3 Poems by Kelly Dolejsi

The Lost Jockey

He wrote rattleboned, he wrote after soup,
he wrote in his banker’s suit and turpentine
that we are capable of liking what we like,
spilling out of bed each day like chocolate milk
or pipes or lenticular clouds or madonnas
and the others, the incapables, sleeping
and not liking to sleep but also he put them
in the dainty branches, a see-through forest
of glass trees, glass squirrels, a collector’s
dream, somebody’s dream. On his horse
in his gray stripes and painted-on hat he wrote
prose to unborn granddaughters, post-scripts
to Mary the blue sea slug, Chris her brother,
every shard in the whole trampled scene.

The Commuter

Thoughts continue toward yesterday,
always giving way to sameness as gnats 
do, as newly cut blades of front lawns. 
Again, I wonder how to head home when 
home multiplies, when I scatter my wish 
on too many stars. I head home. It is night, 
and so warm I could sleep on a branch. 
I listen to steady light rain on the shell
of a wandering turtle that every few years
I return to the creek. I feel both ankles
in the familiar broken ice at the bottom, 
and hear another girl breathing next to me 
in the snow. I gallop away, sure that I’m a horse 
and that I’ll never think about this day again. 

Vigilance

Midnight, children quiet as painting
of saints in a long hallway that no one
has ever entered. Midnight, our bed
like a long gray whale, its belly pressed
like one tine of a rake into the zen garden
of the seafloor. Midnight, your hand
on my leg like a major seventh minus
the third and the fifth. Midnight, is this
what it’s like to be immortal? Thing after
indigestible thing, each one praying
silently and yet I hear them all. Midnight,
and yet day comes — I wake to see a deer
in the backyard, and I wonder how what
we grow could possibly keep him alive.
-
Kelly Dolejsi’s work has been published in many literary journals, including Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, Broken Ribbon, The Hunger, West Texas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Junto, Gravel, Dirty Paws, The Hungry Chimera, Joey and the Black Boots, and The Disconnect. Her poem “Loyalty” was nominated for the Best of the Net, and her contribution to September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, her chapbook, That Second Starling, was published by Desert Willow Press in 2018.

3 Poems by Laura Houlberg

Red

In the shower in the cold light of morning we admire the new rust color of
your nails. Look I hold your hand up to the red tiles they’re the same. Acres
away and in the future a stag rubs the last of his velvet against the back of a
pine. I breathe fog. The deer breathes fog. The water is too hot so I turn it
down for you. Lemons continue to grow out in the front yard. They never
seem to fully mellow, flirting just past chartreuse, falling to the ground in
the middle of the night. The pain of something like water is so much less, I
would imagine, no matter how red my skin, than the pain of being exiled
from you. We could be blood brothers now, but your palms are clean, never
cut. All my private blood everywhere, without contract. The tile fogs where
your hand has been. One of my hairs finds its way to the tile and twists
itself into an antler. I feel spent and alive, cleaned red. When my house has
a tequila night I run outside barefoot to the yard pushing past the thick
confetti of dancers into the starry cold and pick an unripe lemon, cut it
slant on the counter. We bite into it, make faces. Tastes clean.

Wrestling in the Garden with Lexi

Two bodies. No sheets. Two girls. Perhaps not. Pushing on each other timed in
silence in the garden. Image borrowed from Grecian wrestlers, in summer clothes
and half shaves. They pull each other’s legs, heels, dog-like crouch and half
pounce, pin each other as dead bees on cardboard. Okay, one breath. Then — up
again. A fist in the cave of an elbow. Neck under a shoulder’s scallop. The Angel of
Victory and her sister do not watch. This is no sacrifice at their feet. The only
etiquette: avoid cruelty.

The exchange is lightning in the background, caught only as a slick brightness on
the trees. At times when one needs a rest, she splays, back on back, over the other
and stretches open, gasping into what does not regard.

