Anne Riesenberg
What She Dreams the Month He Moves into the White House

She dreams her mother discovers the moon.

She dreams about a queen. A famous poet. Her husband asking can he play with the poet’s hair after he’s already done so.

She dreams inside a benzodiazepine cloud. At sea in the shallows an amoeba a flicker. All those dreamless years without sleep.

She dreams someone gives her a fence a folded stack of clear plastic slats.

She dreams what she lost in the womb.

She dreams a ramshackle house. A woman pulls her into an empty room and kisses her hard. She is astonished by the equatorial fizz their mouths make. When the woman asks her to sing she cannot.

She dreams about wildflower honey rooms full of noise.

She is sleepless. She sleeps without dreams. Three mornings she wakes, upper lip clenched in her teeth.

She dreams a dangerous road. A mirror full of sky. A charcoal drawing of her daughter’s arms encircling the cat.

She dreams she is speaking a language she doesn’t know. There’s a door. A ticket she needs to get through.

She dreams of acting without hesitation. Running down a hill a rolled up rug under her arm.

She dreams an open door. A lilac sweater. An old stove. The poet again. Writing a poem in her nightgown.

She dreams a bedroom. Her friend back from Tanzania heaps of blue beads on a blanket. Another woman weaving loops of beads through her hair.

She dreams the man just made president in his underwear grabbing her crotch.

She dreams a seal with aquamarine spots slithering through the backyard in the snow. When she describes what she’s seen no one believes her.

She dreams a fortress. Row upon row of pale concrete blocks.

She dreams a bridge. A man standing at the gate demanding payment to cross.

She dreams a taxi ride with her sister 4 blocks cost $11.28. She is upset the driver doesn’t care her sister doesn’t offer to chip in still she is in a dream with her sister and it isn’t terrible.

She dreams inside her cells a loosening.

The night of the refugee ban the world she dreams feels more real than the one she’d been living all day.

She is walking across no man’s land in a war-blackened field. Bodies emerge from the mud. Swords slice through her clothes. Her hands are empty. She lets herself bleed. She walks farther than ever before.

She dreams about the queen again. Long strips of red and gold silk flutter across her face as she moves towards the queen, who is lying on her bed in a robe. The queen is young again freshly bathed, gesticulating about justice and freedom.

She dreams she is walking along a frozen waterfall watching people slide down the ice on pieces of cardboard. When she gets back to her car they are snorting cocaine off the hood.

She makes them clean up. She makes them leave. She can’t escape how lonely she feels.

Anne Riesenberg‘s recent work has appeared in The Maine Review, The Blueshift Journal and Naugatuck River Review. She won the 2016 Blue Mesa Review nonfiction contest. She practices acupuncture in Portland, Maine.

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Dana Trupa
A Deleted Scene From Hitchcock’s The Birds:
“Bloodletting The White Lady”

EXT. BODEGA BAY — DAY
Overcast, the blue-black
clouds; dead leaves
twizzling on the sidewalk. Back-
wind whiffles her puffy hood.

Hands stuffed deep in her pockets
when the tip
of the red-tailed hawk’s
right wing
tricks
her left elbow. She looks there,
as the hawk dove ahead
swooping White Lady—
a young girl jumps back
in horror.

The politics
of nature
render
us helpless—
speechless—

Patient, the chicken hawk preys,
stabs in—Lady flutters
on the ground; tufts of white
feathers stripped between
his talons—steeped deep in her guts.

We did not see
it coming.
No “coo roo-c’too.” No
beak snapping.
No birds hissing.

A quelled pen, he dips the red
ink, blood-lets the pools; memos
sink into concrete. With Lady tucked
under his dead weight, they
vanish into the dark-dusk.

Dana Trupa‘s poems are forthcoming in the Red Cedar Review. She was born in Pittsburgh and is a 20-year NYC transplant and recent graduate of Hunter College with a BA in English Literature. She lives and works as a dog whisperer in Manhattan.

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Aimee Pozorski
Allied Forces

We stand before a door that,
when opened, will demand of us
the truth.

Eliot’s phone blew up too late the previous night;
already he was in bed.

Their texts, they light up the room:

Sam, who once was Samantha;
Molly, emergent feminist;
Ahmed, salutatorian of his middle school class;
Catalina, not yet a citizen;
Isaac, then Jared, multi ethnic kids: beauty personified.

