 
### Sixfold Poetry Summer 2018

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Sixfold and The Authors

www.sixfold.org

Sixfold is a completely writer-voted journal. The writers who upload their manuscripts vote to select the prize-winning manuscripts and the short stories and poetry published in each issue. All participating writers' equally weighted votes act as the editor, instead of the usual editorial decision-making organization of one or a few judges, editors, or select editorial board.

Each issue is free to read online and downloadable as PDF and e-book. Paperback book available at production cost including shipping.

Cover Art: Michael Lønfeldt. Online at artbylonfeldt.dk

License Notes

Copyright 2018 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for noncommercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue are acknowledged. Thank you for your support.

Sixfold

sixfold@sixfold.org

www.sixfold.org

### Sixfold Poetry Summer 2018

Carol Lischau | Son & other poems

Noreen Ellis | Jesus Measured & other poems

Amanda Moore | Learning to Surf & other poems

Adin Zeviel Leavitt | Harvest & other poems

Jim Pascual Agustin | Stay a Minute, the Light is Beautiful & other poems

Timothy Walsh | The Wellfleet Oyster & other poems

Anna Hernandez-French | Watermelon Love & other poems

J. L. Grothe | Six Pregnancies & other poems

Sue Fagalde Lick | Beauty Confesses & other poems

Abby Johnson | Finding Yourself on Google Maps & other poems

Marisa Silva-Dunbar | Frisson & other poems

Merre Larkin | Sensing June & other poems

Savannah Grant | Saint & other poems

Andrew Kuhn | Plains Weather & other poems

Catherine Wald | Against Aubade & other poems

Joe Couillard | Like New Houses Settling & other poems

Faleeha Hassan | In Nights of War & other poems

Olivia Dorsey Peacock | Thelma: ii & other poems

Sarah Louise | Tremors & other poems

Kimberly Russo | Inherent Injustice & other poems

Frannie Deckas | Child for Sale & other poems

Jacqueline Schaalje | Mouthings & other poems

Nancy Rakoczy | Her Face & other poems

Ashton Vaughn | Contrition & other poems

Contributor Notes

Carol Lischau

### Son

for baby L.

I say I want a baby because no one says

I want a person.

I'm told it isn't yet time, as if anyone

could determine which foggy breath a tinder will catch

and keep.

A life, the whole weight of it, cannot be carried

in a womb.

But we bear its progressions—

the size of a fig, a turnip, a pomegranate too alive

with red.

A stain. An ER wristband.

The spirit of every human is already

in the world wishing only

to be arranged. And when I look,

I find you waiting everywhere.

A scrap of blanket I was knitting,

a box of prenatal pills on the counter.

Or mushrooms clustering in a hollow of my garden bed

or winter rain spells tearing

from the sweet birch its last clinging leaves.

Why have I finished you, my unfinished?

If I could only offer you that gift, if I could find

your hand to place it in.

### Red-Throated Anole

I was nearly nine when I found the limp lizard

under the porch swing. One eye bulged into a white knot,

two limbs were severed. I didn't know whether to be grieved

or terrified as it wriggled what was left of itself across concrete.

My mother didn't refuse, perhaps she couldn't,

when I came inside, cupping the barely living, its tawny skin

faded to grey. This, my first moment of urgency.

We set up a tank of shallow water and a plastic container

of food on the counter, though I've forgotten what we thought

to feed it. I added a handful of twigs and plucked grass

as if what's familiar would prompt the lungs into swelling.

That a shadow of home would usher in miracle. And what,

if not my gesture, could direct the body to survive? Cooing,

believing all this, I wondered where its ears were to understand me.

In the morning its jaw slacked open, the tongue

a bright red announcement. The heart unwilling to obey,

the milky eye refusing to blink. _Like a pearl_ ,

I wanted to think as I watched it not watching back.

### Azalea House

_He's a drunk_ , my father explained

as they drove the slurring man away. An hour before,

he'd staggered to the road and smashed into our car

just in front of the house on Azalea.

My widowed aunt and her daughter lived there

with their German Shepherds, hair blanketing the floor

and everything inside the walls. The house collected

their collections—manicured Barbie dolls posed forever

behind glass, Carebears and other kaleidoscopic animals

huddled and peering down from upper shelves. _Look,_

_but don't touch_ my aunt would remind me on nights

my father would drop me there. Why did I want to evade

her words? To lose composure, to feel the frill and eyes

filled with plastic and another kind of life.

_Look, but don't touch_ my mind rehearsed.

How to resist the allure of what is forbidden?

After his arrest, the man's anxious wife stood in the yard

as they asked her questions, her blue-bruised arm lifted

to a wordless mouth. What compelled her silence—love?

the private cosmos of a home? I watched from within

the locked car. Beyond me, the crime scene in the street,

and beyond the street, other homes and other private lives

interrupted, their frantic mouths through windows,

and from within window blinds like cage slats,

their gazes white-eyed and wanting.

### Ice Storm, Post-Divorce

My father is freshly alone on the other end

of the line. He talks of all that's rolling in.

I listen. Pacing my attic room, I see

where the pale walls are peeling to show sycamore.

And my eye catches, reels in—an unexpected color

clustered in a top corner of the wall.

Ladybugs. Dozens, red and huddled

like pomegranate seeds in the white meat

of winter. Did the wind force their retreat,

did the brightness against the ground?

My senses reorient to my father's voice, and

I tell him what I see. He says they're lucky.

_Luck_. I cannot connect our life with theirs—

vermillion cloister, elytra and abdomen,

brains like needle eyes open and clear,

and my father's home cleared like a throat.

And what of me in this? What of home?

I cannot say if I am more afraid of loneliness

or its image. Our calls linger after they're ended,

as do the ladybugs till the season passes.

I never can decide whether or not

I should have wanted them gone,

the pitifully beautiful red refuge

tucking further into itself and away

from the window's biting draft. Still,

they collect in the corner of my mind—

crimson nest, endless days, till death

(O the sweet covenant) do they linger.

### Birthday, An Elegy

Today a mother shot her daughters

before her husband breathed a wish over a cake.

And what this says about domestic

ennui or the right to bear arms, I do not know.

Smoke from the heirloomed pistol rises

with our questions, while in the kitchen 45 candles

have begun their forever burning.

A father searches for the right wish.

Where are we taken when longing hems

the edge of language, dares past the boundary of word?

The sound of a whimper. A gunshot. A neighbor's _ohmygod_

from a parlor window. If ever a siren dopplers past,

I wonder what it means to speak. The lights too, frantic

and wordless, urging to transfigure.

The girls collapsed on their manicured lawn

20 miles west of my mother stirring again a pot of risotto,

her own mother propped in a La-Z-Boy straining

to make sense of Lauren Lake or Dow Jones

or Fox newscasters. Every evening, the world.

Every birth, death. You can never know what fears

or exhilarations such people have. Their daughters' bodies held

in the grass there like last notes of the annual song.

_To—you—_ she forces him to hear. Deep breath.

Make a wish sense of it if you can.

Noreen Ellis

### The Feast-Maker

Of course it was me, the daughter,

neither prodigal nor inheritor

who killed and cooked the fatted calf.

There were servants, but it was my hand

against the young cow's complacent cheek.

I sing in her ear, watch blood drain,

make the top cuts of her choicest meat,

cut strips and mix them with salt

and herbs, juice from the pomegranate,

my anger and my spit.

My eldest brother's anger is

a hot wind. Empty clanging boasts

the all of him. He asked me once

for a goat to impress his friends.

I laughed at him and could not,

will not, fix or fill his need

with love or praise or beast.

He beat me, as I knew he would.

My brother's envy is my secret delight,

the twist in our father's heart.

And the old goat himself?

Father, Abba, Master.

His worth measured in gold, tents,

fields, cattle and obedient sons,

girls and servants not worth counting.

My rich lord knows no distinction

between loved and roughly used

the taste of male or female flesh.

I slaughtered a heifer.

They gorged on the herd's future,

feasting the return of their prodigal son.

My brother, my beloved. I dream of him

in foreign lands—an artist, a merchant, a king.

I put him as a seal upon my heart,

I opened. I waited for him

to call, "Come away, my sister,

my bride, you have stolen my heart."

Instead I kill and roast the fatted calf,

gather and cook bitter herbs.

I laugh, I burn, I cut, I sing.

I am the honey in the halvah,

and the hunger at the feast,

for now he is returned,

penniless and smelling of swine.

One more man for me to suffer.

### Grace and the Big Men

They were once the big men on campus

football heroes, wrestlers, athletes

now turned tall and girthed

into mountains that dance

holding up their trousers

with elastic and ties. Sporting shorts

even in winter, to show off their

best features: muscled calves and

well-turned ankles. Ladders of muscle

wrapped in abundance, never falling when

they drink too much, a line of dance

partners waiting for them at parties and weddings.

They lead, pushing and pulling from solid strength,

turning sweethearts with heave and sway of hip

guiding would-be lovers with the ease of leg

pressed against joint and bone, between thighs

to beats of long-stepped fox trot and gliding waltz.

And, oh! How they rumba

on size 15 slip-on patent leather loafers,

on feet that seem impossibly dainty.

They mansprawl on bar stools pulling their women

into the mound of belly, tree-trunk of their arms

hands that cover like paper on rock,

a quilt in winter, the low clouds of distant

snow. To be his woman you learn to climb him

build up the strength and stamina to hold

his heft, his weight, your hands finding purchase

in his bulk—the dihedral where chest

meets shoulder, footholds at knees

and in the flattened mesa

of his outstretched palms. You glissade

along the long length

of his major muscle groups

skirr over the slope and massif

of his body, his hardness hidden

beneath a world of flesh,

no mere mountain,

a range, no an entire planet,

of him, creating gravity as he dances.

### Jesus Measured

My mother measured the cooking time

for roasted lobsters in martinis: two.

Her carnelian cocktail ring mirrored their shells

placing the lobsters, a date night treat, still moving,

aluminum wrapped, butter patted, into the hot oven.

For her sons, the portion size of spaghetti: a quarter,

cooked and topped with braised meat, sausages, bread.

The weight of her devotion. For her daughters: a dime's-width

tossed in lemon, black pepper and salt, a lesson

in simplicity, in want. The measure of backbone and hip.

She taught me pie-crust making from her deathbed,

bare, brittle fingers pinching each batch for the right mix

of fat and flour. Those that did not measure: four. Finally, a perfect

dough, dusted with sugar, baked unfilled. "Sugar pie for my sugar pie"

we sang, her hot hand on my face, eating it all, a final act of defiance.

The span of my lover's hand measures the expanse

of my back, his long fingers tracing the short distance

from shoulder to flank, the sweep of hip to hip, grips the extra flesh

settled there, a saddle, a hillock, a baffle, at my waist, counting

the decades he has roamed this terrain, this body: three.

I count his words, his silences, his absences.

Tally his home comings, mix tempered yeast with flour and salt

measure the time of kneading dough: until stillness.

The quiet assurance of me alone, empty, strong

waiting to be filled by bread, by honey, by sugar, by him.

Even miracles can be quantified. Jesus measured

the hunger of the five thousand on the grass: two fishes, five loaves.

And the multitude was satisfied. Twelve baskets of leavings!

But I cannot square the sum, the rule, the reckoning of enough.

Cannot gauge the measure of eating, of loved, and be full.

Amanda Moore

### Tattoo Artist

When the young girl wants my input

On the design of her tattoo

The bells of my brain don't know

Which alarm to sound first

I am her teacher her father

Is my friend she babysits my daughter

Her mother is days away from dying I think

Perhaps I should dissuade her though

Part of me thinks to cheer I want

To know the right advice to give but what

Does it matter she's already marked

And the dull buzz of the tattoo gun

Will be in her ears always the needle

Piercing her flesh will be nothing

Like the pain that traces itself each day

Through her heart

What is ankle bone shoulder blade

Hip skin over the kidney why not

Wear pain permanently

An heirloom brooch handed down

I would turn up her sleeve myself

If I could I would dip into each colored well

And puncture her skin again again

With what very little I know of loss

### The Dead Thing

Everywhere the smell of death—not a figurative

sense of doom pervading every thought,

but real—in every room

putrid rot: something has died in our duct work

and there is no place the stench doesn't find us.

O effluvium of rat corpse, odor of mouse

droppings, funk from deceased bid. O miasma

of ancient raccoon jammed between joist

and cold aluminum, fetor of possum or mole

or maybe the neighbor's lost cat. Niff of decomposing

squirrel; whiff of skunk. The stink corrals us

in a single room we seal with plastic sheeting,

infuse with incense, windows open to morning mist

and autumn chill. For the first time

since our girl was a baby, the three of us bed down

and nest together, the creaks and midnight stirrings of one

nudging us all in and out of uncomfortable

sleep, perfume of night sweat mingling,

bouquet of hot breath fogging the vanity mirror.

Like a new litter we weave together until we wake,

cranky and confined and knit tight against the invading scent.

Oh, nothing lasts—good or bad. So, come time:

come you house flies and scavengers, you insects, mites,

beetles, larva, maggots, worms: do your work.

### Learning to Surf

OK, ocean:

I have forsaken

the glittering blue eye of lake

to play at the lip of your vast, frothy mouth.

I have memorized your comings

and goings, the tide charts, and the swell; I have

taken you into me by the gallon, let you

pin me beneath your strong arms,

and I have been grateful

for the seals beside me, infinity

in the distance, promise

of pleasure. I have tried

to walk lightly over sand crabs and muck.

