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.

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.

Ken Waldman
Republican Leadership

It’s the hypocrisy and shamelessness
that astounds. How can so many rich men
(and women) incriminate themselves again
and again? With wealth, you’d think they’d practice
restraint, or would mix the deviousness
with subtle smarts. But abomination
after abomination. God, how can
they not see they can’t pass judgment unless
they themselves act with dignity? They’ll stand
in front of a camera, a straight face,
no irony, and claim the opposite
of what they’ve said or done. I don’t understand:
have they all gone to theater school and aced
the same class: Smug Assholes and Crazy Shit?

Ken Waldman is the author of Trump Sonnets: Volume 1 (The First 50 Days) (The Ridgeway Press, 2017), his seventh full-length book of poems. His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Beloit Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and Massachusetts Review, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. See kenwaldman.com for more.

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.

Aaron Belz
To Avert Calamity

Someone needs to unthrone this jackalope
but quick! Already tinier beasts gather
in the woods, under cover of the news,
to appoint themselves a this or that. I say.
Back in our day, if a large, unwieldy
sales-monster came lumbering through the yard
we knew why Mama kept a broom
by the front door and where Papa kept his gun;
yet this, our civilized horde of like-minded
so-and-so’s, can’t seem to raise its sight
to the King Harlequin that’s taking it
from behind, and maybe that’s why! No good
angle on the beast while it huffs. No
clean shot at it. Already smaller offspring
(are they offspring?) fall from its pouch
like alien spawn, their eyes opening
wide upon the sunlit greens of our Fair Capital
their wet and tender loins unfurling,
drooping to the sod, ker-plunk.
I know the midnight meetings well enough,
my friends; I’ve been to them before.
I know what they decide at them,
and it isn’t right. Someone needs to get
the feathers and hot tar and send this P.O.S.
back to Vegas or wherever his glittering
suit will be at home, to man whatever sideshow
he’s best at barking for, draw them in:
Draw those patrons in, not these. Not us.
This ain’t a lowdown show of barbarousness.

Aaron Belz Aaron Belz’s books include Glitter Bomb (Persea, 2014) and Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010).  His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The Washington Post, and many other places. He lives in Hillsborough, NC, where he owns a bicycle shop with his son.

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.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios
Alternate Truths/Stoned Soup

A good soup starts with a good pot.
A good pot is one without a hole.
A good hole is filled with onions.
A good onion does not look like a rusty carrot.
A good carrot is not celadon, or green
A good green is unknowing and softer than a stone.
A good stone will not thumbprint the water.
Good water is as hard to find as empty pockets.
Pockets that are full of makeshift music are a good gnaw.
A good gnaw begins in a junk shop.
A junk shop is filled with winged secrets.
A good secret starts with a cockamamie lie.
A good lie starts with a knock-kneed veil.
A veiled need starts with hunger.
Hunger starts and ends with soup.
A good soup starts with a good pot.
A good pot doesn’t have a hole.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios is the author of the poetry collection Special Delivery (Yellow Chair Review, 2016). Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Stories of Music, Volume 2; Love Notes from Humanity: The Love, Lust & Loss Collection; and Happy Holidays. Her poems have appeared in the journals The Poeming Pigeon, Clementine, Kentucky Review, Unsplendid, Scissors and Spackle, MockingHeart Review, Noble Gas Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, Folliate Oak and Cumberland River Review, among others.

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.

Liz Ahl
Fake Ghazal

The narcissistic man-child points and blusters “fake news!”
during his most recent spew and blather to make news.

Just when I think my despair has touched its limit,
the creature’s maw unhinges, finds more of me to take. News

to no one: his voice chews at the frayed ends of my hope.
To no one with an ounce of heart or sense is this ache news.

The relentless pixels of his thin-skinned cruelty might break me,
break you, break the world, even, finally, break “news.”

I know I’m meant to find some inch of ground where vigilance
and sanity can coexist. Or maybe I should forsake news.

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds, forthcoming in 2017 from Hobblebush Books. She has written four chapbooks: Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, both from Seven Kitchens Press in 2012 (the latter as part of the “Summer Kitchen” series); Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), which received 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 If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration, Atlanta Review, Able Muse, Measure, Cutthroat, and Rappahannock Review.

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.

Ned Balbo
The Dark

Each day, we wake to crisis,   Is
the likelihood of treason   reason
a charge impossible   possible,
to counter or ignore.   or
A small light, like a star   are
behind us, shadowy,   we
flares brightly for a moment,   meant
grows dim… What should we do?   to                                    
The dark provides no template—   let
We’re caught beyond our power,   our
some unknown destination   nation                 
awaiting us… In free fall,   fall?

burned by the atmosphere,   Fear
will we survive? With what   what
scant payload, what supplies?   lies
What quake or thunderhead   ahead,
will follow when we land?   and    

Hold on, and brace for impact.   act.

