Remy Dambron
[nahr-suh-sist]

narcissist goes too extreme
measures

avoids
taking responsibility

for narcissist is never
wrong

but narcissist can only be
if those who praise exist as well

in abundance

for narcissist fears
solitude

in this vain
narcissist loves only conditionally

those who enable its self
serving behaviors

for narcissist demands absolute
loyalty

narcissist systematically
inserts itself
seamlessly
into

everything

for narcissist is blind
to worthiness of
others

narcissist is never
content

constantly craving
endlessly creating conflict to mask its lawlessness
mastering deception

for narcissist is an agent of chaos
thriving on

disorder

narcissist is pathological
repetitious
superfluous

hypocritical
parasitical
pernicious highly

devious

narcissist is multiplying
like swarms of locusts
biblical

city of sin
nation of lies

sickness level

critical

Poems by Remy Dambron have appeared previously in What Rough Beast, as well as in New Verse News, Society of Classical Poets, Poets Reading the News, and Writer’s Resist. He and his wife live in Portland, Oregon, where they advocate for social justice and spread smiles under the belief that happiness can be contagious too.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Jane Yolen
That Damned Pipe

I met you that way, the sweetness
of the briar, your confident walk
eating up city streets where once
it devoured southern mountains,
a lust-filled lunting that took me in.
Who knew time was already ticking
beneath your tongue, greedily
building the reservoir of death.
You who were always so full of life,
never ill: hunter, fisherman, birdwatcher,
your closest companion field glasses
that brought the world into clearest view.
That damned pipe, that damned lunting,
taking you from us way too early
leaving only the field glasses behind.

Jane Yolen is a poet, novelist, children’s book writer, essayist, short story writer, and lyricist. To date, she has published 376 books, 10 of them poetry collections for adult readers. She has won many awards for her work, including two Nebulas, two Golden Kite Awards, a Caldecott Medal, two Christopher Medals, a New England Public Radio Arts & Humanities award, and three World Fantasy awards. Six colleges and universities have granted her honorary doctorates. Yolen writes, “But awards can be dangerous. One set my good coat on fire.”

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Ellen Welcker
Pennsylvania

We were swimming,
bobbing in the tide with all the people,
talking about puberty.

Phthalates, I say, parabens &
phenols, BPA, PBDEs & perchlorate—
whose little baby drank rocket fuel

& squishing your cheeks in my mind.
You don’t like ‘puberty’—who does—
we call it ‘Pennsylvania,’

veer briefly toward ‘spon-
taneous’ & ‘laboratory.’ Beautiful.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, I say, a link

between exposure & onset—the mother—
her child lying limp on her nose—
the orcas of the Salish Sea & the mothers

of Flint & Bundaberg & Kabwe
& Oakdale & Lahore & Johnson
County are lingering

as I do with you here, in the warm wash
of human tide, saying Pennsylvania happens
when it happens, as if passively

precocious—the brain letting go
of its hormones like bubbles. Factors,
as if in a bubble, include being a girl.

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

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem, and you value the What Rough Beast series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Adam Malinowski
For Sale

For Sale: Ignorant love, impossible science. Falling firebombs. The irrepressible art of paramilitaries. Dispossession of missionaries and malls. Bank fascists on the work. Tar and feather sanctions. Empty discounts for ambitious wages. Executive pensions and faltering strip malls. Car bombs and democratic oil kingdoms. No squalid classes needing love. Wildcat solar and gas. Cayman island suicide. Blackfacing boats, the death of spiritualisms. F-14 Tomcat psalms. Splintering politicians. Wildfires in Oakland and LA.
For Sale: Anarchy for the masses.

Poems by Adam Malinowski have appeared in  Poets Reading the News, Philosophical Idiot, and in Mirage #5/Period(ical) #6. They hold an MA in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University, live in Detroit, and facilitate a poetry workshop at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Mich.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem, and you value the What Rough Beast series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Mary Ann Honaker
Trigger

It’s the week after El Paso
and Dayton, Ohio. The grandsons
are here for a visit and my mother

has bought them new Nerf guns.
I’m not judging here– two Christmases
ago I bought them semi-automatic

Nerfs that could fire thirty to fifty
soft foam rounds in one great blaze.
My brother’s house was peppered,

pellets in between couch cushions,
wedged under decorative lamps,
rolled under end tables.

*

When we were kids, we played
the cooler version of Cops and Robbers:
Cops and Drug Dealers.