I have learned not to turn away.

Let me stand on your shoulders,

drop into you and carve

my own hard line. I have been patient.

Show me what to do

with my failure.

after Maureen McLane

Adin Zeviel Leavitt

### Harvest

We have so many stories already written around us

like a safety net, like a straightjacket. When I say,

"Once upon a time," you know what sort of house I'm building.

When I say, "Boys will be boys," you know it really means,

"Boys will be men. Men will be weapons, after all

they were raised in an arsenal. Praised for the height

of their walls. Taught that a hero holds a gun,

is made in its likeness. Why should he be held while he cries?

Power is taken, not shared, and a hero does not cry.

Disarmament is weakness, and a hero must fear

the flowers that bloom in the soft fields of his heart."

In this story, a soldier is a hero and a gardener is not.

I am writing myself a new narrative.

In this one, manhood means believing that a garden

may not be as dramatic as a missile, but it lasts longer.

I have learned that loving the women

in my life means walking through the crowd

of hungry ghosts that other men have left behind.

I look them in the eyes: they are an ugly reflection,

for I know that I still have sharp edges

better suited to cutting skin than breaking soil.

But this I swear: to be a battlefield overgrown with violets,

tomato vines, and runner beans. To plant orchards in my violence.

To remember that my fear of the hurt

I can cause is a map of the work I must do.

I know I have left ghosts of my own behind

from the days when my love was not brave enough

to drop the clothes it was given and stare at itself naked.

How it was told that manhood means to take

before it means to hold, was taught that love looks

like a precious golden ring, a guarded thing.

That it is romantic to say "You are mine."

That somewhere in the architecture of love lies ownership.

One morning my lover and I sat in bed

with sex indenting the mattress between us,

heavy stone it can sometimes be. We stared

at each other across the weight of it.

They have been taught that sharing their body

is betraying it. I have been taught that a partner's body

is a belonging that should be shared. We have both

been taught that shame is an inheritance we deserve,

that we should blame ourselves for sometimes

being the string that breaks, the voice that cracks.

We have chosen to make a different way.

We are standing around a campfire fed with the pages

of an old children's book. It's the one with a tall tower

and a conveniently unrecognizable monster.

Where everyone knows their roles already, sword

and sewing needle waiting for hands that have no choice.

Where "he" and "she" are locked in the mirror,

a reflection without a key.

We are writing something new. In these pages,

shame is a suit of rusty armor half-buried in the soil,

with nasturtiums growing out between its gaps.

Here, the monster looks more like the ways we learned

to hurt each other. Victory is shaped like an embrace.

Here, wholeness holds its darker half.

He and she can leave those shapes behind

like a dress that has become too small,

a suit of armor that blocks the sunlight,

a locked up tower room.

This is the story of how to hold each other

like the mountains hold the sky, to adore

the way it never stays the same, to release

every kind of love that desires to contain.

### Drift

On Westcliff, the ocean stretching

into the horizon like hammered steel,

an old man walks a Chihuahua in a tiny vest.

A few tourists pass him, speaking quickly

in a language we cannot understand.

They point at the dog, their laughter bursts

like summer fireworks, a field of poppies.

When they are gone, he turns to the dog

and says, "It's alright, they were just talking

about how beautiful you are."

What strange flotsam accumulates

in our hearts as a lifetime drifts by.

### Checking In

Morning arrives like an eccentric hotel guest.

Maybe from Switzerland or some other place

with great chocolate and ice over the surface

of the water. I imagine a thick white beard

and tailored three-piece. An undercurrent

dark and iron as old blood. And what have

you got in your briefcase? Perhaps an afternoon

that opens like a piñata, all noise and color

and the gratification of simple desires.

Or lassitude, droll gray downpour. I hope

for that subtle delight that seeps under

the doorframe and through the shutters

like viscous light. Opens up the tightly locked

chest that holds wonder like a postcard

from the child you're certain you used to be.

Or one of those flowers that blooms only once

in a decade. The laughter that is its own beginning

and end. Anything but the bone-deep damp,

hopelessness that creeps quietly under

your skin like mold beneath old floorboards.

Maybe a book given by a friend who knows you

well enough to find you, Rorschach, in a landscape

bound in ink and pages. A self-contained feast.

A missed train of a day, face-full of pungent smoke,

frustration, the scramble to fit the hours together

into an acceptable puzzle. Or maybe a nap

in a swaying hammock: slow, easy, and enough.

### For Ricky

It's nighttime in Montana. The fields

and buildings and streets are drowned

in powder white. Twenty degrees.

The hitchhiker is walking on the side

of the snowy highway, and her posture

says she's been walking for a while. I pass

by, and my heart shudders like an engine

in the cold. I turn around at a side street,

and pull over. She gets in. Tired face,

a lip piercing, eyes too battered to pretend.

"I'm Ricky," she says, and, "been walking

since Gallatin Gateway." "That far?

And no one stopped?" "Everyone's got

their own fears," she says, "I don't judge."

I tell her I'm a writer. Interested in people's

stories. And she tells me. Picture the broken

home. Only she knows the specifics, but

we are all familiar with the scene. Seen

it too many times before, in friends,

on screens, in the past that trails behind

people like a whipped puppy. She got married

at twenty, met her soul mate a week later.

Had a child. Had a divorce. Moved all over

the country, left the soul mate to get clean.

Couldn't stay clean. Couldn't listen to music

for six months she tells me, it hurt so much.

Weeps in the passenger seat as she speaks.

Keeps moving to stay close enough to help raise

her daughter. Sees on the news that her soul

mate died. His memory is everywhere, still,

the way things could have been. As the years

pass your life looks less and less like what

you thought it was going to be. I won't leave out

the worst parts, but I won't try to make them

sound pretty. Like some beautiful wreck,

an old pirate galleon drifting down through

watery sunlight into the blue-green deep.

This is no metaphor, poetic tragedy, just the way

it is for some people. The rape. People you trusted.

The end of trusting. Sleeping in ditches.

Getting a home, a job. Losing them. And again.

Being broken back down to only a body

that feels less and less like your own.

Selling it to survive. All this time, wanting

only to love your daughter, to be good

for her even if no one ever showed you how.

Somehow remaining the kind of person

who spends your last two hundred dollars

bailing a friend out of jail, even without

a bed to sleep in. Who gets in a car

with a young stranger, and tells him,

"I go to sleep each night hoping I don't wake up."

This is a kind of courage I cannot imagine.

There isn't a reason I'm telling you this story.

Only that it was told to me. I just want

to share her storm with you for a little while.

It is all I have to prove she was ever there.

When I ask if I can hug her goodbye, she says

she doesn't know how, but she still holds me

tight as a life raft before she walks into the motel.

Jim Pascual Agustin

### The Wind is Not Strong Enough to Slam the Windows Shut

He roams a wilderness

in his head, the way an astrophysicist

might navigate numbers

to reach a point in space,

wary of drowning in darkness.

The veins on the backs of his hands,

roots that quiver when his heart

quickens. It's a struggle to sleep,

a struggle to stay awake.

Somewhere not too far

a neighbour's donkey

cranks out a mechanical cry.

He is reminded of empty chairs,

and of sheets on another bed

bearing shadows and creases.

### Stay a Minute, the Light is Beautiful

What I remember matters

to no one else: sunlight framed

by a window with broken glass

just before night says

"Now, it is I who will touch

your hands without permission."

Nothing can make me forget

the warmth, my own breath,

an approaching train, the beating

of an iron heart. No one will believe me,

for what is broken does not even show

the thinnest crack.

### The Enemy of Destruction

As a child just beginning

to explore the world, you had to carve

into memory all that might help you

find your way back home.

A streetlamp with a piece of blue wire

sticking out one side, a corner bakery

that lays out a new tray of bread dusted

with fine sugar an hour before the school bell rings,

an elderly neighbour who sweeps

the pavement beyond her property

without ever lifting her head. Everything

is a clue, a point of reference.

Nothing but nightmares can prepare you

for what might befall your city

when war takes over starved minds,

when orders are blurted out and turned

to mortars and chemicals.

Yet among the grey remnants, the countless

shattered squares of concrete, something persists,

defiant in its stand against destruction.

Something green, red and brown

hangs off a crumbling ledge,

perhaps a curtain blasted off

a window that overlooked

a busy street you used to roam.

A person you knew

once waved from that window

hoping you would wave back.

### The Trick is in the Laying of Blame, Not Just the Twisting of the Knife

He may yet forget the ragged

pattern in the skies

before the first bomb exploded,

the eyes of those

who could no longer take

another step, move another limb.

There are reasons evolution

hid the human heart under bones

that allow for room,

why the skull is so much

softer in youth, as in this boy

who crossed a desert alone.

Nothing in hand but a bag

of his mother's clothes wrapped

with lingering scent of bokharat.

### The Last Thing that Touched Your Lips

There was no resistance

when you loosened your skin,

unbuttoned flesh from bones,

slipped them off until you turned

transparent as water, shapeless

and silent as light through fog.

You got up and left without a sound.

No one saw you walk through

the unseen door which opens

to somewhere else. Ann,

I hope you can read this in that place

where you can now laugh

without doubling over. I'm glad

the last thing that touched your lips

was a thin slice of pink guava.

Timothy Walsh

### My Life in Bicycles

Like a lifetime's succession of pets,

apartments, or houses,

schools or best friends,

I can follow my bicycle timeline backwards,

the bicycles diminishing in size—

twenty-six inch, twenty-four, eighteen—

like an exemplum of Zeno's paradox.

From tricycles to training wheels,

banana bike to ten-speed,

mountain bike to city hybrid,

I loved them all—

thought of them as living things—

creatures with spirit, energy, soul—

vehicles to augment my quotidian self,

infusing speed, agility, balance

into my otherwise too-stolid days.

As a child—at the dinner table

or agonizing over homework—

I felt its presence parked outside,

waiting on its kickstand,

faithful as a favorite steed grazing placidly

until next saddled up, bound for adventure.

Even now, after a long day's work, a quiet dinner,

I think of it out in the garage—

perhaps take it out for a night ride—

speeding along the avenue, the twilight cathedral

of trees—

my legs turned to pistons on the pedals,

the spoked wheels whirring against the asphalt

powering the earth's giddy rotation like a child's hand

spinning a classroom globe.

### The Wellfleet Oyster

"In the 1850s Henry David Thoreau came tramping down the Cape and stopped overnight in the house of the Wellfleet Oysterman, and made him a fixture in American literature. But what bugged me was that Thoreau said not a word about the oysters themselves."

—Howard Mitcham, The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook

I didn't much care for Mr. Thoreau either,

though I do not begrudge him his interest in that old oysterman—

that vicious murderer and despoiler who ravaged

and decimated our population

where we rested placidly at peace in the soft sand

off Wellfleet harbor.

Why we must be hunted so voraciously,

our paradise plundered,

feasted on so enthusiastically, our flavor praised so highly—

as if this were recompense for annihilating us—

our shells discarded in great heaps, the world unmindful

of this pitiless genocide,

why, why, why is the question that consumes us

as you consume us, split open on the half-shell,

doused with lemon juice (how it burns!),

a dash of Tabasco (how it stings!)

_Mollusk_ , you call us, as if we were some lowly thing

akin to slugs, snails, and whelks.

Yes, we are indisputably the finest aphrodisiac.

We can make a dried and withered octogenarian

find his tent pole again,

inspire lustful smiles in the ardent

as they slurp us up.

We perplex and fascinate you with our binatural sexuality—

female one year, becoming male the next,

experiencing the pleasures of both,

the envy of Tiresias.

You glory in pearls, the oyster's gift,

string them around the neck of the one

you lust for,

dazzled by their iridescence as you suck our juices

off the half-shell,

ravish each other like barnyard beasts

and think nothing of pillaging our beds.

You say the world is your oyster—

but what does this make the world for us?

What justice is there in hirsute bipeds

feasting on defenseless bivalves?

Your bones will bleach as white as our shells—

this is my pearl of wisdom.

### A Poem Trying Hard Not to Be About Death

Perhaps all poems really are about death . . .

except for all those poems about love, I guess—

though love poems bring tears as well as joy

because we all know they'll become epitaphs soon enough . . . .

But then there are all those poems of new revelation—

you know the ones I mean—

when a startling, slanted way of seeing things

explodes in you like the taste of a fresh, cold grape,

making you realize how narrow our consciousness is

and how short its duration . . .

which I guess does bring in that whole death thing again . . . .

Limericks, then, limericks are certainly not about death,

not the usual salacious sort that call up a quick chortle

or a guffaw . . .

though the way that first rhyme spins around

and chimes with that final word

does make a circle, a circle not unlike

the endless cycle of birth and death—

and it's hard not to realize that even that buxom girl

from Nantucket

will one day kick the bucket . . . .

So here I will write an elegy for all poems about death,

have the last of these last words.

Here, I hand you an elegy for all those poets

who thought they'd write about springtime

but ended up writing about death.

It is a poem we never stop writing

as this country churchyard of a globe

spins our earth-encrusted bones in a perpetual waltz

across the vaulted ballroom of night.

### Singing the Alphabet

Now that I know my ABCs,

I never sing the alphabet anymore,

which is a shame.

The sheer joy of it, I remember, welled up

and out and over me as we sang—

the nursery school tables piled high

with those wooden alphabet blocks,

uppercase on one side, lowercase on the other.

