noun that percolating sensation born right in the center of the gut, where a clock-shaped bruise pulses like a ravaged wound ready to burst from an unrepentant heat magmafying beneath until a petulant purple ooze coats the surface, catalyzing the angst of a country not ready to face its worst fear— real change.
verb1 to froth from within so as to brew a mythology of mistrust
verb2 to burgeon by flooding the dark with cascades of waking light
—Submitted on 01/07/2021
Shei Sanchez‘s poems and prose have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Autumn Sky Daily, Harness Magazine, Common Threads, and What Rough Beast, as well as in the anthology Essentially Athens Ohio: A Celebration of Spoken Word and Fine Art (independently published, 2019). She lives on a farm in Appalachian Ohio with her partner.
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Michael Quattrone Responses to Tina Chang’s Instagram Post, 12/18/20
Problem is, it snowed last night and the day is inviting me to play and to feel that first crunch of foot to frost. That is also art, my mind insists. —Tina Chang
Page on my desk, snow in my window, unwritten life invites me there. —-
Small bird hopping, tracks on deep white snow, written song makes no impression. —-
Quick, make your shadow on the noonday snow, a poem lasts only so long. —-
Snow fell all day long onto my page, this short poem used to be longer. —-
Gentle editor the snow says yes, yes. Even as she hides the work. —-
Two birds on the snow, a lively conversation, let the minutes show. —-
Morning blizzard, bright clean page, a line of footsteps what I didn’t say. —-
This is also art my mind insists, no body playing in the snow. —-
Cold page before me. Do I break the ice? Warm words, legible in air. —-
Snow and solitude. The poet’s last line, boot prints as she walks away. —-
If I die tonight, let snow fall ’til morning comes, bury me in light.
—Submitted on 01/07/2021
Michael Quattrone is the author of Rhinoceroses selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis for the New School Chapbook Award in 2006. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny, McSweeney’s, No Tell Motel, Pebble Lake Review, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2018). With Laura Cronk and Megin Jimenez, Quattrone curated the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series from 2007 to 2011. He lives in Tarrytown, New York.
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Goodbye to the angry man whose words offended us all. Words were not intended to offend.
Born before creation, words give rise to possibility, to hope Placed together they tell stories. Stories bring us to knowing, understanding lives we haven’t led. Words create in us compassion, connection, context and collaboration. Words brought light into the world they awaken, enliven, delight.
Words were not intended to divide, demean, destroy. His mumbled, garbled, distortions of speech hurt the ear, the heart, with sounds that pierced and shattered. Full of anger, bitterness and disgrace, they spoke to greed, hatred and ignorance.
Let his presence be erased. Bring ease to all who suffered by his proclamations. Bring peace to all the hearts his words have broken, the souls divided by his distortion of our language. Put his tirades behind us. Let us speak as if he never was. Let’s put him in past tense.
—Submitted on 01/06/2021
Madlynn Haber‘s work has been published in Anchor Magazine, Exit 13 Magazine, Mused Literary Review, Hevria Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Letters to Fathers from Daughters: A Pathway to Healing and Hope (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2007) and Word of Mouth: Volume 2: Short-Short Stories By 100 Women Writers (Crossing Press, 1991). She lives in Northampton, Mass. Online at madlynnwrites.com
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The omens were unhinged when prophecy blossomed and angry minions, from near and afar’s alternative universe of information spun, deplaned, detrained, poured from busses, parked their cars and swarmed like locusts come to their most fabled chomping ground,
descending in plain sight of a government that conveniently left the apertures appetizingly ajar or breachable. See footage of the arm-raising anarchist perched so regally in the Speaker’s seat. Ritual revenge morphed into melee: a woman was sacrificed.
The man who if he could be would be king or oligarch was supported to the last lick, pre-invasion, by one hundred elected Representatives throwing up flack to shroud a sky they damn well knew had politically turned blue.
They all lost bigly on this one, accidentally shooting In the chest their fearless Disruptor’s 2024 plans. The Liberty Lady due North looks on and hoists her torch.
—Submitted on 01/06/2021
Diane Ray‘s poems and essays have appeared in Cirque, Canary, Sisyphus, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Common Dreams, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including Sheltering in Place (Staring Problems Press, 2020). Ray, a native New Yorker, lives near Green Lake in Seattle and works as a psychologist.
