Phillis Wheatley
On Imagination

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck’d with pomp by thee!
Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.

From Helicon’s refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.

Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov’d object strikes her wand’ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy’s raptur’d eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o’er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow’ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown’d:
Show’rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow’r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o’er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov’reign ruler thou;
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th’ expanse on high:
From Tithon’s bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o’erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy’s flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) was the first African-American woman to publish a collection of poems. She was born in West Africa and sold into slavery at the age of seven, becaming the property of the Wheatley family of Boston. The publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) brought her fame both in England and the American colonies. She was emancipated from slavery upon the death of her master John Wheatley and married John Peters shortly thereafter. They had three children, all of whom died in infancy. Peters was imprisoned for debt in 1784. An impoverished Wheatley worked as a domestic servant until she became ill and died at the age of 31.

This poem is in the public domain.

Chris Emslie
Steak Night

on the stairs behind
my apartment, he kissed me
like a bad movie: mid-sentence.

nothing shivered
on the tip of his tongue. nothing
ached to hop the space

between our mouths.
we burned there
in effigy, a gift

to that wide nothing. we burned
despite the moths alighting
on his shoulders,

despite how later, we’d curl
ourselves into the remainder,
an open quotation.

we burned too soft to see by.
seared but still bloody
even as we were swallowed.

Chris Emslie (also called Kit) is assistant editor at ILK journal. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, PANK, and NANO Fiction, among other journals. Chris lives in Tuscaloosa, AL, where they are an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama.

This poem is not previously published.

Sharon Olinka
Desire Bus

Around the time Tennessee Williams died I was having
sex twelve times a day and thought
it would last forever. The Desire bus
had its route by my Eighth Ward house, down to
the Ninth Ward, past the corner grocery
with dingy brooms stacked outside, two old
men playing cards. Past Jewel’s Tavern,
all the beautiful gentle boys with their arms
around each other who would die,
my friend Girard dead of AIDS before he was thirty, cloisonné
bottles in his antiques store gathering dust.
Past Verti Mart on Royal Street, where I’d go
for fried catfish, barbequed chicken, congealed
squares of macaroni and cheese.

Didn’t know the vaults already had me.
Thought desire would last forever.
Slow dissolve. Blood clots.
Noose of beads
for tourists. Yearly
profits. And where
am I in all this? I’m a ghost,
holding my heart on a plate.
Dancing on Rampart and Dumaine.

Sharon Olinka is the author of the poetry collections Old Ballerina Club (Dos Madres Press, 2016), The Good City (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), and A Face Not My Own (West End Press, 1995.) Winner of a Barbara Deming Memorial Award, her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Barrow Street, Poetry Wales, Jewish Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and the anthology Bum Rush the Page: a Def Poetry Jam (Broadway Books, 2001), edited by Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera.

This poem appears in Old Ballerina Club and originally appeared in The Cafe Review.

Trenton Pollard
Bitterroot Lament

I like to think that bitterroots blossomed
from his tears and blood,
that their pink petals wrapped around his body
and lifted it to the sky,

and not that he limped
into the emergency room alone,

or that his father said it wasn’t a hate-crime
because he was drunk,

not that when I trace the metal plates
around his eye in bed,
he doesn’t feel it.

Originally from Michigan, Trenton Pollard has worked as a welder, graphic designer, massage therapist, and political organizer. His work has been published in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Paper Nautilus, Assaracus, The Cossack Review, Verdad, Codex Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.

This poem is not previously published.

Rich Goodson
Smut

Dad’s face at the window
ensures I feed the mouth
of the bonfire with all of it:
all of Brad, Marcus, Lukas & Jeff
& all of my short life with them: months cutting halos
round the lines
of their glossy contortions.

Since my gallery’s reveal
I’ve been a dud.
A cissy.
Dad’s pupils have shrunk as small as fleas.
He will not say a word to me.
He will not look me in the soul.
& Mum is not to be told at all.

Under these striplight stars
I feed the fire.
I feed it my glossy conspirators,
oddly relieved to have their American bodies brought to light, in this English dark.
I know I, too, will be scissored from my story
fed to a fire
biohazard

because being cissy is human
immunodeficiency virus
is it not?
is abjection
is hyperchondria
is slipping off the tightrope wire somewhere between here & twenty-one
is it not?

*

Brad going down on Marcus
breaks out into aubergine lesions
the moment I put a match to it.

Marcus going down on Lukas
into green-edged fistulas.
Inflammations.

Lukas going down on Jeff
is where the dye’s ammonias twist
into peacock-blue sarcomas.

Jeff going down on Brad
is where opportunistic rashes of mauve
grab grab at the air.

