Arjun Rajendran
Painless

I fill out forms. The cabin crew walks down aisles serving
one final round of anti-depressants.

We’ve entered the airspace of a country dangerously low
on the Happiness Index.

If you’re normal, you get to take one pill.
If you’re like me, someone whose legs haven’t stopped trembling

in over a decade,

you get a hug and syrup— just so you don’t start sobbing
soon as the plane touches down.

An officer examines my documents, checks the validity
of my suicide-prevention kit against a database.

Everyone bids for deals on euthanasia these days. The most popular
ones come with wifi, and are advertised as being painless;

though you who left me widowed should know there’s no such thing.

But I hear more than jet lag: my neighbor, punctually up
at 3 am with a noose, and her will, always unraveled

by the Dalmatian’s barks.

Arjun Rajendran‘s second collection of poems, The Cosmonaut in Hergé’s Rocket, is forthcoming from Paperwall Publications in April 2017. His poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, Berfrois, Caesura, Star*Line and The Bombay Literary Magazine, among others. Anthologies include Eclectica Magazine’s Best of Poetry (Eclectica Publishing, 2016), and 40 Under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalization Poetry.(Paperwall Media, 2016).

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Suzanne Osborne
ABCs of Politics

Accountability is this year’s prime
Buzz word, but by what hopeful
Calculus does that
Denote any serious, public
Engagement with truth-telling?
Facts are thin on the
Ground, pointed questions elicit
Harrumphs that anyone can
Interpret any old way, making a
Joke of the whole effort to
Know who did what when, or to
Link personal gain to professional
Misdeeds. Was a donor’s son given a
No-show job? Oh, no, he was seen in the
Office on June 3rd for at least 20 minutes.
Public trust, never robust, has perished.
Questionable deals are swept under the
Rug, wrongdoing denied with a
Smirk. Caught with your hand in the
Till? No prob, just say you’re checking
Up on the accountants, no need to
Verify further, my friends,
Wink, wink. The peasants don’t need
X-ray vision to see the pols partying on their
Yachts. It’s clear the chances for change are
Zero.

Suzanne Osborne‘s work has appeared most recently in Front Range Review, District Lit, and The Healing Muse. After an early career in theater, a stint in academia, and many years as a legal secretary, she now lives in Queens and write poetry.

James Dott
Advice for the President—So Far Unheeded

—A cento, gleaned from Muhammad Ali, Proverbs (paraphrased), and Buddha

Don’t count the days; make the days count.
Incline your ear to toward wisdom and apply your heart to understanding.
The mind is everything. What you think you become.

The righteous considers the cause of the poor, but the wicked gives no thought to it.
Service to others is the rent you pay for your time here on earth.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
Do not envy the oppressor, and do not choose his ways.
You will not be punished for your anger,…

A soft answer turns away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger
…you will be punished by your anger.
It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe.

Do not let mercy and truth forsake you.
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand.
Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

James (Jim) Dott is a the author of A Glossary of Memory, an imagined memoir in poems. His poetry has appeared in Written River, Turtle Island Quarterly, Green Linden, Southern Poetry Review, Squid, and Rain. Visit his website jamesdott.com for more on his work. Jim is a retired elementary school teacher living in Astoria, Oregon. He taught in Oregon and overseas.

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Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Strigidae

…the nights were soft / With owls
—Robert Hass

With what inner need do we forget
the hawk-beak, meat-hunger
of a reclusive rusty lover?
Why favor instead the seductive
call, the whoo and oooh of owl hymn,
the logic of silent flight and heavy
feather? Why delight in fixed hoop-eye
and swivel gaze or embrace a cartoon
torso and forget the rip and wrest,
the chipmunk swallowed whole, reduced
to pellets? How to condone a bleak essence,
the skill in every talon, slashing?

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of two books and five chapbooks. For more about her work, check her website at wendytaylorcarlisle.com.