Learning the mysteries of symbol and sound,

we gazed toward the foothills of adulthood

where people spoke so astonishingly aware

of the streams of letters corresponding to whatever

they said—their voices rivers of jumbled alphabets!

Teachers and parents who could so effortlessly secure

with ink

the silent sounds and scrawls of their thoughts . . . .

And so we sang, earnestly, proudly,

with a tremulous yearning to learn,

thinking of those mysterious storybooks

the older children read,

turning pages like doors, their eyes like flashlights

cutting swaths through the darkness.

So lately I have been singing the alphabet again—

walking by the lake, singing to the mallards

and geese along the shore,

singing to the busy muskrats, the gliding gulls,

the curious crows.

And it seems that they, too, would like to know

the quizzical mysteries of these gnomic sounds.

So I sing, learning and unlearning as I go,

now that I know with a knowing that unlocks

at least one secret drawer

of this labyrinthine world.

And as I sing, so does the crow—

rasping out its dark alphabet I'd sorely like to know—

while gulls glide on invisible updrafts,

riding the unseen syllables

of my herdsman's song.

Anna Hernandez-French

### Mis·creant

Crouched before a spider's web

a girlchild holds between

her thumb

and forefinger a

sky-bellied beetle, six

kicks

unheeded, she

has caught her eye along the whisper

of the light that plays

its fine vibrations

over eight-legged appetite, her

mouth

works on

a half-hope hum

in anticipation of empyrean

admonishment, she looks

up, but

Space

is a vacuum

and

with a flick of that divine

wrist made of rib

and ribbon

she throws her captive to the carnivorous

thread.

### San Bernardino lullaby

laid out in the garden a funereal

star stuck hand

in hand we breathe burnt

orange blossoms and the smoke

folds into valleys.

the mountains are burning, and

in school they say the very pines that burn are born

of flame, itself wombed within the sky, sewn

seed by seed through thunderstorms, white iron

heat

run hissing through the rain;

a miracle, and

they say

flames flicked off the quick

click of a cigarette

lighter, leap leaf to leaf to cleave

the sweet dry grass into ashes and

if pines be birthed in such a fashion they are silver

lines on tragedy. so

we watch the coalish

clouds build black

across the sky, till ashes fall like tea leaves

shape

the death-defying dying of the trees, or

perhaps

the molten mouth of our own

nicotine need. we chant

until our voices buzz like bees

that rise onebody

in their killer yellow

jackets, lift

one another up like soft white nothing

clouds, till each has had her turn in flying

free.

### Gardeners

To this day my mother is unfazed

by the sisyphean nature of a garden.

But in nurture she feared nothing more than our entropic tendency

toward anarchy, the graftlessness of being.

And we,

her most precious seedlings,

how she watched us

when the wind picked up, lest we be carried off

and scattered

far across the mountains, dropped into the sea and drowned,

or simply freed to wing across the sky.

As guard against

such leavening she hedged us in and rooted

us among her flowers, buried us

beneath the daisies, amid irises and bleeding hearts.

Our nursery was Sherwood, where the green was close

and clung

to sleeves or caught along

incorrigible hair. And

when summer overripened and our time grew

too abundant

she would prune the sweetest torpor

with her order:

pull the weeds that wrap their wastrel hands around the feet

of finer stalks;

snap the necks off roses, toothy hydras that will counter

their beheading

from the hip;

dig ditches till the daylight

pitches slowly into darkness,

hour after sodding

hour . . .

while behind us life made laughlines

of our borders.

### Hooked Up

I wasn't angling for anything

particular, grown cold

to shoals of flesh

and uniform

light bone. You

were out of season, something

temporal,

or so I thought

until

you soft moon-mouthed _I love you_

as you pulled

in too much oxygen,

and slept. I watched

the sun

cut edges to the sky,

watched a premature

beginning

suck the sand

beneath my feet like soup

from a spoon. And

in your wake I wondered

if that rufescent line

led back

to your unfettered

mouth

or mine.

### Watermelon Love

I've never liked watermelon

much.

the way the ripe ones ring hollow

as an unsound

foundation, how they gape

open, gum-colored on their delicate

white rinds and silently endure

dissection.

each time

the flesh gives sweet and dull beneath

my teeth I cringe as those raw gutters

gather.

I was told from babyhood

to swallow any

seed was invitation

to invasion.

and believed

that carelessness

could rise my belly

melon-round and inside

vines would coil,

thread between my bones

and build up such insatiable sunlonging

they'd push out

through ears and eyes, and press

upon my tongue to leave me speaking

only in

prodigious green.

but

the other day

I missed one,

or, better said,

I gave in.

and when I felt

a greening in my gut,

a fruitful ache

down in the pit of me,

I found

that perverse joy we take

in our own

supplantation.

J. L. Grothe

### Six Pregnancies

I.

Pen hovers.

Three options, check one:

Hospital will dispose of remains according to protocol for medical waste.

Funeral home will collect remains for burial.

Patient will postpone decision for up to fourteen days. If no other option is chosen, hospital will dispose of remains according to protocol for medical waste.

(How is that three options? Isn't it just two, really?)

Hand drops.

One call to a funeral home.

Er, um,

how much to bury an embryo

and a Fallopian tube?

Awkward.

Strong enough to rend a body, imperil a life,

small enough to be a baby,

big enough to hold a lifetime of dreams on its shoulders

—did it even have shoulders?—

too young to merit a coffin, a funeral, hundreds of dollars,

the fuss and sympathy reserved for a lost loved one,

too old to be unremembered, unmourned.

Scratch an X.

Option three it is.

II.

Daffodils erupt

in sunny hallelujahs

and an infant squawks.

III.

Desire begat Possibility,

Possibility begat Wish,

Wish begat Anticipation,

Anticipation begat Optimism,

Optimism begat Expectancy,

Expectancy begat Hope,

and Hope begat Plans.

Plans begat Apprehension,

Apprehension begat Unease,

Unease begat Agitation,

Agitation begat Rumination,

Rumination begat Foreboding,

Foreboding begat Consternation,

and Consternation begat Dismay.

Dismay begat Bleakness,

Bleakness begat Futility,

Futility begat Desolation,

Desolation begat Woe,

Woe begat Despondency,

Despondency begat Resignation,

and the woman begat nothing.

IV.

From ashes must rise new life.

This one will live

This one will live

This one will

This one

This

o—

V.

As a parent's hand shields a newborn's head,

detachment guards me, cynicism defends me.

Keep your scans, your tests, your explanations of benefits.

I do not want to view an unformed sac with no heartbeat

or to hear faux optimism that perhaps my dates were wrong

or to sit alone in the car and cry because I am not stupid.

The pain this time is physical.

Sensing what is to come,

not knowing what to expect,

I query Dr. Internet urgently.

"Cramping," says the Internet . . . as pains wash toward me, draw my entire focus, then ebb away.

Instinct rises up;

I pace, then groan.

I scour my memory for breathing exercises learned long ago,

never put to use during surgical delivery.

"Cramps"?

No, _contractions_. The cervix is dilating

—my first time in labor.

"Blood and tissue," says the Internet . . . as a perfectly intact sphere

carefully enveloping a tiny body

passes from its place of safety.

(How often does the Internet _understate_ something?)

VI.

Like droplets from parched earth, brief, bubbling joy

—and laughter: As was Sarai, so am I.

To carry home a healthy girl or boy

would bifocals and calendars belie.

A fledgling fluffs and stretches out its wings

—this longing, hatched and quite prepared to leap.

I tie it to the branch before it flings

itself to plummet in a feathery heap.

Long minutes, stitched by hand into each hour,

and hours, slowly cobbled into day,

expose my odious tendency to cower,

my trepidation when I try to pray.

A wail, embrace, and sweet new name lay bare

both fear and joy . . . and prod me, now, to care.

Sue Fagalde Lick

### Poor Girl's Barbie

I dressed my doll in rags,

squares of black corduroy

fastened with giant blue stitches,

holes scissored out for the arms,

a pink cotton wrap-around skirt,

a snippet of net on her hair.

Though her legs didn't bend,

she would dance like a dervish,

eyelids blinking like shutters,

cheeks smudged with dirt,

two fingers missing from when

my little brother kidnapped her.

Hinged at shoulders and hips,

she had breasts but no nipples,

no vulva, no hair down below,

just hard pink skin over which

her handmade dresses slipped

when she danced on her high-heeled toes.

She slept in a shoe box

on top of her tiny clothes,

wearing a flowered nightgown

made from an old flannel sleeve,

tiny gold teddy bear under her arm

so she wouldn't be scared in the dark.

Fifty years later, I open the box.

There she lies with her teddy bear,

one arm up and one arm down,

eyes closed to the smell of age and rot.

Should I dress her and make her dance again

or close the lid and let her sleep?

### Beauty Confesses

I'm the girl who dates the trolls,

the beauty who loves the beast,

the lamb who calms the bear.

Is it the glasses, the unpainted nails,

the tendency for pudgy thighs

or the broom that's always in my hands?

Was it the dad who wouldn't let me date

till all the artists and jocks were taken,

nothing left but the awkward ones?

I've dated the fat, the freaky,

the ones with bad teeth and breath,

the ones who couldn't get it up.

I've been with the drunks, the druggies,

the paranoid and the cruel,

devils and men who prayed all day.

Only once, I had a prince.

Oh, how we danced, how we loved,

spinning in each other's arms.

But the clock struck twelve, and he was gone.

I'm back in the woods with another troll,

a beast who says I'm beautiful.

No one has ever loved this beast.

I'll stroke his fur, pat his ample belly

and slowly teach him how to dance.

### Unlucky Purple Blazer Strikes Again

Help! My pantyhose are falling down.

Under the jacket, under the skirt, under the slip,

I can feel the waistband oozing south.

Please God, let it stop at my hipbone.

I need just one good upward tug,

but I can't in front of the whole damned church.

If I just sit, it won't move more,

but you know Catholics, sit, stand, kneel.

Okay. Reach in, grab some elastic, pull.

No, they're still coming down. I have to sneeze.

I can't reach my handkerchief, both hands

busy playing the "Lamb of God."

Sweet Lord, it's down to my navel now.

I pooch out my gut just to hold it there.

I almost overslept today. I thought

it was time to change the clock, but no,

at 3 a.m., I looked it up, discovered

it was 4. Fall back next Saturday, it said.

Oh God! It just slipped below my belly,

and now we've got to stand. Let us pray

sitting down for heaven's sake. I reach my hand

between skirt and coat, yank it hard this time.

I think I pulled my underwear.

I need to tie these things around my neck.

Father just gave me a look.

He knows not what I'm going through

here at the grand piano.

Jesus never messed with pantyhose,

nor did the old male organists.

No heels, no hats, no skirts, no slips.

Next week I'm going back to slacks.

### Next Stop: Convent

At 22, I was married

to a skinny man

with brown hair,

glasses,

a liking for booze,

cigarettes, and ass

and a disliking,

apparently, for me.

The church said

it didn't count

because

he didn't want kids,

and being Catholic,

you have to want kids

or never

have sex.

At 29, I was not married

to a chubby man

with curly blond hair,

glasses,

and a liking for Coke,

cruelty, and ass.

Yes he liked me

and he wanted kids,

but he wasn't quite

divorced, so,

me being Catholic,

I drove away,

alone,

just bruised

thank God.

At 33, I married again,

to a burly man

with brown hair,

glasses,

three kids,

and a liking for booze

and jazz, ass not so much.

But he loved me,

and he was kind,

also Protestant

and divorced,

so the church said

it didn't count,

our wedding

by a pond

with geese

in the sun.

But anyway,

he died.

At 63, I live alone

with my yellow dog,

blonde hair, no glasses,

a liking for Milk-bones,

belly rubs and grass.

We're both single.

The church

approves,

believes in fact,

I've never wed,

never loved,

never shared

a bed

with a brown-haired man

who liked booze,

cigarettes

or ass,

never rose

naked

and pleasantly sore

with a hickey

on my neck.

But who am I

to argue

with God?

### In the Garden with Jesus

We're all sitting in the chapel.

Was it foggy that night?

No, it's the incense wafting

from a bowl on a chain

(One year it set off the smoke alarm).

We're supposed to be quiet now,

praying in the garden with Jesus.

The apostles all fell asleep.

I'm thinking if women were there,

we would have stayed awake.

Women would have wept with Him,

hugged Him and wiped his bloody sweat.

Maybe they were stuck in the upper room

doing the dishes and cleaning up,

not even invited to the garden.

Just focus on the crucifix.

As the smoke begins to clear

parishioners are sneaking out,

keys rattling, zippers zipping,

rain pattering on the roof.

I try to feel the nails shoved

through my fleshy hands and feet,

but Lord, I'm weak. My earrings hurt.

I would have screamed, "Bring me down!

You're right. I am not God.

Just let me be a carpenter."

I'm Mary watching blood drip on the dirt.

I'm Peter. "I don't know the man."

I'm all those guys who ran away.

I'm Thomas who didn't quite believe.

So, Jesus on the cross.

Did he really wear a loincloth?

Did his toenails need a trim?

Is that a scar or a nick in the wood?

What color really was his skin?

Next to me, a Spanish man

sits erect, his eyes closed tight.

A woman kneels by the cross.

Lovely figure, snug-fit jeans.

Oh God, my mind, my mind.

