Poetry

Eileen Cleary

Stories of Your Death

for Lucie Brock-Broido

It’s a lie to say you died in China, or that
you survive in another state and commute
to your tomb. That I hang willows from my gate,
and that we celebrate with ginger cake.

( )

Another version is truer because it’s a picture
book about a mute cat and her long-haired
mistress who keeps saying,

Lucie will miss you Nicholas.

( )

One I heard was that you were enchanted.
Or relieved. That’s blasphemy!

They insist you’d wanted to stay young.
They didn’t hear you say you wished

you’d persist, didn’t know that each time
you told a friend, you had to tell yourself again.

( )

If ever I tell it, I’ll mention
there was ice cream. Not
to sweeten your sickness
but rather to show your love

for lists of savors to procure.
Some easy to come by. Some

shaved with pickled fruit.
That part isn’t fact. In fact,

I’m ill at ease that you can’t
spoon dessert with me in peace.

( )

You said,

there is no detail that does not contain some hank of truth.

( )

This is the talk in a stark parlor where I forgive
the gossips who, like me, want a stricken deer
to lift itself from the road, and by that highway’s
ribbon of trees, there are no headlights. Just
skyglow as that doe roots her hooves
into less terrible beauty.

( )

This last is the last.

( )

You tire of driving and we stop for tuna sandwiches.
The air conditioner weeps, and we bail its water.
Near the end, you fix us sunshine toast.

Eileen Cleary is the author of ‘Child ward of the Commonwealth’ (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Mutton Book Prize, and ‘ 2 a.m. with Keats’ (forthcoming from Nixes Mate, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, West Texas Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Solstice, and other journals. Cleary founded and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, and curates the Lily Poetry Salon.

Andrew Cox

Start with Birmingham

Nineteen sixty-three kills a president and sends the children into the streets made of dynamite in the city nicknamed Bombingham

I remember my mother crying once in 1963 and once in 1968 and once in 2005 when my father was taken away by bees

Sign language lives on the same street as the man who stands before his window in his underwear and conducts the symphony on the record player

My friends are not deaf but what they hear from their parents are hands and unexplained motives contained in fingertips

Nineteen sixty-three compresses the summer into something that will fire back at the hooded bomb makers dressed in white

When I walk to school I know the war is being fought close by and wonder when it will come and ask me to give up the dog at my side

The off rhymes that occupy the DMZ this war calls the suburbs want the pools drained and the parks closed and the people to stay indoors

My parents try to keep this city from seeping in under the door and staining our skin with its ill-gotten blood

Nineteen sixty-three does not want this war to end and doesn’t care if hurricane season would like to cover everything in blown-down trees

I remember my father being so pale that I could see his heart and how it showed me I knew nothing about how tough he was

Andrew Cox is the author of The Equation That Explains Everything (BlazeVOX [Books] 2010), the chapbooks This False Compare (2River View, 2020) and Fortune Cookies (2River View, 2009), and the hypertext chapbook Company X (Word Virtual, 2000). He edits UCity Review.

Ciarán Ó Gríofa

No Sanctuary.

O’Brien’s party… came to Tulach na hEaspog, blessed by bell, Mass and gold enshrined relics…In the sanctuary of this great church they remained that night, while their sentries guarded the approaches at the fords and vulnerable places.*

I

Perched on an ivied bridge, chewing grass
I shock you with a shove into space,
Catching you just in time: spliced laughter.
Watching the cattle all-the-day-down
Moving, as they graze, across the corcass,
the rumble as the bulk milk lorry passes,
throwing dust into the air about us.

II

Words are our touchstones, our relics.
In the still evening, the black phone rings,
As the sun fades, between the tight houses,
the men with dogs are distant ghostly things,
while in the magnolia room, the unsaid pledge
is cherished; yet this is a vulnerable place
where the other voice is vital.

III

No church-shelter for us, burdened one,
We are more the sentinels at the ford,
unsure of our own footing, march-weary,
hoping our words will somehow see us through,
while we ache towards dawn and day talking
Where the dew rises from the empty corcass
Quenching fairy fires, spawning changelings.