MoonMoon

A moon of a moon has no formal name, so the question becomes what to call us.
Some dark dragged across a bluer dark stretched farther. Scratching at your
memory like the silver of a lottery ticket. Like the silver of a print left to develop
in a darkroom. Is this desire with the lid off? All four buttons of my jeans undone
with my boots still on, arms around your waist and then: my hand on the faucet
and then: naked together folded like a wing in the corner of the bathtub all clear
pale blue. You have this memory of abundance: lights sparkling at the edge of the
desert. It’s one of the only times I can remember where I did not have to leave the
beautiful thing. You remind me: my life in that city was one long sunny day.
Nights were suggestions to punctuate the bliss. The density of my living deepened
and lengthened time itself, like the way I used to drop a grapefruit at the market
into a bag and it would pull at the mesh. The lights at the edge: it must be how you
know how to greet me, with bags slung over my shoulder on your front step in the
evening, after eight months north at the drop-off. Now, party of people watching
through the glass as you run toward me. Collect me.
-
Laura Houlberg’s work has appeared in Michelle Tea’s Radar Productions: GLOW Queer Poetry Feature, Routledge’s International Handbook of Gender and Environment, the IPRC’s 1001 Journal, and Oregon Poetic Voices. They received an Honorable Mention for the American Academy of Poets Prize (2014) and competed nationally at the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (2012 & 2013) while studying poetry under Mary Szybist at Lewis & Clark College.

"O my God, What Am I" by Devon Balwit

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
(Plath, “Poppies in October”)

Have twins and you are queened,
birth more, a sow,

the small sucklers’ upturned faces
muzzle-morphed.

Don’t make it look too easy—you—
tail lifted in heat,

each long schlong thrusting. Coyly,
devote a week,

a month, a year. Bemoan your delicacy,
the way you spread

legs only for God and Country. Bite
your lip so as not

to shout, coming become jouissance,
the smallest shiver.

Take the babies round singly
in a covered pram.

Maybe, then, the neighbors will lose count
and call you ordinary.
-
Devon Balwit lives scarily close to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. She is the author of the collections: We Are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/Complicated (a collaboration with Canadian collage artist Lorette C. Luzajik), and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). She also has a Flannery O'Connor-inspired chapbook, Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books) and a Moby-Dick inspired one,The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry).

3 Poems by Isabel Bezerra Balée

bodies full of womxn

so many womxn
toss their bodies
across floodplains

to kneel
at the foot
of the bank

all the womxn
who died in me
can tie a knot
underwater
& paint with fire

how we live together
in one room
with one
hammock

speaking
to our deceased
in animal tongues

expressing nothing more
than a need for rest

dipsea

staring into

discrete, euclidean

rays

on the cliff

facing west -

when someone dies

strangers park their capital

on panoramic highway

faceless / defacing

the upper crown

of the oldest tree

predating

borders between

here & other -

below, perennial streams

flow through gullies,

our corneas

divide the sempervirens

a passing

embodiment

of the costal

situation

to swallow

vast blue

is an act of refusal,

a kind of lawlessness

in pillform

the tallest tree

the spectacle

i.

i’m trying to draw a face
eclipsed by a screen
& the screen is touching me
in a sexual way
there are no bodies
or masters
only an immense
accumulation
ofmuted faces.

ii.

tired of being scared
to wake up in the world,
a trader joe’s parking lot

i cry & consume
5 vegan cookies in a row

everything that was directly lived
has moved away into representation.

my body doesn’t look how it should
in the dystopian mirror

i am grotesque

my mind doesn’t sound
like language

the mechanical force
of crashing waves fracturing
the rock into increasingly
smaller fragments.

iii.

in the feed-form
i must be unconscious
of targeted advertisements -

blocking what i don’t want to see
manufactures a different version
of the same tangible world

replaced by a selection of images.

at work i’m copied in an email -
consider saying white identity
instead of white nationalism -

i need to identify
the root cause
of fighting with strangers
but i’m lost at sea
in the panic attack
one last
torrential downpour
until i come up
like a fish
leave me alone
please come back

describe these conditions
using the most specific
terms possible

there is no being
without being-with

the only path to liberation
is revolution

iv.

