Tom Daley
How Frail It Is!

In the disruptions that are coming,
the Nebraska senator suggests

we must return the virtus (“manliness”)
to virtue. Virtue, in the narrative,

is the province of the male. Virtus
also signifies “strength, capacity.”

Logic breeds its own capacity.
Virtue is the windowshade

behind which the domestic slave
must make do by sleeping

on a pile of oily overalls.
A foundation is often

the hobbyhorse of tyranny,
a low-slung bridge poking

through the graphs which document
every challenge to a martinet’s sermon.

Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Hacks: Ten Years on Grub Street (Random House, 2007); Poets for Haiti (Yileen Press, 2010); The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013); and Luminous Echoes (Into the Void, 2017). He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.

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George Warui
Wines

Killer wine
is God and wine
and a very smart king
and very wise and great
And very clever
for the very man he made
every woman obeyed
and God granted the way
and God killed the war of the kings
and returned them to school
Where they did heaven favor
And were killed
And for the day of God
To kill the devil

George Warui is a Kenyan poet.

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Eileen Tabios
From The Ashbery Riff-Offs
—where each poem begins with 1 or 1-2 lines from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” by John Ashbery

Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: The Scent of a Melting Iceberg

There is no other way, and those assholes
who would confuse everything with their
mirror games rub over bullet holes and layer
paint heavily as if the punctures blossomed
on insensate walls rather than a culture hard-
fought into birth. There is fact (gunshot) and
alternative-fact (new paint job). There is fact
(gunshot) and alternative-fact (“No one was
killed”). There is fact (gunshot) and alternative
-fact (“No one was even born”). But the problem
with a martyr is the people who enact someone’s
martyrdom. They form a culture that survives
bullets and a president’s proclamation: bullets
are simply egg yolks. Folks, let us not extend
the metaphor—let’s discourage the evolution
of a politician’s paint job into metaphorical alkyds
that, cheap and easy to make, expand the
expanse of alternative-facts. Let’s call a spade
a spade. Let’s call a bullet a tip of the iceberg
melting to threaten everyone with its polluted
waters replete with tar-perfumed carcinogens

Eileen R. Tabios has released about 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in eight countries and cyberspace. Her most recent include The Opposite of Claustrophobia (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2017) and Amnesia: Somebody’s Memoir (Black Radish Books, 2016). Forthcoming poetry collections include Mantattan: An Archaeology (Paloma Press, 2017). Inventor of the poetry form “hay(na)ku,” her poetry has been translated into eight languages. She also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 12 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as served as editor or guest editor for various literary journals. More information is available at eileenrtabios.com.

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Barbara Reynolds
The Dead of Winter

Deceived
by the calm
of balmy days
coatless bodies
and hatless heads
it is easy to forget
the dead of winter—
in urns, in graves,
and entombed
below boats
rowed toward shore
fleeing war.

Barbara Reynolds’s work has appeared in The Avocet. She is a retired high school math teacher and currently an adjunct instructor in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Carla Drysdale
Addiction

Sex the candy coating
the pill of bitter regret
Run, cried the voice inside
So I ran, full tilt into his arms

The bitter pill below
the candy coat stayed
a long time in my veins
Run, cried the voice inside
So I ran, full tilt into his arms

Carla Drysdale is the author of the poetry collections Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Spiraling, Public Pool, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, LIT, Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, Global City Review, and Literary Mama, among other journals, and in the anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. In May, 2014 she was awarded PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize for her poem, “Inheritance.” Born in London, Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France. To learn more, visit www.carladrysdale.com.