*Quotation from “Wars of Torlough More O’Brien” by Sean Mac Ruairí Mac Craith 1459, translated by Standish Hayes O’Grady Irish Texts Society and also Sean P Ó Cillín in Ó Cillín, Sean P (Ed) Travellers in Clare 1459-1843 Galway, 1977.

Ciarán Ó Gríofa

Hockeyed (Lines in uncertain times)

This taut report of ball and stick; these cheers;
those frosting breaths; this weak Autumnal light
I bid you mark. This high-tech mocking-green
all-weather turf; these streets, the hills beyond
will all fall to naught. There are dinosaur marks
in Kerry rocks, indeed, and those that built
Mooghaun fort were, like us, hopeful, and afraid.
But, it seems, we can’t but mark a century,
without tripping on the fall of words.
So, who will know, in time, of you, or me?
Who will linger on what marks we leave?
A tattered page, a mounted image,
a snatch of smile and song? We can’t predict.
So, mark, again, this crack of ball, and stick.

Ciarán Ó Gríofa lives in Limerick City, Ireland, a short distance away from where he grew up in east County Clare. He works in the public service. He has a keen interest in history and the local. This is his first time being published outside of Ireland.

Roy Bentley

Bird

“An apocryphal story has it that upon being given a clay bird for a toy,
the infant Jesus brought it miraculously to life as a goldfinch. Thus
the small, tawny-brown bird with a bright red patch about the base
of its bill and a broad yellow band across its wings became
a representative of the soul, the Passion and the Sacrifice.”
— Ralph Ellison, Living with Music

Because the scudding clouds invite an idea of heaven,
his brand of abracadabra is unalloyed theater: a Jew-kid
commanding avian gift-Nothing to fly because he says so.

His father is off working sanctuary construction or writing
a screenplay about the life of someone married to a woman
whose gotcha pregnancy she’s named an act of God, asking

old-fashioned blind love to allow her to conflate immaculate
and conception and expect something like nods of agreement.
Why wouldn’t the kid believe insentient terracotta will listen?

All he needs is an audience, really. Watch this, he announces.
And they do. We like to know there are kids like this, because
then the murmuration of blood is more about the gold body

strutting than the failure of imagination that is the set point
for being human. When the bird begins to trill, hallelujahs
at the molecular level have conspiratorially done the work

required to body an intake of breath. Desert children are
unremarkable or fine-looking or club-footed but savvy
enough not to think miracle is what is left after dark.

Christ, what if another child grabbed his or her toy
out of your hand, tossed it in the air and it flew!—
wouldn’t you at least ask to try that yourself?

Roy Bentley

Buzz Aldrin, American Astronaut, Stands Next to the Stars & Stripes on the Moon

Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta, Ohio is out of the shot.
This is Buzz and Old Glory. They’d killed our favorite

Irish-Catholic president. JFK. Taught him about riding
around in open Lincoln limos in Stetson-hatted Texas.

Cronkite is doing a voice-over. Same voice as that day
in Dallas when a whole world held its breath then wept.

By hopping around, Aldrin is affirming America’s right
to swaddle the globe in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny.

Nixon phones Apollo 11 live and in prime time, so Buzz
stops moving, though it’s his show and remarkable terrain.

Supposedly, he is trying not to upstage the presidential call.
Not to say what any Presbyterian elder might, having given

himself holy communion from a secret kit he stowed away.
This moonscape could be the slow-changing light of Kyiv,

a bullying Russian-winter a harvest of unhappiness, hunger.
Over Aldrin’s shoulder, it’s a desperate planet: Golda Meir

is down there asserting the rights of the State of Israel over
Palestinians; consenting to sanctioned killings which, when

taken together, make a nation. Go ahead, Buzz. Bust some
goofy dance move like it’s the first sock hop on the moon.

for Christine Lysnewycz Kruk Holbert

Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published eight books, including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who is bringing out a new & selected. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Rattle, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest, won the Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award and awaits publication.