browsing 41 pages
of sneakers
designed for over-pronation,
a gaslighting term
which also seeks to
exceptionalize
the body

only serves
the production.

ever since i purchased
the 32nd shoe

i’ve had a lot to say

& the heat
has made us all
incandescent:

why all this pain,
how are others
complicit?

instead of touching the screen
let the screen do the touching

i swear

it changes everything.

v.

connected or removed
from all these people
who look familiar,

is dating science
also a construct?

it’s bad
so it must be
but i forgive you.

can a person
be overwrought

or is that
reserved
for aesthetics?

i keep ruining
what i meant,

every generation
thinks it’s the last one

oblivious to all
surrounding events

we could leave
this art object

at any time

don’t think about it too much
-
Isabel Bezerra Balée was born & raised in New Orleans and has roots in Northern Brazil. Her poetry has appeared recently in Elderly, Littletell, and Anomaly! She writes in an ambiguous genre, about a multitude of subjects, at: ibalee.tumblr.com. Links to poems can also be found there. She lives in Oakland, CA.

"Snowman at 25" by Marcus Clayton

Carrot affixed to face, slowly blackened
by blizzard breath, punctuates the micro
torso rounded above white mountain hips.

The arms are forks, the eyes candied orange and red,
everything ages backwards two decades; clothes
fit loose, goose bumps deflate with warmth.

Now stand back, admire the mosaic of flakes,
feel jackboot snow shoes collapse zero degree
snow, crunch dulled like a broken xylophone

quieted by cracks—an unglued mouth
fevered for notes. Overnight, M & M eyes melt
into an orange tear drop. Sternum and hips become one.

Fork spokes disappear into wafted white
of horizon and balcony skin. Overhead, a 747
cuts through the universe—blue
as a puddle—and does not explode.
-
Marcus Clayton is an Afro-Latino writer who grew up in South Gate, CA, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. He is an executive editor for Indicia Literary Journal, and teaches English Composition at Los Angeles Southwest College, Long Beach City College, and Fullerton College. Some of his published work can be seen in Tahoma Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, RipRap Journal, Angel City Review, and Canyon Voices Literary Magazine among many others.

"i didn't know before but now i know it's real" by Greg Zorko

when i found out

that you buy chunks of mango

twice a day

at Trader Joe's

i was so impressed

by your ritual passion

i told you all of my theories

how we should make cash edible

in case we are hungry

and don't want to drive to the store

i build the world around you

i'm like a knock off

Steve Nicks

i remember in text messages

you used to spell it

Steve Knicks

like New York Knicks

i remember too

the eggs in the pan

the manes of all the horses

at the farm outside the city

i feel the movement of the sound around the room

but i don't hear anything

my heart is a hot corn bean bag
-
Greg Zorko was born in 1990 in Albany, New York. He is the author of Ghost in the Club (Metatron, 2016). He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

"Year of the Freshwater Fish" by Leah Leinbach

There is a sentence that exists between you and I
I want to lie down with it
water is underneath, I hear it
the world's shortest ghost story exists in my body
in neon colored spit
on public display
the word discomposure
something quiet pardons remembrance
a secret falls down
you appear out of a pollen cloud
and say boo
sneak your way up into my laugh
I touch your neck
and it is the shape a neck would be
if you truly existed
regret shrieks its way off a moldy peach
an out of order sign is out of order
my only question
if you were born in the year of the freshwater fish
would you have loved it any harder?
-
Originally from Seattle, Leah Leinbach is a writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in CHEAP POP as well as in the New York and Chicago based zine Metaphorical Fruit. 

