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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Kiran Bhat
A character asked: What is the difference between a character and a sentence?

文字问道：文字跟句子有什么差别？

客燃脑说：
句子好像桥，
文字好像绳。
句子好似蛇，
文字好似虫。
句子是故事，
文字是情节。

客燃脑结论说：它们都引领人到真理。问题更多是你偏向哪个 —— 短时间的剧痛还是长时间的微疼。

A character asked: What is the difference between a character and a sentence?

Kiran responds:
A character is like a rope,
A sentence like a bridge.
One is like a snake,
The other, a mere worm.
One is a story,
The other is the plot.

Kiran concludes: Both the character and the sentence leads to truth. The question is more of which you prefer to take – the shorter one of greater toil, or the longer one of greater ease.

The Mandarin version of this poem appeared in Kiran Speaks (White Elephant Press, 2019).

Kiran Bhat is the author of the poetry collections Autobiografia (Letrame Editorial, 2019) and Kiran Speaks (White Elephant Press, 2019), as well as the Kannada-language travelogue Tirugaatha (Chiranthana Media Solutions, 2019) and the novel We of the Forsaken World (Iguana Books, 2019). He has traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He considers Mumbai his spiritual base, but currently lives in Melbourne.

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David Groff
First Warm Night

The noises insinuate
the urban window
and populate our bed—

low hums like oceans
too far to see,
humans or tires,

sirens dying.
Shrieks too,
soon a scream

we can’t decipher.
Joy or terror.
Side by side we lie

like little gods
immune to most disasters,
trying to have sex

because it’s spring and time,
two hawks along a cornice
athwart their tilting nest.

David Groff is the author of Clay (Trio House Press, 2013), chosen by Michael Waters for the Louise Bogan Award. His book Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002) was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series. He co-edited two anthologies: with Jim Elledge, the Lambda-winning Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012); and with Philip Clark, Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson Books, 2010). His poems have recently appeared on the Best American Poetry blog, in Great River Review, and Prairie Schooner, and at Poem-a-Day (from the Academy of American Poets), as well as in the anthology The Manifesto Project (University of Akron Press, 2017), edited by Rebecca Hazelton and Alan Michael Parker. An independent book editor, he teaches in the MFA program at the City College of New York.

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Tyler King
Ersatz

Something else is here,

Something isn’t right,

Imposter empires,
Gilded knives and false flags,
Come, let your towers rise

Fill my mouth with wine,
My ears with honey,
My hands with flesh,
My eyes with light,
Petrify me inch by inch,

The feeling hungers to be lived in,
It’s teeth graze my neck,
It sings of blood and prophecy,
Epoch of an age-
Marked by moonlight cataclysm,
Drifts of smoke and drums of war,
The blinds open,
The feeling consumes

This is not my body,
This is a Trojan horse,
Omen of plague,
Biblical negligence,
Genesis of epilogues,
After the credits apology,
Consolation prize,
Fate cut short and luck run dry,
A type of magic nobody believes in,
Some revelations have to be swallowed whole,
Like police lights in the windows at the party,
Or locusts in the skies of Egypt,
You have to realize when you’ve gone too far, and walk away while you can.

Tyler King is an emerging writer whose work has appeared in Sonder Midwest. He lives in Dayton, Ohio, where he is a student at Sinclair Community College.

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Jared Pearce
Gold Medals

When the sun rises, everyone
will be there, cheering it
to the heavens, and all those
who said the dawn would die,
well, they’ll be shamed by them
who knew how cool the sun was
even before it was cool, yet
they’ll retain their administrative
roles, their political stations,
and the hipsters will hold
their sneer and web their aspersions,
foisting their morals on whomever
they dislike—room for everybody
under this cerulean canopy.

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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LindaAnn LoSchiavo
Subway Pervert

Because all dirty crimes we can’t unsee
Are kept by brain’s biographer, replayed,
The Subway Pervert cannot be erased.

As if by previous arrangement, he’d
Be waiting after class—ten forty-five
PM—his cock unleashed on subway stairs
While masturbating, daring passersby
To stare or stop his public pleasuring.

He blocked the only entrance to my train.

Ignoring him, determined to get past
Untouched—this tollbooth troll outwitted me.
He knew disgust and fear exact their fees.

Women’s untold lives are controlled, fish-bowled—
Cat-calling from construction crews, roughed up
By roofies, rubbed the wrong way by frotteurs,
Man-handled by suspicious fiancés—
As hot male breath clouds up once clear water.

I fantasize about invisible
Shields—safe greenhouses with protective glass
For goddesses who’ll never be defiled.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo is the author of the poetry chapbooks Conflicted Excitement (Red Wolf Editions, 2018), Concupiscent Consumption (Red Ferret Press, 2020], and A Route Obscure and Lonely (Wapshott Press, 2020). Her essay, “If Defamation Is Serious, Why Don’t Italian American Organizations Take It Seriously?” is included in the edited volume Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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Chad Parenteau
Resistance Tankas, Reel 10

Gun-rights Rally Jesus Tanka

Gun-rights rally Je-
sus walks over holy ground
of other martyrs,
shouting their half-written prayers,
drowning out fright-filled whispers.

Lev Parnas Jesus Tanka, Take Two

Lev Parnas Jesus
lets fly a flock of roosters
to hover over
anyone and everyone
who says, I don’t know this man!

Marie Yovanovitch Jesus Tanka

They are still watching
M. Yovanovitch Jesus.
She’s had visitors.
May be eating now. We’ll see
if this is the last supper.

#HoseRepublican Jesus Tanka

It’s only water
#HoseRepublican Jesus
spouts holy water,
anoints himself every day.
No, there are no tapes of it.

Mike Pompeo Jesus Tanka

In case he asks, don’t
tell Mike Pompeo Jesus
where it says he should
die like a martyr. Don’t point
to a bible or a cross.

Private Banker Jesus Tanka

Outside embassy,
Private Banker Jesus sits
wishing for a sign,
wanting to give a signal
to call out for the first stone.

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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Marjorie Moorhead
Practice

As the whole household sleeps
this morning after Thanksgiving,

I practice tai chi exercises
shifting weight, shifting breath

making circles with my arms, hips,
eventually coming to moves named

for Bear, Eagle, Lion, Crane. My blood
is pumping but my soul is still.

In movement, but calm. I float
in space not concentrating anymore

on Impending Tragedy.
Our household; extended family; the world

seemed an accident waiting to happen.
It still is, but I have spread the mountains

with my arms, and I can flex and flow
come what may. Maybe.

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Porter House Review, Tiny Lit Seed, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon; From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), Amanda McLeod & Mela Blust; Birchsong: Poetry Centered in VT. Vol. II (The Blueline, 2018), edited by Northshire Poets Alice Wolf Gilborn, Carol Cone, David Mook, Marcia Angermann, Peter Bradley and Monica Stillman; and others. She received an Indolent Books scholarship to attend a summer 2019 workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.

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J.P. White
Remnants of a Winter Camp with Glove Left Behind

Not that hard to get turned around in Central Park
If you don’t have your phone
And you’re running the sticky flap of July
Between hard rains looking for the reservoir
Or at least that was my mumble on a hill
Above a baseball diamond and there at my feet
The remnants of a winter camp with glove left behind.
I stood beside the bones of a fire pit at a boundary
Where the human hand almost gave out
And I thought this once thin gathering place
Was so much more than a precipice.
A fellow human had settled here for a time
And made of the cold a warming room
Hoping he or she might live long enough
To catch a game or another rain bright as a kiss along the throat.

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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