Concentrate. Holy Thursday.

Jesus, God made man. Washed feet,

gave bread, prayed till Judas came,

died hard and rose again. Amen.

My stomach rumbles. Hungry.

Silence so deep it quivers.

White candles flickering.

Jesus up there, waiting

for me to hear his voice.

I shut my eyes. I try.

Abby Johnson

### Finding Yourself On Google Maps

I inhabit time as a native of dying,

and this too is a grave. Standing

in the streams of rainwater,

piled up behind the feet and ridging

where the skin touches stretches of swirling mud,

my body buried here, in the water,

the river running down

into ditches of concrete.

I am a native of moss decaying

its veiny darkness into darker blood.

I inhabit my feet as I look at them,

transcendent, quotidian, simple,

what is, in fact, nothingness itself.

I inhabit the beige-orange sky,

a sepia tone reality rushing fluid

across the reflection of streetlights,

and moving storm clouds, and the slow

fade of body into buried thing.

This hour on the cement riverbed,

beside the earth-swallowing rain water,

is a physical location too. It is a sedentary

eternality disguised as a grave marker.

### Nothing Is Named Until You Name It

The soft pink light is God

on this flight. Though I have

learned to be careful

with sharp invocations of divinity:

this light is pure, it is coral

echoing from the clouds below.

The chaste sunset

becomes a rose gold wine poured

into the glass of an empty chest.

This fading sky is your heart now:

treat it as such. Drink it

as such. Shake when the wind does

and no sooner.

Everyone hopes to be remembered

for this, and that is somehow

a measure of sunlight.

Before the light rose over the world's neckline,

before we swallowed the ocean,

we could not ever forget the ground,

and now we can do no different.

This heart is always a hanging.

It is always an ocean-swallowing ray

of modern thought. It is always

a plot of land praying to be forgotten,

waiting to be chased down with atmosphere.

### Poetic Definition

_Protect (v.)_ :

there is no future in

which we all

make it to the end

of this life with

enough of ourselves

intact.

_Engage (v.)_ :

I will surrender

my fingers to plugging

all the holes in our liferaft.

_Poet (n.)_ :

I will keep you

in the social consciousness.

I will die before I forget.

_Fear (n.)_ :

There is too much

water in the bottom.

_Engage (v.)_ :

I will jump out for us.

_Poet (n.)_ :

I don't care if you remember

me, just please say my name.

_Fear (n.)_ :

There is a turn in every poem.

I pray every day this isn't it.

Expect the worst as the poetic

form of survival, I am always

minding my pen.

_Protect (v.)_ :

Swear you will go down

with this empty vessel.

### Period Poem for a Theoretical Daughter

You will lie in your own arms

counting on one hand

all the lovers you will never have.

You will name them sun, moon, sky, and self,

You will name the last one power.

You will stain. Let the river run pure

down your canvas-legs,

river rocks in the soles of your shoes.

You will turn everything red, sun and moon

sky and self, and then you will make power

bleed. This is why they will never

love you: the harsh red tint

of your reckless body.

Shame is the thing innocence

gives birth to,

the swaddled child

suckled at the breast.

I leave my motherhood

everywhere

like lost keys and dishes

molding in the sink.

I leave my mothering

everywhere,

shining like anointing oil

on penitent foreheads.

I am sorry I cannot stop

womanhood from

hurting.

### A Millennial Experience: After Smash Mouth

A frozen yogurt place was playing All Star and now I miss my friends. The song hummed across the parking lot between me and the empty orange neon of a reincarnated frozen yogurt place. I was leaving a movie right as the sun turned the clouds black and the space between them a violent pink. The strains of the song crept over the misty air, hovering on the night's breath like cheap beer, a sweaty exhalation. The song of my people played straight through, did not become a parody of itself, though, of course, it always is.

And I was deeply sad, as though this, too, was already becoming fog. This frozen yogurt place is an ill-remembered child of a unforgotten and long gone childhood. We are not, even now, yelling along to words that are not actually in the song. We are not, even now, listening to parody after parody in the search for an unnameable authenticity. Give us something we can never know completely, and we will be ill-content and happy. Give us something we can only talk about and never name, and we will be forever in your debt. Give us something barely loved and we will proclaim it ours forever. Give us your huddled hurries, your starving sons, bedside advice, your oldest lasting dynasties. It is not about what you say, it is about what we do:

We kill corporations, watch unsympathetic as the flesh rots off, speak no elegies over things already dead, mourn only the things left living, like everything that wants attention. We are not, even now, drawing attention to ourselves, just trying to hear the music from across the street. The song makes cement and black dried concrete something organic, a formation of land always located within the encircling highways and other mall parking lots. This song is almost older than me. This mall is most definitely older than me. I have always danced under the same moon as these other living things, and that makes them organic, or, as organic as anything can be. We yelled the song from the crowd one day, yelled it and dared the years to start coming, and the trick was: we believed they wouldn't.

The frozen yogurt place turns off its light, but the song keeps playing over the speakers as I drive away. I can't keep talking about emptiness I feel in a system I did not create and still expect my grandparents to understand how tired I am. I think we chose the anthem we could, after being angry, and after letting dead things die. It isn't so terrible, not as I curve my car away from the sound. It isn't so terrible, I promise myself as the last shooting star falls to its knees right behind where the frozen yogurt place has always stood in my imagination.

Some scenes create themselves more in the mind than anywhere else and they stay there even after the past is something other people mock for existing. If you knew your history, you would be either more or less afraid, but it is impossible to tell.

Marisa Silva-Dunbar

### Here—people don't like to be forgotten

The poet, with red wine and her Cary Grant film collection,

misses the conversations you had in her living room

while you both danced to Run DMC.

The DJ boy who wanted to marry you—but never asked,

still wonders about the men you might've had

when the South American sky swooned over a stranger's kiss.

Your roommate drank chamomile tea with you on nights

when your sentimentality and hiccuped tears kept sleep away. She helped

pour Clorox down the drain when slugs bubbled up in the old bathtub,

laughing as you took turns pushing them down with a broken broomstick.

She waits to hear your sing-song weeping over boys

who don't matter.

You and your freshman best friend went backpacking around

the Aegean. You kissed her sun-warmed cheeks, felt

she should be embarrassed when she sauntered around town in Daisy Dukes,

and was a flirt-monster with the men and their wives.

She stares at pictures, the calendar, thinking about where you went,

why you don't call.

Even I (and I know the chaos I caused) think about:

cooking with a forbidden store-bought jar of sauce,

how you wanted me to teach you the shaky-shaky dance,

or when you'd glare at heartbreaker boys at the bar.

It's easy to know what we miss—what moments

we want you to cling onto—even as you wish

them into ashes.

### Daisy

On moving day, I found her in the kitchen arranging a bowl of apples.

Her skin was bronzed—hair bleached by the Grecian sun.

She spent her summer sleeping on the beach, saving baby turtles in the morning.

At lunch she made veggie sausages—poured too much oil in the pan,

served them with a puddle of ketchup and a wilted salad on the side.

She let one of the guys make her a dinner of noodles in a black bean sauce,

cooed when he called her bonita—a word he picked up traveling through Spain.

She charmed the rest of the boys when she stretched her legs out on the table,

the black tights hugged the muscles in her calves, denim mini crept up her thighs.

For weeks she waited for them instead of braving the long walk with us girls,

on our nightly trips to the pub. Once there she'd stand near the bar, lean into them,

vodka lemonade in one hand, the other on their lapels throughout the night.

Even then I liked her—two front teeth too big for the rest of her mouth, lips in a natural puff,

her beaked nose and asparagus colored pug eyes reminded me of my 5th grade best friend.

In my homesickness I liked that small comfort.

### Polly: The Girl Next Door

Ken made her a steak dinner with roasted potatoes,

frisée salad with lemon vinaigrette,

and strawberry pie for dessert (his version of seduction).

They spent most of the night making out

on his worn blue comforter.

When he couldn't get hard after she got naked,

she left.

But Ken was nicer than her boyfriend

who got annoyed when they went out clubbing

—she was too friendly

(he said she was two-faced).

He laughed when she wore high-heels

and lingerie to bed, said she was trying

too hard to be like the girls in magazines.

He drove too fast down the thin winding streets,

when she whined about how he watched Sasha Grey

on the nights he went home alone.

Ken wasn't hot like her first boyfriend, the Venezuelan

who bit her lips and pulled her hair when they kissed—

made her watch in the mirror as he fucked her from behind.

She felt awkward with him, never knowing

what language to call out in.

It ended when she found out he was luring

other women into their bed.

Polly can't be alone for more than a month.

After the men are gone, so are their photos and T-shirts—

she builds a hole for the next one—longs for the whirlwind,

someone who won't keep her home, and she wants _you_

to be jealous.

### Frisson

He smells like spices,

orders Manhattans, and beer.

He plays the steel guitar; his songs sound

like the Pacific at the edge of dawn—

I feel the hum of electricity.

### Spectres

Here we are—haunted by the same ghosts.

With you they are angry, ignored.

You wake up with the taste of sulfur

on your lips, cabinets are left open,

spoons in towers, your purse hidden

under the couch cushions. You never know

where cold spots will appear,

the chills poking at the nape of your neck.

They've made the walls bleed,

but you just place the blood soaked rags in a closet

no one uses anymore. They send lovers away

with static crackling the air, warning

that your home will never be welcoming.

They're waiting for their rage to get a reaction.

I have built them altars,

make weekly offerings of wine

and marigolds—leave a covered plate

with bread and honey, burn incense

before bed so when they wander through my dreams—

they don't cause foundation shaking nightmares.

Sometimes when I turn my back, they place items on my nightstand—

things I thought I'd lost forever (a drawing of you, an earring you left

at my place, a photo of us sipping on strawberry margaritas).

I never feel loneliness in my bones

because I catch glimpses of the ghosts in the mirror,

feel a hand brush my cheek in the minutes before waking.

When waiting in line at the coffee shop,

you'll confess you want an exorcism. You worry

they'll follow you from place to place, pop up

just when you think you're settled. You know

no matter how thick and cozy the rug—

they won't hide under there forever.

But I've heard them whisper about you, when I've stayed up late washing dishes:

they want you to acknowledge the apparitions, admit—

you're more afraid of the silence they'll leave behind if they go.

Merre Larkin

### The Dandelion Days

He was small then. Condensed.

His fleshy stubby legs would carry him through fields,

his soft virginal hands touching everything.

He'd bring me, proudly, with all the love

his miniature heart

with its bursting intentions

could beam,

a dandelion.

I'd put it in a juice glass on the counter,

longing for it to stay

that way.

Captured in time, so briefly,

so yellow.

### 78 East

I hold his hand to cross the road. At some point, he stops taking my hand. At another, he vehemently pushes it away. Now we are on opposite sides of the road but walking in the same direction. What if he turns to go the other way?

I am driving on the highway. He is in the passenger seat, his angst as always present in the shadows of his face. I don't know what to do about that anymore.

He glances sideways at me and I catch a pleading in his eyes. But when I make a move to cross, his face contorts into a storm.

" _Mom, you know how I've been having kind of a bad week?"_

I see his fists clench at his side and I instantly think he must blame me for everything that our lives have turned out to be.

" _Well, I've kind of been having a bad year."_

I want to hold him, tell him none of it is his fault. He is the light that came into my life when everything else was falling apart. I stop walking and turn my body to stare helplessly across the road to him. Please, my child, let me in.

" _Mom, I'm gay."_

He stops walking. He slowly turns to face me and brings his eyes to meet mine. We search each other for answers. Let there be some.

" _Are you sure?" (What a fucking stupid thing to say.)_

The cars are flashing by us but it doesn't matter. We've connected beyond time and place, past and future, all of it.

" _Yeah." (Gentle with me, relief in his voice.)_

All of a sudden, it's only us, mother and child, the cars are gone, the road disappears, and we're transported to a field of wildflowers growing up around us, recklessly, haphazardly, radiantly.

" _Okay."_

I reach out to him and he lets me. His head leans hard on my shoulder. I hold him close.

### Sensing June

I smell

parched earth

drinking in

soft rain.

I taste

dusty heat

steaming off

oppressive

pavement.

I see

its cloud

envelop

our travels.

I hear

my son's

footsteps

beside me.

I feel

his height

hovering,

gentle,

anxious.

I sense

his thirst

like the

earth's.

We walk,

side by

side, and

I want

to tell

him.

Cascades

of clear waters

will drench

his eager soul

and he too

will know

what quenched

feels like.

But it

won't help.

Savannah Grant

### The Day After Your Birthday

Lying on the floor like a cat, you, unhuman, so they will come and sniff you and I want to ask how you have been lost. I drive under the darkness of our mother's inherited poverty, an unexpected wooden cross on Jewell Hill, a dirt road in light so November, I forgot to get gas; there are no answers. The day after your birthday it happens every year, our mother remembers me. I give you a blueberry popsicle and you cry when she calls you. Some devil blows through her junipers, chocolate wine taken down from pantry shelves but I won't kill myself today because I don't think like you do, baby sister, you just don't seem to care. Sing tura-lura-lural, tura-lura-lai: there's a picture of her in a ballet dress and my arms fall the same way her arms did at my age but even so I will not fall the same onto hardwood floor's grit. It's just scrambled eggs up there, knots in the yarn, baby sister, it's why you won't learn how to drive. A rooster crows from the basement; sing: tura-lura-lural, tura-lura-lai; now she's just chicken shit, all the lights on at 3am.