"no one tells you" by Annette Covrigaru

                 no one tells you
 
             that     shadows shift on concrete

                         like light on water,

that                  darkness reverberates black tides

      leading, leaning, misleading, 

                 that       to rely on these selves

                  is to have faith in illusion, 

   &             it may as well be god lying

       faceless on the sidewalk, 

                    leading, leaning, misleading.

perhaps     we'd see more

          if we hit concrete instead of

     toying with translucence. 

                 perhaps            eyes don't belong

            imbedded in cement, 

                 but       higher, closer, higher.
-
Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender American-Israeli writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. They were a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices nonfiction fellow and writer-in-residence in 2014 and 2017, respectively. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TQ Review, Stitch, Emerge, Cosmonauts Avenue and Entropy. Annette is currently completing a master’s degree in Holocaust Studies through the University of Haifa.

3 Poems by Coco M. Keehl

PENETRALIUM PART 01

you will see this dog before you die
wet teeth crack, a bullet < bark >         before you
know / how the brain creates what the mind creates

dissociative vision & Antonio Damasio
states that  we see more than we  ( are )  
aware               I’ve been leading arrows across an alien surface

better now       tell me what’s inside
the cells your heart      < vibrating >
compact, memory, folding

paper cut the laws of physics
on oneside                 restricts the other side
( phenomenally distorted ) dreams don’t last forever

& gravity we know     is not gravity
as it knows itself, like warm gusher
jewel of eye                 a pseudo understanding

which still, is, an understanding
( to behold a beauty ) everything was  light &
everything indirect lightening

litchenberg, static, etching  in my eyelids        look     
look     how space is    a test of faith or fighting
not just < a  voice > wanting to speak about the void

a void speaking into the void
a void < wondering >how empty
possibility could be

UNDISCOVERED SUBATOMIC PARTICLES

Dark matter can’t be found
if it doesn’t exist or
god where be energy or
the physics of heat

& I rippled two black holes in & out unending infinites
            every               entropy
used to measure the rearrangement
I rearrange then
myself easier to remove
            unbreak reorder           was once
three in womb
but came in two           it did

not surprise me to learn
I was twinned.                         Here is             
my hand &      here
other palm to your shoulder
you surrender to god               
            so what

what makes you think
what makes you think
my questioning
is weakness?

WHILE EVERYTHING STILL BLOWING

across thick, the lawn
I did not understand but maybe

it was an important document
& everything you own

but first vivid image
subjected action partake-

ing apart; love your friendly alien
sitting golden going
nowhere else at all. 2 sandhill
cranes 2 family of geese & a

black bird with a bright red chest watch me
want condense word gut

rule, truth enough to believe
a bigger revelation I swear

I’m always digging deeper examining
observation: what matters, isn’t first

it’s the sparkle off the water,
the birds moving closer in.
-
Coco M. Keehl is a poet living in the forests of Michigan with her dog. She is founder of GRAVITON and a poetry editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. Recent poems are in Hobart, WOHE Lit, FIVE:2:One. Find her on twitter @cmkeehl.

"No Tomatoes" and "Thinking of You" by Carol Ellis

No Tomatoes

Rainfall and I am outside
in rain with rain as rain

apologies to everyone
to myself with wet hands

thank what air to look like that
I grow and comb my hair today.

Thinking of You

If you could run down to the corner store
for a pound of hamburger

don’t wear green socks,
makes your ankles look like small lawns

with only room for one chair
a small table that holds the entire point of a moment     

that sits and drinks iced tea outside or if this is winter    
constant hot tea helps

or let’s face it, coffee is the strong answer
to the start of any day, the list continues,

late at night in a room when it’s too dark to sleep
might as well wake up

besides the electricity is being turned off today
they told me why

and you’ve returned with hamburger
but I’ve become a vegetarian

just in the time you were at the store
so take it, it’s for you.
-
Carol Ellis was born in Detroit, Michigan and lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She is the author of two chapbooks: HELLO (Two Plum Press, forthcoming 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems and essays are or will be published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Saranac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015 she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings.

