Gregory Luce
Too Close

(after Heisenberg)

The way when you look
too close you don’t see
everything clearly when
you look right into your lover’s
eyes and can’t see the pain
plus he’s good at hiding it
anyway and he looks back
and can’t see the history
that comes alive every time
he raises his voice
plus you don’t talk
about it anyway
as autopsies say
no visible marks or scars
not even a birthmark
they get embedded later
and very deep.

Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line Press, 2016). In addition to numerous journals, his poems have appeared in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects (CreateSpace, 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries (CreateSpace, 2016). Recipient of the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Luce is retired from National Geographic, works as a creative writing instructor for Writopia Lab, and lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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Tony Mancus and CL Bledsoe
Collaborative Poem #2

Rust appeals to empires because it’s another name for guilt,
This is how we’ll be saved, not with a bomb but with a whisper.
The words contrailed into failure, what we put up against a sky.
We knead our backs against the roots, watch the shower scene
play itself out and court the dust making its way back to us.
The executioner hates his job, but who can predict when he’ll take
a sick day. It eats at the throat when there’s nothing else.
I’ve been saving this scone recipe for a political climate
like y/ours. It only takes a day and a half of sick leave, threats
from the new faction of neighbors who you didn’t know
hated everyone that wasn’t the thin white duke, the scorn
of our future progeny, and three cupfuls of unbleached flour.
We can take direction, right? It’s just a bit further to never.
Attention is the vig we were promised. I’m just waiting for a dance
number to give me a cleaner agenda. I was lying. I still am.

Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks. He lives with his wife Shannon and three yappy cats in Colorado and serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse.

CL Bledsoe is the author of seventeen books, most recently the poetry collection King of Loneliness (lulu.com, 2017) and the novel The Funny Thing About… (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2018).He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at How to Even… on Medium (with Michael Gushue).

Sanjana Nair
Practical Physiology or the Negative After-Images

after a textbook in New York University’s medical archives, 1908

of mr. x and madam y:

think of me, the darkened square
imprinted on your light-eyed lens

a negative after-image, a white shadow,
if white shadows are possible, a turn on for illusions,
mansuetude of nothing but a wrongly named color, the back—

warding off of this other, this soft-boiled heart.
Name me the foreign fly in the body of your beautiful things
as my heart’s a bothersome thing: Heavy-hand-it-over-bloody-thing
that must be scene for its remarkable color blindness. The orb of this dark eye.

Sanjana Nair’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, and The Equalizer. In a prior lifetime, she was part of a performative series in NYC named Emofru and The Lady Apple. Her collaboration between poet and composer was performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater as well as featured on NPR’s Soundcheck. Nair lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

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Jonathan Rentler
we the way-makers

the cobblers
the scholars
fishmongers & maids
back’us boys & groovers
pit brow lasses & gamsters
bo’suns sailing the seas

bondagers with sextons
find bottomers comfort
with jaggers & dragoons

paintresses with brush
arkwrighters & muleteers
codders, pecters
the loblolly boys-kissers
firebeaters
honey dippers
owlers & chiffoniers

the hoggars, tweenies & furriers
rovers, higglers & rustlers
the empresarios with perked ears
buddle boys with gaunters & gummers
shrimpschongers
vulcans &  plashers
& lest we forget
the coxswains

Jonathan Rentler is the author of the chapbook Times Square Words# 1 (Yonkers International Press/Blurb 2017). His work has appeared in LOLA, Babbling of the Irrational, Fickle Muses, I-70, Ganymede, Unlikely Stories 2.0, and Midnight Muse.

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Judith Skillman
Rift

The drudgery of a house.
Shadows come to tell of supper.
Pan full of grease in water, sloughing.
Bits of egg collect in the drain, yellow.
Hardened is the name of woman.
All hands and arms.
Hangnails come to tell.
Chores for the charwoman.
See her bend into soap.
Lean away from leisure.
In her stained rag a map of the world.
Countries never seen.
Meals brought by uniformed servants.
The silken, inner layers of a word called pretty.
Paired with white or red?
Once they asked that.
Once in the charcuterie she purchased veal.
Carried the butchered animal over cobblestones.
Her Achilles heal burned.
A time of injury.
As in times of peace one hears of wars.