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the news breaking us again//again
perception of perception
still locked in the purgatory of 2020
curry the physics of armed herds braying
at the God door for more dopamine hits from a viral internet
fingering the hilts of their swords
in a country of darkdark Maple Streets
with not enough justice to mete out
for crackpot theories bubbling in cauldrons
monoliths on the hate spectrum
what can cure us of these lunatic pleasures
—Submitted on 01/06/2021
Rikki Santer is the author of Drop Jaw (NightBallet Press, 2020) and seven other collections. Her poems have appeared in The Main Street Rag, Poetry East, Slab, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, and other journals. Santer is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Online at
The ride was not smooth, not as smooth as my skin Eating the cells of dried placenta removes wrinkles Best not to share that with Americans, they cringe When the fog snags highways and makes blindness Possible.
I have all my volatile gestures caged. It is enough That the offshore accounts provide suitable funds. My girlfriends warned me to be vigilant of risky Investments, to stick to my gun(s) or did they mean Gums?
However the thrust of history marks me, my name Is connected to a most powerful man. Dreadful Was he, but husband to me. Now his large body Small heart, and mildly pleasing genitals are formally Coffined.
The relief of these days, the occasional event Where I lift my modulated voice in support of senatorial Candidates—the newest bullies–allows for a frisson of celebrity —-just enough To garner sympathy and lucrative podcast deals that Better best
So many wanted me to legally separate, but I was younger Why bother—widowhood is as perfect as my hair.
—Submitted on 01/06/2021
Patricia Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2015) and seven other collections. Her plays, commissioned by Mabou Mines, were presented in New York City. Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, Spears Jones has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NY Community Trust, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. psjones.com.
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A US-based Instagram account called “GaysOverCovid” has been documenting gay men breaking lockdown regulations for holidays and circuit parties and shaming them with stern, condemnatory captions. —James Greig on Huck
Holy fucking hell, my friends, when AIDS Consumed the marrow of our bones The circuit-parties did not stop; we knew that forma bonum fragile est That all we had was slenderness The fact we could be snapped It was not then and is not now The furtive cowboys in the park Pinch-cheeked teens in the ivy, Rustling, just barely touching But touching nonetheless. Gaudete My storming boys, we are Machines of joy, and as they need Their coming-home for Christmas gyms So we lost boys need our dancery Our shot at life in the glistening dark For you, the old, have had your chance; You lost; you died; now let us live.
—Submitted on 01/05/2021
Matt Broomfield is a bisexual writer and queer activist. His work has appeared in Plenitude, Argot, Anti-Heroin Chic, Tahoma Literary Review, Glass Poetry, and other journals. Broomfield lives in the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava, where he works in solidarity with the women-led, direct-democratic revolution.
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We look like we have aged nine years over the last four. Our dog and our daughter pace the living room, as if they know what hangs in the balance. I slice the apple and cut myself—watch the blood soak into the wooden cutting board as if it were not my own. The days are getting shorter. It is almost a hundred years since Celan was born and fifty since he drowned himself in the Seine, unused Waiting for Godot tickets in his wallet at home. Bill Irwin performs Beckett in a bowler hat and baggy pants—part clown, part clairvoyant. Clean said “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” It doesn’t diminish his words that he chose to stop speaking.
We go to sleep and wake up four times. Still the election has not been called. We find out the news the way our ancestors did in times of plague. Bells ring out in the streets and when we emerge from the cloying rooms, stale with old air, early autumn meets us like longed-for draft. We walk five miles. The dog drags behind us. We talk to strangers; again, the city is our home. Since Celan, after all he saw, could write A star still has its light. Nothing, nothing is lost, I will believe him. We enter the building through the side door and see nobody. I wash and peel the ripe pears.
Memento Mori: New Year’s Eve
The thriller almost doesn’t end in time
to turn our rote attention to the lit
crystal ball in a mostly empty Times
Square. Masked essential workers dance, distanced,
awkward in feigned festivity. Billboards
and neon flash ads for ridiculous
goods to empty streets. Dystopian
and dismal, inflated purple and gold
figures bend to the god of fitness they
promote. “Wonderful World” runs late; the mayor
misses his cue. In the distance, fire-
works sound and scare the dog. You kiss me
after midnight. Then you check the news
for the latest tally of daily deaths.
