Sharon Mesmer
Welcome

A student asked, “When times of great difficulty visit us, how should we meet them?”
The teacher said, “Welcome.”
— Buddhist saying

Welcome subsiding of light
Welcome turning of the year

Welcome unexpected conclusion

Welcome abyss divulging its form

Welcome darkness that is another sun

Welcome all we are about to lose
Welcome all we are about to gain

Welcome sitting with all that is difficult

Welcome climbing the ladder of the spine
and drinking the breath in in a single sip

Welcome no thoughts

Welcome many thoughts

Welcome wound that never heals

Welcome event horizon where familiar things disappear

Welcome age of chaos

Welcome carefully choosing words so as to not tell everything because
certain things lose fragrance in air

Welcome loss of words — in a little while
there may be many

Welcome no words

Welcome many words

Welcome all that is difficult

Welcome all-consuming weariness

Welcome familiar joys tinged with bitterness

Welcome reversal

Welcome moment when something new appears
Welcome unknown frontier that forces us to become
more than we ever were before

Welcome all that is difficult

Welcome turning all mishaps into the path
Welcome driving all blames into one
Welcome being grateful to everyone

Welcome new poem that some will dismiss
Welcome new poem that some may misunderstand

Welcome new poem written quickly wherein I say
“Welcome, new future of which I am not afraid
for I have already looked into the abyss
and am prepared for light”

Welcome subsiding of light

Welcome returning of light

Welcome turning

Turning, turning

To light

Sharon Mesmer is the author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015), voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy. Previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2007), and Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000). Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other places. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School and lives in Brooklyn.

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Ellen Greenfield
Splitting Wood

Jefferson, NY 11/12/16

Here in the chill November light
My job is splitting wood for winter.
True, I am too small of stature
To wield an axe
But I can use a different tool.
True, I have to plug it in
But it transforms little power into great strength.

Looking at the space the wood must fill
I almost despair –
So much emptiness to address
But I can start.
I choose a heap of logs to split
Then run them one by one through the splitter.

Each demands my scrutiny:
How does the grain flow? Where are the knots?
I nestle one in the cradle
And press a switch to trigger the chassis –
Five tons of hydraulic pressure
Conveys the wood, unyielding, toward an immoveable wedge.

Some crack easily, others resist:
The toughest snap back to slam a leg
Or mash a finger.
But soon another pile grows –
Logs readied for the fire.
These I pitch into the barrow and wheel to the porch
(An awkward load and hard to balance)
Where I stack them, armload by armload
Close at hand, to last through winter.

From pile to splitter
Splitter to pile
Pile to barrow
Barrow to porch

Armload by armload.

And when I take stock again,
The waiting space is almost filled
The work is getting done
Winter’s bitterness will be overcome.

Ellen Greenfield is a poet and novelist living in Brooklyn and Jefferson, NY. Her novel, White Roses, will be published this spring by 3Ring Press, which also published her earlier novel, Come From Nowhere.

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Jennifer L. Knox
A Polite Request

“They answered!” Stan yipped and tilted the phone so I could hear: crackly static (we knew it would be). We waited ages for the beep, then Stan recited the script, calm as balm, all blame and rage scoured from his voice: “By sheer luck we are not ones underground, but we hear the tunneling. We put the money in a bag made of yodels like you like it and gave it to the eagle on top of our flagpole. It’s in his talons till you need it. Happy birthday,” Stan said, then gingerly closed the flip phone in a fluid Kung Fu move. Once he’d have slapped it shut like a castanet, but now—who knew how long anything needed to last. “You’re so good at that—I’d just cry,” I said, ashamed. “Don’t you dare,” Stan warned, so, of course, I did, so the phone started ringing, then the doorbell: more phone numbers—my hands, stained clown red from the China marker nub I’d been scrawling them on walls with. Then I saw the black limousine go by again—still circling for days now. So close I could touch it. The tires, at least. “Do we still have that box of carpet tacks?”

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of the poetry collections Days of Shame and Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me, all on Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems, From Poe to Present, and Best American Erotic Poems. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Jennifer received her B.A. from the University of Iowa and her M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. She has taught creative writing at Hunter College and New York University and lectured at colleges and universities across the country. Visit jenniferlknox.com.

