Lynne Viti
Cyber Monday

Dreams of incivility in grocery lines,
on airplanes, captive audiences of
young women, eyes downcast, heads down
while a bully in a black t-shirt castigates them.
Then a dream of riding an old two-cycle engine
Yamaha motorcycle through
a cemetery, I cruise along a gravel road
helmetless and fearless, the road
curves this way and that, till I reach
a dead end, a semicircle of half-built temples,
alabaster, deserted by masons and carpenters.
I head back, to what we still call civilization,
that made by civis, the citizen. My sister,
my girlfriends gather around. We feel fine,
but we’ve got an intestinal infection,
an orange parasitic worm. Here, my doctor says,
handing me a vial of pills. Take as directed,
take with food or milk, take the full course.
Call me in three years if no improvement.

Lynne Viti teaches in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Her poetry chapbook, Baltimore Girls, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in February 2017. Her poems appear most recently in The South Florida Poetry Journal, Little Patuxent Review, Mountain Gazette, Amuse-Bouche, The Paterson Review, Drunk Monkeys, Cultured Vultures, and Right Hand Pointing. She blogs at stillinschool.wordpress.com.

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Arielle Greenberg
Untitled

while the news / came I sat in a wooden A-frame / by a creek
with my friends in their bodies / black man / trans man / black queer woman /
bodies blood-smeared by the president / -elect / to mark a coming / smiting
and we wept / I apologized / wept the bullshit useless tears of a white woman but /
I meant them / meant by them I will do the work/ and when they come for you /
I will not be silent / will put my body as a shield in front of yours
and thought about how literally I might do this
(it was most like when my baby died / that sense of loss /)
and walking back in the starflung / I spoke apologies to the furious bird
who has been screaming all week
I am sorry I know I know I am sorry I said to the species
thinking of Standing Rock / then stood in more circles of bodies
then lay in bed and strategized about revolution

o fire-leveled mountain morning of noticing
in which a kind of winning, kind of conceding
has taken out my breakfast / my breath / my belief in self-evident truths

On the 78th Anniversary of Kristallnacht

Arielle Greenberg‘s most recent books are Locally Made Panties, a collection of micro-essays, and Slice, a collection of poems. She lives in Maine and teaches in the community and in the MFA at Oregon State University-Cascades.

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Lucinda Marshall
Patriotism Reconsidered

My anthem is the serenade of birds,
sung without regard for map lines
delineating human assumption of dominion
over that which cannot be possessed,
and I will not pledge allegiance to,
or defend a flag of illusory freedom.

As the sun greets each day,
I will bravely stand up—against
racism, gendered hate, and xenophobia.

I will join in solidarity
with those who block pipelines
and protest gun violence,
those who feed the hungry
and work to stop the school
to prison pipeline,
and with every person who works
for the common good.

Solemnly I swear not to tolerate
the revision of history to fit
a fraudulent justification for
perpetual war or
wanton destruction of Earth.

This is my oath of citizenship,
because to do anything else is treason.

Lucinda Marshall is an award-winner writer, artist, and activist. Her poems have appeared recently in  Sediments, One Sentence Poems, Stepping Stones Magazine, Columbia Journal, Poetica Magazine, Haikuniverse, and ISLE. Her poem, “The Lilies Were In Bloom” received an Honorable Mention in Climate Crisis: Solutions, a Waterline Writers/Artists as Visionaries galley exhibition at Water Street Studios in Batavia, Ill. The author of numerous essays and articles, she blogs at Reclaiming Medusa. Lucinda co-facilitates the award-winning Teen Writing Club in Gaithersburg, Md. She is a member of the Maryland Writers’ Association and Women, Action, and the Media.

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Samara Golabuk
Electoral Pillage

In the falling down of the year
And the segmentation of society,
Three magical things happened:

First, we bounced on the pavement
of our vitriol, face-first into
the unapologetic wounded.

The hot wind had swept up the tumble
of love and Jesus and the old views
of cabin grandpas and alt-right housewives

who don’t hate the neighbors
but sure can’t stand the negras & the gays not
Knowing Their Place. The monsoon bivouacked

by 3am Tuesday, when hatred got a foothold
with the oligarchy’s gold-lined fingerprints
and smashed up pouts, and foreheads

that chiseled fine china.
Leader of the unfree world, the world
that had its soup upturned into its face by

the monster under the bed, leaping, the one
we thought we outgrew as we Increased
into wiseness and thin-eyed generosity.

We, who never saw it coming.

