Dan Murphy
American Carnage

(an erasure of the 45^th President’s inaugural address, January 20, 2017)

Justice     of America
joined in     effort
promise     Together, we   come
we gather     we carry
we     have been     ceremony     merely
another   power     giving it
too long   a small     cost

The establishment     itself     celebrated
capital.
celebrate   struggling

our land     belongs to you
this is
what truly matters
which     controls     controlled     the people
which    world   is     crucial

a nation     great     safe     good     rusted out
which leaves   of     knowledge     drugs
lives     this American Carnage

We are     pain

Their dreams     heart     home     destiny
I take today
oath     allegiance     to industry     armies     other countries
One by one     millions and millions   ripped from
homes     the past     the future     today

Every decision on trade     taxes     immigration
ravages     countrie
making     stealing   destroying
our jobs.

I will fight
my body and I   bring back     wealth
welfare     back     hands

We will     buy American     goodwill
We will     reinforce     old     terrorism
will     eradicate   the face of the Earth
the bedrock of     politics     loyalty     each other

open your heart
there is no room

how good and pleasant
America     unstoppable
fear     we will     be
We will be
most importantly     we will be   God.

Dan Murphy‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lullwater Review, Blue Collar Review, Panhandler Magazine, Alloy, and the Adirondack Review. He holds an MFA from Boston University and teaches writing and literature at Suffolk University in Boston. He lives just outside Boston with his wife and two daughters and their black Lab, Sammy Adams Murphy.

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Marcus Bales
Trumpymandias

for Pino Coluccio

I met a traveler from an antic land
Who said: “Within his oddly orange-tanned
Visage, puckered lips in childish need
Seek all attention all the time, his greed
Demanding more the more demands are met.
‘Look at my crowds, you Democrats, and despair!’
He boasts, but photos show his Inaugural
Attendance thin and ersatz as his hair,
And when next day the women marched, the sprawl
Of half a million people filled the Mall.
The nations of the world observe his threat
Of id ascendant, super-ego lost,
And wonder what in blood, toil, tears, and sweat
Unquenched and quenchless avarice will cost.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except he lives in Cleveland and his poems have not been published in The New Yorker or Poetry.

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MK Creel
we are a land of shadows

sometimes they break through
the veil
dark, dense and outside
the light
black winged things
swishing saurian tails
dancing
encircling
containing
what we cannot reconcile
thought and memory
blur
incite
the primitive
to rise
a fevered frenzy
of feathery trails
engulfs us
lifts and carries us
not above our own wounds
but the world’s

A note from the author
The story behind this poem is twofold: First, it was in response to Jackson Pollock’s “Untitled. C.1950.” This poem is also in response to the recent ban on immigrants and refugees, and a growing increase of intolerance in the United States. According to Carl Jung, everyone has parts of themselves that they suppress and ignore. These parts make up what Jung referred to as our shadow. Jungian scholars pose that just as an individual has a shadow, so do societies and nations. According to Japanese author Haruki Murakami, “At times, we tend to avert our eyes from the shadow, those negative parts, or else, try to forcibly eliminate those aspects. No matter how high a wall we build to keep intruders out, no matter how strictly we exclude outsiders, no matter how much we rewrite history to suit us, we just end up damaging and hurting ourselves.”

MK Creel‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Paper Rabbit, Tar River Poetry and Avocet. Creel lives in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and has worked in journalism, community mental health and nonprofit marketing.

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Mary Ann Honaker
Worship

This is your practice: kneeling in the bright warmth
from the windows with the holy words buzzing
over your lips. Pressing your forehead to the floor,
acknowledging that you are small, minute,

a speck of flesh on a speck of earth
whirling around a speck of fire, one among
millions, trillions, who knows? Yet you feel
the strings of brotherhood tying you, tugging you,

real as the strings you steady tomato plants with,
making sure they get their share of sun. These strings
are the same, ones that hold you to earth and lift you
beyond yourself at once, to a warmth outside

of your realm of perception yet real; an answer
stirs, rising out of your core, calming you,
nourishing you. You settle into a silence behind
the murmur of familiar voices. Then suddenly

a shout; you jolt from your trance, the cords tighten,
the cords loosen and dissolve into the air, the light
burns and wavers, your brothers fall, you fall
as if pushed by an unseen hand. Your hand

reaches for your brother’s hand. A voice you know
screams. You see your brother recede into his own eyes,
as if walking down a dark hallway, farther down,
farther still, until a black door shuts quietly behind him.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press in 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Alyss, The Dudley Review, Euphony, Off the Coast, Topology, Van Gogh’s Ear, and The Lake, among other journals. Honaker holds a BA in philosophy from West Virginia University, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She lives in Beaver, West Virginia.

