Johnson Cheu
We Lived Well During the 80s

—With thanks to Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily During the War”

During the 1980s bailout and recession,
risk-averse, my father turned down
an executive position at Chrysler.
Still, we lived well during the recession.

By God’s grace, Dad remained employed at G.M.
Sheltered, shod, nourished, we were spared
our neighbors’ fate. Side-eyed, every Yellow
suddenly a “job-stealing Jap,” we also missed

the baseball bat Vincent Chin bore for every Yellow.
We lived well, dancing to Prince, Bruce, Michael,
and Madonna; the U.S.S.R. and Berlin Wall worlds away.
Lee Iacocca, you died on my birthday.

During a heated summer, I read Iacocca: An Autobiography.
Read about how you changed your name to Lee from Lido,
because Lido marked you an immigrant. Your self-imposed C.E.O.
salary a single dollar in solidarity to the employees you led.

You labored hard, yet attended faithfully
your daughters’ recitals. We lived well during the 80s,
despite demands to “Go Back To…” and spat slurs.
What would you think now, Lee of “Send Her Back”

chants, since being American-born leaves
nowhere to send us back to? Your Detroit,
your America, Lee, remain potholed, riotous.
Who will lead us back from the brink?

Johnson Cheu is the editor of four collections of scholarly essays on film, including most recently The Films of Robin Williams: Critical Essays Paperback (McFarland, 2019). His poems have appeared in Rigorous, Foliate Oak, Disability Studies Quarterly, Rattle, Ragged Edge, Atticus Review, Exposition Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among other journals. Cheu is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, and lives in East Lansing, Mich.

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Chad Parenteau
Rudy Giuliani Jesus Tanka

Rudy G. Jesus
asks his Lord Trump if he can
role-play our savior
again, just for three days off
and a heroic return.

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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Simon Floris
My First Girl’s Geography

I study the map
of my first girl’s geography—
Lake Collarbone,
Pretty Mouth Spring,
Bosom Hills,
Ass Crack Creek,
Shoulder Slopes,
Ankle Mountain,
Point Elbow and Point Knee,
Pussy Canyon,
Cape Lips,
Hips Gulf,
Finger Peaks, Armpit Pits—
where my eyes go my lips go.

Her body is a desert made of gunpowder.
Her body is a milk lake, a Tasmanian devil,
Lemonade Land.
Pubic forest and armpit tundra.

Birdy eyes,
bruised-up shins,
motherly fingers,
complicit silence, slyness,
gender studies at Brisbane University,
misunderstanding.

Her body is all the wonders of nature
put together into five feet
and a few inches.
It’s everything I wanted
and it’s nothing I didn’t.

Her body was the shape of my hands.

Simon Floris was born in Rome to an Italian father and a Danish mother. He spent most of his childhood in Brussels, then moved to Beijing for high school, and he is currently studying Film and Television at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The poet writes, “This poem is about the Australian girl who took my virginity in Beijing, then fled to Brisbane two months later, many years ago.” Watch his first documentary video, Die Brück (2019), and find him on Instagram @simonofloris.

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Lauren Hilger
Error of the ingénue

Let me in I said and banged at the piano,
banged at the mesh swing door
because I saw a way in.

Some light opened a man’s chest,
no not him, not him.

It followed, if I got it right, I would receive something
larger than the visible returns. The terms would change.

I once let a stranger carry me home. He said it wasn’t safe.
Said someone could pick me up and take me somewhere.

The softest part of my head dipped.
Collar bones up. I let him carry me.

Once in the meatpacking district, a man started shaking

when I appeared,
he opened his wallet, his zipper,

take everything I have,
he said, just don’t hurt me.

Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from the MacDowell Colony, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in BOMB, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

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Charlene Stegman Moskal
Crazy

I have been watching people
who used to be somebody.

They carry their delusions
as a ghost passes through walls
to rooms filled with cracked mirrors
beckoning them to take a tumble
down the rabbit hole,
skin the veneer of sanity
until raw and oozing
it scabs over
and normalcy is a scar.

See the woman dressed for the apocalypse
who carries her world in a garbage bag,
coos and sings lullabies to the lost child,
fiercely protects the bits and pieces
of soda cans, wool blankets, wire hangers
and her right to be the disease and the salvation

See the man who sees strangers approach
with machetes, baseball bats, M16s,
who flails and curses at syringes
loaded with anesthesia to remove
the only friends he can confide in,
who understand him with cryptic gestures.

