Joss Barton
Blank

What is a death when the life is taken by pieces
Like bricks in a stockyard instead of exploding
Like the lotto where the final jackpot is becoming
A puddle of gristle and brains to weep over
And pass laws over and elect demagogues over
And forget how wealth is always manifested
By suffering and humiliation and you smile
As if you are not complicit in this terrifying world
Of unrelenting misery but you have enough
Moral indignation to say that the system is
Broken so why not burn it all down to the sewage
Drains where the black shit water of nationalism
Saturates the air and your teeth are white like
The men whose cocks throb with every dog
Whistle calling the wolves from their caves
And their reptile cum is smeared across the
Red sambo lips of black porcelain dolls
They cradle in their arms as they draft legislation
In ink that will birth their wet American nightmares.

Joss Barton is a writer, photographer, journalist, and artist documenting queer and trans* life and love in St. Louis. In 2016 she was a member of the first ever Summer Trans Women Writers Workshop at co-sponsored by Topside Press and Brooklyn College. She was a 2013 Fiction Fellow at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging LGBT Writers Retreat and a contributing artist for Nine Network’s Public Media Commons Artist Showcase in 2015. She is also an alumna of the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute. Her work has been published by HIV Here & Now, Ethica Press, Vice Magazine, and Vetch Poetry: A Transgender Poetry Journal.

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Lydia Cortes
Jetztzeit Again

Clouds were zigzagged as if slashed
punctured with z’s the z’s of a sword
the sword that’s mightier than mightier
sword we carry in our brain our being

in our fiber of meaning to puncture the lie
like wasps hovering near our eyes threatening
to puncture our brains our eyes and let out
all our truth that hides there in our being our

brain truth waving like a true flag of colors of
shame we’re shamed into truth the truth that’s
there always just behind or beyond our eyes there
but we don’t we can’t see most times for the fear

in our hearts covers and shields us from the truth
that we fear truly it’s so loud thunderous it makes us
deaf that’s the truth truth we cannot hide or bury inside
though that’s what we’re doing most of our lives for fear

we might get hurt might die if we uncover the truth real
blood and bile truth that comes spilling out of our brains
from behind almost right beyond our power of seeing of
feeling right under our skin’s surface it’s right there makes up

our fiber and muscle and bone it’s there coursing in our
our veins blood truth like the lies we need to get out get rid
of the waste poisoning our lives our guts spill it out we have to
even if we bleed a bit or more we can’t forever live our life’s

lies we can’t live forever afraid can’t be forever so why
not let it all out—first comes the shit—then comes the
breath returning letting us breathe the truth life everlasting
we can’t last forever but we can try to live with truth

revealed like a hallelujah busting out when we let loose
and yell like the pentacostals with tambourines singing
screaming joy engaged they’re completely engaged in
the song in the sound of their body telling body’s truth

truer than mere words than just sounds bursts of music
released truth dangerous truth dangerous beauty let loose
may be fatal it’s bone hard bone chilling our truth the truth we
fear is now here—hear hear—and alive in us even if only for a
second for the first time—hallelujah chaos—hallelujah catharsis

Lydia Cortes is the author of two collections of poems, Lust for Lust and Whose Place. Her work has been published in various anthologies, online zines and literary journals, most recently in Upstreet. She is currently working on a memoir in verse form.

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Judith Hoyer
When News Is Bad

I cry behind the wheel of my car.
Little red flags flutter in my belly.
I read articles that fail to make sense of
consequences that wear black and white.
I take my brother to Herbie’s
Herbie’s where decisions are grilled
“A hamburger, no onion rings!”
Glad for the nearness of strangers
I wait on a folding chair to donate
O negative in a cold hall
bad lighting, kind nurses
needle pricks, tincture of iodine.
At a marquetry exhibit I fall
for a lone Great Blue Heron
whose yellow eye seems to be
searching for what to do next.
Gorgeous trees backlit by sun
middle schoolers peddling grapefruit
construction detours in our village
puncture the skin of my dysphoria.
I muster salt pork, vinegar, onions, beef
for a stew that keeps me on my feet.

Judith Hoyer poems have appeared in The Worcester Review, PMS poemmemoirstory, Spillway Magazine, Main Street Rag, Small Portions Magazine, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine and Skylight 47. Her chapbook Bits and Pieces Set Aside is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in February 2017. Before retiring she was a psychologist working in a small school district in Massachusetts.

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Robert Carr
Neo-Liberal

Protect private parts with a big
male hand. Imagine changing head
garb, disguising children
you don’t have. Take a Xanax.

Don’t speak—suck oppression
second-hand from a safe distance.
Imagine new dark days,
shirts ripped, wine bruises.

Bend for the man—under Ryan’s
Reagan-blue eyes scour skin not likely
burned or flayed. His look, like yours—

water-logged, drink wet crocodile salt,
peel leather back from a whip-welt.

