Maya Jewell Zeller
spell for conjuring order: Pleuronectiformes

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011) and Yesterday, The Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015). She lives in the Inland Northwest with her family.

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Claire Wahmanholm
The Witch

A rich talker, thought the children
from their bone cages. They had been watching
the witch for several days and didn’t believe
a word she said. No one ate children anymore.
Not here, at least. And anyway,
not good children. They had already explained this
to the witch so now they just said it aloud to each other.

If she was really going to eat us, one said,
she would have done it by now.
And if she was really going to eat us,
said the other, where’s the oven?
They had heard that this was how
it was done, back when it used to be done,
which was a very very long time ago,
if it had ever even happened at all.

The children thought back to the footprints
they had made in the mud of the riverbank.
It had not rained in several days. Someone would see
the footprints and follow them along the river
and find the hut and the children inside it.
Not that there was any danger.

The hut was getting warm. The children no longer
recognized each other without their
outer layers—their winter coats, their shirts,
their skin. The river appeared then disappeared
through the woods like an enormous needle,
stitching its dark mouth shut.

Claire Wahmanholm‘s poems most recently appear or are forthcoming in Birdfeast, Bennington Review, The Collapsar, Newfound, New Poetry from the Midwest 2016, Bateau, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Memorious, The Kenyon Review Online, Handsome, Best New Poets 2015, Elsewhere, BOAAT, The Journal, Winter Tangerine, and DIAGRAM. Find her online at clairewahmanholm.com.

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Juan Chemes
Mothers

To turn ninety six to dust
and dust into dust-storms
and dust-storms
into nothingness

and dare to call
that pissing contest
mother?

(not my
mother or
almost any
other mother)

To defy and risk my mornings
and turn mornings into mourns
and mourns into dust and dust
into dinosaurs?

(You don’t even
know their mother
the one who
drops the mic) so…

Enjoy,
may your
devil’s feast
be your monster’s ball.

Juan Chemes is currently writing a thesis for his MFA in creative writing at Adelphi University in New York City.

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Ellen Welcker
That Bizness in the Sky

There’s a story I love, about a boy who looks inside a trashcan, because—why? Haven’t you?

He finds a maggot, his mother lets him keep it.

I change the boy to a girl. I change the girl’s eyes to yellow. Everyone has an opinion on her. She stands for all we have lost or want to destroy. Now I change her back into the boy.

He dreams a typical, terrible, typical dream:

I say ‘no’ but no
one hears me.

Then an animal eats his back. Writhing, he cries:

I want to go downstairs
I want to go downstairs

and eat my breakfast
and hide.

Where will he hide? The weather is grey. Now he’s the girl whose ears prick and swivel.

Back to the boy who loves the maggot.

Who loves the maggot so.

Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, fall 2016) and The Botanical Garden, which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the 2009 Astrophil Poetry Prize (Astrophil, 2010). Chapbooks include The Pink Tablet, forthcoming in 2017 from Fact-Simile Books; Mouth That Tastes of Gasoline (alice blue, 2014); and The Urban Lightwing Professionals (H_NGM_N, 2011). Recent poems are in Okey-Panky, Gramma Daily, and the anthology WA 129, and forthcoming in Poetry Northwest. She is a 2016 WA State Artist Trust GAP grant recipient, and she lives in Spokane.

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Michael Broder
There Were Different Ways of Consuming the Content

Micah Zevin
(Madness!) #3

The machines are no longer working or workers.
The automatic doors open slowly
or not at all.
We are busting and being busted for the little
piece of mind we have or once had
on the days we had a bounce in our steps and
had a bounce in our steps and had a full belly.
We can not endure surprise raids for
whatever legal illegal non-empathetic reason
whether in the middle of the work day
or during the cover of night.
The machines are no longer working or workers
but digital outliers to extinction and
incarceration and decimation.
The automatic doors open or do not
and they are tacky and golden
surrounded by cherubs spitting up coins
onto demons, and then there is the
mysterious trail of blood that leads to the
CEO’s office and Human Resources
and stops at the window at the very top floor
of the skyscraper, where a rope and a pulley
have been left dangling—

Micah Zevin is a librarian poet living in Jackson Heights, Queens, N.Y. with his wife, a playwright. He works for the Queens Library in Queens, N.Y. He has recently published articles and poems at the Best American Poetry Blog, Headlock Press, The Otter, Newtown Literary Journal and Blog, Poetry and Politics, Reality Beach, Jokes Review, POST(blank), the American Journal of Poetry and The Tower Journal. He created/curates an open mic/poetry prompt workshop called The Risk of Discovery Reading Series now at Blue Cups in Woodside, Queens, N.Y. every 3rd Tuesday of the month. He holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School. His website is micahzevin.weebly.com.

