Chad Parenteau
Two Timely Tankas from the Resistance, Reel 3

Whistleblower Jesus Tanka, Take Two

The GOP says
If Whistleblower Jesus
gives us a body
is it really a body?
Please, just bring us his body!

Roger Stone Jesus Tanks

Roger Stone Jesus
tells Judas You are a rat
prepare to die. And
Judas sadly says goodbye.
He hates to see the guy go.

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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Lisa Alvarez
Nine Line Cento for Now

I say it plain
it is not the end of the world
the alphabet was not just theirs
hope is the thing with feathers

There’s bluebird in my heart that
is at a funeral

There’s an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams
of elders, fools and willows

Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything

*
Lines from Langston Hughes,”Let America Be America Again”; Nayyirah Waheed, “if someone”; Sharon Olds, “Ode of Girl’s Things”; Emily Dickinson, “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers”; Charles Bukowski, “Bluebird”; Sonia Vatomsky, “Rhotic Asphyxiation”; H.P. Lovecraft, “A Garden”; Patricia Smith, “Katrina”; Pablo Neruda, “Almost Out of the Sky.”

Lisa Alvarez’s poetry and prose have appeared most recently in in Faultline, Huizache, Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica Review, Truthdig, and Zocalo Public Square, as well as in the anthologies Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), edited by Robert Shapard,‎ James Thomas,‎ and Ray Gonzales; and Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post-Election Poems, Stories & Essays (The Rattling Wall and PEN Center USA, 2017), edited by Michelle Franke. Alvarez earned an MFA in fiction from the University of California,  Irvine, and has taught creative writing and composition for 25 years at a community college in Orange County.

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Joanna Brown
The A Word

I’m finally watching this doctor my age
on the video with her white meat tone
sip her glass of wine and eat her salad
while she talks about how to extract
fetal tissue so it’s preserved for research
and the truth is I don’t know whether this
is a voice over, maybe she wasn’t
in a restaurant maybe she was sitting
in her office in a white coat pants and clogs
like me, maybe her audio was seamlessly sliced
and spliced post recording but I feel like
I’m going to throw up.

She can use this
tone, I know, because causing repeated violence
to the body brings desensitization not always
in a bad way because how else can you
do the work.

I was in diapers the year of Roe v. Wade
so I did not see the women piled in
the “septic wards” shivering ash-gray
from knitting needles turpentine
pus blood seeping from vaginas spiking
temps dying— but I am practical and know
that sex is either just too fun or too awful
to be perfectly controlled no matter how many
pills I slip teen girls in nondescript paper
bags how many rods we insert in arms or Ys
or Ts in uteruses or how many condoms
we hand out like candy.

I trained with a doctor
who went to 14 weeks and it’s true, the heads
get stuck; I watched him break some.
But you have to remember there is a woman
lying on the table with her legs spread
and when I wasn’t assisting or doing the earlier
ones I was holding her hand and she cried out
because she was alone or cramping or talked
through it or closed her eyes and breathed
against the soft breath of suction but she was
there of her own volition.

And can I just say I don’t give a fuck
exactly how much Cecile Richards makes it’s
about a half a million and that’s a heck of a lot–
but she has a big job to do and it’s a lot more
important to me than whatever that guy
who runs Oracle does who gets 67 million.

Abortion is always going to be hell, easier
if it’s early, say seven weeks, you’ll just see
a whiff of white-spun cotton floating
in the water dish lit from below but often
you’ll see a translucent outstretched hand
or ribs like toothpick piano keys or find beads
that were eyes and sometimes they might sing
to you or haunt your dreams.

One thing that makes
me so so sad is that Planned Parenthood
is right downtown near a bus line and my old office
by the schools and Agnes’s café and I know the loving
people who work there and it’s free and girls
and boys can go there without their parents
and it doesn’t matter whether their mother
works three minimum wage jobs or their dad
is on disability or their parents are corporate
execs they can just show up and get birth control
and testing; and these idiots want to take
the money away that allows these kids
to take care of themselves and plan, thank God,
for their futures.

Joanna Brown‘s poetry has appeared in Gertrude, Eclectica, Bird’s Thumb, Earth’s Daughters, the chapbook 2 Horatio (2015), edited and published by Elaine Sexton, and other journals. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her spouse and two sons, and works as a family physician in community non-profits.

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Ed N. White
A Lasting Gift

Little boy with pointed lath,
And trashcan cover shield.
Chase shadows in the alley,
Kill dragons in the field.
Joust with dreams, and watch the old ones
Marching in the past.
See the farthest side of Never.
Listen for the awful blast.
Be patient, little boy,
And practice.
We’re making your war ready now.

Author’s Note: Composed in the summer of 1969 while watching my two young sons at play. Eight years after my United States Marine Corps Reserve discharge. Four years after Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home album. Thirty-four years before we blundered into Iraq.

Ed N. White is the author of some dozen thrillers and mysteries for adult and middle-grade readers (the latter under the charming moniker, Celia J., Teen Girl Detective). White holds a BA from the University of Iowa and an MA from the University of Rhode Island, where he was a member of the faculty.

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Cheryl Caesar
Everyone Has Something

Aileen Wuornos wrote
a beautiful flowing hand.
It might be a monk’s,
in a calm scriptorium,
transcribing God’s word.