### My Head Is A Kitchen

1

my head is a kitchen

filled with smoke

breathe in burned butter

I don't remember

what I do when I leave

but it settles on all the windows

2

a March night isn't necessarily evil but

it wants to remind you of something

with the windows finally open

the air smells like insects in a way

that reassures the end

of winter but habits cling

like fog throwing back high beams

and some chill

in spring's heatwave

3

all this grief

all this lying

on the floor all day

like tar it sticks

drips from the corners of my mouth

he bought ivory sheets

when I wanted plaid

4

and how easy it is

to be picked up off the floor by my elbows again

just to cut carrots for dinner at 10pm

### Bearclaw In December

1

I still have the hunting knife

you gave me

although the other two were lost

at baseball games

you loved to give me things

anything I looked at

New Mexico pottery and plastic trucks

even at nineteen

back against the electric fireplace

not sure where to look when your missing toe

told stories of the Citadel and General Lee

glory grew a white beard and couldn't leave

the brown leather chair

2

You and the sheets

were made of blood spots

thin Christmas carols mixed with radio commercials

only linoleum gleamed

I left as old people gagged in the dining room

onion rings and fried chicken

sweet potato fries

coleslaw

all wasted in front of hanging head

and eyes I wouldn't see open again

I couldn't wash the salt from the back of my throat

we wait

in a way it's already done

we all end up with our faces covered

in who knows what

3

It wasn't you there

wearing the clothes we picked out

they got your smile wrong anyway

we rested our arms over our heads like you used to

in between shaking everyone's hands

in our new black shoes

someone said I was your raging river

the drive home

I told my sister the Carolina fog came down for you

the sun the next day almost like spring

a bugle humming taps

I cried only when

you were above that irrevocable hole

yet our great-aunt can still make us cheese toast

and we can laugh in your kitchen

comparing dresses

and how we're all drawn to bagpipes

I can carry your coffin

and eat a roast beef sandwich

in the same damn day

### Saint

If I cry over a cat

it means they will die

and my wet hair brushed your head

I wanted to draw how your paws were locked, folded

wrapped in your favorite sheet

covering your face, grinning

and open with pain

I watched my dad dig two feet down

in a sweaty shirt

the way August shows you

how death

smells like cold new dirt and an old white sheet

and sounds like many birds

### Indian Summer

across the third rail

someone babbles about faggots

and a last October wasp

clicks against the subway light

these are the days

I guess

of waiting

to fix ways I thought shouldn't be like this

Andrew Kuhn

### The Bacchae, June, Alberta

On a cold dawn run by the black lake's shore

snow still heaped in the lee of firs

low mist seethes like a bad idea

glides across the face

of the waters

seeping wisps

over broken road

and you hear the reckless rider gallop up behind

what the hell

but turning to let them pass

you're wrong

it's a mother elk

recently calved

primed to stove in with one quick kick

the head of a wolf that might swing in close

to her black-eyed tottering all-in-all

and she's cut you off by the low thorn brush

wheeled and with a wedge of hoof

split hard air like a billet of wood

in front of your forehead

and you try in what little Elk you know

to tell her you come here not as a wolf

although in the fall you stalked her father

but her tongue deserts you

so plunge aside

and break the mirror

the lake has made

for the sky

from a glacier

and learn to your bones what it costs

to cross

a local god

### In the Glass House

"The cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs, forming the main motif of the house, was not derived from Mies, but rather from a burned-out wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but the foundations and chimneys of brick." __ —Phillip Johnson

On the springtime coverlet of a little Eden just after sunset

the box of glass floats

and the master builder, alone,

bored with empire, bored with excess, bored

with getting away with it,

imagines himself a prince, back-lit, disrobing,

teasing his subjects

who crouch in the bush like refugees.

This land is my land.

##

Somewhere out in the dark the family tree blossoms

laddered with shrewd poltroons

who pitched Mannahattas off the Palisades.

Old money new money

money accruing it

never stopped . . .

In the massive, shuttered childhood homes

the Daughters of the American Revolution

passed for parvenus.

Now the prince sheds veils that shimmer of abalone,

tarpon scales skimming in moonlit pools.

This land is my land

##

Not all of the pure products of America go crazy . . .

Some live forever

and grow rich, grow richer, praised to the skies.

Before his pampered chin grew whiskers

aluminum made him a jazz-age Croesus,

the protean century's chosen element

shiny ubiquitous light fantastical

spinnable as silk, spun worldwide into

safety razors, throwaway cans

fighter jets, shining skyscrapers.

Rich as Proteus the god

he grew, immune to limits

the Depression for instance

and ordinary life

transcending pedestrian rights

or wrongs, free to float

an ecstatic excursion descending on Poland

in the blitzkrieg's vanguard

burning villages

thrilling the night

This land too

This land is my land

##

Then home to celebrate the ruination of the Jews—

print panting tributes to _Mein Kampf_ ,

throw bricks of cash at Huey Long and Father Coughlin

avatars of radio hate scouring American prairies and hollows

and trick out muscled Nazi squads in custom fitted uniforms

swooning to witness their strutting marches

erect through the squares of Homeland hometowns.

The money flowed and bore him up.

He stockpiled weapons and flirted with learning

to shoot

##

When it became more widely noticed that these enthusiasms

stank of treason

the money served and the talent too

to float him up and out of harm's way

the postwar Proteus morphing into—

no architect, merely—but more

and more the transcendent hero of material culture

the One to decree to each new generation

what is to be

the next Big Thing.

##

As the impudent mandarin

forgives himself everything

the new Canaan in need of mandarins

forgets the unforgiveable—

celebrating the brilliant Glass House,

his see-through palace

great wink at the world

the joke nobody wants to get . . .

This land is my land

##

But entranced this soft summer night

all alone in his gorgeous deceptions

the great man

is suddenly spooked:

naked and still, in view of the trees.

Now gather shifting mobs

of shadow.

And he hears behind the mosquito whine,

tree-frog racket, suburban cough

of a car turning over

the click and whisper

of baffles and dampers:

history, not entirely hushed.

##

He slides open a panel in the façade,

flees the crouched and listening world.

Before him squats the cylinder of brick

like a factory smokestack sheared by a tank round.

Light startles a brilliant frame

through which he slips

and disappears.

On the chimney's far side

a hearth is blazing.

To the ghosts on the lawn it looks as if

at last he too

has walked into

an oven

### Plains Weather

When you wake up

if you wake up

will you see the ceiling has flown far away

or maybe just into the muck pond

down the road where cattle cool their shanks

and switch away the flies, except

the pond's been sucked up to the sky

as well?

The threads that came from Hong Kong or the new place

they now make the shirts that celebrate

your everlasting Oklahoma City Thunder—

will they come apart in shreds as fine

as sphagnum moss

and flutter on the updraft high enough

to find their ways back home?

Oh gosh I hope so.

Had about enough of you,

and this heat.

Catherine Wald

### Against Aubade

Tonight ensconced in your firm fragrant arms,

As tender as new bride and blushing groom,

Tight swaddled, warm, as in the rounded womb,

Let's hold each other close and bless our stars.

Protected from dark morning's dawning gloom

And day's insistent, breast-beating demands,

We think, not with our brains, but with our hands—

Two shuttles, back and forth, across a loom.

Redeemed, replete, released from tales and lies,

Misunderstandings, quarrels and remorse,

Inevitable failures of discourse,

In silence finally our tongues grow wise.

Bedazzled by kind nighttime's sweet deceits

We dread the dawn's unraveling defeat.

### Birthday Lunch

What I wanted to say was, you're still the most beautiful

woman in the world. It's kind of nice to see you.

I've been dreading this all week.

What I wanted to say was, I refuse to dredge any more

lakes for your dead bodies. I don't have the credentials to

absolve you. If it's my birthday, how come you get all the goodies?

What I wanted to say was, I love the way you laugh at my jokes.

There is so much about me you'll never know.

Why do you have to be the gift that keeps on taking?

It kills me that I still love you—another thing I didn't mention.

What I wanted to say was, you birthed me, but I created myself.

What I wanted to say will always stand

between us.

### Death and the Rainbow

We began our flight with

gaily colored globules—

all the bubble gum a

five-year-old could

possibly

chew.

We touched down in a kind of

Oz where oranges grew on

trees instead of in plastic

netted bags from the

supermarket.

Fairy-tale Florida!

Sun shone, palms shimmered,

clean-smelling aqua

splash pools punctuated

every lawn. Houses

wore tropical shades that

made my mother's red

lipstick look almost

sad.

I do recall an ambulance.

I saw men carry my grandpa

away on a stretcher.

He was sick, which is much

easier to understand

than dead.

But what I remember best was

the rainbow, my first. When my

mother parted the curtains, pointed

at what until that moment had

been myth, I knew something

important had happened.

### Journal Entry

She keeps her old journals

in her old bedroom

in plain view.

How I envy her!

She assumes

as I once assumed

a daughter's trust

isn't temporal

like anesthesia.

Her heart's chambers

haven't been slit or

scrutinized by

maternal surgeons.

Structurally sound

she stands firm

inviolable.

I love to see,

I love to watch,

the light flash in

her eyes.

Joe Couillard

### Like New Houses Settling

Dressed in our blue trousers and our white polo shirts,

we stood bashfully in two lines while we waited for church,

always two lines.

Had it ever been quiet you probably could have heard our knees and ankles crackle

like new houses settling on their foundations,

but thankfully it was never quiet.

We weren't Catholic,

but when my dad left we had to move.

Mom said we can pretend to be Catholic or I can go to that school with no windows,

I said I would do my best to pretend.

I don't think you were Catholic either,

but I knew it wasn't polite to ask,

so I didn't.

My uniform was too big.

Mom found it at the school's summer yard sale.

It hung loosely around my shoulders,

begging me to fill it.

I hated that shirt.

Mrs. Vanderczyk said we weren't supposed to hate things,

but I hated Mrs. Vanderczyk so it was all very confusing.

One day in gym class I accidentally held your hand.

We were playing capture the flag and I rescued you from jail.

My brother said that it didn't count,

but to me it did.

My hand was sweaty.

Yours was too so I think it was okay.

I used to believe you were too good for this place,

that the stench somehow couldn't stick to you.

In fact I was sure of it,

but then your mother overdosed and everything changed.

You cried at the visitation, and your cheap mascara ran like gutter water.

I think it was the first time you ever stood upwind.

My mom and I started bringing dinner to your house on Tuesdays.

Your dad would drink half of a bottle of wine and cry.

We got to eat TV-dinners in your room.

You told me you felt bad for hating your mom for dying.

I told you I hated Mrs. Vanderczyk.

You laughed,

so we sat on opposite sides of your twin-sized bed,

hating things together.

### A Hotel Bed

Unable to sleep despite the early hour and your shared evening,

you lie awake in a hotel bed

watching the sunrise undress the virgin snowfall.

You feel guilty.

She wasn't yours to undress.

She may not be someone else's,

but she certainly wasn't yours.

With the anesthetic of whiskey and rebellion long gone,

the absence on your hand burns

like a soldier's leg forgotten overseas.

Over and over you hear your wedding band ping against hardwood

softened by the denim of a back pocket,

a muted gavel falling.

You want to roll over and look at her,

but you're terrified of what you may see:

a mother's nose,

a father's eyes,

features previously masked by a short skirt a bar lighting.

"I didn't mean for it to happen."

It sounds hollow in your head already,

and it will rattle even emptier when she reads it in a text two days from now.

"We can still be friends,"

will be her Abilenian reply,

but after it's all said and done she won't sleep for a week,

and you'll donate 300 dollars to a strip club on Hennepin and 6th.

You'll see each other again,

on accident of course.

You'll hug and say hello,

but your Chinese food will be getting cold,

and she'll be late for a meeting,

so you'll part ways like you should have from the start.

### The Man Outside the Arena

I woke up with a dream of writing a novel,

but by noon I cut it to a short story,

and by dinner I pared it down to a poem,

and then eventually I gave up and just tweeted it.

It could have been my breakthrough,

my masterpiece,

a wonderful idea that instead I distilled into 140 characters,

a vision I traded for vibrations

instant gratification in my front right pocket.

I wish I could blame my luck,

but I was born a healthy white male.

And now I can't blame my generation

because a Millennial is the 6th richest man in the world.

I can't even blame my parents.

They didn't adorn me with trophies nor smack me with a wooden spoon.

I can only blame myself,

my ego,

my crippling fear of not being liked,

so crippling in fact that I'd rather create nothing

fluff

bullshit

than create something that someone might not get.

Marred by dust and sweat and blood,

Roosevelt stares at me from inside the arena.

I cannot meet his gaze.

I look down at my phone,

waiting for it to light up and save me.