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Adriana Díaz
The President Is

Government is not business.
Government is not entertainment.
I knew that when I was twelve.

I barely remember President Eisenhower,
I thought he was the granddad of the country.
Then Kennedy made me think
The President is the Prince Charming of the country.

Over and over I learned something new about the President.
The President is the slickest politician of the country.
He is the biggest crook of the country.
He is the most famous actor of the country,
The most well-connected man of the country.

All of them were lucky white boys, except one.
He taught me that the President
Is the most optimistic man of the country.

I watch children leaving school in the afternoon.
What do they think?
The President is the angriest man of the country.
The President is the biggest liar of the country.
The President is the scariest man of the country.

Government is not business.
Government is not entertainment.
I knew that when I was twelve.

Adriana Díaz is the author of Freeing the Creative Spirit (HarperSan Francisco, 1992). Her poems and essays have appeared in several journals and anthologies. She hails from Oakland, California and is working on her first novel. You can see her visual art at adrianadiaz.com; read her blog at thiscreativelife.blogspot.com; and learn about her work ass a teacher and life coach at yourcreativelifecoach.com.

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Sarah Stern
Moss

Elias Wolf Pressburger
Sophie Pressburger
My great grandparents.
Heinz and Barbara take us up the hill
To the Jewish cemetery
It’s raining
Barbara says, “The graveyard is beautiful in every season.”

The stones take us further and further back
The 1600s
The all-shades-of-green moss
Cover everything
We are under water
In a land of gorgeous fish and names
A black chill rises and thick vines roar
Write my name here.

I could have been a middle-aged woman in Berlin.
Boots and jeans, kinky just right. Gluehwein.
I cry for the numbers.
Fish have no end—see them in this small green.

Is this what it means—to see the past in front of you?
Even the still-visible smashed glass is lyrical
Even in death you try to take from us
But you can’t
We are on the other side already
Ha—bastards.

Mommy, I feel you here
I’m remembering how you told me you’d play,
Run and hear the church bells
I see the village below, the pastel houses
Fields, the fields you spoke of
How your papa would come home from
A week of cattle dealing
And he’d ask you—

“Who did you beat up this week?”
Because you were strong
And he loved you.

Sarah Stern is the author of But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock, 2014) and Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in The American Dream, The Man Who Ate His Book: The Best of Ducts.org, Epiphany, Freefall, New Verse News and Verse Daily, among other journals. She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Poetry Award. She graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. You can see more of her work at sarahstern.me.

Christine Jones
At Stop & Shop after the Inauguration

I’m wandering
the aisles of spices
and cereals, bumping
into the free-standing display
of the now fruitier Fruit Loops.

I meander,
finger each bottle,
each cardboard box.
I shake, debate
every priced ounce,
for no reason
other than to linger.

Gripping the cart’s cracked plastic
steadies me as I shuffle
past neon colored cans of cat food,
thirteen different brands of pickles,
and umpteen flavors of potato chips.

On the magazine rack,
Women’s World pushes against
today’s headlines, then

my red grapes rolling
on the conveyor belt,
the tenderloin, the carton
of organic blueberries, scanned
by a sixteen year old named Lily.

Remember how we argued
over Dylan’s prize, legalizing
marijuana, or whether chickens
should be free to roam?

I want you to know
it’s cold outside, and I resist,
a bag of groceries in each fist,

before succumbing
to those automatic
whale-mouthed doors.

Christine Jones is a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA program, working on her first book collection with mentor, poet Erin Belieu, and is founder/editor of poems2go, a public poetry project funded by The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in The Offering, Kindred, Muse, The Literary Bohemian, and is forthcoming in The Timberline Review.

