Sarah Dickenson Snyder
For Light

Just dip
your pen

and write,
let the words

unfurl, light the darkened
windows, the way

small candles do,
how every darkness flickers.

I will tell you about hope—when
the article I was reading in the medical library

of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, gave people
diagnosed with what my father had a .05% chance of survival,

and I began to see my father as part of that spark—
how I started to watch funny movies with him in the small

hospital room to get endorphins swimming in his diseased blood,
how I made signs for this room—slogans he remembered

from the Marine Corps, Praise the Lord—Pass the Ammo!
Doctors nodded, saying a positive mind will help them

as they insert ports into his skull and chest to deliver poison—
how he shrunk to a skeleton as if he were melting—

many months of this, and he lived. Fifteen
more years. Let’s become

cathedral builders of hope,
of listening, of a country

with a light
for each window.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder’s first full-length collection of poetry, The Human Contract, is forthcoming from Aldrich Press, and her first chapbook, Notes from a Nomad, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. In May 2016, she was a 30/30 Poet for Tupelo Press.

Veronica Golos
I Am A Spy In The House of Cold

Veronica Golos is the author of three books of poetry: A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline Press), to be re issued by Tupelo Press; Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press), and Rootwork (3:A Taos Press). She is the co editor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, and Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She lives in New Mexico with her husband, writer David Perez.

Tom Daley
November Shadow

November shadow, abide
in the tumult, in the multitude.

Let me always speak
in complete sentences
and may your long, black,
and sharpened edges keep my cool
from drying dull.

May you stretch to such a shape
that even summer will seem
a thing short and curt.

May you follow my calves
and corduroys
out the path to the place
where the tumors settle.

And may you play
your translucent black
like a splendid pack
of moles or crows.

Tom Daley is the author of House You Cannot Reach—Poems in the Voice of My Mother and Other Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2015). Recipient of the Dana Award in Poetry, his poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Witness, and elsewhere. He leads writing workshops in the Boston area and online for poets and writers working in creative prose.

Scott Wiggerman
Aftershocks

a golden shovel including a Dickinson last line (#799)

From some dark cavity, an affliction,
long-brooding, surfaces across America. It feels
like a brass-knuckled fist. What was impalpable

and buried has flared up and spread until
the ache of anguish is unbearable—ourselves,
our loved ones, in shrink-wrapped panic. How are
we to rise from chaos once unleashed and struck?

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Bearing the Mask. Recent poems have appeared in A Quiet Courage, Naugatuck River Review, Red Earth Review, Rat’s Ass Review, shuf, Yellow Chair Review, and others. He lives with his husband, the writer David Meischen, in Albuquerque, NM.

Darius Stewart
Dear Mr. President

What will happen when there’s another story
of a boy whose fate’s been sealed
for a limp wrist
a lisp
a herringbone pattern
in his tie-dye t-shirt
how will we reconcile
the senselessness we can’t understand
& neither will this boy who hadn’t made his bed
one morning on a whim & decided hmmm, what if
his pointer finger pressed to his lip
contemplating the pros & cons
but later used it to silence his blustering
to shield a purple gash so deep in the flesh
it takes weeks of healing
what do we do when there are clues everywhere
& somehow coming in from the cold
became evidence the muddied snow-slush traipsed
over the clean carpet
the dog sniffing out the scent of another dog’s shit
lingering on the boy’s boot soles & why
how we will ask ourselves
when the roads are clear the sidewalks
clear all the way to the house a clear path
so where did all the mess come from Mr. President
will you help us
get past how dreary it’s all become
to be a school-age boy in love with boys
who sacrifice those’s & them’s to the gods
of eternal damnation & we know why
but not him
this naïve lovely fool so fond of make-believe
to be a pauper or a superstar he sings to himself
as if he has a choice
as if those hallways divided
with sneers & jeers will give him a choice
as if they aren’t tripping him up every chance they get
flicking their narrow fingers against his skull
barely covered with hair cause they cut it off
nicked him good in the process
that & more graffito on his locker
bitch faggot cocklicker
& there he’ll be on his knees
elbow-deep in suds scrubbing away
all those why’s & what-did-I-do’s
wringing out rags & sponges
his grief into filthy pails you’d think it’s dissolved shit
mucking up those buckets & somehow
we can’t seem to do enough for this sweet boy
who sashays too much & can’t sway enough souls
to his corner walking home bunched up
in that winter coat for miles shivering
trying to shake the gay away they scream at him
passing by on the school bus
hanging out windows with tongues flagging
so uncontrollably content
in their miscreant joy
they might not ever recover from it
might not ever care to see that boy again
his head bent to the wind
cinching his coat tighter
adjusting the soreness from his shoulders
each time he switches his bag from one side to the other
struggling to make it home in the cold cold
because Mr. President
all he wants is to make it
home