We had tiny pistols that cracked,
argued over who was now dead,
raced around on bikes

equipped with yellow plastic sirens
bolted tight to the handlebars.
The sirens had three settings:

Police Car, Fire Truck, and Ambulance.
We never used Ambulance;
we never dreamed of aftermath–

*

but now of course kids do.
Kids young as we were then
have known aftermath as a spill

of red from their own bellies.

*

The middle boy immediately
schooled the younger one
on these more complicated,

more life-like guns.
Soon there was an argument.
The ten-year-old strapped

one gun into a shirt waist-tied,
another down the back of his T-shirt,
and held the third, true child warrior

stance. He crept room to room
targeting the four-year-old,
who cried, “Don’t shoot me!”

“But you shot me in the face!”
the older child tattled. Dad tore
the guns from their hands

one by one but not before
the ten-year-old, seething with fury,
pinged a plastic bullet casing

hard on the hardwood floor.
His cry of unfair so loud
we all jumped a little, shocked.

*

Super soakers were the rage
when I was in high school.
There was a summer spate

of super soaker drive-bys,
like real drive-bys except
victims were only surprised, wet,

and sometimes, even, refreshed.

*

After El Paso I refreshed my screen
and watched the death toll rise.
The grandkids– my nephews–

watch hour upon hour
of safe, silly, violence-free
cartoons. But they know

how to jam a cartridge in,
how to rest the butt on a shoulder,
how to pull the trigger.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Dion O’Reilly
Scavenged

…what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future…
—Dorianne Laux

When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back
and ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone,
I ran through the house, a contagion
cindering the couches and carpets.
Flayed, my fingertips peeled back
to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air,
light, and the steel cot where they took me.

The way, each day, they peeled me
like Velcro from my sheets,
left bits of my meat there.
Lowered me into Betadine,
and scrubbed me to screams—
that became my history. Scavenged
by the curious. They see my twisted fingers
and are hungry for the tale.

I’ve done the same, stared
at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it,
feel the cut bone under the knob,
hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know
how that man was alive, arms glistening
playing basketball from a high-tech chair,
making his shots.

The body’s scarred terrain becomes
consecrated field. We gather to pick
through the pieces that remain—
an ear hanging from its hinge of skin,
diamond stud in the lobe, a ring finger
shining with its promise-band of gold.

Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Michael H. Levin
City of Flowers

(Firenze)

Serene beneath its heart of beating stone
the city stretches and reclines in pleasing
ocher curving lines; spreads its gray paws
upon the piazzas, haunches tucked against
precisely windowed and proportionate facades;

turns—a glint of claws. Secreted daggers
at the Duomo’s doors, Savonarola’s
fierce dark face, edged as an axe,
still cut their saturnine steel ways below
arcades that run from weathered corner frescoes

past slit palace eyes, to the Campanile
lifting itself hand over hand in slender
colonnaded spurts of hope towards heaven.

What caused this nuclear outburst
we can never know, who talk
of grand dukes, Buonarotti, Fra Angelico

the force that remade sight
still volleys, vaulting passionate and hard
down arched percussive halls to where its dwarf
retainers troop—small shuffling bands
on tessellated floors.

Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. See michaellevinpoetry.com.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Amanda Forrester
In a Time of Crisis

I punch myself.

When it is time
I do not act.

Allow me to demonstrate:
I laugh on the outside
to make you feel better.

I am exhausted from faking it.

My survival depends
on my imagination.

There will not always be time.
I realize this.

When I finally see a break in the weather,
I will run.

But I will never tell.

Poems by Amanda J. Forrester have appeared or are forthcoming Collective Unrest, the Sandhill Review, and the anthology We Will Not Be Silenced: The Lived Experience of Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault Told Powerfully Through Poetry, Prose, Essay, and Art (Indie Blu[e] Publishing, 2018), edited by Christine E. Ray, Kindra M. Austin, Candice Louisa Daquin, and Rachel Finch. Forrester received her MFA from the University of Tampa. She serves on the executive board of YellowJacket Press and snuggles with her fur babies when she isn’t working long hours as a data analyst at Saint Leo University. Follow her on Twitter @ajforrester75.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

Lydia Cortes
Find the Form to Love Your Life (Section 10)

Editor’s Note: “Find the Form to Love Your Life” is a long poem that we are posting in eleven sections on consecutive Saturdays.

Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet and on the Black Earth Institute’s 30 Days Hath September poetry feature curated by Patricia Spears Jones.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.