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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Billy Clem
Interstices

To love makes one solitary, she thought.
—Virginia Woolf

The crescent moon lies on its back
tonight. Looks lazy

for the first time ever. Such comfort
ought to be an affront, really:

a student snap-chatting, a single piece of
clean toilet paper after great pain,

a sleeping security guard on a clear, windless
night. But, no. It’s

an infant’s legs held up while her aunt
slips on another dry diaper,

a quick check for freshness, some fast
love before returning to the adults.

A still, well-worn hammock, not waiting
for the burden of someone’s belly,

mind, or ass. Just the clean palm of the ill
man finally on white sheets, not

fighting yesterday, stocking tomorrow’s ammo.
Cupping only light.

Not a sickle. Or a reflection. Not even
bared teeth, ready. Just resting,

one leg over the other, head held firm,
worn knuckles interlaced. Preparing

for its own fullness, for all the eggs
to come, for you.

Billy Clem‘s poems and flash fiction have appeared in The New Verse News, Counterexample Poetics, Moon City Review, Elder Mountain, and in Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology. His academic work has appeared in MELUS, Asian American Poets, Asian American Short Story Writers, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literature of the United States, LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia, and Voces de America/Voices of America: Interviews with American Writers. He teaches writing, Multicultural Literatures, and Women’s and Gender studies outside Chicago.

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Lydia Cortes
Jurutungo

Jurutungo: a Spanish word (used primarily in Puerto Rico) meaning far away or difficult to access. Also the name of neighborhoods in the Puerto Rican municipalities of Jayuya and Ponce.

lost
in a place so far away

Jurutungo
hard to get to

Jurutungo
where it’s easy to lose things
where keys go when
taking a mini vacation

Jurutungo
sometimes your glasses
end up there too
stuck in this

Jurutungo
without words
without coherence

Jurutungo
lost to the world
at the end of the earth
in darkness in the hell
in the heel of the world
in the ass of the world
worse still in the coño
cunt only coño in Spanish
word not as ugly
without words lost in

Jurutungo
without voice vocal
chords stripped down throat
closing in on itself crushing the chords
now are all twisted cannot vibrate
or tremble dried up ready to snap
I’m mute mousy lousy without words
it hurts too much to talk about the

Jurutungo
I’m in most hours of most days
lately the days supposing to get longer
still light has been drowned in a no end profound
so easy to disappear in lake found in

Jurutungo
without sound
my throat aching red with
rage not outrage this rage
is all in me in this

Jurutungo
I found and cannot get out of
without words I can find to put
down put together to get this
mad anger this coraje which in pr
we call anger but coraje also means
courage all courage gone along
with my words there’s room
only for darkness fear a wanting to
withdraw be back to a place safe
home where I can put down get out
some of the words stuck in fury
how to get out of this

Jurutungo
of rage where there’s no page
for words to come or
fear if they came they’d be dumb
fragile aborted fetuses of words
malformed that shouldn’t see light
still could I at least put those misshapen
fragments down to make some kind of sense
give some measure of release let go of this
seething this paralysis of my head my belly
my teeth all clenched hard

Jurutungo
coño   coño carajo y puñeta
I explode red
words so scandalous angry my mother
would gasp paralyzed I’m at a loss
for thinking for moving for getting out
I can’t for I’m sick with this cold sick with
the state of my country my cunttree
‘tis of his so I pledge allegiance to rage
rage that keeps me tied up feeling raw
clouding my vision all shut up no words
coming to mind to put something down
sometimes I don’t feel a thing except maybe distrust
more like destruction I feel things coming apart I feel

anger coraje anger in Spanish also means courage
courage to find my words

Lydia Cortes is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust (Ten Pell Books, 2002) and Whose Place (Straw Gate Books, 2009). Her work appears in the anthologies Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times (U Mass Press, 2006) and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (Editorial Campana, 2012). Recent work has appeared in Upstreet.