October
Even though we have done nothing wrong, when we cross state lines, we feel guilty. Being inside an apartment for six months straight makes me dangerous. The light interrogates us as we drive north out of the city, to the cape. The ducks and heron greet us with their calls, monitoring the inlet all night as we lie awake glad to be tucked into strange thin sheets. The dog sits by my feet and watches water fowl walk back and forth on the dock, next to a tree that’s the closest to a cypress that can grow in New England. I put my phone in the drawer so the news cannot claim me. Still, I hear the tyrant is in the hospital and as soon as he’s released, he makes his men drive him through the streets though he’s still contagious. The woman who wants to repeal Roe vs. Wade will be confirmed before the election. It all comes through as static, as indistinct as my friend in Trinidad reading his poems from his aqua room.
Here, I wake early, sit on the small deck with a mug of strong coffee, read the new novel by the writer with whom I rode the train in January. I don’t care if she has used part of my sad story to help make a case for euthanasia. That was my old life and I leave it here in the damp marshlands where the ducks skim the water in jagged rows. I watch light lace the trees. “The meaning of life is that it ends,” Kafka wrote. When we go home, you bring me coffee in the mug smothered by Warhol’s outlandish poppies—purple, red, purple.
—Submitted on
Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and Looming (Elixer Press, 2015). If Some God Shakes Your House is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2023. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, Los Angeles Review, Paris Review, and other journals. Franklin teaches at Manhattanville College and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and she is a co-editor at Slapering Hol Press. Franklin lives in New York City. Online at jenniferfranklinpoet.com.
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Carrying America in my jaw the milk expires November 7th a joke date that I cannot understand or laugh at when I left my mask and like a dusty clock turned back distracted nervous on my urgent way to voting 8 days early joining this strong line of aching hidden jaws…
in the rain masks get damp we shift our feet impatient for a free exhale a risk America held behind my teeth cannot afford.
—Submitted on 11/09/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series
Heather Lee Rogers‘s poems have appeared in Rat’s Ass Review, Harbinger Asylum, Here Comes Everyone, Leopardskin & Limes, El Portal, and other journals. Online at heatherleerogerspoetry.com.
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dump trump responds the neighbor make amer-
tw -ica great again
our way of life
lively debates and brawls
for rights from rights by rights through rights insights
scant few and far between
our dreams give way
to children running snuggling back in bed
blankets with cartoon monkeys rubber duckies
we teddy bears to courage and honor
we cities towns aspiring to towers
or burning ivory towers
saddened scowls
return to sender singing singing sung
child played with food with peas n mashed potatoes
same child in monolithic marches child
who squeals nothing whose boon went boom boom boom.
Description Of The Block
lawnmowers camrys peach trees landscaping
projects the secrets that uncle and aunt
are said to know tw
hispanics
sincere pariahs tribes old high school clicks
“diversity of thought” terranged lawnewb
piel de tortilla seeking
affirmation
the can i touch your hair white woman who
joined book club to read ibram x kendi
named after saints colonial
western states
the mountainside the valley the seaside
the cottage cabin brick garden and kids
are “with my own two hands”
and life-long friends
who know your braced and clear-faced face who’ve loved
anticipating happiness just you.
A Hyphen-American
used-tin-can clear-taped-on paper reads POOR
the look of words the feel of lines hermana
cómo te sentistes cuando tu
amiga last name gusto pleasure skipped (away)
when middle-school microagression’s mouth
trotting away trotting away tossed you
into the jaws of white america
peru where five foot ten and curly you
learned mantras and relearned your mother tongue
your cultural tongue
missed the eldest’s day
the one by church the one that counts for catholics
denying circumstance despising it
the look of words the feel of lines hermana
your soul rejects the picket fence of white.
—Submitted on 10/31/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series
Emiliano Gomez is a 2020 graduate of UCLA, where he completed an English Department honors thesis under the direction of Brian Stefans. He was born in rural northern California.
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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.
Shei Sanchez‘s poems and prose have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Autumn Sky Daily, Harness Magazine, Common Threads, and What Rough Beast, as well as in the anthology Essentially Athens Ohio: A Celebration of Spoken Word and Fine Art (independently published, 2019). She lives on a farm in Appalachian Ohio with her partner.