Since January, Cheryl Caesar has published political protest poems in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Cream and Crimson, Agony Opera, Winedrunk Sidewalk, The Stay Project, What Rough Beast, as well as in the anthology Nationalism: (Mis)Understanding Donald Trump’s Capitalism, Racism, Global Politics, International Trade and Media Wars, Africa VS North America Vol 2 (Mwanaka Media and Publishing, 2019), edited by Tendai Rinos Mwanaka; and other poetry in Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply, Dormiveglia, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Black Coffee Review, The Wild Word, Q/A Poetry, Ariel Chart, Credo Espoir, Bleached Butterfly and Beautiful Cadaver. Caesar earned a doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and has taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University.

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Elana Lev Friedland
On Driving East from Colorado While Reading As Visibly Queer

August 2019

Blessed is this boyhood//of mine, praised//are the dark//patches beneath armpits, curling,//
the eyebrow arches grown in//and breasts so small//as to have been called//concave//nestled
beneath a sports bra//as I move past//the narrowed glances of shopkeepers//deep in Jesus country.

I do not want to be like a butterfly//splayed ochre upon a windshield//that is to say made
a dead thing with innards glistening//even if my organs//are far more//eloquent than any slogan//
stitched upon stacks of red hats//on the shelves of these gas station stores.

The whole of me is composed of a great//and gay//many parts, broad//
shoulders bared//beyond any box,//driving,//above ground.

Elana Lev Friedland‘s writing has appeared in Cartridge Lit, Cosmonauts Avenue, Salt Hill, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. They are a writer and performance artist. Find them online at elanalevfriedland.com.

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Colin Halloran
American Etiquette

They told us not to talk politics
so we pack our frustrations
in pipe bombs
and send them across the aisle.

They told us not to talk religion
so we load our questions
into twenty round magazines
and fire them at those we do not understand.

They told us not to talk about race
so we shut ourselves off
we fail to connect, until round by round
we unload our anger in supermarkets.

We model this example we were told
so when two high school boys disagree
they reach for weapons, not words
until one is in jail and one in the ground.

No need for discourse means
no need for civility. We do not talk
and our silence
begets silence.

Colin D. Halloran is a United States Army veteran who documented his experiences in Afghanistan in his memoir-in-verse Shortly Thereafter (Mint Hill Books, 2012), winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. He is also the author of the poetry collection Icarian Flux (Main Street Rag, 2015). His poems, essays, and short stories have been appeared in many publications. When not writing, Halloran leads workshops that seek to promote personal and international healing and reconciliation through writing and the arts.

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Chad Parenteau
Two Timely Tankas from the Resistance

Whistleblower Jesus Tanka

Trump Junior says I
know Whistleblower Jesus!
Rand Paul says No, I
know Whistleblower Jesus!
Rooster stalls at spectacle.

Michael Bloomberg Jesus Tanka

This poem is paid for
by Michael Bloomberg Jesus,
the most recent of
our beta billionaires
hawking their own golden calf.

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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Michael Hogan
Lament for Honduras

She’s the most distressful nation that ever yet was seen.
—Anonymous Irish song

The pages of the calendar turn
inexorably as autumn leaves, brittle and rustling, speaking of winter
but still holding faint illuminations of the past:
russet, with the dried blood of forgotten wars to the south
brown, like the faces of migrant children,
traces of green, from a time which came once
and could come again:
the double doors leading to the morgue
open also to the garden and the light.
We are busy with our daily routines
self-righteous in our innocence
(we voted after all)
but still afraid to look each other in the eyes,
like strangers trapped in an elevator going down,
while all along the border men gather with guns in our name
uniformed centurions to repel frightened children
fleeing the wasteland we made of Honduras
then called it “peace.”

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.

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Tina Barry
Welcome ladies your name?

  	Come with me                 I heard your voice
as if you had let loose     the “lady of the house”
A secret life hidden deep    in its vault   a little black
book a wound    A kind of toxic     sexuality in a nut 
shell   She phoned me    She saw the moon 
that bled into my mouth    Bed   borrowed  
it felt the taste of fire  rock scald  He 
went off  a cork-trapped wine   Notorious 
black vestige of age  Of underage  Of by 
gone  To whom one had access has
had access to   the women   O
                          Love  O Love  Come
                               with me

Author’s Note: Borrowed lines from Sonnet VII of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets, and the article “Those Little Black Books, From the 1700s to Epstein,” by Vanessa Friedman and Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times, July 25, 2019, Page D1.

Tina Barry is the author of Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016) and Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019), prose poems about Virginia Haggard and Jean McNeil, the artist Marc Chagall’s lover and her daughter. Barry’s  work has appeared in Drunken Boat; Inch Magazine; Yes, Poetry; Connotation Press; and The American Poetry Journal, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies The Best Small Fictions 2016 (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016), edited by Stuart Dybek; Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017), edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane; Feckless Cunt: A Feminist Anthology (world split open press, 2018), edited by Susan Rukeyser; A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019), edited by Diane Lockward; Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women (Sable Books, 2017), edited by Melissa Hassard, Gabrielle Langley, and Stacy Nigliazzo (Editor); and Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women (Kasva Press LLC, 2016), edited by Charles Fishman and Smita Sahay. Barry lives in Ulster County, NY, where she teaches poetry and short fiction.

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