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Laura McCullough
And Also Sunflowers

—after the election, 2016

Distracting myself, I discover the year 1510,
an interesting one, recall the old Chinese curse:
May you live in interesting times.    The election
 
turned, and it was only you I wanted
      to talk to, but you’d changed the way you’d voted
about our marriage.          My grown son called;
 
white and with guns, he said, “The revolution
is coming, and I’ll protect you,” but knowing
the different triggers       we’d each pulled that day
 
only made me feel lost in the maze of our loves’ histories.
           My private civilization seemed
twisted, every passage a dead end, and the morning
 
after, people walked looking down as if distrusting
even their own feet, and I felt strange community
in our grief.        No wonder I am looking back
 
at other times.      That week, the unearthed skeletons
of a mother and baby lain precisely
      on a spread swan’s wing made me weep
 
because you aren’t here.  I can only describe
the feathered gesture in the six thousand year old grave
      as majestic though the word for elegance
 
wouldn’t be invented until 1510.  Also that year,
England’s Henry VIII was 18, a boy-man with a world
     of violence yet to manifest in his future,
 
the Portuguese General Albuquerque,
      Christian empire builder, would conquer part of India
for the spices—black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom—
 
calling it trade, and the 10th emperor of the Ming Dynasty
would defeat a rebellion involving a prince, a eunuch,
     and the perennial issue of tax reform.      Oh,
 
in that year, a random one, so much occurred, and this, too:
      the first pocket watch was built in Germany.
I am trying hard to think about time, how it grows,
 
collapses in moments of loss or betrayal, our fascination
      with the gears of humanity, how one person’s future
is another’s past, one culture’s colonization is another’s “settling.”
             
       Yesterday, in a public space, a woman admired my ring,
then crossed the borders of our bodies to touch my bare arm
       with such tenderness of invasion that my throat
 
loosened and the hairs on my neck
       shivered like feathers riffling.   I almost felt
unafraid.     Later, at twilight, my neighbor once
 
again shooing deer from his untended shrubs,
      arms overhead, looked as if he were being
chased by something terrible and dangerous.
           
     My son may have wanted to make me feel safe.
     My husband may feel shame and guilt alone
in his rented hut.  I take everything in so personally.  
           
     My life is interesting, and I feel cursed,
though there is no such thing as that “Chinese curse”.
     The phrase was popularized when Robert Kennedy
 
used it in his “Day of Affirmation Speech” in 1966
at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
It came first from the English ambassador to China
 
in his 1949 memoir.
       It may have come from this expression:
"寧為太平犬，莫做亂離人"
             
    (nìng wéi tàipíng quǎn, mò zuò luàn lí rén)
which I read is translated as
Better to be a dog in a peaceful time,
           
       than a human in a warring one,
but when I tried to verify this myself
in Google Translate I got: For the Pacific dog,
           
      do not leave people from chaos,
so surreal, it feels right right now.    Turning back
      to 1510, it turns out sunflowers are American,
 
cultivated by the First People’s of New Mexico
and Arizona.         Spanish explorers brought them
     to Europe, and then they were cultivated in Russia,
 
and in 1887, late in a Paris summer, Van Gogh
painted four canvases with rings of yellow
      feathery leaves around seed-heart discs, seeds
 
that, ground or pounded into flour, make
cakes and bread, and I’ve read the pulped
      roots can even draw poison from a snakebite.
 
It was the Italians who patented, in 1716, squeezing
       the seeds for oil, and today, the biggest fields
are found in Tuscany and described as endless. Closer
           
      to home, in the New Jersey farmlands most people
don’t know exist, one can get lost in a sunflower maze
      at  Liberty Farm for just $10 per adult, $6 for kids,
 
though a recent sign—No Drones Please—
seems so complicatedly American. Bobby Kennedy’s speech
     in South Africa is also called
 
“The Ripple of Hope” and he spoke against apartheid,
and for the effect of individual efforts:

A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.
 
All males, yes, and the unexamined issues of classism, racism, sexism,
       were only beginning to be seen as  poisons
needing antidotes,               
                         and I was just eight
 
when a young Palestinian man shot and killed him,
the train with his body going from Boston to DC,
my family and me standing in a string of knots,
 
our community of Irish and Italians and Poles lined
along the tracks in Merrill Park, the women crying,
and whispering “Not another one.”           
                             Was it the year
 
I became politically conscious? Began to wonder
about the ways we are connected?  I had not
heard nor read:
 
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a [person] stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice. [S/h]e sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.
 
Nor had I seen Van Gogh’s sunflowers, all those blind eyes,
nor understood the seed head pattern
is Fibonacci, named after the Italian who used
 
the discovery by the poet Virahanka living in India
in the 6th century.                
                   I don’t understand
       math, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling
 
as I look at the whirled flowers, paint strokes for seeds
       a pattern discovered and then explained
by people on different continents,
                              but I can see
 
the fallen petals of family, community, and country
as exposing patterns so complex and embedded in time—
the many futures of so many people’s pasts—that I am both
 
awed by the elegance and terrified of what will come
to pass, feeling alone and hopeless but trying to believe  
in one thing: time, both endless and terminal.