Matt Pasca

Parent-Teacher Night

You lean over the space between us
& murmur, through your moustache:

You can’t say anything anymore

& because subtext is how I make a living,
I know that you really just miss being
hateful without consequence & only
said so to me because I look
like you & when I say

No, more is being said now than ever
especially by those who’ve been silenced
& use the words exciting & overdue

your mouth becomes a music box
cranking tinny notes
to the I’m-Not-a-Racist Backpedal

Truth be told:

I don’t care about your kid’s comma splices or dangling participles
her misplaced apostrophes or subject-verb disagreement.

I care that she calls Hondurans Spanish. Says Columbus.
Says forefathers. Says dick flick, chick flick, friend zone.
Says Mama’s Boy when a guy cares
& Bitch when a girl don’t

or hysterical—

did you know that word derives from the Latin hystericus, meaning “of the womb”
& was used to pathologize women’s emotions?

Am I saying too much? Am I causing hysteria?

I don’t care if your daughter overuses rhetorical questions—
I care that, as Brown folks’ bingo cards
flood with trauma,
she says ghetto she says race card she says get over it
says illegal says Speak English.

I’m proving your point, aren’t I—
saying what can’t be said?

I can be a screen of green squiggles
for anyone, but grammar isn’t the check we need.
Algebra not the only way to redefine terms.

So miss me with your faux liberty—
the kind crowded with sentences
that end, not in periods, but Black death.

All language is political—
how correct it is a matter of who matters
to you & who doesn’t.

Now, it’s my turn to lean over the space between us & ask:

are you mourning the time you looked a woman in the eye &
said I’m sorry that happened to you—I believe you?

or when you grabbed your queer colleague’s hand &
said I spoke to the boss about his “joke”—it won’t happen again?

or when you counted Brown faces at a meeting &
said Why is this room so white—we’ve got to do better?

No?

What is it exactly you miss saying?

Why so silent?

Facts got your tongue?

Matt Pasca is a poet, teacher, and traveler who believes in art’s ability to foster discovery, empathy, and justice. He has authored two poetry collections—A Thousand Doors (2011 Pushcart nominee) and Raven Wire (2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist)—and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of 2 Bridges Review. In his corner of New York, Matt curates Second Saturdays @Cyrus, a popular poetry series, and spreads his unwavering faith in critical thought and word magic to his Poetry, Mythology, and Literature students at Bay Shore High School, where he has taught for 23 years and been named a New York State Teacher of Excellence. Pasca is currently at work on his third poetry collection, tentatively titled Traitor. See more at www.mattpasca.com.

Julia Knox

Burning the Bridge

Did you know I was watching you,
the day the sun set fire to the bridge?

You skipped rocks -
I was watching you through the dense pine.

Wet grass stuck to the backs of my thighs,
dirt in the crevices of my summer knees.

They smelled of horse manure and freshly cut grass.
It had never occurred to me to look pretty.

I hunted for crayfish down at the creek,
I never wore sunscreen, I never burned.

Did you know I was watching you,
the day I set out for Mecca?

Knee deep in the creek,
I watched the crayfish swim through the clear, freezing water.

I felt my feet on the always rocky bottom.
I watched you burn.

Julia Knox is from rural Maine, where she grew up amongst the pines and complex characters impacted by the multi-tentacled monster of poverty. She works as a scientist, and she has started writing about her upbringing over the past two years as a way to process more about where she is from and find integration with her current and future self.

Robbie Gamble

Credo

I believe in one shot
pulled off with patience and precision
accounting for distance, elevation,
and windage, dialed tightly in.

