Melissa Rendlen
Cry Country

I am no refugee,

yet cry for my country.

It bleeds from self-inflicted wounds
torn with a jagged knife wielded by elected officials
more self-serving than selfless.

Bludgeoned by haters
who use fear as their tool,
pervert patriotism to divide,
divide to destroy.

Half against half, democracy the victim.

Freedom dies when opinion is outlawed.

It is not our flag that is important
but the ideals for which it stands.

I weep on bended knee.

Melissa Rendlen’s poems appear in GFT Press, L’ephemere, Ink in Thirds, Rising Phoenix Review, Still Crazy, and Writing Raw, and is a previous contributor to What Rough Beast. She has also been a Tupelo Press 30/30 poet and her chapbook received honorable mention in a recent Concrete Wolf chapbook contest . She has been a practicing Urgent Care physician for thirty-seven years and lives in Michigan City, Indiana.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Valerie Wu
Phonics for Sound

American education says phonics is good, great.
Pronounce the word “cat” like
“cat” & say the word “dog” like
“dog.” Practice phonics by reading Peter Rabbit out loud.
In America, phonics is different from grammar though–
don’t get the two confused. If
you learn phonics, you’ll have to start with
the Hooked on Phonics books, a series. You pronounce “series” like
“see-rees.” Sometimes, the way you spell out how a word sounds
is different from the word itself. Sometimes, the letters have different sounds individually combined they’re all the same.
If they’re combined, there’s only one way to pronounce them.
My mother, foreigner. Her tongue, heavy
with words left unsaid. Words hungry
for meaning. Dog takes one apple, cat takes two.
How many are left?
People say she’s an ih-muh-grant (build a fence, build a wall)
but the way they say it sounds so bad
consonants grating like a knife on chalkboard.
Others laugh when thick English tumbles out, chewed-up.
Molasses. Never forget. No one
hears your voice until you speak up.
Speak up. Living on the margins but being
undefined. America, the beautiful. Sounded so
nice, so pure. So good. Not anymore. Feel
the words rising from your throat
& spilling out. Feel / the sound of
a nation
& listen.

Valerie Wu is a Chinese American student at Presentation High School in San Jose, CA. She was a National Gold Medalist in the 2017 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and her writing has previously been featured in the Huffington Post, Alexandria Quarterly, Project GirlSpire, and more. Find her on Twitter @valerie_wu.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Adam Zhou
Inverse

Hands can’t cup
images painted over waves.
Petals of sun,
streams of chrysanthemum.
How quickly they trickle
through my fingers.

Now, an image
I care for. A face:
eyes, nose, lips
and knowing the skin
is of glass,
already shattered.

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Geese

One summer in Queens, two strangers set my hair on fire.
It was thick then but also fine and soft, a baby’s hair, down to my butt.
I was thirteen.
Summer day camp, a younger boy I called “gosling” got a buzz cut.
Showed off muscles, skinny arms white-blond with soft down. Age nine.
He asked me, “What are you?”, then stayed, eyes following.
He’d press in close, without me touching him.
Where he lived, girls first were surprised, then bored by motherhood.
Those girls used formula, rested. Then calculated just how long
a baby could be left alone, the precise
Measures, milligrams, of white stuff they obtained to feed themselves, injecting, warm,
Transforming jagged into soft, pain into bland, blood into circles of gold light,
Caressing veins. Their not-so-secret formula, costly of time, hours, even days,
During which baby was a thing and not a set of eyes watching, alive, merging, learning.
Mainly a benign thing, cute and cuddly, to settle down, to put somewhere,
To be settled, when baby breaks its benign mask of sleep with raging cries
And eyes, watching, counting, needing. Measuring. Judging mothers for using formula.
My gosling’s mother was a heroin addict, and he was thin like her.
“White trash” the name other white people had called them in the projects, he said.
I said, shush
The ones I hate, who hate me: Never trash to me. Little gosling.
Out at Jones Beach, he swam to me, mocking my new and chubby breasts in my tight suit, but then when no one saw us, tried to burrow in.
He ducked under my dark mammy arm, blond fuzz of him hidden by my brown.
I was a thirteen-year-old mother then, in that water,
hair streaming behind me like an island madonna’s. In the Atlantic waves, anonymous,
I had to be his mother or his nanny, no one knew.
Except for him, who took for granted he was safe.
That I would never trade him for some secret stash, betray his hurt blue vivid eyes, pluck out his bird-wing eyelashes.
“Hey baby bird,” I’d said, letting him climb upon my back in deep water.
I swam to shore and sand, laughter and dark, to fall asleep, once he was safe and dry.
Hours later I woke up. The popping, breaking sounds of a bonfire.
Camp counselor, age nineteen or twenty, jonesing and stoned, rolled a hash joint narrower than a child’s finger,
lighted a small torch from the fire and carefully touched ends of my hair, incinerating princess curls, black whorls on sand, before I woke.
Screaming out, crying in fear, holding my head, I registered
White stranger holding his roach and smoking it,
While Gosling laughed and shouted, “Check how he burned that Hindoo bitch’s hair!
“He burned the trash.”