Darius Stewart is the author of The Terribly Beautiful (2006) and Sotto Voce (2008), each of which was an Editor’s Choice Selection in the Main Street Rag Poetry Chapbook Series, as well as The Ghost the Night Becomes (2014), winner of the 2013 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. Other poems and prose appear widely in literary journals and anthologies. He is a former James A. Michener Fellow in poetry, receiving the M.F.A. degree from The University of Texas at Austin. Presently, he resides in Knoxville, Tenn.,  with his dog, Phillip J. “Fry.”

Leah Mueller
Seven Stages of Grief

1). I shouldn’t try
to speak to anybody:
I should just be here, where
everyone has arrived by invitation
and is on her best behavior.

2). The can has capsized,
crows pick at the remains.
Last week, the police
came to my street twice.
They made no arrests.

3). I should be here. My life
has been a series of collapses
like early airplane films. No one
is concerned, except me.
This should not
be a surprise.

4). No point in pretending
it doesn’t matter. The rest is
popcorn in my movie.
The wall was always built
and waited patiently
for someone to make it visible.

5). I should be here.
End is abandonment.
The wreckage won’t go quietly.
Throw my wounded shoulder
to the gate, but settle for
the opposite, until finally
everything stops working.

6). We all say
whatever we want. My
main objective is to endure
until bedtime, then repeat.
Don’t forget to leave
the silverware out, in
preparation for mourning.
It saves time.

7). I never expected this knob
to last any longer
than its predecessors,
but the boss told me
it would work fine for
a few more years. I
am not responsible
for its failure, when it
finally falls apart.

Leah Mueller is an independent writer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of one chapbook, Queen of Dorksville (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2012), and two books, Allergic to Everything (Writing Knights Press, 2015) and The Underside of the Snake (Red Ferret Press, 2015). Leah was a winner in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, and a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Blunderbuss, Memoryhouse, Atticus Review, Open Thought Vortex, Sadie Girl Press, Origins Journal, Silver Birch Press, and other publications.

Emily Vieweg
Pardon My Voice

I HAVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT

I want to fight.
I want to fight—for freedom—for myself.

What god I pray to
What higher power is to me
When life begins for me
Who judges me
Who loves me
Who wants to be
FREE.

Until the sun comes up on-a
Wash-ing-ton and nowhere else
I say what I should and should not…

I say what I should and should not…

Believe about Iraq
Believe about Iran
Believe about Afghanistan
Believe about being free.

I fight for the right to choose—what you think is best for you
So
You can fight for the right to choose—what I think is best for me.

Who wants to be free?

Though we think it’s out of our meager hands
Our votes do count.
I said our votes DO count.

HA!

Our votes are counted by those that wish

to deploy our troops to “assist relations”
to instruct the beliefs of our creations
to misunderstand the nurturing of other nations.

WHO WANTS TO BE FREE?!