And I believe in a high-velocity projectile
locked into trajectory,
closing hard on its target—
mark of mark, flight of flight,
clean shot of clean shot,
invoked, not aimed.
Being of one purpose with the shooter
by whom the target is claimed

And I believe in a concealed carry
who for us and for our protection
I bear with me in due righteousness
wherever I may go.
Who emboldens me in dark moments
of conflict and intimidation
a weighty comfort, holstered by my heart.
Who steadies my trembling hand.
and guides me into decisiveness.
Who is capable of dropping
a target in his tracks
ensuring a clean termination.

Yes, I believe in this glorious bullet,
this seeker and taker of life
who proceeds from my weapon.
Who with my weapon is both
feared and glorified.
Who has spoken as a deterrent.

And I believe in one sacred Amendment
that upholds my right to shoot.
I acknowledge I would sooner die
than have this ripped from my hands.
I believe in this shot,
this Sacrament, this charge.
I live and kill by it.

Thus, I uphold the justification of the dead
and the security of my world to come.

Robbie Gamble’s poems and essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Cutthroat, RHINO, Rust + Moth, and the Tahoma Literary Review. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop, and serves as associate poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont.

Isabel J Wallace

Chorus, Chorus

I help her adjust
nasal cannula first, mask second
the patient in 514 is familiar
and the news report on her screen
hangs sticky in the air between us and
she reminds me of
my grandmother

eyes that only need to see eyes
to know a person’s heart

and like my grandmother
she sees me
she tells me
“You were not given a spirit of fear,”
and something inside me parts like gauze
clinging and unwieldy;
I know the verse
scratched into my fifth rib
with the claws of a hungry child.

But I can’t touch it
That old and unhealing wound

Because I know that ultimately
I am

Afraid

I am afraid, and I can’t

See far enough down this road to know if
My spirit was given
anything at all.

Isabel J Wallace

Rust

It’s a familiar house,
every window dressed in a different shade.
The halls follow lines that trip and stumble
into patterns that mean nothing to each other.
I found you in one room and lost you in the next,
figuratively and then literally, a breath taken and left half-made:
like the bed, like the curtains the wind caught;
and could it take you with it?
(the air, the cold, the promise of destination that motion gives)
You waited for something to catch you, but nothing did.
It cost more time than you were able to hold.
It reached out and missed;
we reached out and missed.
And we’ll go on missing you
in this familiar house, where grief has robbed that familiarity
from the walls, the doorways, and the lights on the bedside table
from the room where you were and won’t be again.

Isabel J Wallace is a queer writer and registered nurse working in the wilds of North Florida. The swamp has left her predisposed towards ghost stories and the certainty that something is always lurking just out of sight. She’s been published in Malaise: a Horror Anthology, as well as in Smitten: this is what love looks like. She can be found @izzyjowalls on Twitter and Instagram

Dallas Lee

Every Time We Lose Mother

We walk the hospital corridors, glance
into rooms, certain to find her at a stranger’s
bedside, clutching her purse, consoling,
perhaps offering prayer. We never interrupt.

My husband is the chaplain here, we hear her say, when in fact our father is upstairs
fighting for life. Arterial surgery failed.
Surgeons have just amputated his right leg.

I enter the recovery room with her. Stunned,
she flings her purse onto his lap and reaches
out. He snatches that purse and barks –
They took my leg, Margaret!

She stiffens, frightened and defenseless
as a child, fists locked on purse straps.

Later, we gather. Children, in-laws,
grand-children, great-grandchildren –
a joyful racket. She knows not a soul,
never lets go her purse and all it holds dear –

pocketbook, lipstick, one-dollar coin
“for emergencies,” a tiny notebook,
a pencil for when again a thought occurs.

Dallas Lee is author of The Cotton Patch Evidence, the Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment (Harper & Row), a book that chronicles events leading to the creation of Habitat for Humanity. His poetry has been published by the South Florida Poetry Journal, The Cortland Review, Connotations Press, The Boiler Journal, Starry Night Review, Prometheus Review, Poetry Leaves, and Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith. He is a native of Graham, Texas, is a graduate of Baylor University, and lives in Charlotte NC with his wife Mary.