Faleeha Hassan

### In Nights of War

My mother forced us to go to sleep before sunset

She told us the warning siren will take the sleep from your eyes

Just as the raid will take the houses from their streets

We run toward everything

We eat from fear of running out of food

We drink water without thirst

And like chicks

We crawl into her abaya

And sleep without sleeping

At dawn

We run toward the windows

And open our eyes wide

When we start counting all the destroyed houses around us

And thank God for the blessing of sleep

### My Father's Feet

When I was a kid

I saw them

Running

And

Running

After the bus

That took him to his job every morning

And returned him to us late every day

Carrying so much love in his heart

And bags of food

To our souls and our mouths

Starving forever

Running

After our school books

Which we were covering with our prayers

To protect us from the sticks of our principal and teachers

Running

After my mother

Whose days all finished in different hospitals

And when I grew up a little bit

I saw them

Still running

But in military boots

For days never ending

Covered with dust from Khorramshahr* and Dezful* And when he stretched out his feet on the floor

We all ran to them with joy

And like a big pillow filled with dreams we slept on them

*Two Iranian cities where the Iran – Iraq war was fought in 1980

### War Museum

Whenever the dictators get bored of their long daytime hours

Which they spend sitting on their stinking chairs

They open the door to their War Museum

And force us to enter

We pay with our lives as a ticket for this entry

To see :

The remains of soldiers we played with in our childhood

A picture of my grandmother

Who, when she saw the oppressor's face

Predicted our orphans would come soon

A Picture of my father's military boot

Which he lost on the border of a city

We thought belonged to us

Maps of cities where......

There is nothing left but their names

Melted onto the tongues of kids

Women's abayas chewed up by the treads of tanks

Medals who could not find a deserving chest to hang on

Large jars filled with the tears and sorrows of mothers

And

Helmets

Helmets, helmets

Helmets, helmets, helmets

Of unknown soldiers

But......

On the door of this museum They put a big red sign "No Exit"

### Raising the war

Like a pet

The tyrants raise the war

At first, they feed it

Their sick dreams

Their reviews of the soldiers under the heat of the summer sun

Maps they have imagined for their conquests

Speeches they have written in dark rooms

The future of our children

And when that war grows

It chews away at us

Every day

Every hour

Every moment

Like a ruminating anima

### When I Hear the Siren

I remember

Like birds afraid of their feathers catching fire

We scrambled to hide

Whenever we heard the siren

My little sister's voice hits the walls of the room

She screams

!Hold me

As she stands still in her place

And her eyes sink into a sea of fear

Words break on my tongue

We run towards our mom and we hold her hands tightly

And our whole little world begins shaking from the roars of the fighter planes Now

I thank the siren a lot

Every time I hear it

It reminds me of the taste of my mother's hands

When she was training hard to strengthen our thin roots

Olivia Dorsey Peacock

### Thelma

i.

for as long as I can remember

her dedication to morning routines was unparalleled

her silence

miffed

but blaring gospel music

warmly carried me out of bed

and down stairs

for sausage links or bacon

always with pancakes

and orange juice with pulp.

I loved to make her laugh.

And would

chase her around the house with a camera—

the game conceived from a fear

of permanently remaining

imperfect on film.

Watching game shows

confidently declaring the prices of

Clorox bleach

among other commodities.

Making fun of fancy ladies

while playing make up

in the mirror.

Her laughter announced

her presence in this life

from a stoic seat

in that dining room chair

or her scrunched up nod-off

spot on the TV couch.

I kept thinking

if I made her laugh

Grandma would have no reason

to fall asleep.

ii.

the sensual dance of crazed

delusion

glee within the

charred remains of a

spick-and-span

misfit

held against the restraints

of her own reality

binding her petite Black frame

to stiff, rollable one

'll fix it

the wine'll fix it

the second one'll fix it

the pills'll fix it

whispered

Fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it

is this why Bill traveled?

what did the voices tell her?

how long until it burned it all away?

innocent faces on glossy yearbook print

chuckled under a nice, retiring char

_I tried to_ —

" _be a good wife_ "

_amid the voices_.

iii.

pinot carried angel kisses in each sip

each stem a rung

bottle the wrong key

for a gate that wasn't ready for her yet

I made an angel

did I need to make another

and try motherhood twice?

I had plenty

_of practice_

flying with the pillows

_if I collapsed,_

_pressed my face_

_into the cushion_

I could almost see

the

_view from the clouds_

_kicking my heels, confetti to the lives below_.

iv.

happiness was at the bottom

of an egg custard pie

where ferries sailed away

and to Beacon lights ice cream in hand

scuttling children leaping

thin brown bodies in thick coats on thick decks

to retreat to warm rooms

and sweets from father's dirty quarry hands

mother at the oven´s edge

creasing lips into poised, anxious

unspoken passages and a voice into

a tickled clink.

v.

her favorite photograph

froze her in 1964

her senior picture

a bobbed haircut just

the right amount of frizz

arched horizons

to shield chocolate eyes

from dreams into the distance

( _As a student I—_

" _studied business secretarial."_ )

slightly aloof

shaken

of a blemish free promise

meant to fill in the blanks

( _My ambition was—_

" _to become a secretary."_ )

mouth barely open

as if the photographer

forgot one little thing—

flashing too fast to capture

smile's full essence

( _My Mother taught me to value—_

)

but to her, it was perfection

punctuated with swift penmanship

Mother

with all my love

Thelma

Sarah Louise

### Tremors

I.

Hippie farm near

Thunder Bay

sauna made of barn

board harvested from

neighboring abandoned fields

inside two kerosene lamps a

bottle of red wine some home

grown Mary Jane six

steam cleaned friends and lovers

starlight visible through knot

holes

deep winter

snow ready to seal their

pores

Twenty years later

state of the art Finnish

sauna in town

Christmas snow falling on

reunited friends as

they enter

disrobe

ladle water onto hot

river rocks

sit on rich redwood benches that

feel like silk on slick

skin

The air between them steams

open like oyster

shells hands reach for each

other wrap thick warm white

towels around torsos

bring ceramic sake

bowls to moist

lips

contented unraveling

tongues

II.

A loud bang, not like a backfire or car crash or battery of rifles at a military funeral. Black and white checkered linoleum floor under old clawfoot bath tub begins to vibrate. Surface of water in the tub pops gently as if peppered by many tiny pebbles. Bather brings her knees to her chin, hugs her legs, holds her breath. It's 8:30 on the morning of May 18, 1980, her 30th birthday which she will celebrate that evening. She doesn't know Mount St. Helen's has just exploded. When the shaking stops she takes her turquoise terry cloth robe from the peg on the wall and slips into it, amused for a moment by the iffy introduction to her third decade.

Water swirls down the drain faster and faster, as magma and melted ice will soon cascade down the mountain pulverizing trees and cabins, disappearing animals and humans. The birthday girl goes to the south window of her kitchen, sees what might be mistaken for a mushroom cloud by someone less upbeat. She tunes into local radio, hears the news. Friends who haven't called for months make contact, talk in tones that imply the world is about to end. She begins to wonder if ash will reach Vancouver, if the sky will darken.

After dinner at her favorite curry house she lets burning candles on the cake drip wax onto the cheerful lemon icing as though crying for all the life taken unawares that day. When she finally blows them out, everyone at the table feels a little older. They raise glasses to more subdued toasts, close ranks around fragility, go home at a reasonable hour.

III.

Teenage girl genuflects before

her mother's early morning anger

needs bus fare to get

to school

Middle age mother takes

change from nightstand throws

it at the uniformed girl leans

back on her pillows

Girl collects coins from

deep pile of the carpet runs

out to the bus

stop late for her first period class again

Mother back in bed by

three when girl comes

home with a note from the

principal

From behind her back

girl takes a clear glass

vase of burnt orange

gladiolas picked from the neighbor's yard

Mother watches girl place

flowers on the cherrywood dresser

careful not to spill any water

I thought they might cheer you up

the girl says slipping the

note under the vase

Mother doesn't ask where she got

them doesn't speak at all

won't see the note until the gladiolas

wilt

IV.

Professor Arlene's head shakes

yes then no then yes as she

does the double helix dance with

her nursing students to

teach them about DNA

Her voice is unsteady too

when she conducts the class

in a rhythmic

recitation of human

bones and their

connections

Sparks from nerve

endings jolt food from

her hands make lunch a solitary

task in a space

cleared on her office

desk

It's called essential

tremor Arlene tells a

new friend and colleague

one weekend

I'm not supposed to smoke or

drink but

They take a chance

split a beer

feel fine split another

Arlene lights a cigarette they

move to the front

porch

Show me the dance

the new friend

says keeping time by

tapping her Hopi pinky

ring on her

glass

It takes two

Arlene says

coaxing her friend to

her feet with

words temporarily less

tremulous

Head and hands on

leave from jumpy muscle and

bone

V.

Anxiety Reaches Epidemic Proportions, says the headline of a local newspaper. People in doorways, coffee shops, offices, cars. On street corners, TV reality shows, smartphones. Kids at school, parks, friends' homes. Pets under tables, chairs, beds. One teenage girl sums it up while her mom buys two six packs of Heineken at a convenience store on a Friday night. I'm dying here, she says. No you're not, mom says. Yeah I am, mom. The world is going to hell. Mom.

The cashier gives them a complimentary lottery ticket with the receipt for the beer. He wishes them luck, trying hard to delete the skepticism from his face, voice, hesitant hand.

Kimberly Russo

### Inherent Injustice: a tribute to Trayvon Martin (February 5, 1995-February 26, 2012)

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lion's share of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

—Coates, Ta-Nehisi. "Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice." The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 15 July 2013.

With a plastic syringe,

I dispense three beads

of water to the hushed

beak. He is dying—

quiet and ethereal

in my hand. Meager efforts

evolve too late and fail to

assuage the institutionalized

condition from which it

suffers. A murder of crows

shriek in violation and barrage

the airways with outrage.

Apathy settles on alabaster

masses. Eyes reflect the distortions

of a whitewashed mind.

But I can't erase a youthful

flight. Innocence unaware, the predator's

proclivity—ruin.

The embodiment of ignorance

breeds a "perceived threat."

A coward's bullet explodes

your heart. I am left to consider

unwavering racism

amidst the velvety feathers.

### My Mid-Life Crisis Rap

Why dontcha wake up and see my face?

It's a shame for my all my change to go to waste.

Why dontcha wake up and stop my lies?

It's a shame for all my love to slowly die,

love to slowly die,

love to slowly die.

I'm not certain when it settled in.

But somehow one day I was broke and bent.

Deep inside I underwent a subtle discontent.

Lyin' still, all my energy spent, fatigue's intense.

Even though the heart repents, my brain invents

Excuses for lies, flight unrestrained,

No matter how it's ascertained, hara-kiri, I'm causin' pain, attention gained.

And when it's time to pay the price, he blames me.

He restrains me, and I hate it.

"Stop! What are you doing?"

"I'm living life!"

"Shit. Can't you abstain?"

"I can't keep you chained."

It makes me crazy, cuz we had it all, beyond a doubt.

I fucking loved him and proud of him, day in, day out.

Then I drown in the madness, and I freak out; I choke.

Who are you?

Keep that crazy self-contained!

I eat his trust and leave him stranded bare and drained.

The story of my marriage stained.

Why dontcha wake up and see my face?

It's a shame for my all my change to go to waste.

Why dontcha wake up and stop my lies?

It's a shame for all my love to slowly die,

love to slowly die,

love to slowly die.

In the beginning when we dated, 'twas a perfect fit.

Every day we were together it was better, bit by bit,

Two magnets that could not be split,

Our marriage was so tightly knit.

Years go by, close your eyes, forget the benefit.

Life impedes and steals a hit; values cloud lickedy-split.

Begin to nit-pick, permit; submit; you quit,

Throw a fit, and split.

Not even tryin' in the least bit.

Love and hate is interlaced.

Promises erased.

Any chance of hope is chased, replaced with scorn.

Waiting vacant, silent, stillborn, another death to mourn,

Cuts like thorns, distaste,

Fall from grace, wrongs retraced, judged me in haste, but can I blame you.

I had already sworn,

This time you can trust me and

I'm hearing that I am forewarned.

Left me unadorned,

Words never spoken from your lips leave me dyin'

Now I'm hollowed out defeated, mentally worn.

Why dontcha wake up and see my face?

It's a shame for all my change to go to waste.

Why dontcha wake up and stop my lies?

It's a shame for all my love to slowly die,

love to slowly die,

love to slowly die.

### Antiquated Chamber

Mailboxes, a quiet passing

nostalgic anchor of home . . .

somehow romantic, anticipating

secrets of the womb . . .

tugging trap-door, caressing

bottom grooves . . .

creamy envelope, heart fluttering

sealed and stamped.

### Illusion

First snow

Streaks the portrait of a home

Dusting a renovated roof

An exposed structure suffers the weight

Beneath expectations.

First snow

Blankets the lawnmower

Quieting proven capabilities

A newfound resource endures the restraint

Within a confined space.

First snow

Alights on grass and tree

Murmuring, "Time is up."

One scarlet leaf committed to evolve

Amidst a tangle of habit.

### Scarlet

I am the girl you think of last

when A-listers have heard your proposal and passed,

and B-listers' refusals have left you outclassed.

I'm the one who'll respond in eager contrast-

fed-up with a history of being bypassed,

assuming the role for which I've been cast.

A movie, a Coke, the ice-cream store-

picnic in the shade of the old Sycamore?

A flash of my skin to even the score,

your hand at my chest; trace every contour.

Tonight, will not close with a kiss at my door,

and dates of such nature present no encore.

And now you'll pass along my name

with lusty scenes of sin and shame.

Excuse yourself from any blame-

the male player in an age-old game.

And, I, once nameless embrace the fame,

burning with a scarlet flame.

Frannie Deckas

### Keep You Safe

(If I dropped acid

In the fire with you,

Pulled the trigger

In the dirty rain,

Could you have pushed despair

Out of the nightmare? As if I

Pulled it from the vein?