Mr. Bill of Rights
Freedom of Speech
Mr. Bill of Rights
Freedom of Press
Freedom of Religion
Hail Allah
Hail Brahman
Hail Buddha
Hail Zeus
Hail Athena, Poseidon, Aphrodite
Hail Christ, Jehovah, Yahweh!
Mr. Bill of Rights.

I say FREEDOM!

What god I pray to
What higher power is to me
When life begins for me
Who judges me
Who loves me
Who wants to be—

WHO WANTS TO BE FREE!

Emily Vieweg is a poet and educator originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has been published in Foliate Oak, The Voices Project, Red Weather Literary Magazine, Soundings Review, Art Young’s Good Morning and more. Emily’s debut chapbook, Look Where She Points, is forthcoming from Plan B Press. She lives in Fargo, North Dakota with her two children.

Sarah Sarai
Beyond Reach

By sleight-of-hand
               her fellow
        copulator keyed 	into 
        a studio of sheets  
and walls a matching 	floral, 
       a singing room from
Les Parapuilles de	 Cherbourg, 
                autrefois,
     and copped a snatch of 
her     warm	brain 
     to sell on a green island glittery 
like Dr. Moreau’s. 

     San Francisco nights 
         in a lair 
         were	squawked by 
the ruffian-breed, 
        half-	human blue jays, 
half over the edge with 	details 
like frayed twine	odd strands of hair 
        and 	sweet grass 
     scattered on sheets red
     as sky	aching that daylight 
     	   stay and stay. 

     The selling was cheap.  But ]

the punishment nil.  	Another 
        saint-lost-in-ecstasy,
this woman 	beyond reach of 	
        a million stupidities,  
zip-locked against 	smirks and 
legalities of any too-	eager for facts.

Sarah Sarai’s Geographies of Soul and Taffeta was published by Indolent Books.

Sergio Ortiz
The Mind Is its Own Place

We all yearn to go back
to the edge of that fire and kick
that fucking election, the religion, the race
of an entire nation in the balls
so everything breathes
at the rhythm of our lungs.

But none of that worries us now.
We worry about the detonator of tomorrows,
the almond beyond the shell,
the shiny nugget, and the damn heat
even when we know it’s November
and an eerie cold is fast approaching.

We want pleasure to surround
our waist. It can be you, or anybody else
who embraces my body
already lightened
by the burden of the world.
Yes, you can take me
to the sea inside
where there is only the sound of blood
running like a flowered beast.

And so, you go back to our room
tell yourselves,
fuck it, it’s better this way?

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. His collections of Tanka include For the Men to Come (2014) and From Life to Life (2014). He is a two-time Pushcart nominee and a four-time Best of the Web nominee.

Jenna Le
The Morning After the Election

The morning after the election, we
converge, as usual, on the bus stop: three
commuters with no commonality
except our silent shared dependency

on public transportation. I don’t know
the other two commuters’ names, although
each day for weeks we’ve stood here in a row,
craning our necks to watch the bus’s slow

climb up the skinny, frog-cold, fog-wet lane.
Overnight, something in the air has changed:
the gusts that leave the yellowed weeds deranged
now make us tremble for an unexplained

split-second longer than before. The square-
backed woman in black wool stands just a hair
more near to me than previously, to share
warmth. I smile shyly, prompting her to bare

a crescent of white teeth, though her black eyes
in her black face stay somber. To my right,
the other bus-stop regular, a light-
skinned girl with wiry spectacles and tight

glossy curls, ventures, voice soft as velour:
“You ladies think it’s gonna snow?” “Not sure,”
I answer. We discuss the temperature;
the curly girl is scared she can’t endure

New Hampshire’s famed harsh snows: until July,
she lived in Georgia. “Moved for work,” she sighs.
I give my name; “I’m Sahja,” she replies.
A surge of fellow feeling warms the sky

around us three: a fragile, tender flutter.
In this new world, we must protect each other.

Jenna Le‘s two poetry collections are Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume, 2016). She is a physician and a daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Her website is www.jennalewriting.com.