Ashley Rebhun

Hot Dogs and Safety Pins

after my shower
wet
hair braided

and falling down to
the small
of my back

I stand
in the cellar
just-between-us

on display
in my Christmas-in-July
nightgown

ruffley frills
that lace
across my chest

I face Uncle Bob
at a finger-length
distance

Listening
to the shuffle
above me

as the adult’s sip
their champagne saucers
filled with

Between the Sheets
with a fresh
fruity twist

asking
if I’m hungry
he offers me

a hotdog
knowing
I’m starved

Ashley Rebhun is an OEF and OIF Navy veteran and an emerging writer. Through her pen-to-paper journey, she has found her voice in an ear-splitting world and utilizes her studies to fully understand how writing can assist with PTSD and trauma. Ashley lives in Norfolk Virginia with her husband, two children, and an exhibition of furry friends. Her work has been published in the University of Virginia’s MOSAIC and Penultimate Peanut.

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski

Margaret Gadreau’s Mike

Killed last March.
Afghanistan.
That boy could fix anything.
We heard she walked out to the barn in her nightgown
let the chickens out
and lit it.

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of the full length collection Sanctuary, Vermont (forthcoming Orison Books) and the chapbook How to Prepare Bear (2019, Redbird Chapbooks). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hunger Mountain Review, Ruminate Magazine, American Journal of Poetry, Passengers Journal, Confrontation and others. She is winner of the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize, the 2020 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry International Prize, and the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize. Laura lives and writes in a small town in Vermont.

Dan Kakitis

Bearing Myself

Against
the earth,
my body writhes.
Shingles blister
micaceous. Shifting,
collecting as a tide
might bundle an ocean’s
briny bones.

Blossoms appear
on a barren
limb, a snake-less
skin evolves
amid landscapes
like Fire Poppies
helping themselves
to the black earth.

Dan Kakitis is a Western Mass native with an affection for words, sound, and art in all its forms. He recently earned his MFA from Lesley University. His work has appeared in Beetroot Literary Journal and the NYSACRA Trade Journal. Dan’s dog, Truman, moonlights as a Komodo dragon in Richmond, Virginia, where both currently reside.

Andrew Lobel

Going for a Walk

Intersecting planes of moths orbited a K Dwarf
streetlamp glowing orange against the blue expanding evening.

We walked, exploring planets. End-to-end our street formed
one galaxy in a supercluster of low, dim houses. All around us

smell of rank creek water carrying fresh decay, garbage bags peeking
from bins’ warm burrows. I had so much to tell you

about the Kardashev Scale and Type III civilizations,
about apollonian armadas emerging from penumbras of impossible planets,

my favorite pharaohs, the fifty state capitals.
On these walks you introduced me to the Theory of Relativity:

accelerating toward c, past droning cars, toward the breathy rasp
of crabgrass, ferns, and seed-headed dandelions against our legs,

between fireflies portraying the lives and deaths of stars, time dilated,
and the worldline of our wander turned clocks viscous

if for only twenty minutes at a time.

Andrew Lobel

Erysichthon Comes to My Neck of the Woods

First Erysichthon razed Demeter’s sacred grove. Now,
he rides an overripe-banana bulldozer flecked
with brown streaks of humus through my yard,
scything backyard dryads winter barberry and buckthorn,
leaving mud and gravel scars that roads named after trees
will follow. And later, pressboard-gutted houses,
steel-boned buildings, blowflies to a corpse.

What he leaves is hunger as a landscape.
Spaces grow empty as they fill: knots of
black asphalt, construction tailings forming mountains
in sunless abscesses between squatting buildings,
bottles budding from the ground like saplings.

In Fames’ pestilent embrace, he can only consume—
the world first, and when all else is gone, himself.

Andrew Lobel is, among other things, a poet and sound artist in Washington, D.C. Andrew studied creative writing at American University.

Sophia Summerlin

Tiramisu

I.

I fucked the minotaur during the orchid-dying season.

I was a beguiling thing then,
an OTP of Georgia girl, native to the backyard, native to my head.