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Melissa Rendlen
We March

Women marched on Washington
more than five hundred thousand members strong.
You may have heard.
My eldest, Marietta and I were there.
We marched five days after her sister’s wedding,
in Texas.
Marietta flew to home to Seattle on Tuesday, Chicago on Wednesday.
I didn’t go home, flew to Chicago and met her there,
We hopped a train at six pm, Chicago to DC.
There were Trump hats on the train, but more pink pussy hats on board.
A picture of all pink hatted in the observation car, published in the New York Times.

We stayed in Pentagon City, twenty minutes on Metro to the Mall.
At least it was on the 20th…
That day we went to the Smithsonian.
Saturday morning the Metro station swarming.
Signs of all sizes, pink hats, old women, young women, gay guys, straight guys,
mothers, fathers, daughters and sons.
Forty minutes just to board, three hours more to the mall.
From every direction pink tentacles undulating toward Third and Independence Ave.

Joy danced across the air, bounced from breast to breast, circled around and lifted you off the ground.
We wove and dove through ever tightening crowds until we could move no more.
We never saw the stage, couldn’t understand the loud speaker, but stood for hours
packed together
singing, chanting, chatting.
A six year old on her daddy’s shoulders, held her homemade unicorn sign that said girl power.
Every direction all she could see was people shoulder to shoulder, front to back, sharing the cel-ebration.

Black, white, Hispanic, Muslim, Christian, Jew, old, young happy in our collective purpose.
A we with people on every continent, including Antarctica’s entire population.
All of us just wanted to say:

Love is love
Black lives matter
Climate change is real
Immigrants make America Great
Women’s rights are human rights.

Melissa Rendlen is a 66 year old poet physician, recently returned to her love of writing. She was a Tupelo Press 30/30 Project poet, received Honorable Mention with her first attempt at a chapbook in Concrete Wolf’s chapbook contest, and has had poems in GFT: Press, Still Crazy, Ink in Thirds, L’emphemere, and Writing Raw.

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Aimee Herman
Dear America,

This isn’t about Canada, though I can’t pretend she’s not on my mind these days. You’ve made mistakes before:
dance crazes I couldn’t wrap my hips around
North Carolina, your ridiculous obsession with who uses your bathrooms
too many guns
your disregard for the need for free education
Sarah Palin

Now I’m screaming out my safe word because it’s just too much to bear:

Passport

Aimee Herman is the author of the poetry collections meant to wake up feeling (great weather for MEDIA, 2014), The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013), and to go without blinking (BlazeVOX, 2012). Aimee’s poems have appeared in journals including cream city review and BOMB and in the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2013). Aimee is a queer writer, performance artist, and writing/literature teacher at Bronx Community College.

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Devon Balwit
Beautiful and Terrible

The wind, while not quite gale force,
is close enough.

It hurtles across the sky to the right margin,
dragging clouds

and cracking trees, a violence oddly wafting
hyacinth

and apple blossom, for it is April. We pull
the dog out

just as a trunk topples at our feet. Our neighbor,
a woodsman,

fetches his chainsaw to lop the branches
and free us.

Devon Balwit‘s poems have appeared in The NewVerse News, Poets Reading the News, Redbird Weekly Read, Emerge Literary Journal, Rat’s Ass Review (Such an Ugly Time), Rise-Up Review, Unlikely Stories Mark V! and more.

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Soraya Shalforoosh
Humpty Will Fail

The flag smells like dollar bills
The dollar signs smells like cement and steel
The cement and steel smells like blood and mud
The blood and mud smells like landfill,
Swamp muck
The swamp monster wears heavy cologne and cheap ties
Tapes them shut with billion dollar scotch tape
The scotch is gold
He snorts it and stalks our sleep—night terrors spread across this land and after three weeks of sweats, clenched heart and screams, my friends tell me the same is happening to them, the same is happening to their coworkers the same is happening to our cousins, to our neighbors, to our teachers, to our doctors, to our prophets, even therapists break silences and have had it too pounding arms rests. Post-it note-filled subways, protest board lined streets, pinks hats on the heads of us like flowers defying snow in spring, marches feet hurt, brains constantly trying to figure out, how and why
Collectively
Our hearts panic and recover
Panic and recover

My couch, I am there with my son, cuddle, warmth prevails as we watch Harry Potter, the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters take over Hogsworth, I keep searching for more messages through Potter, through fables, and folklore how do they banish Voldemort? I study the film more carefully,
My son wants to know if we can make spells, yes we can, we can

Humpty will fall
Humpty will fail
Humpty will wail

The emperor’s daughter’s new line of clothes is for sale
Her dresses smell like boarding school
And the boarding school smells like white privilege
White privilege smells like baloney and reams of blank paper
The blank paper is ready for counterfeit
Rubles, Pounds, dollars and bitcoins
The cash smells
Decaying capitalism wrapped in a flag

Soraya Shalforoosh is the author of This Version of Earth (Barrow Street, 2014). She has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Black Earth Institute, Apogee Journal, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Lumina Journal, Skanky Possum, and Marlboro Review, among others. She hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University won first place in the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. She has been a guest poet at William Paterson University in New Jersey, Berkeley College in New York, San Jose State University and a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria.

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