See the one whose sex has been obliterated
replaced by lice, rotted teeth, matted hair,
pants soiled under the buttocks,
booze-sour breath and swollen limbs
that leave behind open wounds
dripping like the gash in Jesus’ side.

They bring their world into mine.
I invent simple fixes;
turn empty megastores
to house them,
delouse them with showers,
give them clean clothes,
beds to sleep on,
psychotropic drugs to soothe them.

I sit in my car watching
through rolled up windows
like those who sit in glass walled spaces;
their paper plans tattered at the edges
far from the tents and shopping carts,
away from the reek of the unwashed,
the abandoned who sit shaking
with blankets over their heads,

But my assumptions about their needs
may be outweighed by their wants.
Perhaps in some metaphysical shift
they are in my illusion to remind me
how tenuous is my reality
when I seek logical answers
in a world gone crazy.

Charlene Stegman Moskal is the author of One Bare Foot (Zeitgeist Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The Esthetic Apostle, Multibilis, Dash, Chaleur Journal, Helen, Sky Island Journal, The Raven’s Perch, Exposition Review, and other journals. She is a teaching artist with The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and a fellow of the New Jersey Writing Project. For three decades prior to moving to Las Vegas, she taught in public schools in South Texas.

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Meghan Sterling
Six Weeks in Vietnam

Deeply alone, my bones sang with it.
Alone. Alone. Alone. My absence from
the USA a relief like sudden rain.
My toes in murky puddles.
Shaky as I stepped around the grandmothers cooking
on woks in the sidewalks.
Puddles swirling with gasoline.
Hoan Kiem lake smoking with the heat.
Iron gates, bamboo, cobbled streets smelling of fish.
Anything to be away from him.
To look up like a turkey at the heavy sky
and let it rise and disappear
like the ghost of who I was when last I took stock.
Hanoi cafes began to take on more color each day
as I came awake. Each step began to lighten.
Alone. Alone. Alone.
Away from the din of the news,
my solitude rising like the hum
of the fishmongers,
the slap of sandals on stone.
Splash in the filthy puddles.
Eat the butter-drenched fish
out of a copper bowl in a wooden hut
leaning dangerously.
Wander the rice paddies,
their colored patterns
like the earth from space.

Meghan Sterling is the author of the chapbook How We Drift (Blue Lyra Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Glass, Driftwood Press, Lingerpost, Chronogram, Red Paint Hill,  Balancing Act, Sandy River Review, Sky Island Journal, and other journals. Online at meghansterling.com

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Ellen Welcker
Drone Rituals

Their pitch induces a sheaf of almonds to hatch from their shells.
It’s a casual law, round here: for every socket, a wrench.
To hum is the rule, restraint the exception.

A sack of emotions is a baby. A sack
of jewels, flagellating like cells. Lack
is to power as tail is to cathedral,
as sex is to holy, as number is to hum.
I think we can all agree: it’s relational.

I thought I bought a dress, but it’s a slanket.
I thought it was a horde of rams, but it was a herd.
Of gazelles. Horning sweetly, drowsily, from their skulls.

Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, fall 2016), The Botanical Garden (Astrophil Press 2010), which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the Astrophil Poetry Prize. Her Chapbooks include The Pink Tablet, (Fact-Simile Editions, 2018), Mouth That Tastes of Gasoline (alice blue books, 2014); and The Urban Lightwing Professionals (H_NGM_N, BKS, 2011). Recent poems are in Okey-Panky, Gramma Daily, and Poetry Northwest, as well as in the anthology WA129: Poems Selected By Tod Marshall: State Poet Laureate, 2016–2018 (Sage Hill Press, 2017). Ellen lives in Spokane, Wash. Online at ellenwelcker.com

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Judith Skillman
A crust of snow

You like to imagine, as the drifts melt—
beached whales, pelican beaks,
royal penguins
stranded far from their eggs—
you the humanist
see human forms all too well.
A hand reaching from soot-remnants,
pleats and darts
folded back and tacked
as if to embroider a time
of angel-making,
when, hooded with your sisters,
you fell back into virgin snow
arms swinging back and forth.
Wings no longer taped,
no more straightjacketed to earth.

Judith Skillman is the author of Came Home to Winter (Deerbrook Editions, 2019) and 15 other poetry collections. She has received grants from Artist Trust and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Cimarron Review, Zyzzyva, We Refugees, and elsewhere. Visit judithskillman.com.

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Chad Parenteau
Rick Perry Jesus Tanka

Rick Perry Jesus
turns back from Jerusalem.
He’d come for the oil
only to learn there was none.
Save your nails for someone else.

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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