(A thin whisper in the wind urges,

Keep him safe—

And I keep you safe).

To have and to have held; but today

An ironic gravity pits in the palms,

A bitter serum sits on the tip of the tongue.

Seraphic injustice—

It's candy for the atheist,

But I will not let you float away.

Don't you leave me, don't you go—

There is nothing behind the sky.

I am not inside.

(In the throat of a stranger,

A guttural cry desperately keens,

Keep him safe—and I vow that

I can keep you safe).

As you slip into ashes into

Atoms into angel,

I am the broken cracked open,

The activated, blackness-saturated

Runaway on fighter plane,

And the jet engines sputter

Blood orange fire to the

Hellish core of it.

I am what was.

I shoot up with your words

In the thickening sickness of it,

But the cold old world is bitter

And inextricably twisted as it

Misses you in it, and

I think of you

I think of you

I'll think of you eternal

(And silent lips breathe a final plea of

Keep me safe—but

I could not keep you safe)).

### synergy

you yearn yearn yearn for fusion

fire like neurons fire like ice like

blue green neon inside of those veins

under paper thin innocent skin

electric like synapse like lover

like volts charged to fry the membrane

rewire the brain shock shock shock

you back to life

you choke on your words

because you hate the way they taste

fly they like shrapnel lodge they

like bullets fester they like

dirty maroon wounds

and they wince and you dry cry

sink back into the silence

into the solace of pinkish

pinkish internal inferno

suddenly you realize the folly of the melancholia

the surrogate pain the surrogate shame

that ceaseless loop that looks something like a noose and

you're caught in the amber when the chair topples over

you tread upon the bloodstains

gone and so gone

don't you scrub; recall, recall all of it

ride ride ride push back against

the idle night; the darkening coward

might he perish in the pride

gone and so gone and

so far gone this time—the hellfire defied

he shook he cursed he trembled upon the throne

he denied he lamented he lied he lied he lied

the heat, the crime, the final word misheard

you understand with anguish what the burn belied

### In the hot beyond

in the hot beyond,

I take my time.

I do not measure sighs

or sideways eyes

with seismograph and blood-stained tiles.

in the hot beyond,

I am trusting.

I do not take for blistering

the cold nothings.

I do not think the anomaly a cosmic microcosm,

and these thin wisps of sinful whispers

are decaying, graying.

in the cold cold old,

I am salt salt sordid sidewalk

dirty shoes dirty shoes dirty shoes.

I have every limb in the casket,

and I am brutally wasted,

you bastard.

in the cold cold old,

I am the dirty death march.

I am become him, harm.

I am bandit come undone in the blunder.

I hush hush—push back against the thunder.

Funereal dirge and it tastes like delight:

In the hot, hot beyond,

still I burn, but

I am alight. I am a light.

I am light.

### Tractatus

The riddle does not exist

The elusive everything—all

Captured in the vanishing

Hurled flashing backward

Into the vacuum

I am accident

Fibers in the hellstorm

And gone so soon

Space between raindrops

Glimpse of the maybe mystical

I am a nothing nothing nothing

But I move move move

Constant crusade for the womb

The something the all things

The one thing

They laid pretty bricks for the haunting,

And I thought I had a dollhouse.

The riddle does not exist

I bicycle in the timelessness

Crepuscular man, idol of the twilight

Hold hand, hold hair, hold heart,

Hold dirty appendage, bandage,

Baggage, everlasting damage

And flash vanish backward

Into the vacuum

The riddle never existed

It was only ever the spectral echo

Only ever the crippling withhold

Always ever masked in the damaging

And tongues glistening that

Only ever left me famishing

Weary in the search for nurture

Crusade for the white hot womb, and

I was only ever vanishing

### Child for Sale

I am a child for sale

won't anybody please buy me?

I'll tell you, mostly what I do is read, and

I am enraptured, I am so very fractured,

that whether lowly or holy

I can humbly assume any role you need

noiselessly, I can put myself to sleep

my flesh burns, my skin bleeds

but I do all I can not to weep

some may say I am cheap

sure, I'm a child knight errant

in search of a parent, and

I'll barter, I'll bargain—

you can just have me for free

it's whatever you see fit,

whatever you see fine

prospective parent,

I am docile and I am kind

I am deferential and benign

I am nine

could you teach me

how to tie my shoes? (if

I could so impose), and

might you show me how to

just grab hold? then, if there's

time, how to mercifully let go?

would you teach me

not to throw out my woes?

you and I, shall we sanctify?

allow me to bask in the

sweetness of sadness dignified

and if I go unsold, may I die

may you lay me down alone

without the nonsense

of a headstone

yelling about my unsacred bones

Retrospective parent, remember who I was

I was a child for sale

I was good, I was kind

I wanted so badly for you to be mine

Please, won't you think of me from time to time?

Jacqueline Schaalje

### Dante's Lines

If Dante dyed his hair, he would be terrifically delayed on a Saturday morning,

half an hour bombed to read and write in,

which would result in one less line.

maybe two.

If Dante polished his nails, he would dedicate half an hour to this tedious task

(including scrubbing and buffing), every two-three weeks,

or more often if he got tired of the color,

or in the event

[Line lost.]

where the composition of his dress would be all-important.

Each of those primping parties where he'd be seen and wooed

would cost him one or two lines. Although

when you dye your hair or polish your nails, lines, like

lines under your eyes, may also be gained.

In all likelihood, they would pop up in Dante's brain,

effortlessly, quite independently

from his slow, purposeful actions,

that could be banal like nail polishing.

The polishing causing and not causing a fist ramming lightning antithesis in his gut's dark wood.

Okay then.

Never underestimate the nail polishers.

It's so easy to poke fun at them.

[Line lost.]

If Dante divided the tasks of childrearing equally with his wife,

he would have spent a few hours on this every day, which would mean fewer lines.

If he hadn't been a powerful Ghelf, on the receiving side of the political divide,

the darling of the Pope and Charles of Valois, and hadn't been

up to his single-covered eyeballs in debate,

would it have been possible at all that he took up a dishwashing brush,

just to help the wife out now and then, or at least his housekeeper,

for he surely kept one to keep his posh chambers neat?

And if he hadn't fallen from office would he have brought back his chalice to the kitchen,

avoiding to look at the ruby drops he lost on the way, but the lines,

the lines,

that left his hand trembling, while his

head kept busy with all this menial nonsense?

Not being able to do things simultaneously.

Hell, think and write?

[Line lost.]

Enter Beatrice, the antidote to Dante's housekeeping fetish: she became the dote.

Beatrice, she wasn't a time-suck: on the few occasions he glimpsed her,

she made Dante's poetic zen zip aloft and run gloriously turbo,

until he crashed down and found himself backtracking over the same painful

dishwashing brush.

And in the endless fretting and throes of blessed passion

he likely lost a few more lines that were true and felt—

Oh blessed mother, you angel,

that takes away my boondoggle from me, let's

have done with our mourning.

I will make you famous.

### Mouthings

Your winter coat from Prague. Thermo-patched, dove-cuirass

Lays down blond fur corona, buckled forward for a kiss.

Bubble gum encroaches, making mad with riddle—

I ask is that cleanser tea, that scent your collar keeps in.

Beatific with your husky halo, devourer of chicken breast,

you resist so many who would have you—

I can only envy you, sculptor of heart muscles. Lightning.

Geranium lips curling with expectance, the first toppings.

A pearly rain drips in the overlit, plum parking lot.

In the boudoir of our seaming hoods it's moist and warm,

leaning back lucky into hovercraft, spice of spittle,

you're taking after the baby. I start to dream.

In this protectionism of permeable yearning we control our

import. I like the things that you don't like in you.

You trust your loss, that pain contrasted; bubbling like lava,

I follow your censer. The plated car cracks open

to stay put until midnight. The organs swell and luxuriate:

bitter, blooming, I have done this ad nauseam.

Newbie divorcé, I meet your eye to see

and there is more. With the drama sketched in,

the routines you work seem marvelously new.

### If You Know Snow

If you know snow only from a book

you can be alone, or make a snowperson

and create anything under your gloved hands.

If you know snow only from a book

you can have white, quiet mornings

and mysterious, shivery evenings.

In the wide tide of shimmering

icicles might trick you

and propose a beauty overhaul.

Unseen, you can have hundreds of words for it

your children will have a feeble grasp of,

unless you make them read.

If you know snow only from a book

you stand looking out, flailing,

not the easiest words melting against your palate.

You must listen to witnesses of snow

but beware, don't take over their words—

The words must be yours.

If you know snow only from a book

you won't ever use sand to efface it.

Snow sphinx sounds like a dope idea.

If you know snow only from a book

you can make a movie out of it,

add some blue light.

### Reassembly

The decision not fleshed out,

so small it didn't really exist.

Could I resist its shadow

and feel affection for its parent?

That I could give it dreams, maybe bad

ones that I caused?

Sometimes I imagine going shopping

for gaudy rags at Primark

and screaming at the top of our lungs.

So small it is crazy that I flushed it,

it would have been a you now, wan

youth, but of my growing own.

So undefined, I'm shy to ever

look you in the eye—all purpose, not

one to disturb. What good is a shadow

if not created? A partner only

at parties? I've looked at your profile

and thought you resembled me, the shape

I'd been trying to recollect for

when I'll grow weaker, so to speak.

You keep with me, child, tiny

again, so I can hold you in my belly.

I talk to you, quietly,

give you a little pat now and then.

### The City with a Heart

You know the city where you went to on the cheap,

the city that had positive buzz, said your friends;

see this cozy cafe, salad with pomegranate;

the city where once upon a time they bombed its heart

out, and now you find yourself wandering, looking

for where it could be; maybe it is in that street,

behind that mall, palace with its sunburst sign and turrets—

kind of cool, but clearly not authentic, is it?

Still, it's nice here, and warm, because I make that effort.

The museum has a model that recreates sacrifice

after the showdown. It turns out the city never had

a heroic gush of glory, if you discount war. After it closed,

orphans were recruited by clergy, passing buckets

with rubble from the spire. I have trouble putting myself

in the place of a stricken, bow-tied daughter. Then,

that monk was smiling, avuncular. In his past of past,

his parents fed him black bread and potatoes, deloused

his fine hair and lovingly coiled his earlock, before they

sent him along, a slap on his cold, dull cheek. What can

he say now to those cute kids? More pictures roll

past. Bedraggled beggars schlep along pony walls.

Who knows that if I had a daughter I would tell her

the city we visit, it has a heart still, and gradually

I would have her discover she can slip in.

Nancy Rakoczy

### The Exploding Father

The exploding father

silently smolders with

slow wicks buried

beneath light camouflage

hot flares etch eyeballs permanently.

Once a simmering youth

now he explodes with impunity.

Hot spots in his psyche

percolate with vitriol,

pockets full of short fuses,

arteries stashed with nitro.

Why does he flame

in a furious hale of sparks

flashing blue, yellow and white?

Don't ask. It only sets him off.

### What My Mother Saw

What she saw:

a front room that needed dusting,

the kitchen a good scrubbing;

dishes sticky from

breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Toss in a few brats,

and a shadow that pauses and waits,

making the floorboards creak.

She'd stop,

wait.

Thirteen and she'd

begged her mother, please, no no,

please no, but in Polish, with all

the soft sounds coming out hard.

The other girls,

her friends,

faces streaked with tears,

all begging and pleading no,

no no no, the Great Depression's chorus,

its dirge of fear.

This was their youth.

Don't leave me here to sleep

so close to their bedroom

to him

the shadows, and the tiptoeing—

No, scratch that.

No tiptoeing, he just took her

just like that:

just another utensil,

like the broom or mop.

Her mother works the braid of betrayal

into her hair. Hands button her into a dress.

He clears his throat and waits.

Turn the page: this is another story of

immigrant success.

### The Imploding Mother

She was taught that it didn't happen.

That the money was needed

That whatever happened was for the best

That everything was meant for a reason.

That he didn't really mean it.

That it's to be expected a fine looking girl like you

That you probably led him on.

That's what men do.

That you should have known.

That you're too attractive, take that bow out of your hair.

That you're lucky he paid attention to you

That you had it coming dressed like that cover yourself

That there's no use screaming over spilled milk

That it was meant to happen one day

That if you had nicer clothes it wouldn't have happened

That when you're older you'll understand

That it's time to get over it

That it's not like you're bleeding

That you can't prove it anyway

That life doesn't hand you anything you have to take what it gives

so hand over that money your sister is hungry

That you'll be back on the job tomorrow bright and early.

### We Rise

Like a moth I rise from bed,

join the others, bump heads the ceiling.

shh

quiet

wait,

safety's above.

Our bodies below

lie curled, cruelty tossed larvae,

fear our only blanket.

See how we rise: let's fly,

spread arms wide and white.

Return to those poor bodies?

escape is through the window.

Mother stands waiting.

Father bends over our husks.

They don't know we're gone.

We'll return tomorrow, when it's safe.

### Her Face

Now that she's dead,

we began a slow dig.

We examined, sifted, combed through,

held up to the light, raked, rummaged, ransacked

ravaged every corner of every room,

every closet and its shelves

for traces of the girl who had been our mother.

It was our private hunt,

a furtive probe for clues,

our backs to each other

working in tandem as we

brushed away dust looking

for artifacts she surely left behind.

And uncovered—

an entire album—loot.