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Nicole Callihan and Samar Abdel Jaber

Translucence (5)

An empty boat
is not much of a boat
I am wracked
with tenderness
I could say we are all refugees
but how wrong
I would be
I would be
so wrong
the thing inside
which capsizes
all night we rode
towards the shore
and the shore
towards us

English by Nicole Callihan

بين قارّتين (٥)

لو أنّ البحر
بقي هادئاً ذاك اليوم
لو أنّ الرّياح
أبطأت قليلاً فقط
لكانوا وصلوا:
مائةٌ وسبعةُ وأربعون مهاجراً
أحدٌ ما أحصاهم
واحداً واحداً
نظر إليهم
وجهاً وجهاً
وقبل أن يكتب
تقريره الصحفيّ الدقيق
أخذ لهم صورةً جماعيّة:
مائةٌ وسبعةُ وأربعون
وجهاً حزيناً

Arabic by Samar Abdel Jaber

Translucence (6)

Boats
are not the only way
to move bodies
across water
I skim the shallows
for each known thing
the fuckless days
grow quiet
my tongue as
flat and heavy
as a bloated
two by four
these houses we build
aren’t built
for living

English by Nicole Callihan

بين قارّتين (٦)

أمشي
إلى أن تستسلم قدماي
لكنّ البيت فارغ
ولا أودّ العودة
إلى الصّحراء
اليوم رأيت بيتاً
فوق نهرٍ
بين أشجارٍ شديدة الاخضرار
وضبابٍ خفيف
حلمت بأنّي أسير
على الممر الخشبي
المؤدّي إليه
بينما ينتظر خطواتي
أحدٌ
ليفتح الباب.

Arabic by Samar Abdel Jaber

Editor’s Note: These poems are part of an ongoing dual-language collaboration in which each pair of poems, written in response to the same photograph, appear to be translations of each other, but are not. Ultimately, the project reckons with notions of translatability and how language is shaped in both foreign and domestic spheres.

Nicole Callihan’s books include Henry River Mill Village (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), co-authored with Ruby Young Kellar, which documents the rise and fall of a tiny mill village turned ghost town in North Carolina; the poetry collection SuperLoop (Sock Monkey Press, 2014); and the poetry chapbook A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015), co-authored Zoë Ryder White and winner of the Baltic Writing Residency Chapbook Contest Award; and The Deeply Flawed Human (Deadly Chaps Press, 2016). Her new poetry collection, Downtown, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2017.  Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review; Painted Bride Quarterly; Forklift, Ohio; PANK; and as a Poem-a-Day feature from the Academy of American Poets. Nicole is assistant director and senior language lecturer at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and lives in Brooklyn. Learn more at nicolecallihan.com.

Samar Abdel Jaber Is the author of Wa fi rewayaten okhra (And There Are Other Accounts; Malameh Publishing House, 2008); Madha law konna ashbahan (What If We Were Ghosts; Dar Al Ahleyya Publishers, 2013), winner of the Palestinian Young Writer of the Year Award granted by the A.M. Qattan Foundation; and Kawkab mansey (The Forgotten Planet; Dar Al Ahleyya, 2015), published through a grant from SELAT, Links Through the Arts project, organized by A.M. Qattan Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund. Samar participated in the 2008 Arab Female Poets’ Festival in Damascus, Syria. In 2012, she won a prize granted by the Danish Institute in Damascus for the best poems that reflect the status of Arab societies after the Arab Spring and its effect on youth, and thus participated in the Copenhagen Literature Festival that year. In 2016, she participated in the Khan Al Fonoun Festival in Amman, Jordan. Samar holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Beirut Arab University (2008) and is currently working in Dubai. She blogs at www.summer-blues.blogspot.com and tholatheyyat.blogspot.com.

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John Q. Mars
The Brothers’ War

Big Brother has never been too fond of me.
I remember a time when I fell down
and, as I lay there, on the ground,
I asked “B-big Brother . . . w-won’t you take my hand?”
But all he did was stand and stare.

My Big Brother left me there.

Now that I have grown, forced
to think on my own, I realize
that Big Brother taught me a lesson that day.
I learned that we live in war times and that I
must fight and find my own way.

So each morning I wake up and pray,
hoping that I will live to see another day,
and pull up my bootstraps
before setting out—dodging the booby traps
that lie in my path.

The battleground is full of sounds,
murmured microaggressions all around,
resounding with the rumbling thunder
of police boots, with scorched earth thereunder,
and the lightning cracks
of legislation, executively whipped out
at breakneck pace.

And during one particularly stormy scene,
I turn to see Big Brother standing before me—
wearing the colors of the enemy.

Heartbroken, I try to ask why,
to find out how he could defy
a trust I thought we had compiled
over the course of our lives.