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Journey McAndrews
Ever worry when

We hang the petty thieves
and appoint the great ones to public office.
—Aesop

walking alone down a dark street/jacked up for wallet/cellphone/sneaks/by a sex-hungry consumer/obscured in shadows/getting a taste of it all

having is all there is in a world they packaged/we bought

rollbacks and mega sales/black Friday specials/wants and wishlists/.com mania/consumes consumers/even though we know/big screen fairy tales aren’t true/electronic static comes at a cost/replacements plentiful/like primetime stars/pilots become sitcoms/cookie-cutter homes/like gee-golly gosh-darn good white Christian missionary position moms and dads and their biological only/no adoptees or Franken-test tube petri-dish kids/allowed

disavowed/excluded/polluted/throw-away/giveaway/free to the first caller/t-shirt/ball-cap/swag bag society

landfills full of crap we the people bought/can’t be buried/the sea inherits it one broken G.I. Joe and strung-out Barbie/toothbrush/hypodermic needle at a time

there aren’t enough hours to check off/check out/jack off/jack out/emails/ texts/newsfeeds/to do-lists/sidetracked at every turn/slip-jacked by tweenage Kellyanne/fabricated a massacre/Sean screams at the masses/to be see-seen-scene/dad has a case of the Twitters/to twist-bend truths/mom locked away in the gilded Tower/wearing the latest fast facts fashion/news-noose/today’s this just in/tomorrow’s cloak and chokehold/Goodwill cast of/like a good neighbor/state and Big Pharma is there

money is fleeced off the sick/needy/Epi-penned into the poor-house/the best nation in the world/In Living Color/is “a donation” of we the people/our blood/semen/piss/talent/money/truth/time

exorbitant donations to super PACs/wasting time isn’t all there is/forty-to-fifty years of life/grinded on corporate gristmills/enslaved by financial tycoons/they get the dollars we keep the cents/make sense of it all/go on just try

alternative reality/a nightmare sold as the American Dream/topsy-turvy/round the traditional marry-Mary-merry-go-round/contorted into an Amerikan scream/while fish/sunsets/sand/mountains/snow/redwoods live without 9-to-5 schedules/what a way to fake a living/that morphed into 24/7 work-a-day/workaholic lives for blue/white/pink collar/we the people who keep the country running/well/oil/machines

seven days a week not enough anymore/nothing is enough even with BOGO’s/All-you-can-eat/2 for 1/Buy 2 Get 1/rebates/% off/nickel-and-dimed/morning-noon-night/all the days of our lives

going off grid/off trail/off track/something we the people dream about while chained to our desks/on the go/on the ball/on the clock/on the mark/on the hook

they manipulate line and sinker/swallowed/every time another breaking/our hearts/news “story” [cums] spurting into our living rooms/terror in the palm of hands/held device/detonating every second/frightening/keep the masses afraid/react in fear/with fear/don’t ask don’t tell/caught between repeal/repent/rescind

equality is given a hand job by politicians/cum-coming to a con-sensus/ eliminates queer/black/women/Hispanic/trans/children/they are only concerned with unborn children/they always say consider the children/the eight-year-old girl who might be in a stall next to a trans-woman/never mind that the girl and trans-woman just need to/piss and get off the pot

where a gal or guy takes a piss in the good ol’ U.S. of anti-gay/moral majority cause for concern but not when a white frat boy rapes a girl behind a dumpster/pissing on her future/in this lurid PTSD/make-Amerika-rape/hate again nation

we the people conditioned to ask not what our country can do for us but what we are willing to suck-suck/chug-chug/swallow from our country

news doesn’t broadcast real stories/loop-recycle/deluge of shit/strain/ constipated by lies/in a civil lies nation/built by immigrants they want to boot/axe/let’s talk about real fear/terrorism/actual issues melting/floating away/like polar ice caps/we the people/distracted/detracted

they want us to obsess over trannies in bathrooms/email scandals/take the key and lock her up/lock her up/what we the people talk about over our take-out family-size bucket dinners/buy the bucket then kick it/that’s the Amerikan way/while the government is dismantled/hostile takeover of truth-liberty-freedom-justice

they chide when questioned or challenged/manufacture dissonance/plant seeds of suspicion/grow scandals/pull hoods down over our heads/so we the people won’t see the real executioner’s face

Journey McAndrews‘s poems and essays have appeared in The Feminist Wire, Kudzu Literary Magazine, Motif, LILOPOH, New Verse News, Inscape, and the HIV Here & Now Project, among others. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction with a minor in Poetry from Spalding University. McAndrews received an Individual Artist Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentorship. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her two rescued cats—Catticus Finch and Boo Catley.