Dreamt with a silver chain around my wrist
like a band of forget-me-nots,
with soft pungence—an unplastic item.

Pretty pink and red flowers
and the smell of an old man’s Harley,
basketball skin,
and wild turkeys.

A walk in closet
with a full length mirror stands clean
in a fairy garden,
which, though an alleged fantasy,
was august ground.

Bandit, old boy, matty and ripe, who coughed up a rabbit head under the basketball net

Guards the garden.
Old root.

A gargoyle-watsit to dress the wrist,
to anchor the blow of monsters.
But I was born sick with monsters.

Liked the cut of their jib,
like fingers over water,
fingers playing with blood
till their skin is tacky.

Peering deeply with lashes that demand the weight of blinks,
resisting gloss,
a skull slapped on a wall.
The contemporary soul,
our skeletons.

I collect and melt enamel, clean the fat slab.

II.

Invited to get sticky, fat, wet high,
I master attendance with red eyes.
Or sit backseat and bite down against my jawline,
sew up new gums, after smacking negligently on mine.
Eating my own lips.

Get you a girl that can do both.
Get you a girl with style.
Get you a girl who leaves her baggies around.
One who plays it cool.
Play cool!

Cheeks get hot under the gaze of the eternal audience.
They watch me in a tank,
one or two may even love me.
Might clean my weekend vomit from the still waters
as I paint my nails and pin my hair back.

I affirm I am not friendly,
and scrawl a syrupy, chocolate “Happy Birthday!” onto a cold white plate.
I recommended the tiramisu with a wink.
I am not friendly. Scary. Big. I bite. Everyone loves me.
What a drag.

III.

The beast is not a feathered thing,
but a fibrous wasp learning
to unhold his tongue.

And after all, what is material depression
but a mother rolling hot stones
down her son’s back.

So you understand.
The beasts were the best part of dreaming.
The beasts weren’t boring.

They were hot, like south, humid like south, street like south.
All this to say,
I liked them.

IV.

Bella feeds the black cat her hands.
It tumbles from the banana box
like a long gone rotten darling.
A slain fear.

I worry my hands will cripple,
that a screwdriver will find its way to my feet, or.
I leave my fingers, their intrinsic knotting and bowing and, alas,
ugly hands… I leave them long and unbent.

Yet still
they ache before rain.
Premonitions.
Arthritis?

But I fixed simple concoctions often those days:
Urine, an opaque white, of the moth and chigger.
Urine like milk laughed
out my nostrils.

The sink has nostrils.
I hate
the way
I know this bathroom.

I always choke on the first
bite of Tiramisu.
But you pour IPA over your steak,
so.

And you
do not know
how to throw your hands up around a stranger’s neck,
so.

And you
do not know
how to drive correctly,
so.

And you
have never done
your laundry yourself,
so.

But you
too
have given people premonitions of doom.
You understand.

V.

It is amazing what the body
will do to stay alive.

You and your tigress demeanor
Lie flat on
A mustard rug.

Skilled

At
Angel crafts
And makeshift love letter.

You and your
Molten bleeding
Ear.

You know, that
Isn’t
True?

Life over death.

This conversation would
Change every time
I had it.

Can’t taste it
Anymore
But my blood still feels

Like tigress
Kisses
Gnawing my eyes

To a close.

Sophia Summerlin is a poet and writer residing in the Atlanta area. She is editor-in-chief of The Tower, a literary magazine established at Oglethorpe University where she studies literature and writing. Her poetry has been presented at the AJC Decatur Book Festival (2019) as well as various local reading events. Sophia’s love for the south, particularly her unconventional, small city life, are the dedication of her works. She can be reached at ophiawritez99@gmail.com.

Darren C. Demaree

with yard work

i cannot
trim my own
body &

I don’t own
this land yet
the bank does

for twelve more
years but i
manicure

this good prop-
erty with
baffling care

Darren C. Demaree is the author of fourteen poetry collections, most recently “Unfinished Murder Ballads” (October 2020, Backlash Press). He is the recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louis Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.

