Adam Zhou
Stale Goods

Four years should pass
for one to adjust to the darkness
of unblinking eyes
and even if a man
were to stare at the irides:
a small pair of mirrors
he would discover
not his reflection
but a yawning hole spilling
back into the river
now as clear as the water
now as rippled as the scars

of a body whose hands
never offered
pink carnations.

Adam Zhou’s poetry has appeared in The Rising Phoenix Review and The Kill List Chronicles. In 2017, Zhou won a National Silver Medal for personal essay and memoir from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (presented by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers), the longest-running and most prestigious recognition program in the United States for creative teens in grades 7–12. He is a sophomore at the International School Manila.

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Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Gordimer at Dusk

There was a ripped basketball net, just a few threads hanging from metal
Well-hung, perpetually ready, moving in the breeze or in the gust of wind created by people swishing.
There was the hard thwack of basketballs metallic from the air in them, punching down concrete.
Ripping away at the rubber.
I sat unnoticed for hours, bench under shade, shade near the grass, grass holding snakes, for all I knew,
And there was Doris Lessing in my hand, and singing grass and terrifying lust that leads to death,
And braided, cryptic Indian women in Gordimer’s book, their tension crackled in the plastic of library coverings.
I read these books and learned about terror.
Not the kind that galvanized rallies, made blood electric, bouncing off fences,
But terror, silent, sitting by itself on a park bench, cold and crying, old before its time,
Defining “writer” as a woman I could never be.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s  work has appeared in Nimrod, Bangalore Review, Blue Lake Review and the Asian American Literary Review. She is lives in the US with her family and is a practicing physician at work on a novel.

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Zachary Taylor Knox
(poor concentration)

come to the wagon stall at the carnival and
graze upon the prescribed crystal ball
to see what litters the lobes and halls
of the mind served on a silver
platter fed to the cannibal chatter
talk is cheap they bleat, lucky for us
someone bleeps the bad words that
could raise some concerns with the
parents that have easy to hit nerves
got to protect the children from the
danger of words that we heard from
the mouths of our parents it’s a
competition to see whose childhood
was worse they put it on tv in the form
of pornographic tv but mark twain didn’t
speak kindly about the african american
community so he shouldn’t be taught

they all speak fast enough to make the head spin
in this land where the grass is always greener no
one wins and everything done is counted in a swear jar
as a sin

Zachary Taylor Knox’s poems have appeared in Ealain and Penny Ante Feud. He lives in Fort Madison, Iowa.

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Ann Chadwell Humphries
Very Fine People. On Both Sides.

He says, then waves it away like a fly.
A flow chart of infrastructure furls

from the glass of Secretary Chow’s
blue-suited smile. Other cabinet members

study their shoes. His words fracture
their masks. Even

the marble floor shows cracks.
I cannot look away. The fissure lures

me like a keyhole. I recoil at the odor
of ugliness, pledge to do something.

I’ll start with myself.

Ann Chadwell Humphries’s have appeared in Jasper Magazine and on The Comet, the bus system of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority in Richland and Lexington counties in the Columbia metropolitan area of South Carolina (an initiative of Columbia’s inaugural poet laureate, Ed Madden). Winner of a 2017 Into the Fire scholarship from The Sun magazine and recipient of a Jasper Magazine Emerging Voice award, she lives and writes in Columbia, SC.

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Connolly Ryan
We Drugged

We drugged the ghetto
to numb its rage and plant
bitterness without end.
We drugged the freedom rebellion
which degenerated into orgies
and medicated slogans.
We drugged the avenues
with gentrification or
cultural genocide if you will.
We drugged the sidewalks
with stop and frisk and bend over now boy.
We drugged the prisons
with more black men
than there were slaves.
We drugged our children
when daydreaming and restlessness
was deemed counter-productive
yet marvelously lucrative for over-the-counter dealers.
We drugged the farmers with big machines.
We drugged agriculture with agribusiness.
We drugged the topsoil with heresy.
We drugged our community with hearsay.
We drugged neighborhoods with suspicion.
We drugged our cats and dogs
in the name of loyalty and love:
Loyalty to our own malaise,
Love for the pills that manage it.
We drugged our schools with plastic tests
on which both spontaneity and innovation gag
and on which ennui and detachment thrive.
We drugged our husbands and wives
with techno-surrogates for intimacy.
We drugged our elderly parents
with bewildering isolation.
We drugged the sky with lemon-scented
demon-fumes and stainless steel cowardice.
We drugged the manna with Mammon.
Drugged the land with syrups of piracy.
Drugged the forests with disappearance.
Drugged the beasts with erasure.
Drugged birds with drugged bugs.
Drugged our hopes with rape and plague.
Drugged love with God’s consent.
Drugged God in the name of hate.
We drugged evolution with nostalgia.
We’ve even drugged our pursuit
of happiness and then slyly replaced it
with an eagerness for emptiness
as we carefully scream
into our fiendish screens
and morph into the final drug.

Connolly Ryan’s poems have recently appeared in The Good Men Project, The Valley Advocate, The Opiate, Vagabond City, and Gravel, among other journals.  He holds a BA in English and an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst, were he is a senior lecturer in the Commonwealth Honors College Honors Seminar Series and also teaches courses in Contemporary American Popular Culture and Metaphor and Creativity.

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