Sarah Sala
The News

Today federal officials apprehended
an undocumented brain tumor
and transported her to a detention center.

45 declared: We’re getting really bad dudes
out of this country. And at a rate that nobody’s
ever seen before. And they’re the bad ones.

For weeks, my brain crashed through the waterblack
basement of alternate galaxies before coming
to a halt on my pillow.

This tumor and I, we share the same name.
You have a beautiful brain, my neurologist beamed.
A printout of alpha waves trailed across his legs.

See that gap? That’s where you blinked!
In the Old French, to deport is to be patient.
What is language, but the genesis of crime?

45’s vice his tongue: to drive out by order.
I feel dizzy, with pain. Heavy eyes. Nausea.
The tongue is not always responsive.

Sarah Sala is the author of The Ghost Assembly Line (Finishing Line Press , 2016). Her poem “Hydrogen” was recently featured in the “Elements” episode of NPR’s hit show Radiolab in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. Sarah’s poems appear in Atlas Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and Poetry Ireland Review, among others. Visit her at SarahSala.com

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Ashleigh Allen
Seems to be the nature of it

Ashleigh Allen‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, Tethered by Letters, The Literary Review, and the Best American Poetry blog. Her essay on Apollinaire’s “Zone” appeared in The Operating System. She holds and MFA from The New School and has taught a variety of writing courses at colleges and community centers in New York City and Toronto since 2010.

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Laura Winkelspecht
Meanwhile in the Heartland

Rural electrification
brought longer days
game shows
Rush Limbaugh,
but it didn’t stop
the highway bypass
the mill from closing,
or the resentment
spreading like rust.

Laura Winkelspecht‘s work has appeared in Clementine Poetry Journal, NEAT, and One Sentence Poems, among others. She is a poet and writer from Wisconsin who writes with the hope of finding some lightning among the lightning bugs. Follow her on Twitter @lwinkelspecht.

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Matty Layne Glasgow
To the President of the Ames Community School Board

who said this proposal is just a political statement,
who said they will call this district a sanctuary,

& we sang education is a kind of refuge,
& we sang knowledge is a stained-glass window,

so let the sun shine that colored light on all our children,
& if they come for one of them, let them come for us all.

You see, I’m learning that a school board proposal can be
like a poem in some ways, because I’ve known men

who’d say this poem is just a political statement, too.
& they are white & straight & cis-gendered, like you,

& they tell us this is not the time or the place,
& they tell us art is no political animal, to put our fangs away.

& it’s kind of funny how you all use the word political
when it’s not about your child, & then you go on talking

about a multimillion-dollar natatorium years in the making,
but I’ve walked into a classroom, eyes fixed on an empty desk

that drowns in all that colored light, & I imagine
how they came for that child in the night, or the mother,

or the father, but we will never know. Have you heard
of America’s disappeared, the students we never see again?

This poem is for them. & it might be a political song,
but we will sing it through our fangs No subpoena? No dice, ICE.

& it will echo through those hollow desks, over stained-glass
broken in every color, & in that empty, empty light.

Matty Layne Glasgow is a queer pixie of a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals here and there, including The Blueshift Journal, WILDNESS Journal, Rust+Moth, Flyway, HIV Here & Now, & The New Verse News. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State university, where he serves as the Poetry Editor for Flyway and teaches social justice rhetorics.

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Elizabeth Macklin
The Virtues of Red Dragon–Hard

Shanghai Mahjongg@coastclick.com

No language for a minute, no language at all for a minute
or minutes on end—no trope of any kind! That goes for any
language—any language at all.

Just sight—by sight—when you sit back, suspense or sadness, wordless,
and like Dream–Very Easy and Towers–Easy and in Cloud–Normal
there in Red Dragon–Hard are the Flowers and Winds, the Winds

and the Seasons. Remembering glancingly—that’s what the drug’s for.
I don’t like to think what we’re thinking, think what I’m thinking
as the reefs bleach, fact of the matter.

I’m glad I went out tonight and ran into a philosopher.
You’ve gone and you’ve got some done, he said. So enough for now.
Why not scout out priorities in Red Dragon–Hard—

once learned, it’s second nature? But don’t believe me.
The new game is always a new game, I thought. Nothing’s the same
as it was. But there with the tiles on the table—

Circular, Bamboo, Character—no language needed.
And the new algorithms make change—a relief!
Resisting the easy “Sad!” Finally, the score is immaterial.