Kenneth Pobo

Graves, Almost Paid For

Last year Raylene and Skip
bought graves,

one pine tree to shade both.
Even in death there’s no sep-

aration. Eventually
no one will visit--

dandelions yellowing
an impressive silence.

Kenneth Pobo won the 2019 chapbook contest from the Poetry Society of Alabama for Your Place Or Mine. They published it this May. Forthcoming from Assure Press is his book called Uneven Steven. He just retired from teaching at Widener University in Pennsylvania.

Theresa Cader

The Season of Our Sundering

Under locust trees, in the blossoming park by Town Hall,
masked and unmasked walkers dip hands in the fountain pool,

cool on this hot day, a limbic throwback to summers
at Walden or Long Pond, a day’s release from work.

Near a young pear tree, I sit on a stone bench in noon sun,
watch my country divide. She that was great among the nations,

Jeremiah grieved, and princess among the provinces, how is she
become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night. Our resident ER doc

posts to the town Facebook list: help us save lives, help us
flatten... Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern of mud, despised,

imprisoned. And whatever prayer is, I pray for the mocked
and the deniers. My breathlessness is easing. I can walk up stairs,

stroll here like the others. I have no God to talk to, though I try.

Theresa Cader

Isotopes

In Fukushima, wild boars from the mountains
graze in abandoned yards and gardens,

eat radioactive crops without dying,
rut by hedges, defecate on streets.

Tainted, they breed in empty houses, squat
on tatami mats, males often two hundred pounds.

People left years ago, dishes still in the sink
at the restaurant where wild boar was a delicacy,

mounds of decayed vegetables in the grocery collapsing
the shelves as rats ransack the sludge.

The poisoned dirt bagged and ready to go,
but where? And how to get rid of the beasts?

Three mass graves in Nihonmatsu hold 1,800 of them,
no public land left to use except maybe schools.

Hired hunters try to bury them, but dogs dig them up,
and now who can trust the dogs, running like wolves.

In Soma a new crematorium filters isotopes
from smoke. It can only burn three boars a day.

Not enough people want to work stuffing body parts
down the stacks, first cutting them to fit.

Cesium-137 has a half-life of thirty years.
The government says to its people—

we’ll make it safe, plant new fields, we can’t pay
to keep you in other towns.

The government says, Come back.

Teresa Cader is the author of three poetry collections, History of Hurricanes (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 2009), The Paper Wasp (NUP, 1999), and Guests (Ohio State University Press, 1991). She has been awarded the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize from the Ohio State University Press, the George Bogin Memorial Award, a “Must Read” award from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Harvard Magazine, FIELD, Poetry, Ploughshares, Ecotone, Plume, AGNI, and many other journals. She taught at MIT, Emerson College, the University of Massachusetts-Boston and for ten years in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

Jones Irwin

Brannigan

I
Plain clothes in the
stairwell there to catch more
than porn cinema punters or payers
for pleasure. Brannigan of Irish
extraction. Moustache from Leone
even plays guitars some furore

bad east London band. Whores
are all Eastern European. Down
in the basement they’re
cutting up some informer. Where
is Brannigan again? A woman
worth killing for.

II
A man with spaghetti westerns
on the brain. No shame
in Italian taste. Suits and shoes
from Milan. Don’t cross
him, please. Brannigan is
a stylish policeman. In the death

it’s all marching money. More
art, meaning. The way one whore
from Lithuania speaks. He likes
her hate. She had him take
her pimp out. Watched him
do it. Then Laima became

a free agent.

III
In the police station some
youth is giving off fearsome
lip not obviously realizing who
or what gives. Quick askance
are you for real mate takes
an easy jab to the fat face as
an early warning don’t mess
with Brannigan. Jesus
doesn’t listen comes at him
not fast enough and across
the table this youth goes
1-2-3 crash bash bosh cries
call the police you’re breakin’
my neck. The sun always
goes down like this is
the police, boy.