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.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Zachary Taylor Knox
(irregular heartbeat)

“he’s a white male,” paperboy poets
haled as they sold the movie right
sympathy of their minority for a steal
they had the right to protest from first
through twelfth street because of the
permission slip their parents signed for
them last week, they were allowed

by the police to beat the old man
with sticks and lil slugger baseball bats
because the mayor said they were of
the middle class oppressed variety
they felt they were badasses for fighting
unarmed fascists, best of all they stayed in
fashion dressed in mussolini black shirts and

masks they wore to ignore the white faces
beneath because what if they were just
another instrument of peace that marched
to redeem freedom to lease a piece of the
gated security that bought them depression
and disease, it was their voice they silenced
by choice because they were educated and

said they would speak for the dumb
and the weak

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

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Charles W. Brice
Sweet and Low for the Brain

We keep confusing wealth with virtue.
They aren’t the same, right?
The seventy-one year old man with orange hair,
the duck wave in front… .

Wait, his appearance means nothing, but we think about his appearance.
Still, the orange ruminant regurgitates, eats his cud, regurgitates.
His followers sop it up amain. How many stomachs does he have?
How many stomachs do we have?

We think in slogans now:
Make America great again, Crooked Hillary—
all the branding, but it’s not branding. Branding is his word.
It’s name calling. I keep forgetting.

Racism is freedom. Do I have that right?
Orange is the new white. I think. I’m not sure.
I don’t know what America is. I don’t know what it means.
We watch TV. We watch TV. We watch TV.

We get sound bites. No, that’s their word. We speak in tiny sentences,
no, in phrases, pithy phrases. That’s what a sound bite is.
We speak in incomplete thoughts. Incompleteness sells.
We romance flash and splash.

Look at his cufflinks. Don’t look at his cufflinks.
They don’t matter. His hair doesn’t matter. His airplanes don’t matter.
His daughter doesn’t matter. His son-in-law doesn’t matter.
We sleep in flimsy blankets of stupidity.

We awake and wonder what he’s done today.
We watch TV. I feel so embarrassed…for us.
Our president sells George Washington
and Robert E. Lee: A two for one deal.

He sells Nazis and white supremacists and
those who protest against them. There’s a market for that
thought because it isn’t thought. It’s thought substitute—
Sweet & Low for the brain.

Charles W. Brice is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (WordTech Editions, 2016) and Mnemosyne’s Hand (WordTech Editions, 2018). His poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, Chiron Review, The Dunes Review, SLAB, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Sport Literate, The Paterson Literary Review, VerseWrights, and elsewhere.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Sarah Henry
Iceland

Iceland is arguably the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy, with the Parliament, the Althingi, established in 930.
—Government Offices of Iceland website

1
The judge and his kids
by four women swim
naked in a public pool.
Bodies bump together.
The pool is awash
with those who call
him “Dad,” “Honey,”
or “Judge.”
He has a following
in the shallow end.
It’s indecent.
Who votes for a flasher?
There ought to be a law.

2
Don’t go to the interior
without a plan.
Let someone know about it.
Fill your tank.
Check the weather forecast.
There are earthquakes.
Volcanoes.
Glaciers.
It’s wild in the interior.

3
On Icelandair
we fly back to America
where we elect
men with fig leaves
and private pools.
The ground hasn’t
buckled
beneath their weight
but we have begun
to feel tremors.

Sarah Henry’s poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Sounding East, and The Hollins Critic, as well as in four anthologies published by Kind of a Hurricane Press. She is retired from the Tribune Review newspaper and lives near Pittsburgh.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Amy Baskin
Silence the Hearing

Dear Sir

You have shelved the Share Act
I hear that the hearing of hunters is at stake
and silencers will serve to eradicate
future aural impairments

Hear me out
silence the hearing
and all future hearings
that would serve to silence

The very tools that served to silence
the listeners at the Route 91 Harvest Festival
their hearing is impaired now
hear the silenced

Hear me out
when the Share Act
is trotted off the shelf
please vote no

Shooting massacres are as American
as apple pie as country music as the flag
within our sacred canon of red white and blue
rituals I no longer challenge this

Please allow us to hear
the bullets soar about us
this may give some of us a chance
to survive the next blood baths

thank you

your constituent

Editor’s Note: The Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement (SHARE) Act is a bill that would, among other things, make it easier to obtain gun silencers. After the mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, congressional sentiment turned against the bill, because silencers could make it more difficult for potential victims to flea a shooter who used a silencer. An article in the Washington Examiner on October 3, 2017 was titled “Republicans Shelve Gun Suppressor Bill After Las Vegas Shooting.” The October 1 mass shooting took place at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival held annually in Paradise, Nevada.

Amy Baskin’s poetry has appeared in Fire Poetry Journal, The Ghazal Page, Postcards, Poetry & Prose, Dirty Chai, and Panoply, and is forthcoming on Allison Joseph’s poetry blog. Baskin won the 2016 Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry from the Willamette Writers Kay Snow Writing Context.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.

Jacqueline Jules
Practicing Humility

No more than my space, no less than my place.
—Alan Morinis

All have a seat in the sanctuary.
One space—no more, no less.
How do I fill mine?
Sitting so still, hands in my lap,
no one feels my presence?
Or stretching long limbs,
elbowing, kicking others?
I have a seat in the sanctuary,
to lift my book and sing my hymn,
just as you have a seat beside me.
One space—no more, no less.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Field Trip to the Museum (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Stronger Than Cleopatra (ELJ Publications, 2014), and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String (Evening Street Press, 2017) winner of the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has appeared The Broome Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Hospital Drive, and Imitation Fruit. She is also the author of 40 books for young readers. Visit www.jacquelinejules.com.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you want to support the mission and work of Indolent Books, consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Indolent Arts Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Join our mailing list to receive news, updates, and special offers from Indolent Books.