But I’m here resisting every task I was given, I said.
Despite algorithms, you cannot predict the future, he answered.
All you need to do this minute is resist easy.

Thich Nhat Hahn was at peace in wartime, if only for minutes.
Suffering’s not enough, he suggested. We don’t need
to go to China to enjoy the blue sky.

Sovereignty over ourselves, he called it.
Not drowned in forgetfulness.
Finally, whatever the score was was immaterial.

And there’s no way to replay the game.
You can’t get bored, since it never repeats.
No way to replay a game.

I said I heard they did it just like this on the prairie,
back when teamsters had teams, with their round of days.
And that made this day different.

But the perfect sadness of why they are now unable
to even conceive, can’t stand to believe, and cling
to the same damned previous game forever.

Of course they blame the vaccine,
pushed by that gene in the air
to avert—turn away—what could help them.

But now: Flowers Any, you’re blessedly left with patchwork
to look at—a ship, blue-violet Sparrows for sails. The whole
unfortunate layout. But now you get to say the, at least.

It’s a definite article, and it’s the!
After the hours of calling unlimited minutes—
It’s was, and the crowd are going wild!

Hardy in Python, Roth on Louis—
it could work in the streets, if bottled:
just do the best you can with what you have.

Elizabeth Macklin is the author of the poetry collections You’ve Just Been Told (Norton, 2000) and A Woman Kneeling in the Big City (Norton, 1992). She translated the Basque poet Kirmen Uribe’s Bitartean Heldu Eskutik (Meanwhile Take My Hand), published by Graywolf in 2007. Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review, among others. Her awards include the Ingram Merrill poetry prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center.

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Lisa DeSiro
Hashtag Millennial

At night the sky was white and full of crows
instead of stars and each beak offered a shiny prize.

They goaded:
Buy a scratch ticket. Can’t win if you don’t play.

Those lucky enough to pluck one
turned into loons and flew underwater.

We carried buckets bare-knuckled,
sanitized our hands.

Before masturbating we turned the family photos
face-down on the bureau.

They urged: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

The weather kept getting weirder until
the seasons got scrambled.

We were all thumbs on our dumb phones
texting everything verbatim.

LOL OMG WTF TTYS
They twittered:

This event occurs in the past.
Replies are no longer required.

Lisa DeSiro is the author of the chapbook Grief Dreams (White Knuckle Press, June 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Commonthought, Friends Journal, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and other journals.  Along with her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Lisa has degrees from Binghamton University, Boston Conservatory, and Longy School of Music. She works as a production and editorial assistant for C.P.E. Bach: The Complete Works and is an accomplished pianist.

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Anne Riesenberg
What She Dreams the Month He Moves into the White House

She dreams her mother discovers the moon.

She dreams about a queen. A famous poet. Her husband asking can he play with the poet’s hair after he’s already done so.

She dreams inside a benzodiazepine cloud. At sea in the shallows an amoeba a flicker. All those dreamless years without sleep.

She dreams someone gives her a fence a folded stack of clear plastic slats.

She dreams what she lost in the womb.

She dreams a ramshackle house. A woman pulls her into an empty room and kisses her hard. She is astonished by the equatorial fizz their mouths make. When the woman asks her to sing she cannot.

She dreams about wildflower honey rooms full of noise.

She is sleepless. She sleeps without dreams. Three mornings she wakes, upper lip clenched in her teeth.

She dreams a dangerous road. A mirror full of sky. A charcoal drawing of her daughter’s arms encircling the cat.

She dreams she is speaking a language she doesn’t know. There’s a door. A ticket she needs to get through.

She dreams of acting without hesitation. Running down a hill a rolled up rug under her arm.

She dreams an open door. A lilac sweater. An old stove. The poet again. Writing a poem in her nightgown.

She dreams a bedroom. Her friend back from Tanzania heaps of blue beads on a blanket. Another woman weaving loops of beads through her hair.

She dreams the man just made president in his underwear grabbing her crotch.

She dreams a seal with aquamarine spots slithering through the backyard in the snow. When she describes what she’s seen no one believes her.

She dreams a fortress. Row upon row of pale concrete blocks.

She dreams a bridge. A man standing at the gate demanding payment to cross.

She dreams a taxi ride with her sister 4 blocks cost $11.28. She is upset the driver doesn’t care her sister doesn’t offer to chip in still she is in a dream with her sister and it isn’t terrible.