Judith Skillman is is the author of Premise of Light (Tebot Bach, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Cimarron Review, Zyzzyva, and other journals. She is the recipient of grants from Artist Trust and the Academy of American Poets. She is a faculty member at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Washington.

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Charlie Leppert
Scrolling Through Facebook in the Midst of the Impending Climate Catastrophe

A Breitbart status declares its concerns about how Black Transgender Communist Jews are stealing resources from Honest, Christian, White Men in what was once Your City.

You didn’t think you followed their page, but every once in a while something strange finds its way in front of you.

A New York Times editorial discussing how Gen Z is killing the feudal agricultural communities in western Russia by refusing to inhabit the fringes of the nuclear fallout zone or emigrate any further south than St. Petersburg.

The faces of the workers, sunburned and emaciated, stares out from the screen.

A girl from your high school feeling sooooooo blessed, posing with her husband and the Canadian soldiers at the Alaskan border, to which they have been traveling, by foot, for six months.

The soldiers are even smiling, and her sister has left a comment, asking if any of those hunky Canadians are single.

A Wall Street Journal report, composed by a New York City stock broker waist deep in raw sewage and oil, on the current market value of Elon Musk’s TeslArk™ in the aftermath of his assassination by Christian Armageddonists.

get it? he had Tweeted after the project was announced, his smart house auto-posting his 3 AM, designer-drug ramblings, while he sat motionlessly under a ceiling fan deep into the night. TeslArk™ like Tesla and Ark. Im a fucking superhero.

A Buzzfeed quiz asking which Idaho Survivalist Compound should YOU try to infiltrate before the upcoming forest fires season?

You think you’ve already taken that one, though.

A picture of the sun rising over the edge of the Earth, taken from space, captioned “Love this view <3,” posted by the mission attempting to reach Mars and establish a colony there that had launched ten years ago.

It was one of the first posts they had made, and every day the same picture and caption was posted again, endlessly clogging their newsfeed with identical, final sunrises.

You have 1 Memory Today, according to your notifications. You posted 36 years ago, on March 12, “uugh, when will this finally END??” under a picture of the backyard you haven’t seen in twenty years, cloaked in snow you haven’t seen in fifteen.

The light reflected off the snow dazzles the camera, and beyond the bare trees is a clear, blue sky, crisp and devoid of clouds. The sun is on its way toward noon.

You like the memory, return to the present.

Charlie Leppert’s work has appeared in Mind Over Gender, The Labyrinth, and the Validation Project, among other websites and publications. He has been awarded the Stephen W. Chung Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation Scholarship from Bergen Community College. Leppert is queer poet and student from northern New Jersey whose poetic work focuses on queerness, the complexity of American identity, mental health, faith, and resistance.

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Chris Lim
Coffee Stains and Venom

We watch the raindrops
sweat on glass panes of the building
As the gusts of wind
Sweep the plastic bags along the pavement
Cars drone on the pebbly road like goaded cattle
Along the sidewalk, we walk past
the blur of faces
Trickles of lost words
slip through our mouths
The lamp post flickers at us, signaling the
approach of the storm,
while clouds shift in the black tinged sky.
Sometimes, we bury ourselves
too deep
and drown in the tides
Lock ourselves in a stranger’s body
We stare at the mirror, only to see the
Crumpled sheets, coffee stains
and the venom in our teeth

Chris Lim is a 15-year-old high school student from the Philippines, who attends the British School of Manila, where he won the 2018 short story competition. He likes taking part in Math competitions and reading dystopian novels. His poetry has appeared in the journal K’in.