*

Dad’s face has gone from the window.
He’s left me to it.
So I snatch one glossy page back
shake shake the fire off it.
I hold its edge as close as I dare to my eye.
Its inner edge a hissing lava, moving inward, crossing bedsheets.
Its outer edge frays, gently cremating into air.

& then I notice that Brad, Marcus, Lukas & Jeff have completely slipped off the page.
I squint into the dark around me & there they are
crawling on their stomachs
through the delphiniums
like Army Ken dolls
neither created nor destroyed
eyes swiveling to the left & to the right, escaping.

Rich Goodson is a poet from Nottingham, U.K. As a day job he teaches English language to refugee and migrant teenagers. He read English at Oxford and went on to do a doctorate in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He has two poems in the Penguin Poetry of Sex. He is Queer, Zen Buddhist, is growing a mighty beard—but no, he is not trying to be Allen Ginsberg.

This poem is not previously published.

Eric Norris
The Education of Eric Norris

For Derrick Austin

I’ll weep all night, with stars I’ll fight,
The fray shall well become me.
—Anonymous English ballad, seventeenth century

This book is mine. The margins are full
Of little cartoons I doodled in school.

This is my Inferno. The light is by God.
This Beatrice isn’t my cup of cod.

B is D’s vision, his Heavenly joy.
Not mine. I prefer a kind of cowboy.

Here I have drawn her, a saint in stained glass,
Miss Middle Ages. I had to work fast.

She modeled by day. I worked at night.
I never quite got her Humanity right.

I found her cold. She told me I stink
Worse than Perdition. She’s dead, I think.

My love, in her eyes, had a turpentine smell,
Like Pablo Picasso, boiling in Hell.

So, I closed her eyes, whispering, “Love,
My love is like nothing, seen from above.”

Here, Dante drops in, smiling like the sun,
Until he looked down. He noticed the gun.

I stuttered like mad, I tried to explain,
“I f-found her like that, shot in the brain.”

Dante called Virgil. He entered the room,
All biceps and pecs. My heart filled with gloom.

I had heard rumors. I told my best friend
I thought they were lovers. My best friend told them.

The case against me seemed open and shut:
A V and a D adorned the gun’s butt.

Dante the Don, he chewed a toothpick.
“Son,” he said, “Love is my bailiwick.”

“I own all the judges, I pay the police,
I AM THAT I AM. Go, ask your priest.”

Sweet Jesus, I freaked! I’m screwed! This is bad!
The guy thinks he’s God! “Easy now, Dad.”

I shifted my feet. Inhaled. When I could,
I ran like forked lightning into a dark wood.

I scrambled through brambles. I hid in a swamp,
Under a lily pad, like a large bump.

Cautious as cream, trembling with fear,
When only insects were all I could hear,

I crawled to a log. “Whew, that was close.”
But in that dark wood, a problem arose.

I grew kind of lonely. I sat and I sat.
I wrote in the dirt, “You want to go back?”

For billions of years, I sat in this park,
Listening to crickets, ‘til I saw a spark.

My spark was a star that fell from the sky,
The smoldering Angel who taught me to fly.

Well, did he smell? Did he look nice?
Is Lucifer’s light worth the huge price

We pay for insight? Milton says, “Nope.”
And I have my doubts. My Devil is Hope.

The thing without feathers: tender and tough,
A saint and a sinner who likes his sex rough.

He picked me up. He dusted me off,
Like an H-Bomb, delivered by a dove.

This fist full of ice, all fiery white,
Ten thousand sensations he seemed to unite

In one giant flash, sky and hard ground,
A rogue comet shattering sound.

Triceratops heard it. Life on Earth changed.
Whole mountaintops moaned, ‘Home on the Range’.

Stones slid into rivers of lava, shards
Of rock bounced around in hot leotards.

(A chorus of Greeks, observing this dance,
Observed to the lizards, “Now is our chance!”)

The damage was vast. The scale where life lay
Vanished completely. I shouted, “Hooray!

We’re out of the woods!” One of my mistakes.
Dante returned, in a great squeal of brakes.

Ten sedans followed, black, full of thugs,
Each thug with a tommy-gun full of slugs.

What did we have? A couple of Colts?
Two cocks full of ammo? Twenty-odd smokes?

That log took a pounding. So did the dirt.
The bullets kept coming. Unfazed and unhurt,

We fucked with high spirits. The world was our bed.
And I felt happy my love never said

He had been shot. No, not a cry
Did I hear, ‘til he fell. “When I die,

What will you do?” He looked in my eyes.
“How will you face those bad guys

Alone?” I cried, “I don’t know!”
I cried and I cried, “I don’t know!”

I don’t know.

