D. Dina Friedman
Policy for Whales

In the beginning, whales ruled the world. There were no apples, no trees of life or knowledge. No God. Just whales, and a lot of blue and salt. There wasn’t much to rule over, a few fish and whatever grew on the ocean floor that didn’t get eaten by the fish. There were a few outliers—octopi and coral—but the whales and fish paid them no attention. It was a society that valued conformity and had no regard for extra limbs. The prevailing motto was live and let live, unless you had to kill to eat.

Somehow, the world changed. People started to kill octopi and fish, and even coral, though they didn’t eat the coral. People speared whales and wrote great books about whales as symbols for the fall of humanity. But how did people even get there? God created them. God rose out of the slimy mass of salty water and created people, and created apples, and then told the people not to eat the apples. And God created cartoons that people watched in which octopi were the incarnates of evil. God gave people the authority to destroy everything that grew in the whales’ world, though God called this authority free will.

In protest, the whales threw their heavy bodies on the beach, but this was a stupid act of self-destruction that did no good and the whales soon realized it. Then God realized there should be a policy for whales, so God told people to create one. Since then people have been bickering about what this policy should be, but the whales have floated themselves past politics (from which the world policy is derived) into a perpetual state of buoyancy. “Ocean is the opiate of the masses,” they titter to each other using their sonar signals. The whales now know truth, and the whales also know that truth has nothing to do with policy, and that another word derived from policy is police.

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.

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.

Mary Jean Port
After the Wedding

My older sister came home bruised.
Mother said, “You made your bed,
now lie in it.” I think of this
when I smooth our warm sheets,
straighten the down comforter
with its orange paisley pattern.
Why did she say that. Did she believe
women are trapped—it didn’t matter
the man, it would all work out the same.
She said, Don’t mouth off
like your grandmother, that’s when
she got hit. My sister’s face a window
to raw fury. She knows she was robbed.

Mary Jean Port is the author of the chapbook The Truth About Water (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her poetry is forthcoming in The Halcyone, Leaping Clear, and ellipsis…. She lives in Minneapolis, where she taught at The Loft Literary Center for twenty years.

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.

Michael Hogan
Parallel Lives

I’ve forgotten much of what I used to remember:
the cause of the Seven Years War, the value of Pi to six digits,
the capital of Bolivia,
baggage I thought was important.
Things I carried inside my head like pebbles,
others like boulders:
fear of flying, fear of dying
sudden unexplained panics, fear of what was out there in the dark
all submerged now in the business of living.
But in quiet moments (Oh…La Paz, by the way)
they emerge real as they’ve ever been.
None of the ancient cypress trees which sentinel our neighborhood
can blind me to the setting suns of parallel lives I´ve escaped:
loss of limb in a futile war, death at an early age,
vast darkness of dementia choking the brain with inky tentacles
as time runs out like the air of a diver who has lingered too long.
It would be foolish not to be grateful
for these quickening years, this free fall
caught briefly in the chute of time.

Michael Hogan is the author In the Time of the Jacarandas (Egret Books, 2015) and 23 other books. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, and others. His work is included in Perrine’s Sound and Sense and the Pushcart Prize Book of Poetry. Hogan lives in Guadalajara Mexico with the fabric artist Lucinda Mayo and their Dutch Shepard Molly Malone.

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.

Jessica Ramer
To An Anonymous Road Worker Building Alligator Alley

Please Lord, I’ve been a good man. So if I get cottonmouth bit, or attacked by some of Oscar the Alligator’s brothers, and if I get to that Big Job in the Sky, oh, please, Lord, let it be on dry land. Amen!
—Graffito on an outhouse for the Alligator Alley road crew

He stood in swamp water up to the knee,
Muscles moving to the rhythm of space,
Toiling to build Alligator Alley.

Within that sawgrass curtain where wary
Denizens guarded their kingdom of space,
He stood in swamp water up to the knee.

Stripping off muck as his walkie-talkie
Chattered, he slogged through that bedlam of space
Toiling to build Alligator Alley.

Imprisoned by miles of sawgrass sea,
And yearning to flee this tedium of space,
He stood in swamp water up to the knee.

Far from home, he prayed, “Let my next job be
On dry land, not some two-bit thumb of space,
Toiling to build Alligator Alley.”

Nameless man, known only by his scrawled plea
In an outhouse squeezed on some crumb of space,
He stood in swamp water up to the knee
Toiling to build Alligator Alley

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

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

Kiran Bhat
My boyfriend asked: Why do you like me?

我的男友问我:你为什么喜欢我?

我回答:因为身处自然,我们本该在一起
它不是宇宙法则
不是政府强求
这是天命
你我在一起便是自然而然 你我便是自然
让我给你个例子
海洋由无数个粒子组成
当海洋孱动的时候
它并不知道为什么在动
只是自然而生
我们就如海洋
我推动着你
你推动着我
我无法知道你自哪而生
你无法明白我至哪而死
客燃挠知道
我想让你看看在你体内的所有部分
我想让你清楚我的极限在何方
我想和你如琵琶鱼般缠绵 变成小鱼蠕动在女性的身体里
直到他在她身体里消失 换句话说,我们是两个灵魂, 一个肉体.