She dreams inside her cells a loosening.

The night of the refugee ban the world she dreams feels more real than the one she’d been living all day.

She is walking across no man’s land in a war-blackened field. Bodies emerge from the mud. Swords slice through her clothes. Her hands are empty. She lets herself bleed. She walks farther than ever before.

She dreams about the queen again. Long strips of red and gold silk flutter across her face as she moves towards the queen, who is lying on her bed in a robe. The queen is young again freshly bathed, gesticulating about justice and freedom.

She dreams she is walking along a frozen waterfall watching people slide down the ice on pieces of cardboard. When she gets back to her car they are snorting cocaine off the hood.

She makes them clean up. She makes them leave. She can’t escape how lonely she feels.

Anne Riesenberg‘s recent work has appeared in The Maine Review, The Blueshift Journal and Naugatuck River Review. She won the 2016 Blue Mesa Review nonfiction contest. She practices acupuncture in Portland, Maine.

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Dana Trupa
A Deleted Scene From Hitchcock’s The Birds:
“Bloodletting The White Lady”

EXT. BODEGA BAY — DAY
Overcast, the blue-black
clouds; dead leaves
twizzling on the sidewalk. Back-
wind whiffles her puffy hood.

Hands stuffed deep in her pockets
when the tip
of the red-tailed hawk’s
right wing
tricks
her left elbow. She looks there,
as the hawk dove ahead
swooping White Lady—
a young girl jumps back
in horror.

The politics
of nature
render
us helpless—
speechless—

Patient, the chicken hawk preys,
stabs in—Lady flutters
on the ground; tufts of white
feathers stripped between
his talons—steeped deep in her guts.

We did not see
it coming.
No “coo roo-c’too.” No
beak snapping.
No birds hissing.

A quelled pen, he dips the red
ink, blood-lets the pools; memos
sink into concrete. With Lady tucked
under his dead weight, they
vanish into the dark-dusk.

Dana Trupa‘s poems are forthcoming in the Red Cedar Review. She was born in Pittsburgh and is a 20-year NYC transplant and recent graduate of Hunter College with a BA in English Literature. She lives and works as a dog whisperer in Manhattan.

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Aimee Pozorski
Allied Forces

We stand before a door that,
when opened, will demand of us
the truth.

Eliot’s phone blew up too late the previous night;
already he was in bed.

Their texts, they light up the room:

Sam, who once was Samantha;
Molly, emergent feminist;
Ahmed, salutatorian of his middle school class;
Catalina, not yet a citizen;
Isaac, then Jared, multi ethnic kids: beauty personified.

All of them ask the same simple thing:
How could they do this to us?

My husband holds me at the bottom of the stairs
while I weep
for a country lost
to fear, hate, and false promises…
something about draining the swamp.

We hold hands while we ascend to Eliot’s room
to wake him to a new reality,
to tell him about who won and who lost.

But for a brief moment
it is just the two of us.
Allied forces.

We will tell our son—
a strong, white middle-class male
unlikely to be affected much—
that he must be an ally
for his friends who need him most.

That day, and every day after
we brace ourselves there,
against a closed door—
against the things that we may never know
and the things we know too well.

Aimee Pozorski is the author Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) and Falling after 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Pozorski has also edited or co-edited three collections on Philip Roth, along with two special issues of Philip Roth Studies. Her poems have appeared in Paper Nautilus and The Helix, among others journals. She is Professor of English and director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University.

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Erica Sofer Bodwell
Washington, DC, 2017

—after Wordsworth

King! You should be living at this hour:
America needs you: she’s burning
with that deepest fire—a never-ending
smoking funeral pyre. Our fear has grown like cancer
cells divide, malignant it seems; Our hubris!
Bring your voice and Gandhi’s steady hand,
remind us justice sits as well as stands.
We are selfish and forget darkness
cannot drive out darkness. Raise us up,
restore sanity to this mirror time.
Still pendulum’s eternal swing, let minutes slow
to crawl so we’ll recall. Come and trumpet: Yes!
This tide can turn. It’s not too late, I swear—
just please, we fall to knees and beg: return.

Erica Sofer Bodwell is the author of the chapbook Up Liberty Street (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Fat, Minerva Rising, White Stag, APIARY, The Fem, PANK, HeART, and other journals. She lives in Concord, New Hampshire.

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