3 Poems by Anthony Hagen

Cough Drop

“I never went fishing,” said the doctor. “Instead, I did homework. For my son, I have bigger plans. I’ll catch a fish for him one day.” I brought home a vial of medicinal balm. You insisted on putting bread in the refrigerator, to reduce the likelihood of infectious spores. You went for the discount toaster, so it’s still cold in the center. I could guzzle down broth in the time it takes for you to toggle the thermostat. When there was still time for it, we would take strolls down the muddy embankment, wade in the shallow region, and catch tiny minnows in our palms. Now there is nothing but cinnamon and ginger ale on ice. “There seems to be a problem with your prescription,” said the doctor on a call. “The most obstinately intellectually devoid among us have seen fit to saddle me with ill advice. Cease all ingesting of the tablets. Come to my office as soon as possible. You know my extension.” We tried to lug the couch into the parlor area, but could barely lift it up before dropping it again.

Sneeze Guard

It was the first morning of frost, and I noticed the leaves broken beneath my shoes. I was in the midst of negotiations with the CEO. “Sentimentality blooms like flowers nowadays,” he said. His office was adorned with a large oil painting of several multicolored horses on a plain. I was complimenting the décor when, without warning, he blurted, “I am no longer able to continue this conversation,” and ran out of the room. He left half a mug of black Italian dark roast coffee. It hung in the air. I was tempted to drink. It was early. You always advised me out of speaking and into listening. Your gift of that nice leather chair helped me, to such an end. Out to lunch, we could see the glistening tubs of chopped pork behind the glass. That tone you set, the one that always wakes me up, took all the germs from me. I can constrain myself with a necktie, and fall in love with my shirts, but everything flows, and flows like rain. The CEO left me an odd voicemail. “I have not yet begun to fight,” was all it said. Thanks to you, we are never wanting for the newest scents. For that, I am thankful.

Impeachment Proceedings

Frequent stops: gas hub, feeding station, rubber emporium, discount cattle outlet. Communiqués to party headquarters, screaming matches via fax machine. “I’ll murder this job before it murders me,” you said. “What do you suppose they make figs out of?” I said. We departed the fruit barn just in time for the industrial fudge squirter. “Obscene?” you said into the phone. “Of course it’s obscene. Don’t distract from the real issue at hand.” Onward to the semi-legal explosives warehouse. “I can’t look at anything colorful,” you said. “I must look away.” At the hospital, scrubbed nurses stitched my wounds while chatting about the recent banking scandal. Outside the room, doctors stared at clipboards while chatting about the latest baseball scandal. “I have my own life too, you know,” you said, perhaps into the phone. Machines next to my head beeped like flugelhorns.
-
Anthony Hagen holds an MFA from Hollins University. His writing appears in Caliban, Boston Accent Lit, Clarion, Bird's Thumb, The Hollins Critic, and DenimSkin. 

"When You Go to Where the Bells Ring From" by Cooper Wilhelm

Other people are the lightning in our lives,
joining sky and earth, churning dirt
to glass. Now

what am I?
It’s okay to be afraid, to wave
at everything
like a leaf prepared to fall.
Death

is coming to save us
from the things we love.
-
Cooper Wilhelm is the author of three books of poetry, including DUMBHEART/STUPIDFACE (Civil Coping Mechanisms/2017). Swine Song, a chapbook of poems about pigs, comes out next month from Business Bear Press. He used to do a radio show about witchcraft. Yell at him on twitter @CooperWilhelm.

"7" by Rax King

The following is the seventh recitative in Rax King's The People's Elbow.
-
I think about kissing The Rock a lot. I think about what a huge person he is, but how tender he’d be, and what his smile must look like when it’s shy, when it’s nervous. In my waking life, it’s always me who’s shy, it’s always me who’s nervous, and it’s always me who’s smiling. I believe that he kisses like I do.

He’s so big he’s so big he’s so goddamn big. Masculinity in macrocosm. No man exists who’s as big as The Rock is in my imagination— there wouldn’t be enough food in the world to feed that man if he were real. He’d starve. My outsize feelings can only thrive in the context of unreality. My body can only thrive in the careful grip of a man the size of an SUV. It goes without saying that The Rock is not in love with me.