IV
Thing is this
boy can’t yet maybe
never see that Brannigan
half-disguised is his keeper
stupid parents no school bad
blood and crack hide maybe
fatally. Average age of
death round here is
23. A challenge to the helpless
act of reading surely taking
this a-b-c nevertheless kids like this
must be raised by the honest
people of the earth.

V
Back outside near Compton Street
strippers male here purple lipsticked
fraternize the clip shop punters horny
from lack of sex. Spittle
and innuendo. I don’t like
paying over the top. That pink
exterior pub with the open
front has gangs leering for
love. Brannigan lights a cigar
tilts his sunglasses who’s
dealing this hot mid-afternoon? The Albanians,
crack meth and assorted pills. Tell
them we’ll leave ‘em alone soon
they give us the name who
cut the Thai guy up
with the longest stockinged legs.
Poor bastard died on the way
to hospital.

Jones Irwin has taught Philosophy and Education in Dublin since 2001. He has written widely in Philosophy and his most recent fiction and poetry develops a postmodern existential perspective, with a certain dash of noir.

Max Heinegg

For the Student Who Slept Through the Lesson on 9/11

History is the smoke
of the towers as the boy’s
head rests in peace
on the desk asleep,
allowed. I know
he works all night
& just yesterday borrowed the Iliad
because his father made him read the Odyssey,
& though I’d roused him, he sleeps
again while the man falls,
an arrow, his photographer saw, bisecting
the two buildings,
one where a high school friend died,
the other where my cousin worked & was on vacation from
& I wonder if this is what it means to teach
in the empire where soon there will be no
longer recognition
of fault or anger
waking him for the clip of Osama
who explains what will happen if America aims at Mecca & Medina,
& the flashback ends. The class is reminded
what Mecca means
& the child who works to help feed his family has to
be told he’s missed the bell, that he was dreaming
perhaps of places he wants to visit,
things he wants to happen in America.

Max Heinegg is a high school English teacher and singer-songwriter, based in Medford, MA. His poems have appeared in Thrush, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, Crab Creek Review, and Love’s Executive Order, among others. His music can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com.

Amy Lerman

How David Lynch Affects My Brain

I can’t walk near dumpsters at night for fear
a miniaturized, elderly couple will walk out
of a crumpled, brown bag. I can’t pass a man
riding his lawn mower without wondering if
he will steer the machine across states. I can’t
help myself from wearing oversized, re
eyeglasses with a brown and gray cardigan
every Halloween, my logs sometimes just
unpackaged Duraflames. I can’t stop telling
my husband Where we’re from, the birds
sing a pretty song, how many times a week
I open Youtube to watch the dwarf, suited
in red, dance. I can’t budge from the store’s
baking aisle, the can’s photo bursting
with cherries, it makes me hungry and miss
Norma. I can’t help believing those sporadic
grays I conceal and spray brown will multiply
overnight. I can’t dance at concerts or weddings,
my swaying and closed eyes too dreamy for those
around me. I can’t look at our tea kettle
without expecting David Bowie’s voice
or an impersonation, the weird clicks, rising
steam, Judy’s phone number digits circling
air bubbles. I can’t hear Roy Orbison’s
“Crying,” it’s now “Llorando” sung always
by a woman, a mime’s tear drawn under
her eye. I can’t stop thinking about all
our doppelgangers, the Rays, the Dougies,
our amassing, how can we be so many

living everywhere, parallel, maybe unaware
or merging, we erase the Las Vegas strip, cold
motorcycle rides through the Northwest forests,
the last, nightly notes of the timber mill saws
ushering us through the restaurant’s open door,
the fresh, white cups of damn, fine coffee.

Amy Lerman was born and raised on Miami Beach, moved to the Midwest for many years, and now lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert, where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. She received her Master’s and Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Kansas, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Smartish Pace, Slippery Elm, Common Ground Review, Prime Number, Solstice, and other publications.