Second, after the diagnosis came in,
some of us woke up choking
on our sick, dripping tears and

gasping past spasmed throats as we
tried to swallow the masses
that presented. Swing states

hovered in midair. The Age of Aquarius
ran upstream for a while.
Cats barked, and the Cubs,

having won the World Series,
ushered in a time of darkness.
They didn’t mean to.

Nobody did.

Third, In the Eden of paranoia
where all the bodies are buried,
the black soil overturns itself

as if it were full of god’s worms,
the turning boil of compost
rising with its heat, its chemical

burn the sprouts press through,
volunteering up into
the unremarkable sunshine,

a shockingly normal
Wednesday unlike
any other.

Samara Golabuk is a two-time Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strong Verse, The Whistling Fire, Inklette, Peacock Journal, and others. She has two children, works in marketing, and has recently returned to university to complete her BA in Creative Writing.

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Ina Roy-Faderman
digging

white and chalky,
the skull of the world,
picked clean by
something much less than—
because you’ve created what’s left:
a hollow bowl for bones.

this is not the work of raw-necked
vultures.
they faded with the last
long drink of water, in the dry valleys
where layers of shale
shift under the weight of sand.

surely someone warned you that blood
will be the first drink to go.
are you afraid that your sacrifice
has been for nothing?
you have sacrificed my child and
my child’s children and the generations
that wither like thornapple pods
until there’s
no seminal drink left, just
dry powder, with nothing left
to stir it back to life.

Ina Roy-Faderman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Surreal Poetics, Inscape, HIV Here & Now, and the Tupelo 30/30 project, among others. Dana Gioia recently named her “Elegy for Water” the outstanding poem of the Richmond Anthology of Poetry. A native Nebraskan of Bengali heritage, she received her formal creative writing training at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. She currently teaches bioethics at Oregon State University, is a fiction editor for Rivet Journal, and works as a school librarian.

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J. Gay
7. The Lost Penny

(From a series of poems imagining the Major Arcana in a modern Tarot deck)

This card has seen a few revamped visual depictions, the two most popular being the sidewalk in the abandoned city and the grimy dustpan. We have chosen the sidewalk in the abandoned city, as it is both traditional and consistently relevant.

On a crumbling sidewalk next to a potted street sits a bright, burnished penny. It is accompanied by bits of paper and unidentified detritus. There are no other symbols, but the sensation of having forgotten something important, of being watched, tickles the back of your neck. Not necessarily ominous, but the copper taste of anxiety may fill your mouth and nose if you stare at the card too long.

To draw this card means nothing can be done about it. Leave it. Yes, the penny is shiny and new and you just got it as change from the store but the city is abandoned and you don’t know how long the penny had been clutched in your fist when you went running into the afternoon, your eyes wide.

The reversed meaning of this card does not exist. No matter which way you look at it, no from whichever direction you approach, the lost penny is the lost penny. It is not going to be found again. Leave it behind and start afresh.

Fortunate colors: Leave it.
Necessary materials: Leave it.
Ephemeral numbers: Leave it.
Lovely herbs: Leave it.
Remember: Leave it.

J. Gay lives and writes in New Mexico. She was born in Louisiana. Her chapbook “Decomposition” is available from Dancing Girl Press. Visit jgaywriting.com.

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Amy Gordon
Sunset

As I stood by the oak tree, the sun moved across the sky,
turning day to night. A perfect stripe of pink held my attention
until three crows flew down, perched on the fence. The farmer
called the sheep from pastures, the cows were called to barns.
Strands of wool caught in wire knots whispered in the breeze,
told me tales of olden days when women sat at home. They
knitted socks for sailor men, didn’t believe the earth was round.
Even now, who can believe this stolid earth is round? And then
the light went out. Sky hardened into blackness, the sort of black
you sometimes see in the eyes of homeless men. A damp, cool hand
pressed against my neck. This was the first time I had been alone
under a night sky in a long time. Where were the stars? The moon?
Only worms rustled in the leaves. The planet tilted, stopped, turned
on its axis, reversed direction. Birds in branches above me groaned,
devolving into dinosaurs. The oak tree shed its bark, a giant fern
unfolded from its core, and I could smell the sea lapping up the miles
on salty feet. By morning I knew I would be extinct. I began to run.
How I wanted to see you one last time, and now, and now I bury
my face into the lanolin scratch of your sweater. Wool is the most
reassuring of all earth’s gifts.

Amy Gordon is a writer of children’s and young adult books, and continues to seek (“Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.” Basho) Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Aurorean. She lives in western Massachusetts.

