Teixeira holds an MFA in creative writing from The City College of New York (where he was an editor of the student-run literary journal, Promethean), and a BA in English from San Francisco State University. His work has appeared in Dream Pop. Teixeira has been a server and tended bar at such noteworthy New York City establishments as 3 Dollar Bill, Phoenix Bar, The Toolbox, Tandem, and Pounds and Ounces.

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Jessica Ramer
On a Son Deploying to Korea

Daniel, my son, son,
God knew what he was doing
when he gave children to the young.
Not quite old when you were born,
I was a fat, graying father
mired in memories of the Marne,
hiding behind my closed study door
to escape the sight of you,
your eyes magnified behind thick glasses,
pouring over anthills, termite nests,
“Plays well with others” marked N—
needs improvement—every quarter.

You tried. I know. I winced
whenever I looked out the window:
playing army, you marched out of step;
at bat, you struck out yet again,
head dangling like a hanged man’s,
waiting for teammates to stop yelling.

Grief flogged me into old age
when Emmett returned from Anzio,
leg, eye, and several fingers gone.
I spewed an aged man’s bile,
wished it had been you instead.
Daniel, my son, my son,
forgive an old man’s ire.

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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