Philip F. Clark
The Emigrant

I could not watch, had long stopped listening.
Slept—or tried; some distant place to go
in unreadable dark. We always dream,
but don’t remember some. Remember
nightmares most. Countries of the mind,

these kinds of travel. My phone light
buzzes on the nightstand, or at least
it seems in my retinal miasma—I pick up,
Dublin—“Please, god, don’t tell me!” Fall back,

sleep—“A dream” I think, as I bite knuckles,
grind teeth; no private Idaho. How far
and to what shore in morning or night
away from thought or action? I wake again,
shake and slough another phone buzz.

“Hell has arrived.” I know.
I know, I know, I think. I know, I lift,
wash, eat, drink—I think: Copenhagen?
Nova Scotia? Christopher Street? Trafalgar Square?
Where? Here. Right here.

Philip F. Clark teaches Advanced Poetry in the English Honors Program at City College, New York City, where he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 2016. His first collection of poems, The Carnival of Affection, will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press in Fall 2017.

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Oz Hardwick
The Driver’s Nightmare

It’s the day the driver falls asleep
and seven die. You paint your face,
careful as glass, on the morning train,
and cash trickles slowly through the map’s
cracks, though the news reader assures you
it’ll be alright. But your house is burning
as your children sleep, and bitter letters
with no return address blister
your bloodstained fingers. You need the pills
more than ever but can’t make the cost.

You strike ice behind your eyes,
while each promise is a stone you have to
swallow, till your veins silt, and even
cartoons clench your gut with fear,
as European rubble lays
foundations for the wall that’s already there,
pens you outside yourself, and the driver
falls asleep, leaves the track,
ploughs through markets, wakes the dead,
and you’re afraid of the colour of your own skin.

You are not one of those who died,
but you’re sure you will be, the time bomb
hammering in your blood, as you up the volume
on the sharp suit with the razorwire grin
at the hospital gate, turning away
the burnt and twisted, counting the cash
that flutters like ashes, and you squint in the mirror,
a refugee in your own face,
and tonight the knock will sound on your door.

And as you loose the chain, the locks and bolts,
you fall asleep, leave the track,
empty pockets whistling some anthem
for which you can’t remember the words,
as you hit the wall you built yourself,
peer through the door’s burning crack,
appalled by your own human stink,
and brake too late, face-to-face
with your uncomprehending alien eyes.

Oz Hardwick is a York- (UK) based poet, photographer, music journalist, and occasional musician. He is co-author, with Amina Alyal, of the Saboteur-shortlisted Close as Second Skins (IDP, 2015). Oz is Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, and has written extensively on misericords and animal iconography in the Middle Ages.

Anthony Cappo
Days of 2016

Hushed, huddled, spinning
in the sad wheel
of history.

The walling of the human heart.

Pikes raised in celebration.

That trembling late night call, that
lump that turns out terminal.

Sometimes the worst
happens.

The battering ram pounds the gates,
its steel heart taking
no questions.

Anthony Cappo is the author of the chapbook, My Bedside Radio (Deadly Chaps Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in Prelude, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Pine Hills Review, Yes Poetry, The Boiler, and other publications. Anthony received his MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in New York City. Anthony’s work can be found at anthonycappo.com.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The Map

The questions are slick as oil. Dive under
that dark surface, that rainbow sheen as if
there is something; espy, originate,
pioneer without a map. Facts are rock
bottom. Hit them, you’ll think: pay dirt. But, facts
have cracks. California, born of earthquakes,
can’t be trusted even in the solid.
When you walk from the oil your heritage
sticks to you like feathers. Dead. Promising
wind/flight/understanding. Stories whisper
like aspen leaves: static, word, static. It’s
up to you to find the narrative. And
all the while underneath: vesuvial:
that red fire that can create, or destroy.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the author of There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech Editions, 2015) and Interrupted Geographies, forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2017. Her first poetry collection, Gold Passage, was selected by Ross Gay for the 2012 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press. Her chapbooks include Inheritance and The Flying Trolley, published by Finishing Line Press in 2010 and 2013. Her poetry, essays and creative non-fiction have appeared in journals including Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, JMWW and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches writing and literature at Napa Valley College and is on the staff of the Napa Valley Writers conference.  She currently resides with her family in Northern California and is the 2016-2017 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder
For Light

Just dip
your pen

and write,
let the words

unfurl, light the darkened
windows, the way

small candles do,
how every darkness flickers.

I will tell you about hope—when
the article I was reading in the medical library

of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, gave people
diagnosed with what my father had a .05% chance of survival,

and I began to see my father as part of that spark—
how I started to watch funny movies with him in the small

hospital room to get endorphins swimming in his diseased blood,
how I made signs for this room—slogans he remembered

from the Marine Corps, Praise the Lord—Pass the Ammo!
Doctors nodded, saying a positive mind will help them

as they insert ports into his skull and chest to deliver poison—
how he shrunk to a skeleton as if he were melting—

many months of this, and he lived. Fifteen
more years. Let’s become

cathedral builders of hope,
of listening, of a country

with a light
for each window.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder’s first full-length collection of poetry, The Human Contract, is forthcoming from Aldrich Press, and her first chapbook, Notes from a Nomad, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. In May 2016, she was a 30/30 Poet for Tupelo Press.