Ned Balbo is the author of Upcycling Paumanok (Measure Press, 2016), and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press, 2010) winner of the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. Recent poems may be found at NewVerse News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle: Poets Respond and in Ecotone, First Things, New Criterion, Birmingham Poetry Review, 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.

Jane McPhetres-Johnson
Growing up beside the continental divide

we lived on the eastern slope where the great slabs
of red stone tumbled down steep inclinations
above our heads and buried their sharp points
in the sandy soil where wild flower children followed
in the foothilly steps of Chief Left Hand’s canyons

barely aware of the other side’s western faces
except when we skied the highest mountain peaks
and got lured down “advanced-only” trails in error
or dare, ending somewhere over there where
great white mogul-ridden slopes tipped us over
and dumped us into summer fields of cantaloupes.

Who were these people anyway, staking out claims
to long straight rows of gain in their shiny tractor
cabs full of stereo talk-radio heads and cool A/C and
who were their followers, shadowy rows of fold-up
folks strung out behind, hands full of melons, eyes
peeled for another sort of slippery slope called ICE

and who are we in this country of pointless furs and
filtered glasses, one foot in salt of the earth-melting
fat cats’ oil and gas pipes fracking our own mother’s
bedrock and broken waters so we can keep the other
foot on the up slope, keep on truckin’ and flying free
sky high over the not-so-ancient great wall of Mexico?

Dying out incontinentally divided now, hanged, drawn
and quartered into states of red and purple and black
and blue, so bruised and beaten down and swollen up
we’ve lost our heads and now we’ve got a head that’s
lost his way, a bipolar chief for two polarized slopes
tottering, divided, forgetting how to lean on each other.

Jane McPhetres-Johnson holds an MFA from Goddard College where she studied with Thomas Lux and Stephen Dobyns. Working for the NEH via the New England Foundation in the 1980s and 90s, she created and coordinated literature and history programs in public libraries throughout the region. During that time she edited two readers, Consider the Source: Old Tales (New Eng. Foundation for the Humanities, 1989) and Encompassing Columbus: Five Italian Lives (New Eng. Foundation for the Humanities, 1992), both designed to facilitate discussions in library programs. She recently moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she takes daily walks on the Robert Frost trail accompanied by the ghost of Emily Dickinson.

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.

Anne Kenny
Alternative facts

Anne Kenny‘s poems have appeared in Equinox, South, Blue Dog Australian Poetry, Contemporary Haibun Online and other journals as well as in anthologies including Mirror Writing: An Anthology of Poetry by Common Room Poets (Categorical Books, 2009). She has recently claimed dual citizenship and is now the proud owner of an Irish passport and plans to remain European.

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.

James Diaz
The Arrival Never Ending

I dreamt you destroyed the world
and you weren’t even here to see it
something about the heat pressing in
and the planet was getting uncomfortable in its skin
and the people I loved
didn’t know what to do
with themselves anymore

life was getting small
words repeated like incantation of spirit

we cannot wash fear off

time being circular
hate follows its own tail
in the dark

and under the table
a tug of what-call-it?
Hidden light,
the atomic morning after?

I dreamt that all of that hate was turned into a garden
and there was no water to nurture something new
and I wept knowing how you didn’t even notice.

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Ditch, HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak, Pismire, Chronogram and My Favorite Bullet. His first book of poems, This Someone I Call Stranger, is forthcoming from Indolent Books (2017). He lives in upstate New York.

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.

Desiree Morales
Anthropocene

I remember it very specifically
as it’s happening
so I’ll be able to tell someone
how astonishing it was
beautyberries neon purple
the shaded trail I walk
the year summer was lethal
I mean the year heat
almost killed me
the year it seems like
everyone good was dying
the year earthquakes
were everywhere now
the year North Dakota locked
people like you in dog kennels
and wrote numbers on their bodies
to identify numbered bodies
even though people like you
have names
the year of lemons
so gold like daylight
I purchased them extravagantly
showed them affection
wondered how long
we would have lemons like that
the year Haiti flooded
the year we were horrified
the year we were angry that others
were not horrified, the year we sang
Redemption Song at the capital
at Black Lives Matter, a few yards
from men fondling their
semi-automatic weapons
the year of the Rain Room
the year I knew I’d have to fight
for drinking water someday
I mean the year
we fought for drinking water
the year I came home
from drinking wine with my
beautiful friends
saw the news
and sunk to the floor sobbing
I am remembering very specifically
as it happens
which is called bearing witness
which is called a kind of hubris
believing there will be someone to tell

Desiree Morales‘s work has appeared in Chaparral, Truck, and Conflict of Interest. She grew up in Southern California and lives in Austin, Texas.

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.