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Stephen Gibson
Article on Torture

I just finished an article which said that when they dragged
the victim half-conscious from his prison cell, he begged

because he’d already been beaten and starved for days
(he knew what was coming—he could tell—and begged);

the article described a room slippery with blood, eyeballs,
teeth—and the means to leave anyone a shell—he begged;

the article told how skeptics, amused by others’ lack of faith
and who mocked their unbelievable versions of hell, begged;

the article told how social progressives and other reformers—
and all those who predicted ignorance’s death knell—begged;

even those who found themselves exempted—for a time—
because they were once true-believers under a spell—begged.

At the end, I wanted to read something about redemption,
about courage triumphing—he didn’t die well; he begged.

Stephen Gibson is the author of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror, was selected by Billy Collins as the 2017 Miller Williams Poetry Prize winner from the University of Arkansas Press (February 2017). He is the author of six previous poetry collections. Gibson’s poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming in Able Muse, Copper Nickel, Gargoyle, Lake Effect, Nimrod, Per Contra, Quiddity, River Styx, Unsplendid, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and The Yale Review, among other journals.

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Michele Stepto
Celebrate

with everything shut down
in a tight little box no
words for it for the rage
my fellow citizens
who used to be wise
turns out your wisdom
was a full belly
which tells no lies
or tells only lies
what did you do
what have we done

only laughter works
and we are choking on it
everyone has a joke
choking on the last laugh
if America is first
the Netherlands wants
you to know it wants
to be Number Two
it is good to laugh but
it hurts even more
afterward

and the lost words the words
no one wants anymore
jobs worker victim
patriot great decent
and the ones
we cannot find for the rage
for the horrors
here and to come
a whole lexicon
of civic being
beyond use

and only the big words
useful now like treason
tyrant and traitor
and the little
ones like hope
maybe and let’s
wait and see
celebrate
while you can
what you did what
we have done

Michele Stepto teaches writing and literature at Yale University and the Bread Loaf School of English.  Her stories have appeared in Italian-Americana and various online journals.  She is the translator, along with her son Gabriel, of Lieutenant Nun:  Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. 

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Elizabeth DelConte
Ode to Edna Pontellier

You chose the ocean because
it could hold you in its blue infinity
in a way the sand could not. Or
the road. Or the floors cleaned by a woman who
couldn’t even imagine the buoyancy of water.

One hundred and eighteen years ago you left
your muslin dress on the edge of Grand Isle.
You were Chopin’s music—her words round as
notes—come alive, as hard to hold as a bird determined
to fly, as transient as footprints in the sand.

I don’t judge you for leaving. I know you
Wanted to create, with a tool other than your womb. Love another
unfettered by marriage. Feel the weave of the hammock
rock you to sleep—back to the freedom of childhood—where
you ran your hands along the feathery tops of grass.

Come back, Edna. We need your strong wings.
Adèle is still here, mothering her brood. Women still judged
for daring to be things. Can you hear Mademoiselle Reisz
play? I can, when I sit by an open window and
turn my ear to the wind.

Paint your story, with strokes that dry thick
and dark. Smash a vase on the floor and refuse
to let another sweep away the evidence. Remind
us to fight and only to give the unessential. Never ourselves,
but maybe our lives.

Then you can go back to the shore if you’d like to.
And I’ll brush your footprints away with my own
hand. Or maybe you’ll want them there, under the Creole
sun, for others to find you. Or just the impression of
you—because you don’t owe us anything anyway.

Besides, I’ll still have Chopin’s story. And
I can imagine how her pen pressed into her paper,
scratching against its pebbled, tea-colored surface.
Giving birth to a character who transcended her page
and her pen and who had the last word.

Elizabeth DelConte teaches high school English in Syracuse, New York. She earned an MA in English at The Ohio State University. She recently attended the Kenyon Novel Workshop and spends as much of her free time as she can writing.

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Edward Falco
Note To America

A woman like you in sunlight leaned over the motel’s balcony railing
In fringed blue jean shorts and a bikini top and barefoot in the heat

Called to me as I stepped out of my beat up Ford Pinto in the parking lot.
She asked if I wanted a date and smiled with teeth so white and straight

They glittered in a flash of white sun in burning brutal unbearable heat.
She was pretty and young a woman like you with blond hair and big eyes.