Laura McCullough is the author of The Wild Night Dress (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series. Her other books of poems include Jersey Mercy, Rigger Death & Hoist Another, and Speech Acts (Black Lawrence Press), Panic (Alice James Books), What Men Want (XOXOX Press), and The Dancing Bear (Open Book Press). She curated two anthologies of essays on poetry, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press) and The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press). Her prose and poetry have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, Pank, Gulf Coast, The Writer’s Chronicle, Best American Poetry, and others. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in NJ, is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA, and has taught for Ramapo College and Stockton University. She is the founding editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations. Visit lauramccullough.org.

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Sharon Dolin
A Momentary Stay Against Confusion

Why not prolonged confusion
against a momentary stay

or a momentary confusion
against a longer stay

why not a momentary lay
against contusion

why choose clarity
over confusion

and the moment over
the continuing confusion of

every world’s stay

and why against
instead of for

a momentary stay for
confusion

confusing moments
for the staying.

Sharon Dolin is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, Manual for Living, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. The recipient of a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, she directs and teaches in Writing About Art in Barcelona each June.

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Stephanie Kaylor
On Board

truck: commodities for bart-
er or exchange, etymologically
preexisting the engine, its
oil & mechanics only incidental
((bearing no weight no name
but that which was waiting at
the loading dock
like a virgin womb
finding itself taken
onboard))

***

in Pennsylvania
the men were always
real men waiting
was the road between
here
and there

on the horizon
a woman in diamonds,
the lipsticked outline
of a sun setting into No

***

a girl waits
at the truck stop
where she heard her life
will be great

again
in the passenger’s seat
of a vehicle made for one
solitary driver sweating

his crumpled bills still
warm in her faux leather
purse, he told her
afterward she owed him
change

pants around his ankles

a withering erection
pointing toward god

Stephanie Kaylor is a student at European Graduate School whose research interests include feminist theories of relationality and narrative structure. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Queen Mob’s Tea House, BlazeVOX, and The Willow Review.

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Joanna Fuhrman
To a New Era

Fuck you with your tufts of violence
growing above your groin
with your busted lip called media
and your automatic, gilded
imitation-platinum blade-studded cock ring,
encircling a planet you’re ready to destroy.

The Old Era may have been a fragment
floating in an ocean of private prisons,
chicken-shit rivers, and remote
controlled wars, but it smelled like lilacs
and artistically-sourced lattes
and it knew how to read on a 12^th grade level.

Unlike you who reduces Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Women
to a garbled idiom tattooed in micro-script
above Frankenstein’s monster’s blazing pee-hole.

Please, gods of sunlight and morning naps,
goddesses of semicolons, give us
another chance to welcome in
the better angels of nurture,

to open our arms wide enough that our flesh
becomes a stained-glass house
the exile can find comfort in and recreate
out of whispers and tulip hearts.

Let our desire for kindness be larger
than the sickness of our fear.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009).

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Jason Schneiderman
Anger

When I was angry,
I kept asking how
anger works.
No one understood

my question.
Friends thought I was joking.
Or being obtuse.
Friends would say: What

do you mean
how anger works
Anger is anger. What
are you asking.

And I would say:
Well. Is anger
a finite
material.

Is anger like hydrogen,
and there’s simply
a certain amount
of it in the universe.

Is there a zero sum
of anger, a law
of the conservation
of anger,

and can we
pass it back
and forth.

Can you take my anger
and leave me less?
Can I take your anger
and then have more?

Is anger a renewable
resource, like trees
or coral reef, subject
to natural rhythms

and mass die offs,
forest fires,
and warming tides,
cycles of growth and depletion.

Is anger something
you spend like money,
that you save or spend
and is gone as it goes,

or something that
is replenished like ejaculate,
more on the way
as soon as you send some off

or is anger like ova,
each egg coming
on its own schedule,
until they run out.

Is anger like pus,
a response to a wound,
that you can drain,
or that you can heal,

Or is anger like a gas
you can vent
so it won’t explode
the tiny vessel

or is anger like water
that will explode
the water balloon
unless you tie it off

at the right time.
I thought someone
had to know
the answer

because I was consumed
by anger,
it was under
everything I did

I felt it all the time,
all the time,
and it never
departed.

I didn’t have a breakdown,
though I asked friends
if what I was experiencing
was a breakdown (no,

they said, a breakdown
looks only
like a breakdown), and
I looked OK,

but no one knew
how to help me,
and I told a friend
that I wasn’t OK

and she told me
that I was OK,
but the anger was there
all the time,

like a pair of shoes
that were always
between me
and the ground I walked on,

and I kept asking everyone
how anger works:
Can you drain it?
Can you vent it?