My boyfriend asked: Why do you like me?

I answered: Because according to nature, we should be together.

It is not that the universe dictated it by law,
it was never a government mandate,
nor the will of the Heavens.
It is the simply the nature of you and I together.
It is natural for you and me.

Let me give an example.
The ocean is made of many particles.
When the ocean is moved,
The ocean does not know why it is being moved,
It simply reacts.
We are like the ocean.
You move me.
I move you.
I do not know where you begin.
You do not know where I end.
Kiran knows;
I want you to see every part of your body.
I want you to know the limits of me.
I want to mate with you the way the angler fish does.
To be that little fish that squirms into the female’s body,
Until he disappears into her.
In other words, we will be in spirit two,
but we are, in body, one.

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.

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.

Tyler King
Monorail

Nothing can kill me, I spin the chamber
once,click, twice,
click, dial tone, your voice
on the phone is deafening, the
screen is ripe with
blood and this is a gift, violence
I don’t have to
pay for, I catch the last bus
and there is a woman crying,
and there is a man crying, too
and this is also a gift, the aimless
grief of a stranger, the interior of
devastation made loud and
obvious, the chime of a
clock grown
feral with
longing, maybe you won’t wake
up today, maybe you’ll dream
of war and tell your mother
you need to come home
for a few days, we’re still cleaning the
broken glass, complaining about
the landlord, I wish you could write
about something else, but
my blood has sung enough
about home to know
when getting high is the last
exit off a highway, the night is long,
the night is so long I can see
my whole body in it, and no way
out, sleep is a letter
with no return address, in your
infinite mercy,you strike
a match instead

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.

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.

Jared Pearce
We’re all brothers & sisters.

She told me she was concerned
we were hacking that tree
without chainsaws, but how
else teach the boys the axe,
hatchet, bow saw unless they
have a body to teach them
about trees and woods and work,
duty and compassion in the city.

We students were reverent coming
to the cadavers, careful to keep
them clean, readable. We’d lift
the skin, trace the rings, find
where a cut or vein is making
its way. The dead are fine teachers.

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.

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.

Lynn McGee
Crush, 3

I clear the gap between the subway’s gliding
doors and platform’s yellow rubber ledge,
find a space on the plastic contoured bench
and cross my legs, flash the silver straps
of my sandals. We rise aboveground, level
with black tar roofs sunken at their centers,
pools of water mirroring clouds. Sunlight streams
through windows frosted with the residue
of winter. I squint and curl spiderlike on my seat.
I disembark and walk past the park, branches
beaded with buds. Last night, I sent you a photo,
feet crossed on the ottoman, the faintly-veined,
ambitious arch. A blister on the back of my heel
sings out now, with each step.

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.

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.

Marjorie Moorhead
Vape

Watching small birds at the feeder
swooping through a mix of rain and snow

Worrying about my son
still a teenager, and so

visiting home from school;
his first year away.

Left a cartridge on the tv room table
last night. “VGOD” “Iced Mango Bomb”.

Nicotine hovers, like vulture in flight, draping
darkness over a young body so able.

This vaping device invites him to suck poison into lungs
we shared, housed in my womb’s warm burgundy fluids.

Now, he breathes in an icy mist. Mango Bomb.
Didn’t those vape business suits have a Mom?!

What are they thinking? To damage a whole generation!
Leading sheep to slaughter. It boils down to greed.

Shareholders making money, while mothers hearts
of herded teens, addicted now, bleed.

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.

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.

Stephen Gibson
A Brief History at Cotton Mather’s Tomb in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston

From Salem, not his grave in this cemetery,
you could almost hear the witches nearby
in Danvers village being hanged from trees—

nothing they could say would convince a jury
they weren’t screwing sleeping men as succubi—
we visited Salem; now, his grave in this cemetery.

They never had a “third nipple” on their bodies—
for their “devil’s teat”—but how do you deny
what’s not there? They got hanged from trees.

Cotton repeats this “evidence,” which he believes
and doesn’t really want to question—or even try:
Salem’s deaths belong in his grave in this cemetery.

Cotton would later be accused of witchcraft when he
urged smallpox inoculation for Boston—and the country
(remember, decades before, witches hanged from trees)—

claiming a small dose of disease prevented worse disease:
his African slave explained his pox scar, and he didn’t die.
Black lives mattered, even back to a grave in this cemetery
where a born-again white guy justified hangings in trees.

Stephen Gibson is the author of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) winner of the Miller Williams Prize. His previous collections include The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2016); Rorschach Art Too (Story Line Press, 2014), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize sponsored by the Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards of the West Chester University Poetry Center; Paradise (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), a finalist for the Miller Williams prize; Frescoes (Lost Horse Press, 2011); Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House, 2008), selected and introduced by Andrew Hudgins; and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in Agni, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review, and other publications. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.

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.