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Patricia Boomsma
Arc of the Apocalypse

Does the arc of history bend toward justice?
Or does it just sway,
Directionless
Random
Erratic?
Does it swing like a hangman’s noose in the wind
Waiting for the next martyr
Who believes her virtue will save her?

Savor the illusion of time as a willow
Weeping towards a crystal stream.
Its teardrop leaves will not heal the world.
Its broken branches fill the wide and rushing stream
That divides us, makes those on the far bank seem small
Unimportant
Foreign
Dangerous.

And see those other arcs—
Joan of Arc, an armored virgin banners flying
Blood dripping from her neck and down her leg.
Lit on fire for dressing like a man
As she waited for a just God to save her.
Or Noah’s ark
Where only two of each survive
We choose our child, our friend
Our tribe the Elect.
Condemning all others
To the deluge.

I long for an Epiphany
For a bright star to follow
For Magi to enlighten me.
I stand staring at the sky
Waiting for the clouds to break
To see an arc of moon.

Patricia Boomsma is a recent MFA graduate from Queens University of Charlotte, where she was an editorial assistant for Qu magazine. She is also an Arizona lawyer. Her poems, stories, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in New Orleans Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Haiku Journal, and Persimmon Tree. Her work received an honorable mention in the 2016 haiku contest for the Arizona Matsuri festival.

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Joss Barton
Blank

What is a death when the life is taken by pieces
Like bricks in a stockyard instead of exploding
Like the lotto where the final jackpot is becoming
A puddle of gristle and brains to weep over
And pass laws over and elect demagogues over
And forget how wealth is always manifested
By suffering and humiliation and you smile
As if you are not complicit in this terrifying world
Of unrelenting misery but you have enough
Moral indignation to say that the system is
Broken so why not burn it all down to the sewage
Drains where the black shit water of nationalism
Saturates the air and your teeth are white like
The men whose cocks throb with every dog
Whistle calling the wolves from their caves
And their reptile cum is smeared across the
Red sambo lips of black porcelain dolls
They cradle in their arms as they draft legislation
In ink that will birth their wet American nightmares.

Joss Barton is a writer, photographer, journalist, and artist documenting queer and trans* life and love in St. Louis. In 2016 she was a member of the first ever Summer Trans Women Writers Workshop at co-sponsored by Topside Press and Brooklyn College. She was a 2013 Fiction Fellow at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging LGBT Writers Retreat and a contributing artist for Nine Network’s Public Media Commons Artist Showcase in 2015. She is also an alumna of the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute. Her work has been published by HIV Here & Now, Ethica Press, Vice Magazine, and Vetch Poetry: A Transgender Poetry Journal.

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Lydia Cortes
Jetztzeit Again

Clouds were zigzagged as if slashed
punctured with z’s the z’s of a sword
the sword that’s mightier than mightier
sword we carry in our brain our being

in our fiber of meaning to puncture the lie
like wasps hovering near our eyes threatening
to puncture our brains our eyes and let out
all our truth that hides there in our being our

brain truth waving like a true flag of colors of
shame we’re shamed into truth the truth that’s
there always just behind or beyond our eyes there
but we don’t we can’t see most times for the fear

in our hearts covers and shields us from the truth
that we fear truly it’s so loud thunderous it makes us
deaf that’s the truth truth we cannot hide or bury inside
though that’s what we’re doing most of our lives for fear

we might get hurt might die if we uncover the truth real
blood and bile truth that comes spilling out of our brains
from behind almost right beyond our power of seeing of
feeling right under our skin’s surface it’s right there makes up

our fiber and muscle and bone it’s there coursing in our
our veins blood truth like the lies we need to get out get rid
of the waste poisoning our lives our guts spill it out we have to
even if we bleed a bit or more we can’t forever live our life’s

lies we can’t live forever afraid can’t be forever so why
not let it all out—first comes the shit—then comes the
breath returning letting us breathe the truth life everlasting
we can’t last forever but we can try to live with truth

revealed like a hallelujah busting out when we let loose
and yell like the pentacostals with tambourines singing
screaming joy engaged they’re completely engaged in
the song in the sound of their body telling body’s truth

truer than mere words than just sounds bursts of music
released truth dangerous truth dangerous beauty let loose
may be fatal it’s bone hard bone chilling our truth the truth we
fear is now here—hear hear—and alive in us even if only for a
second for the first time—hallelujah chaos—hallelujah catharsis

Lydia Cortes is the author of two collections of poems, Lust for Lust and Whose Place. Her work has been published in various anthologies, online zines and literary journals, most recently in Upstreet. She is currently working on a memoir in verse form.

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