 Calculate how much he’d weigh at that size. Calculate the weight of even one single hand. Understand that any human, any real human, would be crushed to death instantly by a hand like that. Imagine it stroking your shivering gooseflesh back into itself, hot but not sweaty, firm and heavy and correct. There, now. Don’t you feel better?
-
Buy the full chapbook here and read the other twenty nine recitatives. Thanks.

3 Poems by William Repass

Sound Horn

Exhibit Y? Photogenic proof—albeit

pixelated—stumps even a rigged jury, painting pictures of a land florid with fauna. Out past the lumber mills, past the lumber yards, past the chugging auto saws and acrid plumes; out beyond the slope of thistle, of stumps and mist and rust: the land of boon, sprouting honky tonks. Yes. There. Where the towing just ain’t enforced. Parp parp!

For it was then the blowhard caption horned in, reports The Bugle, sounding off “On the Recent Spike of Oryx Sightings: a Symbology of Cornucopiæ.” And almost... well it almost... sneezed up a hunk of manna.

Almost. Instead: a helical tusk sur le bout de la langue. Magisterial companion to our rotating cast of carousel mounts. Cast in brass, that is. Talking animals?! Shorn affidavit. Political allegory?!—a horse shoe crabbed by narrow margins, purely milling.

Poof! And as for this “protrusion”?

Crushed to a fine, glittering powder, cut with poppy, pressed into neat pills, patented by Little Big Pharma, and finally, sold. Antidote to the common cold—

the only side effect, excessive swearing.

Scum Purse

Interest you in a gimlet? Consider this, technically, your official welcome to the pond. This sump sunk dead center some dead aristocrat’s Cartesian garden. Pring has prung. Our vegetative hat grows knobbly as a sacful o’ limes, disbursing a twist of ignoble gasses. Common slaw—a fish wife fragrance,

available for limited time only. We may be bottom feeders but, I tell you this, that our pond has got a whole lot going on. Iridescent scales but in whose flavor? Lil’ fishies nosh big fish, neck ticklishly, in the shape of exfoliage and trashy novels. Deconstructed salad days, if you will. These turgid whiskers not for naught.

What you might call in technical terms our common craw chews common slaw for us. Now that’s what I call haute couture!

Thud Aplomb

Rex ink hole hot off the machina—itself squamulose w/ prefeathers. Gothic curly cues amidst which the character, extinct to us, returns. That’s P as in pterodactyl. Equipped with the advanced new pulley system, can we not master the past faster? Monarchist! Your philtrum is awash in slobber. Suchlike behavior reads illegible, a glandular feint. Shrink peccadillo.

Newtonic fig squelch and ensuing dropsy paroxysm, averted both. Thanks, air plane gluey foot pads. Don’t suppose you happen to know the where bouts of my cockatoo, exiled since last December? Lizards affix all over. After tarring afterfeathers, gravity pules.

Cigarette?

Any last words? You just never know. At this late hour, any word

at all could wind up famous somewhere down the line 

“You and what anvil?”
-
Originally from Los Alamos, New Mexico, William Repass lives in Pittsburgh and works as a projectionist and film librarian. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Hobart, Small Po[r]tions, and elsewhere.

3 Poems by Maura Way

Slow Cooker

I left my heart in the general
pozole. I thought it would
be safe from harm. I got so
fat. Some pulling happened
while I thought about the crab's
immortality. I should be tender
by now. Silence is not peace. It is
the lack of courage in human meat.

Grand

Big Macs now
come in three

different sizes.
I don't want to

be a teacher. My
world can come

to an end. I'm just
documenting it. No

one cares about
superlative forms.

Babylon

The getaway will break me
into fourteen clay tablets. I
will have to arrange them to
create a narrative of a poppy.
Clearly prescribed life cycles
will emerge, but it will still
take a dogged wrongness to
organize a logical storyline.

Is it really releasing fear if you
step off the cliff, harnessed into
complicated belay system? I
know the trick is infallible,
but I don't believe in it. I'm
more apt to sleep on it. Only
blooms will hang overhead,
still & carabinerless legends.
-
Originally from Washington, D.C, Maura Way is a schoolteacher in North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in/on Drunken Boat, Verse, DIAGRAM, Ocean State Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. Her debut book of poetry, Another Bungalow, was released by Press 53 in 2017. She has been a teacher for 20 years.