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Gregory Luce
No Escape

Take one if it hurts,
two if it doesn’t
because the world is too much
it crowds in with its
traffic noise and cell phone
chatter, its birdsong, jazz
and guitar chords wafting
out of cafes, raindrops
spattering leaves,
its sunlight and unlit tunnels
its mobs on the Metro
and solitude in lonely parks
its jagged beauty and
encompassing horror

Take one if it hurts,
two if it doesn’t
because I need to stay awake
and feel the pain and pleasure
and breathe however raggedly
equilibrium is critical
is everything right
speech right conduct
right effort now
abandon silence
exile cunning

Take one if it hurts,
two if it doesn’t

Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line Press, 2016). In addition to numerous journals, his poems have appeared in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects (CreateSpace, 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries (CreateSpace, 2016). Recipient of the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, awarded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Luce is retired from National Geographic, works as a creative writing instructor for Writopia Lab, and lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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Ana Fores Tamayo
Checkmate

The dancing queen is yet important
to the king’s deflowered innocence:
he plays the chess game
a little bored with laughter,
renouncing celibate eyes of onyx blue.
And as she sings his tears
lost in the flood of little rabbits,
the queen moves backward,
circles checkmate on her
narcissistic lover,
and pounces her loss,
victorious virtue tamed.

And so he squalls
the mountain of his maimed oblivion,
enchantment and castration lost
in scissors strangling fish.

Ana Fores Tamayo’s poems and/or photographs appear in Acentos Review, The Raving Press, Rigorous, and Frontera. She advocate for marginalized refugee families from Mexico and Central America.

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Sanjana Nair
Some of My Best Friends are Human, or Anger

I.
That girlhood stories of happy girls,
even royal born, always ended with princes.
I hear a rendition of the masculine
joining the feminine, to finally make a whole person—
but I think of Daphne.
How I’ve turned tree to escape the unwanted man,
and I tell you: It doesn’t work.
The wrong man, the one that requires escape,
sees a tree as a place to piss.

II.
Grateful it’s rocked me for the while
before I crumble into a heap
of bones, unmade dreams, melancholy
dead memories. I’ve been called dirty names
in the places of my grief,
but anger doesn’t do that.
She turns me into fire
and no rain of any kind can put me out.
Even without being wanted, I burn.

III.
Dangerous as the 19th century:
The girl who wants and must be cut for it.
What is the removal of a female organ,
of a girl-child, of the poor uterus of me,
of the broken life-giver in me, to do—
consigned to a steel plate and then to the place
where all dead things heap and rot?
Deep down, the spirit of me thinks
it is a sickening at this world of men.

IV.
If I told you anger saved me when I was too weak to save me, when I was too small to try,
that she was the sole thing that kept me alive, would you love her then?

V.
Anthropocene, Holocene, homicide.
I don’t take the animal nature
of my body as unalterably solid.
My wrists can break, my breath has, on occasion, stopped.
I’ve gone blue with longing,
run red as war. I’ve battle scars
and I’ve birthed a girl. I’ve been ugly as battles
between us. Always, I’ll be bound by the leather
skin-sack that bolts me together.

VI.
Unless I burn.

VII.
What did it feel like for the women before me,
to burn as if the deaths of their husbands
robbed them of the right to breathe?
The asphyxiation of an idea
and all the little witches that came after
flood the globe. If they could grow gills,
breathe water, extinguish flame,
and return, no skin to bind them,
where would their hands wander?

VIII.
I am less without anger.
I want fire and strangers.
I want sand in my nails, in my clothes.
To be of tree and wood and to lay in the grass.
If I could deflect our evolution,
what color would I paint it?
Of our history, a scar. Of the scar, black.
The women who rise are often fallen and we know,
by now, a tree that falls, doesn’t just fall: It crashes.

IX.
I love Daphne like the river.

X.
Apollo, be damned. Bring on the night.

Sanjana Nair’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, and The Equalizer. In a prior lifetime, she was part of a performative series in NYC named Emofru and The Lady Apple. Her collaboration between poet and composer was performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater as well as featured on NPR’s Soundcheck. Nair lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

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