Jared Pearce
Praise Band

I meant to play the guitar
last night, but instead read
the Koran, the verses
making their own song
thrum in me so someplace
that was me and not me
began to sing along,
the bass note of gratitude
and the tricky melody
of treble-clef cheerfulness.

I began to clap and shout,
happy as a tambourine
in the strict staves of commandment,
the fierce signature of covenant.

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, 1

I think I would like you sleepy, staggering
into the kitchen, putting the Keurig pod into
the press and pulling down the handle to puncture
its plastic top. I am agitated because of you, fitful
in the workplace, careful to hydrate, both topically
and with bottles of water I toss easily into
the wastebasket a few feet away. There are
a dozen states between us. I play it cool
as the willowy end of a branch lightly scratching
the roof of your car. I sit up in bed cycling through
your photos. My windows are open and a jet
churns through the black sky, cars loud
as ball bearings on the parkway. I contain
myself. I wake in the night and check my phone
for evidence you have passed through. Your
indifference is powerful, like weather. I can’t get
out of its path. I doubt my sensory data. I swerve
around trees. I walk back up the hill.

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.

Alana Hayes
Promise

Promise never to touch me
without my permission.
Promise.
Never make a broken promise.
I know a cursed jaw when I see one.
Many a man has unhinged his mouth
in an attempt to devour me.
Unsuccessfully.
I’m not sure if they’ve forgotten
how very human I will taste when they do that,
or simply forgotten how very human
they once were.

Alana Hayes is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County,  where she received a BA in English Literature and another in Women and Gender Studies. Most of her poetry revolves around themes of Judaism, feminism, and social justice issues. Her work has appeared in Night Music Journal. Follow her on Instagram @womanasriot.

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 Ann Honaker
Hometown

If you drive far enough, the four lane
ends abruptly in a bulldozed heap
of fresh turned sod and broken limbs.

Turn right and you can descend
into a coal camp where tight packed
company shacks are mostly

still inhabited, curtains in the window,
plastic chairs on porches, laundry
swaying in the cluttered backyard.

Further still and the blasted peaks
of a strip-mined giant glisten nudely
in the fog-damped air, ghosts

rising in wispy clumps up slopes.
Crammed in a narrow valley
is a town from the fifties:

houses of brick and cut stone so close
you could reach out your window
to knock on your neighbor’s wall.

A red-bricked downtown, some stores
still open, others boarded over,
a single restaurant, a single gas station.

The streets are empty. Someone scoops
the town up in a sheet, lifts the corners,
ready to close it. That’s how tall, how close,

how sharp the mountains are.
Fountain after fountain ripples, gleams
down the walls of the canyon

cut to make a road.
I return home, my face splashed
and awakened by awe, washed clean.

*

My neighbors sit on the shaded porch
again, while a red sunset quietly burns.
The talk today is of a man near my age,

whose son has taken his prized
convertible Mustang. No one knows
if he’ll ever see it again. They’ll take

checks from your mailbox, tools
from your shed. Do you have an alarm?
You should have cameras. How much

are cameras? Last week the kid took
the groceries back to Walmart for cash,
was gone for days. He’s into it bad.

Once Howard was offered a blow job
in the automotive department. Betty’s kid
is on drugs too, and Howard’s stepson.

*

When I was a kid I’d take off
on my bike and ride for miles.
Stop by a roadside store

and buy Pixie Stix and Baby Ruth
bars, Dippin’ Stix and Fireballs.
On weekends we’d picnic in the park,

our only worry a profusion
of fat black ants. Yesterday a woman
was raped by two men on a bike path.

*

I like to walk along the rooftop
of the Gorge, peer down into that cut,
watch the hawks circle the sun.

But they tell me not to go alone.
I’m more afraid here than just outside
of Boston; I double-lock the doors,

don’t sit on the porch after dark.
Every day the landscape dips me
in beauty. What has happened here.

*

Help Wanted signs in every window.
No one can find a worker who’s clean.
At night the crickets tune their guitars,

by day the dial-up buzz of cicadas.
Sometimes I swerve when driving,
stunned silly by the roadside wildflowers.

A matted dog is chained in a driveway.
He barks and barks. No one speaks to him
but to scold him. I want to steal him,

give him a bath, let him lounge
in my bed. A short walk from here,
you can step from the road

onto a beaten path through trees.
There’s fire pits and boxes with blankets
in them, discarded dirty clothes.

Bottles everywhere: cheap wine,
rotgut liquor, diluted and bitter
brands of beer. I try to make a line

in my mind, pile the mountains
and flowers and hawks on one side,
the misery and filth on the other.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015) and Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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.

John Huey
The Divided Sky

The clouds from the West are running fast tonight while
in the East they are static and heavy.

It’s as if the sky itself is divided as is the land of my birth,
now with its parallel universes, filled with strange inhabitants
with fanciful creeds, inside the broken territories of OxyContin,
cheap liquor, toxic wine and cigarettes.

These are of the other land’s, now unknown to me though
some of those places were settled by my ancestors, those old
Huguenots running from Catholicism to a Protestant paradise
now turned dim and ugly by recessive generations.

The people out there seem like disembodied aliens, their
appearance, speech and manner stranger than some
of the tribes I knew out on the Soviet Steppe.
These new barbarians in our lands far more primitive than any
nomad, dangerous, superstitious, easily led.

Dazed sometimes, in the bloom of my 70 years, I awaken to days
unrecognizable, unnegotiable demands pouring out of contorted
mouths, a world with the veneers off, grasping hands dragging out
the most outrageous things from their deep, black-hearted recesses.