Can you stop it?
Can you heal it?
Can you trade it?
Can you sell it?

And no one,
no one, no one,
no one knew
what I was asking

until finally
someone asked me
to describe
what I was feeling,

and she said
you’re not talking
about anger
you’re talking about rage,

and I realized
that I’ve never
experienced anger.
I only know rage.

Which helped a lot.
Which explained why
I could only think
about striking out

and then not strike out.
Which explained why
I knew which plants
in my garden could be made

into poisons, and how.
Which explained
why my daydreams
turned into

elaborate fantasies
about harming people,
until I did the things
I imagined to myself,

and listen, please listen,
I knew it was bad,
and I wanted out, but
I couldn’t write

my way out of it,
and I couldn’t think
my way out of it,
and I couldn’t love

my way out of it,
and I couldn’t read
my way out of it,
and I thought I would live

with it forever,
that I would contain
it at whatever price
I had to pay,

and I’m telling you this,
and I need you to listen,
because I’m saying
that I do understand

what it’s like to want
everyone else to suffer
as much as you
are suffering,

and I understand
what it’s like
to want to die
both to contain

the pain of rage,
and to spread
the pain of rage,
and when you read

of this murder or
that bombing, know,
these killers are not
inhuman or monstrous,

but rather that they
are weak vessels for rage,
that they are balloons
that burst with their rage,

that they are pipe bombs made
of flesh and bone,
and peace is what I want
more than anything else,

but peace is so fragile,
so easy to take, so easy
to lose, and so they take it
from you, to feel less alone,

and I’m out of it now
because I thought
I had done it to myself,
but I didn’t. And I see

that now. I’m closer
to peace. I’m further
from rage. I’m a bomb
no longer ticking,

but I was a bomb.
Hold me tight.
I was a bomb.
Hold me tight.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Primary Source (Red Hen Press 2016), Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press 2010), and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books 2004). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2015). His work has appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, Tin House. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and Associate Editor of Painted Bride Quarterly. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York.

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Kristi Maxwell
Before After

The breadking appeared
in breaking’s misspelling: his rise
accidental, and, now, yeas exchanged
for yeast. The laughability tempers
the tragedy, but does not change it.
Language always the jester.
What do you think the Cheshire cat’s
grin was made of if not the word teeth?
But it wasn’t the word, though t’s
touched t’s to demarcate each tooth
in the cartoon mouth. It was the idea—
and the irreconcilability between the idea
and its articulation.

Kristi Maxwell is the author of Realm Sixty-Four (Ahsahta Press, 2008), Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009), RE- (Ahsahta Press, 2011), That Our Eyes Be Rigged (Saturnalia Books, 2014), and Plan/k (Horse Less Press, 2015). Her honors include the Greta Wrolstad Scholarship for Young Poets through the Summer Literary Seminars, the Phyllis Smart- Young Prize in Poetry, and the Margaret Sterling Memorial Award.

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Cammy Thomas
November 1968

—a reflection for November 2016

My Classics teacher at Boston University
came to class wearing a black armband.
Nixon had won, Nixon the war-monger,
the racist, the liar, had won.

The fear had started sooner, with JFK’s
death, Jackie’s pink, blood-stained suit,
the caisson and the riderless horse.
In Georgia, Lester Maddox threatened black people
with ax handles. In Memphis, April 1968,
King was shot dead and the cities burned,
and in June, the day after my graduation,
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

When that summer’s Democratic Convention
turned into a riot in the streets of Chicago,
I thought the old way must end–
“The whole world is watching”–
the revolution would come and we could
exit Vietnam, cancel Wall Street, and
live in the peace of all nations.

I thought the world would right itself
and the elders give way. Instead,
George Wallace, unabashed
segregationist, won five states.

Instead, napalmed Vietnamese children
appeared in Ramparts Magazine,
their eyes burned off, limbs infected–
tiny amputees too sick to cry.
And that was my government.

I learned that the world kept turning
even when children were tortured.

I didn’t end the war. Peace sign
around my neck, I walked barefoot
down Fifth Avenue, sang
Bob Dylan songs by heart,
read aloud from Howl, hitchhiked
to Arizona, to Mexico, to California.
1968 was the first time I voted,
and the bleakest, up until now.

Cammy Thomas has published two collections of poetry with Four Way Books, Inscriptions (2014), and Cathedral of Wish, winner of the 2006 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. She teaches at Concord Academy. Visit cammythomas.com.

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