But before a single word is uttered,
before any curse or plea I have the chance to mutter,
he strikes me. Though through the warm,
metallic taste I manage to stutter:

“Th-the world will not s-st-stand for this . . .
the f-fruits of her toils
—all of her s-sp-spoils—
being sent into this abyss.
Sh-she will not stand idly by
and watch you distort the m-m-minds
of many w-with lies.

Th-there will be a reckoning
in which the ghosts of your past will come, b-beckoning
for you to join them in this hellfire you have made
as we rise to heights untold;
and, O my Brother, you will enviously behold
the splendor of our rightfully gained freedoms.

This is the future and, here, it has been foretold.”

To my words Big Brother pays no mind,
a slight smile playing on his lips as he walks on by;
but it will be this very blood-stained proclamation
on which I build a foundation.
There will be a nation that rises high,
in which—every day—the people will have cause for celebration.
As we will no longer merely survive, but thrive,
in this brave, new world.

John Q. Mars is an undergraduate student at New York University in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is concentrating in poetry, philosophy, and foreign languages. This is his first poetry publication.

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Tom Daley
Petit Bourgeois Despair

The shame mongers
are splitting hairs

with the arsonists.
We are left

to the integrity
of our attics.

Every day is a beach day
in the budget of baby oil.

Skim me. I’m as loose
as a spoon cooking horse.

Ecstasy makes hay
like a woman who moans

with a vacuum cleaner’s
prerogatives. Tears often

mistake themselves
for kisses.

To thaw is to turn from an itch
to a scrape.

Piety is the wrong poppy.

Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, 32 Poems, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Hacks: Ten Years on Grub Street (Random House, 2007); Poets for Haiti (Yileen Press, 2010); The Body Electric (CreateSpace, 2013); and Luminous Echoes (Into the Void, 2017). He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.

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Judith Hoyer
An Imagined Telegram

LONDON, ENGLAND
23 JUNE 2017

TO THE PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON D.C.

FACTS:
YOUR PROBLEM IS VANITY (STOP)
IT LEADS TO CRUELTY (STOP)
YOU ARE SILLY (STOP)
JUST SILLY (STOP)

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Editor’s Note: During the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 15–28, 1962), British philosopher Bertrand Russell sent a series of telegrams to President John F. Kennedy, Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, and other world leaders. In a televised address on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy announced his decision to enact a naval blockade of Cuba. In response, Russell sent the following telegram to the president: “YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION. CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT. WE WILL NOT HAVE MASS MURDER. ULTIMATUM MEANS WAR… END THIS MADNESS.”

Judith Hoyer is the author of Bits and Pieces Set Aside (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, The Worcester Review,  Persimmon Tree, PMS poemmemoirstory, Spillway Magazine, Main Street Rag, Small Portions Magazine, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine and Skylight 47. as well as in the anthology Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, forthcoming). Before retiring she was a psychologist working in a small school district in Massachusetts.

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Eileen Tabios
From The Ashbery Riff-Offs
—where each poem begins with 1 or 1-2 lines from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” by John Ashbery

Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Raging Against the Dying Light

The explosion is so precise, fine
And the sun’s eye so unrelenting
But, afterwards, picking up the wily
fragments of wine bottles thrown
against rock walls, he is unsure who
should feel humiliated. When a sliver
cuts his finger, he looks at the blood
drops tip-toeing on tile and wonders
“Do I deserve that?” Someone yelled
but another yelled back. Suddenly he
understands horses and dogs—how
unexpected erections embody fury
For, against the wildest bout of
something-or-another, the inevitable
outcome becomes one of deflation
a whisper to one’s drooping ears:
a self already cringing at mortality

Eileen R. Tabios has released about 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in eight countries and cyberspace. Her most recent include The Opposite of Claustrophobia (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2017) and Amnesia: Somebody’s Memoir (Black Radish Books, 2016). Forthcoming poetry collections include Mantattan: An Archaeology (Paloma Press, 2017). Inventor of the poetry form “hay(na)ku,” her poetry has been translated into eight languages. She also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 12 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as served as editor or guest editor for various literary journals. More information is available at eileenrtabios.com.

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