This happened in Miami the summer I was twenty-five and on my own
Or twenty-five years later on a sunny day outside a trashed motel in Phoenix

Or just outside Las Vegas with a skinny girl who looked to be in her teens.
She was young. She asked if I wanted a date. In summer’s merciless heat.

You were off somewhere with one of your lovers and a bottle of good wine
Always a taste for the finer things high thread count sheets gourmet meals.

You were lost to me tired and sweating out there on the cracked blacktop lot
Jittery from the drive a lottery ticket in my pocket and a nearly empty wallet

Hungry sore a tooth rotting in the back of my mouth a body full of aches.
She looked like you. Same hair same eyes. Or maybe Dallas, I’m not sure—

As still she looks down from the balcony with a playful smile. “Honey,”
She says, “do you want a date?”—and leans over the railing on crossed arms.

Edward Falco is the author of  the poetry collection Wolf Moon Blood Moon, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2017. His poems are forthcoming in The Southern Review and Blackbird. Falco has won a number of awards and prizes for his writing, including The Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from The Southern Review. He has also published several novels and short story collections.

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Samantha Leigh Miller
America Cries

First he said, “lock her up,”
And we cried, “lock her up!”
Then he shouted, “drain the swamp,”
And we cried, “drain the swamp!”
Then he screamed, “build the wall,”
And we cried, “build the wall!”

America cries.
Yes, we have.

Look, they said, his face is glass.
And we cried, we don’t ask.
Listen, they said, his words are air.
And we cried, we don’t care.
Run, they said, his hands are red.
And we cried, it won’t spread.

America cries.
Yes, we will.

Now you say, we didn’t know.
And we sigh, we didn’t know.
And you say, we didn’t see.
And we lie, we didn’t see.
Finally you say, we didn’t trust.
And we die, we didn’t trust.

America cries.
Yes we can

Samantha Leigh Miller is an educator and freelance writer whose creative work has appeared in literary magazines such as Talking Writing, Raving Dove, Peace Chronicle, and Sofa Ink Quarterly. Miller has also coauthored research in peace pedagogy for the journal Teaching of Psychology and presented her work at conferences around the country. She lives and teaches in Pennsylvania, where she strives to help others find their writing voices.

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Dolores Brandon
KU: Work on What’s Been Spoiled

Editor’s Note: Ku is the eighteenth of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese divination text.

Dolores Brandon is the author of THE ROOT IS BITTER, THE ROOT IS SWEET In the Shadow of Madness, A Memoir published in its 2nd Edition by the Object Relations Academic Press, New York (2016). She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more on her website, doloresbrandon.com

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Elizabeth Jacobson
Perfectly Made

Northern Flicker you woke me from dark sleep, your head
slammed into my window, neck snapped as you dropped
to the frozen ground. I had been dreaming of Gettysburg,
can you imagine? Our fathers brought forth a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
So perfectly made, I put my nail between the split of your beak, pulled
out the long worm of your tongue as if it were a measuring tape
coming out of its case, let go and watched it coil back, then
my fingers in your spotted under-down, a marvel, so
warm, so warm, in the bitter morning; I felt history
toying with itself as I stretched your stiffening
wings as far as they would spread and plucked out the stunning
bright orange tail feathers, one after the next, each quill spilling
a black ichorous ink onto my palms.

Elizabeth Jacobson is the author of A Brown Stone (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), and Are the Children Make Believe? (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Orion Magazine, Hinchas de Poesia, Ploughshares, and Plume. Jacobson is the recipient of the Mountain West Writers’ Award from Western Humanities Review, The Jim Sagel Prize for Poetry from Puerto del Sol, a grant from New Mexico Literary Arts, and residencies from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Herekeke. She holds an MFA from Columbia University. Jacobson is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project which conducts poetry classes at local shelters. She teaches in the Creative Writing program at the Santa Fe Community College.

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