From my sickbed I tried to game it, tried to tell the kids that
all was well, that dad and their nation would be better soon.
But I fear, as this winter lies in wait, that I was buying my own
small heap of foolishness, wishing this away.

The sky moved to the deepest violet framing the drawn moon, the
darkest frame, the inner frame before first light, the tightness of a
longed for redemption drawn out of a septic wound that soaked
through our now ruined sheets, through the bed, through the
floorboards, out the door to the streets.

The rot we desired so intently forever in ubiquity.

John Huey is the author of The Moscow Poetry File (Finishing Line Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Leannan Magazine, Sein und Werden, In Between Hangovers, Bourgeon, The Lost River Review, Red Wolf Journal, Poydras Review, Flatbush Review, Memoir Mixtapes, and Perfume River Poetry Review. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Temptation (Lost Tower Publications, 2016), edited by P.J. Reed; Unbelief (Local Gems Press, 2018), edited by Thomas Ragazzi and Marc Rosen; and Addiction & Recovery (Madness Muse Press, 2018), edited by Chani Zwibel. Online at john-huey.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.

Chad Parenteau
Timely Tankas from the Resistance, Reel 6

Lev Parnas Jesus Tanka

Lev Parnas Jesus
has Devin Nunes screaming
I don’t know this man!
Rooster finally quits post
getting tired of this shit.

Kamala Harris Jesus Tanka

Two crucified beside
Kamala Harris Jesus.
One cries You’re a cop!
The other one cries All white!
The hopes we have left! All white!

#ToiletTrump Jesus Tanka

#ToiletTrump Jesus
says ten-to-fifteen flushes.
The first ten are for
each commandment, the last five
are saved for the rosary.
Do this in his memory.

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.

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
What Is Freedom?

Seed party!
Little birds have discovered them
in our blue coffee-pot feeder

They cling to its mesh and feast
on the black oil sunflower seeds
flit, flit

swoop, swoop
back and forth branch to feeder
to branch …

Such happiness outside my November window
with the leaves down
and cold winds blowing in

“Let It Be” comes on the radio
and I sing out
with tears in my eyes

Marie Yovanovitch’s red hair
from last night’s tv
matches the breast of a small bird

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 was honored with a tuition scholarship from Indolent Books, in summer 2019, for a week at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. 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.

Lori Desrosiers
Of Alleys and of Men

In a book I read too young
a woman was accosted in an alley
during New Year’s Eve festivities
in Time’s Square.

It read as if it was
an adventure rather than
the most frightening thing I could
think of at fourteen years old.

For years every time I had to walk
down an alley I imagined men
waiting in doorways, like the ones
who cat-called me out walking

with whistles and hey baby
while I pulled my coat close
around my shoulders,
as if that would protect me.

Nothing happened then,
only later, when someone
I loved, far from the alleys
of any city

forced himself on me
rupturing my trust
trapping me for a long time
in the alley of my fears.

I am no longer young,
and no longer afraid,
although still cautious
of alleys, and of men.

Lori Desrosiers is the author of The Philosopher’s Daughter (Salmon Poetry, 2013) and Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak (Salmon Poetry, 2016). Keeping Planes in the Air is forthcoming (Salmon, 2020). She is also the author of two chapbooks, Inner Sky (Glass Lyre Press, 2015) and typing with e.e. cummings (Glass Lyre Press, 2019) She is the editor of Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry, and Wordpeace, an online journal dedicated to peace and social justice. She lives in Westfield, Mass., and teaches in the the Lesley University MFA program.

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.

J.P. White
The Elephants are Listening…

To the giant sheets of ancient ice calving into the first salt bath,
To the electric prods used on the dancing bears and cheetahs,
To the fires leaping out of embers to enter the green pastures,
To the knives seeking out the meat and scales of the pangolin,
To the psalms spoken and unspoken in the strangle wee hours,
To the thin lips of the sea alive at the door of the failing mollusk,
To the never-ending procession of gullets swarming the street,
To the lava seeking the cold quick axe of the vertigo water,
To the tongues swollen with politics and a lust for weapons,
To the river in flood throwing off boulders big as houses,
To the flags whipping against the penthouse glass of the mega rich.
At this time of earth ruin and save-your-ass-if-you-can with your phone,
The elephants are listening to one another six miles away.
They are not gossiping, not speculating, not making enemies,
But making plans to find the next waterhole outside the burn.
They will remember everything after we have found the exit.

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.

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
At the Nuremberg Museum

American GIs would have learned from movies and posters during basic training that each poison gas had a different smell—in the museum video, Göring won’t look at camp survivors. Each gas was compared to something familiar, so any city kid or farm boy could tell—GIs would have learned about poison gasses in basic training from movies and posters. Camp inmates who worked on Auschwitz’s platform knew about the showers, but had to keep silent with each train arrival—Göring won’t look at those inmate sonderkommando survivors. Some gasses were infamous, from World War I; others didn’t make the war, being late bloomers—GIs would have learned that in basic training from movies and posters. After Charlottesville and its “Confederate-heritage” white-supremacist marchers, the Southern Poverty Law Center in the U.S. updated its 900+ hate groups—if Göring were alive, he’d flash that famous grin greeting such supporters. GIs learned in basic training from movies and posters

phosgene was like hay;
chloropicrin, flypaper;
mustard gas, garlic—

in the Nuremberg video, Göring won’t look at survivors.

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 poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including (but not limited to) Agni, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review The Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. 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.