David Walby
What Little Time

I pray to my god,
it may not be your god, but I pray to my god.

The things we call sacred are all different,
what I call sacred is not what you call sacred,
for we are all different,
we are individuals.

My family is sacred to me,
but maybe not yours.
I believe in one god,
perhaps you believe in three,
but what does it matter if we do not agree.
Are we not all people of our own likes,
do people not disagree?

For what does it matter if I believe in heaven,
and you believe in Nirvana,
an afterlife is an afterlife wherever it is.
Why fight each other now while where in the same place, about where we might be tomorrow.
Life is too short for all this bickering.

Let us be brothers and sisters, and to not think of what comes ahead,
only the now.
Let the black and white merge into gray,
let the social class crumble around us,
and let us all be free.
Agree to disagree and let us be together while we can.

I may be autistic and you may be black, what does it matter?
We are people, and people are people, regardless of color, race gender, and any other sort of boundary.
The rich and the poor,
the black and the white,
the nice and the mean,
the honest and the liars,
the beautiful and the ugly,
let us be one in what little time we have left on this Earth.

David Walby is a 15 year old Autistic author and poet that is based in Indiana. He hopes to use his writing to improve the world as a whole and show people that Autism isn’t something to be ashamed of.

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George Warui
Juices

Is from heaven
And for the poor
And the oppressed
And very seldomly
Seen
And believed
And cures and gives
Freedom
And praises God
And of the wisdom
And the seller
And for the Asian
And cures and feeds
And clothes
The naked
And cures the needy

George Warui is a Kenyan poet.

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W. B. Yeats
The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Editor’s Note: Not having had a previously unpublished poem by a contemporary poet to post for this date, I chose to post the poem that inspired the name of this series.

William Butler Yeats (/1865–1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival.

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Andrew K. Peterson
If It’s Not Love Then It’s The Bomb The Bomb The Bomb that Will Keep Us Together

That wall with a door in it was something I had to have.
—Georgia O’Keeffe

Things to do in the din: slip
away, fall off, balk back double
time. Turn down the bridge

reverb in a robin’s egg. Cop
a whisper. The universe is
smaller in America. Scream.

Walk the driest latitudes crushing on
bustling pink flowers of a burnt gown
grown wide with bark-fried tears. Radiate

gaucho dusk. Wander out from blunderings,
back to the street, empties in pockets,
practice late capitalism with minimalist pan-

ache: huddle vulnerable with soft
secrets at the ATM brushed smooth
by smooth jazz pouring down the crack

of a lion’s ass. Seek loss in false stops
or risks too loose. What’s nobler?
Trust that lowers, lilacs. Also, memory.

You’re the water in a congress
of the best thing I can do
today: get money off my mind.

This isn’t fate, it’s just what you get.
Who put the bomb in the bomb
sh’bomb. bloop! still tested over the sea.

A willow-spun joke, a fathom’s
dumb depths. Tightly wished at.
cusps Crush out. Shimmer.

Rest the rest in morning air’s
illusions simmered into.
Summon in summer faster.

Andrew K. Peterson is the author of The Big Game Is Every Night (Locofo Chaps, 2017), Anonymous Bouquet (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), and bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile, 2011). His work appears in Emergency Index 2012 (Ugly Duckling Presse) and has been featured in museum exhibits and performance projects. He edits the online literary journal summer stock and lives in Boston.

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Christopher R. Vaughan
Facebook Feed After the Acquittal in the Shooting Death of Philando Castile

• Steamy Sunday night, city edge
• What’s on your mind?
  
• Vamping Eagles heard on dashcam
• Delete post
  
• My sway to the curbed sedan
• This post will be deleted and you
  
• Driver’s-side confession like a boy
• won’t be able to find it anymore
  
• fingering the rosary beads of organs
• You can also edit
  
• poised to topple from his cavity and
• this post, if you just want
  
• my voice his voice my warning
• to change something
  
• a click, fire, burst of fucks,
• What’s on your mind?
  
• the darkest berries spilling as
• If you didn’t create this post,
  
• fast to their bitterest end
• we can help you secure
  
• as my clear warning
• your account
  
• strangling my throat into a fist
• Delete post

Christopher R. Vaughan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Off the Coast, Review Americana, Prick of the Spindle, Canyon Voices, Del Sol Review, and Connecticut River Review. Vaughan is a teacher based in Minneapolis.

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Zachary Taylor Knox
Dysphoria

i’ve known no proud nation,
no rules, reason, or order, no
ointment to heal this deep chip on my
shoulder, felt little elation
in meaningless victory another
pawn drowned by history, inner voice
crushed by the weight of the boulder pushed up-

hill over and over under the order
of the supposed higher order
whose demands are simple hush, don’t think
too much because “work will set you free” why?
because freedom isn’t free and war isn’t peace
but it’s still a release

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

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Liz Ahl
Evangelical Pastors Lay Hands On Donald Trump In The Oval Office, July 12, 2017

In January, I thought he’d burst into flames
when he touched that Bible for the oath.
It’s summer now, and still he has no shame

that I can see. On Twitter he exclaims
and bullies and sputters daily untruth.
In January, I thought I’d burst into flames

when he started playing odd and ominous games
claiming and denying fraud at the voting booths.
It’s summer now; he still says he was framed.

His thin skin can’t withstand a mocking meme,
but still he’s drawn, an angry, pointless moth,
impervious to the Internet’s bright flames.

And add to this a vision, an absurd dream:
a laying on of hands by “men of the cloth.”
It’s summer now, and still they have no shame.

They do the devil’s work in Jesus’ name.
They feed and stoke a dark, malignant growth.
In January, I swore he’d burst into flames.
It’s summer now, and still he has no shame.

Liz Ahl is the author of Home Economics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016); Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens, 2012, “Summer Kitchen” series); Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), winner of the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader’s Choice” in Poetry Award in 2011; and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Able Muse, Measure, Cutthroat, and Rappahannock Review. Liz has been awarded residencies at Jentel, Playa, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New Hampshire.

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David Walby
Left Before the Tone

Pass the time of Revelations,
My love for you is already known,
Such was not at my discretion,
The message left before the tone.

I shan’t speak of sadness or of the gaping hole in my heart.
Nor I burden you with my tears of sin.
I made the wrong call,
Chased the bird at the wrong time.

I’d ask you to forgive me,
But my mistake was dire.
That is something I cannot require,

My love for you,
Was something of great power,
Forever doomed to remain at the top of the tower.

Pass the time of Revelations,
My love for you is already known,
Such was not at my discretion,
The message left before the tone.

David Walby is a 15 year old Autistic author and poet that is based in Indiana. He hopes to use his writing to improve the world as a whole and show people that Autism isn’t something to be ashamed of.

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George Warui
Killer

Is forth coming
And cruel
And cruel
And cruel
And very seldom seen
And fruit of killer
And fruit
Of war of guns
And cures of the illed
And very illed
And cures of the ailed
And cures of the iller
And cures of the illed
Is forth and cures the iller
Is the fruit of the graves

George Warui is a Kenyan poet.

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Daniel Culver
The Dreamers

Would you consider stealing just one dream?
Or even eight hundred millenaries?
Those aspirations and hopes you would deem
Unworthy of life, and increase for these—
Children who’d give everything to beseem
A great nation built upon reveries.
If you would wake them and send them away,
It’s this nation’s principles you’d betray.

Daniel Culver is a software developer living in Houston with his wife and two daughters.

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