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Darius Stewart
G.T.B.T.P.

Grab them by the pussy . . . you can do anything . . .
                                                        —Donald J. Trump

now imagine them are young boys
who might encounter an old man who’s lost everything
youthful beauty   his pride
but not his joy     in how

he covets them             wherever they’re going
jogging past his house in the hours
before sunrise      arriving home from school
after a clarinet lesson    it doesn’t matter he’s there

circling the Exxon parking lot
waiting for them to emerge one by one
from buying slushies or Snickers bars
to tide them over until dinner                 waiting

for the one boy especially to detour through the alley
shortcut to finish homework before
joshing around outside with the rest of the boys
before dark signals him back in

for bed                 this is the boy the old man seeks out
most  the boy he fantasizes seduction
as he sits alone in his bathrobe looming
a bachelor late in life

with all the fixtures of solitude detrimental
the way he adjusts the draped bay window
in the den feverishly lurking through it
while he slurps down cold brown tea

places the cup back on its saucer
without a trembling hand      not a drop spilled
not an eye averted        diligent to a fault
& when did all that start       the million stars vanquished

one evening         the million reasons
he fell out of love with appropriate love   was it
the eventual silence of arriving home with only
details of the day having wasted away to greet him

at the door or was it simply he wanted
a boy who would lay beside him a while
a boy to undress by layers like an onion peeled
down to the gleaming smooth skin beneath

the boy’s arms crossed over his chest the way pubescents
prove a budding masculinity  legs propped
on a foot-rest       head tilted to the ceiling
like poster boys of the old man’s youth    though

not the baby-faced dimpled ones     he prefers
ne’er-do-wells known to subvert the law
scarred expressions of the wily
already lighting fires to dumpsters

behind convenient stores      pitching bricks
through windows of abandoned houses
boys needing the most rehabilitating
he wants them reduced to basic parts

two eyes a mouth jaw nose & torso
all of him tinged or not         so long as a boy’s
clarity of beauty remains comprehensible
in other words a boy to whom you can do anything

Darius Stewart is the author of three chapbooks: The Terribly Beautiful (2006), Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, and The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. He earned an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, and lives in Knoxville, TN with his dog Philip J. “Fry.”

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Daniel Nathan Terry
What It Takes

What it takes each morning is time to remind myself
of all that is good despite all that is evil. Through your ugliness,
you are teaching me to love harder, deeper,

more possessively, all that is beautiful. What it takes
to fight you is more than a phone call, an email,
a vote; it takes the pursuit of beauty, it takes eyes wide

open to Earth in all her vulnerable glory. What it takes
to survive you is the nearly impossible
camellia bloom unfurling in the winter wind,

its fragile petals trembling in the dawnlight. What it takes
to resist the great urge downward is the hummingbird
that remained in our garden through January,

that took its place amid what remained
of the red and white flowers and found sustenance
among the dying.

Daniel Nathan Terry is the author of three books of poetry: City of Starlings (Sibling Rivalry Press 2015); Waxwings (Lethe Press 2012); Capturing the Dead (NFSPS 2008), which won The Stevens Prize; and a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles (Seven Kitchens Press 2011). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in numerous journals and anthologies, including Cimarron Review, New South, and The Greensboro Review. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina with his husband, painter and printmaker Benjamin Billingsley.

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Elizabeth Knapp
Is That a Gun in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

Because we could not look you in the eye,
we turned to social media. In your suburbs,
yard signs blossomed, dollars spent
and deposited themselves. Everywhere,
carnivals returned to fashion, particularly those
employing clowns. When I say we, I mean
the dark that seeds the fear of itself.
Summer evenings still featured sprinklers
and baseball for the sake of fans,
but everyone agreed the sun seemed shaky.
By everyone, I mean the collective dream
we restream each night. America,
in one tiny fist you held a bottle of pills
marked Amnesia; in the other a concealed .45.

Elizabeth Knapp is the author of The Spite House, winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. The recipient of awards from Literal Latté and Iron Horse Literary Review, she has work forthcoming in LUMINA, New Orleans Review, River Styx, and Sonora Review, among other journals. She teaches at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Visit her website: elizabeth-knapp.com.

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