"Every other summer our house would get hit by a tornado" by Joshua Bohnsack

Every other summer our house would get hit by a tornado
That would dip into the valley of my parents’ backyard.
The first time my sister was paranoid because she lived through one
But I shrugged it off until the closed windows swoll and the plate flew out of the closed
     microwave.
& it opened us up to what can go wrong in our world as the dog was sucked up from the deck
     and I watched it through my basement window and told my little brothers, Don’t look out
     there.
Their swing set was wrapped back to a tree and the trampoline floated down the
Mississippi
& it might still be there
I don’t know.

& they kept hitting.

& I went to Ireland
& didn’t hear from my family
But saw the pictures.
My mom wrote me
She had a bad feeling
& moved my records from her den the day before
The basketball hoop would have splintered the vinyl
Where it landed through the window
& I would have never came back.
-
Joshua Bohnsack is an MFA student at Northwestern University, a reader for TriQuarterly, and the managing editor for Curbside Splendor Publishing. He is the author of Shift Drink (Spork Press, forthcoming 2018) and Burnt Sienna (Throwback Books 2017). His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and others. He ran an ice cream shop in rural Illinois until he moved to Chicago. @joshuabohnsack

3 Poems by Darren C. Demaree

[the firepower is what you expect it to be]

i told my children the firepower is what you expect it to be and we use that firepower simply all of the time because it’s simple to use it’s simple to press buttons and blow those blue eyelids off of all of our enemies who of course have their own buttons and their own firepower that has been simplified for the witnesses who love to see a countdown they can understand hell even if there’s two keys for one death that doesn’t quite seem complicated enough and what about for a million lives regardless i taught myself and i will teach both of you exactly how to make your eyelids look blue from a distance

[we don’t need a reason]

i told my son we don’t need a reason to look away

[the poison is occasional]

     after Brenda Shaughnessy

i told my daughter the poison is occasional the bad stuff is every day but the poison is occasional the bad stuff is every day but if you’re lucky all the poison will do is change your tolerance for poison which will eventually kill you but for a while you will appear to be superhuman you will appear to the ultimate refraction of the reflection of the battle of never getting any better and that sort of narrative will flip pages like lifetimes

-

Darren C. Demaree’s poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including Diode, Meridian, New Letters, Diagram, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Many Full Hands Applauding Inelegantly (2016, 8th House Publishing). My seventh collection Two Towns Over was selected as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award by Trio House Press, and is scheduled to be released in March of 2018. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He currently lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. 

"The Stanford Prison Experiment, Laptop, Split over an Evening" and "Jaws, Laptop, Split Over a Meal and Some Carpentry" by Justin William Evans

The Stanford Prison Experiment, Laptop, Split over an Evening

Why not bother to understand
no one wants to be happy

and you are meat
that was afraid to rot

that's singing to itself
the same song until the song is walking
until the song hatches from its melody’s weight
and becomes marches

then the fruit of looking
or rashes
or red bulls in ochre
fading from the walls of your skull

you sink into sleep
the lake skin banks repeat
and the posture dignifies
or embarrasses
or invents dignity

let's not claim independence from anything
there's no tunnel between us
only telephones and microwaves

fill me with dry leaves
or pull me to your side by my teeth
the taste of your clay fingers
your boggy ankle somewhere else
your belly singing
like a whale
in a sea of blood