Eric Norris is co-author (with Gavin Geoffrey Dillard) of Nocturnal Omissions (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011). He is also the author of the chapbooks Terence (Square Circle Press, 2011) and the collection Cock Sucking (On Mars) (lulu.com, 2012). His poems and short stories have appeared in Soft Blow, Assaracus, Jonathan, Glitterwolf, and The Raintown Review. He lives in Portland.

This poem appeared in Assaracus.

Keetje Kuipers
Diagnosis

There are a variety of ways to respond
to despair: drinking, weeping, picking
fights in bars. I took a lover under
the stairwell of a brownstone
at a party in Brooklyn. It was winter,
had been a week of buttoned collars
and long, black coats, of the nurses
from St. Vincent’s taking their cigarette
breaks huddled against the hoods
of ambulances, pale blue scrubs flapping
at their knees, of hotdog vendors working
stiff bottles of ketchup and mustard
in their gloved hands, of corner
bodega roses frozen fast in their
buckets of water. It was also the week
I learned my body could do itself harm,
arriving at the doctor’s office, cheeks
bitten red by cold, the nurse saying, Sit down.
All I remember from that party
were his hands moving in quick dressage
under my blouse, the tangled carousels
of dust motes falling from the stairs
above our heads, and how every time
I wanted to cry out instead I made that
tender bird of desire nestle in my mouth.
All bodies hold secrets. My lover’s armpit
were whittled ampersand hollows. I clutched
at the spaces that were not there.

Keetje Kuipers was a Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and an Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Her first poetry collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions (2010). Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail, was published by BOA in 2014. Keetje is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University where she is Editor of Southern Humanities Review.

This poem appeared in Beautiful in the Mouth.

Christine Gelineau
Grace

for Allan Eller

If you’re lucky, at some point
ordinary life becomes itself:
something to inhabit, rather than
something to pass through. It’s unserious
to express so banal an idea in these
postmodern times but it’s all that he
could think of in the year it took for him
to die, that friend whose stay in ICU
turned out so much worse than had my own.

Early on I’d tried to encourage him
with that: how I’d lain in this very bed
and gotten my life back whole, a
futile hope, as it turned out, for him,
whose mind was clear to the end but
who remained locked into a body frozen
from the shoulders down. All that
apparatus of the respiratory system:
the weakened bellows of the lungs,
the compromised diaphragm, insufficient
in the end. Nothing about that contest
was ironic. Which reminds me

I should have the courage to say
cherish to describe the cove
of warmth, the hive our two bodies make
beneath the blankets, and the cooler
nimbus of the bedroom air around that hive.
The house’s outer walls groan in the clench
of midnight cold while the glass
integument of windows blooms
with feathered frost, crystalline bargello
through which the silver winter moonlight
pours, yes,

I will let these hosannas out:
this baptismal of pearlescent light,
the eucharist of yet another
night nested together:
it is a grace, praise be,
it is our blessing to behold.

Christine Gelineau is the author of Crave (NYQ Books, 2016). Earlier books include Appetite for the Divine (2010) and Remorseless Loyalty (2006), each of which won publication prizes from Ashland Poetry Press. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize. Gelineau is Associate Director of Creative Writing at Binghamton University and she teaches in the Wilkes University Low-Res MFA Program. She lives on a farm in upstate New York.

This poem first appeared in Paterson Literary Review No.38 and it is included in Crave.

Xavier Cavazos
At the AIDS Clinic

Men with long bones crossed legs &
Bent hands like 1492 transatlantic
Here nobody knows the name of the land
They’re going to   everything could be the West
Indies or at least the West Indies for awhile
Then the first flush of air   like a pilgrimage
Across the great hall of despair   artwork
Holds the walls with dignity   you think
You’re in Seattle but the nurse you Soweto
You ask the doctor your name &
He begs you for bread in Spanish
You try to tell him the time on your watch
Before your lips collapse
All he says   lo siento   lo siento
Lo siento

Xavier Cavazos is the 1995 Grand Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, and author of Barbarian at the Gate, selected and introduced by Thomas Sayers Ellis as part of the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets Chapbook Series (2013) and Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press, 2015), the inaugural Prairie Seed Poetry Prize from Ice Cube Press. Cavazos teaches at Central Washington University.

Devanshi Khetarpal
Lullaby

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Lullaby by Devanshi Khetarpal

Devanshi Khetarpal is a junior at St. Joseph’s Convent School in Bhopal, India. She is the author of Welcome to Hilltop High (Indra, 2012) and Co:ma,to’se (Partridge, 2014). She currently serves as the Founder and Editor-in-chief of Inklette magazine, a Poetry Editor for Phosphene Literary Journal, a Poetry Editor for Moledro Magazine, and the Head of Redefy India. She is an attendee of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio 2015 at the University of Iowa. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, Polyphony H.S., Crack the Spine, The Cadaverine, Eunoia Review, and Dirty Chai, among others.

This poem is not previously published.