All of them ask the same simple thing:
How could they do this to us?

My husband holds me at the bottom of the stairs
while I weep
for a country lost
to fear, hate, and false promises…
something about draining the swamp.

We hold hands while we ascend to Eliot’s room
to wake him to a new reality,
to tell him about who won and who lost.

But for a brief moment
it is just the two of us.
Allied forces.

We will tell our son—
a strong, white middle-class male
unlikely to be affected much—
that he must be an ally
for his friends who need him most.

That day, and every day after
we brace ourselves there,
against a closed door—
against the things that we may never know
and the things we know too well.

Aimee Pozorski is the author Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) and Falling after 9/11: Crisis in American Art and Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Pozorski has also edited or co-edited three collections on Philip Roth, along with two special issues of Philip Roth Studies. Her poems have appeared in Paper Nautilus and The Helix, among others journals. She is Professor of English and director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University.

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Erica Sofer Bodwell
Washington, DC, 2017

—after Wordsworth

King! You should be living at this hour:
America needs you: she’s burning
with that deepest fire—a never-ending
smoking funeral pyre. Our fear has grown like cancer
cells divide, malignant it seems; Our hubris!
Bring your voice and Gandhi’s steady hand,
remind us justice sits as well as stands.
We are selfish and forget darkness
cannot drive out darkness. Raise us up,
restore sanity to this mirror time.
Still pendulum’s eternal swing, let minutes slow
to crawl so we’ll recall. Come and trumpet: Yes!
This tide can turn. It’s not too late, I swear—
just please, we fall to knees and beg: return.

Erica Sofer Bodwell is the author of the chapbook Up Liberty Street (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Fat, Minerva Rising, White Stag, APIARY, The Fem, PANK, HeART, and other journals. She lives in Concord, New Hampshire.

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Sean J. Mahoney
He did not fall alone

When He fell he did not fall alone.
And those others, those fallen souls
hunt tirelessly. Not the weak, nor
the strong, the infirm or the young
will remain free so long as there be
swift confusion and babbling for truth.

It is promise serving as the spoon-feeding.
It is promise filling the glass with blood
and tainted water. It is promise allied
with a dead cold eye and cruel hand
marking foreheads, staving the course
of being, stealing air and biting throats.

When He fell he did not fall alone:
terror begat alerts which begat the bar
which begat the cell and finally prison.
Still the fallen came, hungering for that
pulse what was taken from garden and
from school and stripped from heartland.

They came for factory and union people.
By night they closed out the clerks, nurses
and watchmen; impaling the public as well
as its servants the fallen broke the damn
place and left only the bold lie, the sign of
the double cross, and crumbs of stale bread.

Sean J. Mahoney‘s poems have appeared in Wordgathering, Breath & Shadow, Nine Mile Magazine, OTV Magazine, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Antithesis Journal, among others. Sean helped create the Disability Literature Consortium. He lives with his wife, her mother, two Uglydolls, and three dogs in Santa Ana, California, and works in geophysics.

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Ellen Greenfield
Every Generation Thinks it Invented Sex

What I really want to say is this:
In 1882, Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Chinese immigrants were barred unilaterally for a period of 10 years,
American citizens of Chinese descent were stripped of their rights –
Forbidden from owning property, forcibly excluded from re-entering their own country
(our country) if they left,
sometimes brutally murdered by their fellow Americans.
Does anyone know what the A in his name stood for?

It took a wrenching war between the Union and
Jefferson Davis’ Confederacy
to cancel out the rule of slavery.
He was eventually indicted for treason,
imprisoned with irons riveted to his ankles,
not a bit of pussy in sight.

World War II saw President Franklin Roosevelt sign Executive Order 9066:
American citizens of Japanese parentage
were marched off to internment camps in a North American gulag,
their homes and businesses and self-respect stolen.
This, the same man who turned his bowed back on some 900 Jews
fleeing certain death under the Third Reich.
A blot on his legacy; ptooey!

McCarthy wielded his poison axe in the Fifties—
Who, today, even knows where he is buried?

Ellen Greenfield is a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn and Jefferson, NY. Her new novel, White Roses—a psychological thriller, family saga, and love song to Tanzania—will be published in May by 3Ring Press.

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