A photo that showed a 12 year old

with features too big for her face.

It was—how to put this kindly—

a man's face—on a slender girl's neck

with the kind of purity

you see on people growing up

on an atoll in the Pacific,

smiling widely at their first camera.

I peered over her shoulder

at the Detroit neighborhood,

of broad shouldered houses

and bashful front yards.

With sidewalks that claimed

would never trip its young.

On her face—nothing was measured;

nothing divided. Nothing held back.

There was nothing coy,

nothing posed, nothing tempered

by the outside world's censure.

Clearly, she had never glanced at a fashion magazine

with its lessons on how to be a female adolescent.

Nothing had tampered with this man-face.

No apologies for the big nose, big smile, big expression.

I peered closer,

trying to guess how close she was to the abyss.

No scars apparent in her wholeheartedness.

Had it happened?

The man the whispers the secrets the pay-off.

It was—what—a month—two weeks—maybe just a day or two away?

Was it tomorrow when she'd be dragged in so far and deep she'd forget she'd been broken?

Was it that very day of the picture, when the architecture of loss would take over,

and its columns and arches, atriums, buttresses, vaults and spans would cave in, lying shattered beneath the face of her youth?

Her mother would teach her to smooth and rearrange her expressions.

She would learn to cover over a sinkhole of eruptions,

letting the secret niches and dark corners take over.

Age would tame her features into attractiveness.

Close the album—

still the Medusa: one look was enough.

This face was the before we never knew she had.

Her life with us—all pure after.

Ashton Vaughn

### Sick As The Rose Water

Supple hands on skin

and a ripe tongue to

pluck the fruit from the tree.

Watch me as I fall like an apple

into the palm of the unsated,

into the hands

of the elated, the bored, and the triumphant.

Sickly sweet and

utterly intoxicating

like an odour of ammonia—

I remember that scent clinging to my skin

like some sort of glorified crown

with thorns that would surely prick the skin

and draw blood for all to see:

my sins on display for the world,

my sins on display for the world.

(They were mine, for I had claimed them.)

In this time of remembering,

I urge myself to recall those things

that got tangled in the thickets of my memories:

The milkweed with its woolen blooms; the purple blaze

of lavender that danced and bowed in the breeze; the

dandelions, who wandered not for the world, but for

their own enjoyment.

The mockingbird, who sang so that any passing traveller

may hear his sullen voice and rejoice in the song that

sorrow brings.

### Contrition

I. There is a fire

that burns

riotously

through the night,

spindling up like

the fingers

of God

Himself.

His touch boasts

the gentleness

of a lamb,

soft and shorn.

II. "Make of yourself a light,"

said the Buddha

to the people

before he went off

and died.

III. "Into your hands

I commend my spirit,"

said Jesus to the people

as his soul

rose and shattered,

and, perhaps, rose again.

IV. God lives within us

the way that

A seed

lives in the ground.

Unseen, untouched by the world,

only to be awoken

by some

great and glorious rain—

let it rain down from the Heavens

a great and glorious storm.

V. May you find God in everything:

in yourself,

and in the daffodils, and in the

wry oakwood trees.

and also in the laughing lilt of

the raucous wind.

VI. May the fragile bird

of yourself

rise up,

and maybe, after all,

see things the way that they are.

### Sugar

I. "I love you,

"I hope you know that I'm proud of you."

II. The silver snake slithers in the grass—

black pearls for eyes and metal twist of a heart.

Young and assuming, the rabbit succumbs

to the thick rope of its body.

III. Do you remember the summer you locked me away?

I rarely saw the sun

and I couldn't even read,

for all the books were stuffed

in the attic.

Oh, irony

when you made me pack up my own libraries

in boxes and crates

and

leave them behind for a summer.

IV. Neither of you knew, but I had some of the books

hidden

in a field just outside of our neighborhood.

A couple years ago they built a

house over that field.

V. There are many ways one can manage to live through

a storm.

When you starved me I rationed sugar

underneath my tongue

and I hid libraries out in the field,

and eventually, yes, the sugar melted and

the books burned,

but at least it kept me alive for the year.

### Salt

I. "I love you,

"You know that I love you, right?"

II. Like the blue jay who nudges,

and then pushes

his young out of the nest

to fly

He was only teaching.

He was only loving.

Woe to the beloved blue jay,

weep for him who fell.

III. Do you think that change is always a good thing?

It would've been a good thing for you,

the way that you wanted me to change;

and it was a good thing for me,

_the way that I had changed_ ,

but where do you fit in?

Was it too much to grow out of that crack

in the sidewalk?

Are you still caged by the hard, the stone, the rugged?

IV. You come not to hurt,

you come not to change,

you come not to blame—

then why do you come?

V. I stole away sugar

and built again my fragile libraries,

but you,

you buried salt under your skin

and you held onto the books that you stole,

the books you would never read.

### Still, There Is The Light

I.

Feel it circling

around you like a cloud

oh, what a sense of sadness

what a sense of dread

that washes over like a wave,

covers me like a shroud,

meant to wear to one's grave—

let it adorn me like a silk offering,

let me wear it like crown.

And, still, at the center

there is the light.

II.

Who is that bird that sings

outside of my window?

Who is the one that trills

the song of the seasons?

You hurt me in ways, indescribable—

what is it to forgive?

How do you look at the same person

in a different light?

I can never tell when you have truly changed.

And, still, behind the silhouette.

there is the light.

III.

Midnight has come and gone.

I am not normal.

You are not either, though you will never say.

I know what you did.

I know who you are.

IV.

The thing about apologies is that they

don't really mean anything if you keep

making the same mistakes

an apology for the same mistake

ten times over

is not truly an apology

but merely a test of patience

How much until you break?

How much until you cave?

When will you finally

shed your skin?

Somewhere—there is the light.

V.

Somewhere there is the light

that burns without the help of anyone.

It does not have to be told

to keep making light.

It does not have to be told

to love the world.

I hope someday to be like this.

I hope someday to forgive you.

Contributor Notes

 Jim Pascual Agustin grew up in Manila and has lived in South Africa since 1994. He opposes the anti-human rights policies of the current Duterte regime in the Philippines. Jim's poetry has appeared in Rhino, New Coin, World Literature Today and Modern Poetry in Translation, among others. Wings of Smoke, (The Onslaught Press, 2017), his eighth poetry book, is available on most online retailers. Jim shares random thoughts and drafts on www.matangmanok.wordpress.com.

 Joe Couillard was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended college at Iowa State University before serving 5 years in the United States Navy as a Submarine Officer. He currently resides near Seattle, Washington where he enjoys reading, cooking, playing basketball, and spending time with his fiancé.

 Frannie Deckas is a 20-year-old college student living in Los Angeles. She is new to publication and an abiding devotee of all things poetry, literature, science, philosophy, music, and film. Consumer of the deadly serious beet.

 Olivia Dorsey Peacock is a techie from North Carolina who currently lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband. By day, she helps doctors and academics make sense of health data and by night, she unravels genealogical mysteries. She has a Bachelors and a Masters in Information Science from UNC Chapel Hill. When she's not writing poetry, she's brainstorming ways to use technology for good instead of evil.

 Noreen Ellis is a poet and chief communications officer at an engineering firm that designs and builds big public infrastructure projects. She geeks out about words, poems and bascule bridges. She is the recipient of a 2017 Troubadour International 25 for 20 Poetry prize and her poems have appeared in Cease, Cows, Poets Reading the News, Hanging Loose Press, and New Voices magazine.

 Savannah Grant lives in Northampton, MA with three rescue cats. She attended Smith College to study English, studio art, and poetry. A few of her poems are published here and there, including a former issue of Sixfold. In her spare time she enjoys biking, exploring around town, drawing, and photography.

 J. L. Grothe can't seem to limit her interests to one genre or medium. She has written for documentaries and instructional media, edited news and academic works, and designed learning experiences for both adults and children. She continues to explore poetry, memoir, photography, and video editing. Grothe lives with her family near Denver, Colorado.

 Faleeha Hassan is a poet, teacher, editor, author, and playwright. She was born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967 and now lives in the United States. Faleeha was the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq. She has her master's degree in Arabic literature and has published 21 books. Her poems have been translated into the English, Turkmen, Bosevih, Indian, French, Italian, German, Kurdish, Spanish, Korean, Greek, Serbian, Albanian, and Pakistani languages.

 A California native, Anna Hernandez-French cut her baby teeth on the rhymes of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. As childhood progressed she began to write her own verse, weaving into it her deep love of the Pacific Northwest. Expanding her landscape eastward, she made Brooklyn her home, where her work received an honorable mention in the Women's National Book Association's 2017 contest, and was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Writers at Work Competition.

 Abby Johnson is a poet and a Hoosier who is proud of the local art scene that fostered her. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing through Butler University. She loves her minivan and the moon. She is previously unpublished.

 Andrew Kuhn is a psychologist in New York City and the Hudson Valley. His poems have appeared in Common Ground, Conclave, The Mailer Review, Vending Machine Press, So Be It, The Ghazal Page and other venues. His collection of interviews with 21 eminent poets, How A Poem Can Happen, came out in 2017.

 Merre Larkin is a writer, educator and counselor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is revising a novel, working on a memoir, and continuing to submit her poetry. She has raised three children as a single mother and relishes uncovering pockets of time newly available for her writing as her children embark on their own life adventures.

 Adin Zeviel Leavitt grew up mostly in the mountains of Montana and between the covers of books. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 2017 with a degree in creative writing, and can usually be found doing his best to get lost. He has published a collection of fiction and poetry, It Still Rains In Imaginary Places, which can be found on Amazon.com. He currently lives in Vietnam.

 Sue Fagalde Lick returned to poetry after a long detour in the newspaper business and a better-late-than-never MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in The MacGuffin, Willawa, Cloudbank, New Letters, Tenemos, The American Journal of Poetry, Diode Poetry Journal, and other publications. When not writing, she leads an alternate life as a music minister in Newport, Oregon.

 Carol Lischau grew up in Southeast Texas, where her relatives have lived for the past 200 years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cider Press Review, Notre Dame Review, and Common Ground Review, among others. Her manuscript was a finalist in the 2017 Literary Awards for the Tucson Festival of Books. She resides in Blacksburg, where she is pursuing an MFA at Virginia Tech.

 Sarah Louise lives in rural northern Mexico with two dogs and two cats. She writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and teaches writing online. Her work has been published in various journals and magazines, including Contemporary Verse II, Prism international, The Fiddlehead, The Cimarron Review, and the Canadian Forum. Her academic work includes an MFA and a law degree.

 Amanda Moore's poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Best New Poets, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and she is the recipient of writing awards from The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She received her MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where she served as Managing Editor for EPOCH magazine. Amanda lives with her husband and daughter near the beach in San Francisco, where she is a high school teacher.

 Nancy Rakoczy was published by Sixfold in the summer of 2017, and received an Honorable Mention in 2013 from New Millennium Writers. In 2009 she participated in the Dancing Poetry Festival in San Francisco. She's written art reviews for the Mdaily.com, and has contributed a chapter on climate artists, "Working with Artists" for the forthcoming book from T&T Clark/Bloomsbury publishers, T&T Clark Companion on Christian Theology and Climate Change.

 Kimberly Russo is an English teacher in Aurora, Colorado where she resides with her husband, Tony, and her four children. Kimberly spends her free time gardening & bird-watching. Much of her writing is dedicated to marriage/family, social issues, including the perpetuating inequality among genders/race, and the stigma associated with mental illness. Her poetry has appeared in River Poets Journal, Open Minds Quarterly, PDXX Collective, Sixfold (Summer 2016,) and Cricket Media:Spider Magazine.

 Jacqueline Schaalje (MA English from the University of Amsterdam) has published stories in On the Premises and The Massachusetts Review. Another story was a finalist for the Epiphany Prize, and in the New Guard Competition. She went to the Southampton Writers Conference (NY) last summer to work on a novel. A poem has just been published by Sky Island Journal and some are forthcoming in Sixfold.

 Marisa Silva-Dunbar's work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Poetry WTF?!, Better than Starbucks Magazine, Redheaded Stepchild, Words Dance Publishing and Gargoyle Magazine. She graduated from the University of East Anglia with her MA in poetry, and has been shortlisted twice for the Eyewear Publishing Fortnight Poetry Prize.

 Ashton Vaughn is an upcoming senior at Thompson High School. He is a writer of fantasy and poetry, as well as music. When he's not writing, he's either reading, at school, or working at Chick-Fil-A. He has plans to attend an Ivy League university as an Environmental Science major.

 Catherine Wald is an author, journalist, translator and teacher based in Manhattan. Her chapbook, Distant, burned-out stars, was published in 2011 (Finishing Line). Poems appeared in American Journal of Nursing, Deronda Review, Gravel, Minerva Rising, J Journal, The Lyric, The New York Times, Quarterday Review, Westchester Review and others.

 Timothy Walsh's most recent poetry collections are When the World Was Rear-Wheel Drive: New Jersey Poems and The Book of Arabella. His awards include the Grand Prize in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition, the Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize from North American Review, the New Jersey Poets Prize, and the Wisconsin Academy Fiction Prize. He is the author of a book of literary criticism, The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing, and Emptiness in Literature (Southern Illinois University Press) and two other poetry collections, Wild Apples (Parallel Press) and Blue Lace Colander (Marsh River Editions). Find more at: <http://timothyawalsh.com/>