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Kamal Kimball
The Hand That’s Dealt

I try to blot myself out
in the blank of sleep
when the visions start
their nightly chatter.

A man with a face
scrambled like TV static,
sheriff’s aviators, a red
ball cap joins our table.

We’re courteous, distracted
with drink and laughter
so we deal him in.
Shoot the shit, forget

he’s there and bet
all we own ’til every chip
is in the pot. Before we
fathom, his fingers flash

to talons and he reveals
Ten Jack Queen King Ace.
We gape as his claws rake
in everything we’ve earned.

Kamal E. Kimball‘s poems have appeared in Zetetic, Literati Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Cincinnati DIY Writers and founder of Fresh Darlings, an online writing community. She is a reader for EG&J Press and an intern with Dos Madres Press. She lives in the Ohio River Valley. More at kamalkimball.com.

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Nina Padolf
Veterans Day: After the Trump-shit Blows

I think today of all of the people that “served our country,”
whom will they be serving now?
As the trump-shit blows—
and many feel like we’ve be slapped down
to some nasty trump job,
I think of the women who had to wear uniforms
in a world dominated by men.
Skirts and hose, glossed lips, painted fingertips
vulnerable legs exposed flesh.
Pants were for the men.
How do I manage to salute a man that fingers women
just because he can?
I feel violated, I can’t seem to sleep it off.
It’s a nightmare
in replay, his-story repeats
while the trump-shit blows.
I am raw, confused, and dazed.
He says, “Make America what again?”
I think today of all of the people who came here seeking freedom.
I think about the people who were here first.
Whom are we “serving” and what are we really being served?

Nina Padolf is the co-editor (with Deena November) of the upcoming anthology, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres, forthcoming from Six Gallery Press. Her poems have appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper and The Dandelion Review and her short stories for children have appeared in Carnegie Mellon University’s Project Listen. She holds a PhD in educational leadership from Argosy University, an MA in teaching from Chatham College, and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Carlow University. Padolf teaches writing at the The Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online.

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Chad Foret
Ngarong feat. The Autocrats

The stragglers are fashioned into borders by cigar
Light. This is how I romance erosion, rearranging

The republic until unrecognizable. When the mortar
Was depleted, poverty answered my prayers. Once,

A ronin would disappear around their other arm,
But I traded CDOs for honor, antiques in acid

Baths, so they shine in some capacity. Sometimes
It is easier to rage than admit you are a megalodon.

The details should destroy us, whittle loneliness
Into something tender. I’m awake as I can under

-stand, the baddest seed with everywhere to be.

Chad Foret is a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi where he assists in the publication of the Robert Frost Review and teach composition. His work has appeared in Louisiana Literature, The Midwest Quarterly, the anthology Down to the Dark River, and was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Tennessee Williams Fest Poetry Award.

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John L. Stanizzi
New Year’s Eve 2016

…and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fire-pit on the last day of the year,
same intensity as yesterday’s fire,
the heat, the flames in a luminous spire,
so there is nothing more for me to fear.

Smoke into black December’s sky a smear
through thoughts of pain and the next crossfire;
fire-pit on the last day of the year,
same intensity as yesterday’s fire.

So what’s the metaphor I’m seeking here—
—the crackling of wood is a prophet choir
singing staccato hymns, those hopeful prayers
that, in spite of diminishing, still flare?
Fire-pit on the last day of the year,
same intensity as yesterday’s fire.

John L. Stanizzi is the author of the poetry collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallalujah Time!, and High Tide-Ebb Tide. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, Tar River, and others journals. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. His newest book, Sundowning, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Coventry with his wife, Carol.

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Shikha Malaviya
Touchdown

She says she can’t stop crying
her heart in a holding pattern over Allepo
while she sips coffee in Atlanta
You’re overreacting I say
Thank God you’re okay
that you aren’t being asked
to prove yourself
by singing O Say Can You See
dawn’s early light melding into dusk
in a tiny room that quakes
as planes land and take off
the baggage carousel spinning
round and round
two suitcases unclaimed

Shikha Malaviya is the author of Geography of Tongues (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2013). She is a co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a literary press dedicated to new poetic voices from India. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Water~Stone Review and other journals. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at shikhamalaviya.com.

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