Jaws, Laptop, Split Over a Meal and Some Carpentry

My kids were on that beach too
and I’d put them out there again
I’d drown them with my own hands
if it meant I could stay their father forever

death isn’t permanent
death aint like some personal insult
give me death or give me liberty
but just for a little while
give me a deep long death

and come to me in two pieces
you and the radio mother
you and the undersea misfit
you and the missing parts

and I’ll speak softly and show no fear
drink and love
with firmness only
but with love

all black eyed monsters
are full of steaming milk
all scars and nightmares turn beautiful
that live long enough
inside one finds license plates
rubber hoses
tin cans
but no children’s limbs

so on to the radio mother’s dream
three lovers held in the palm of a wooden god
in painful yearning for the undersea misfit
the hidden giant come to paint the water red

smart fish
once he’s free we can all go home
to the sand
where we never sing
and the birds eat the turtles in their shells
-
Justin William Evans is a poet and playwright from Charlotte, NC. He has been working with and producing exclusively original theatre since 2011. Currently he is a member of the Charlotte theatre ensemble, XOXO. Past writing credits include A Tonguey Kiss for Samuel Davidson (Anam Cara Theatre Co.), Satan v. Laundry (ACTC), I Wont Hurt You (XOXO), and The 30th Annual Bernstein Family Christmas Spectacular (The Magnetic Theatre). He is former co-editor of Vanilla Sex Magazine. His poetry has been published by Five2One, Metabolism (as Valentina Tereskova), and The Peal. He frequently performs with Asheville's Poetry Cabaret, and is the creator and editor of the sound collage podcast Mystery Meat. He organizes and hosts the America's Pastime reading series, a reading of un-original poetry and fiction.

Fortune Cookie (May 9, 2017) by James Croal Jackson

You have good reason
to be self-confident.

After all, this is what
the fortune cookie said.

After a dinner portion
of greasy lo mein
from New Peking.

After CNN reports
the president’s firing
of the FBI director.

This is a gross abuse of power,
and there is a gross amount
of noodles inside me.

Despite that,
I have good reason
to be self-confident,

I suppose.

I am reasonably certain
I still have a job.

I am reasonably certain
I am not under investigation.

There was no backdoors
deal struck with the restaurant
to ensure this would be

my particular
fortune.

All I did was order
the noodles via telephone.

Then I drove to the
restaurant to pick it up,
face-to-face.

I used my credit card
to pay for it, but
I will pay the bill.

In the plastic bag
they handed me,
there was a brown bag.

In the brown bag,
there was a white box
with my food in it

as well as chopsticks,
napkins, a fork, and
the fortune cookie.

That’s it.

All I’m saying is
if you don’t believe
me, investigate.

Anyone who says
differently
is reasonably suspicious.

-

James Croal Jackson is the author of The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in FLAPPERHOUSE, Yes Poetry, Serving House Journal, and elsewhere. He edits The Mantle, a poetry journal. Find him in Columbus, Ohio or at jimjakk.com.

"Prayer Peaches" by Matthew DeMarco

     after Plath

All day walking in Austin, then peaches,
ice-dewed in a silver bucket.

Their flesh was sealed but soaked—
dense-haired, close-mouthed Ziploc,

unpierced. They sat piled across the street
beside a flushed and beaming persistent woman

who waved one wandlike arc of hand
toward the six of us, insistent.

Purple magic marker on the ramshackle
cardstock sign: FREE PEACHES! FREE PRAYERS!

There are peaches when it is hot
in Austin, preciously secured in private,

cold buckets, secret sweetness behind their seals
across the street. The woman wanted

to pray for us, I wanted a peach, and Erik
wanted to bow his dry sober shut mouth

in humble silence while her hand acquired
the whispered drying saltwater of his skin.

They were already bathed. So easy to slide sharp
flat tooth into fruit, render askew

ropes of slippery tissue from the waxy rind
of peel. So easy, with a blessing and sticky lips,

as sand salamander streaks congealed down my wrist,
to pitch a pernicious pit into the gutter of the bridge.

Pray the nectar that remained in ribbony veins
on the stubborn hard stone would secrete a scent

to provoke, at least, one in the millions
of the city’s nightly bats.
-
Matthew DeMarco is a writer, editor, and educator living in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. He is a recipient of the Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize, for which his work has appeared on Poets.org. His poems can also be found in Opossum and Columbia Poetry Review. Drop him a line at matthewpauldemarco@gmail.com.