Sang Yun Jee
What Happens in a Blink

When he blinked and winked
and turned all the world into shiny static
he wanted to see his faces again
so he created the world —your world—
It’s by the red hairless baby with the face of a lab rat
in the purple plastic crib with starfruit and bananas carved outside.
No one knew nor paid respect to the Creator of Worlds,
the Envoy of the End, the infantile King.
But you see, hundreds of people were moved
and thousands of trees were felled
Just so that the world could be a little different.
Or maybe the world simply slipped by him.
But if the infant could really change the world —
its lack of creativity disappoints.

Sang Yun Jee‘s poems have been published in the AIPF Youth Anthology and the What Rough Beast feature of Indolent Books. He currently studies as a sophomore in the Philippines, and is the poetry editor for a student-run magazine, The McKinley Review. He received a gold medal in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

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Kazimieras M. Campe

Frigid March breezes.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Fired, everyone.

Kazimieras M. Campe is a retired engineer whose poetry has appeared in Potomac Review, Metropolitain, Bitterroot, Innisfree, and Hot Calaloo.

He lives in Maryland.

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Sam Collier
Mother of All Bombs
U.S. Drops ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on ISIS Caves in Afghanistan
– New York Times headline, April 13, 2017

If a bomb is an animal to mother
other bombs, its skin and teeth

a mother’s armor, ringing songs
of war, its progeny the feral fiends

who play their screaming games
in someone’s bleak backyard,

this beast must occupy some planet
where humans have invented

everything, where fabricated rain
is cut from glass shards, where trees catch fire

to signal holy truths, where
every time a monarch lies, a species

goes extinct. If bombs are mothers,
birth must be a kind of grim despair,

and tenderness a trick, and growing up
must be like climbing slowly

down into a grave. On this strange world
the generals give names of love

to weapons, built by feeble hands,
that split the very fabric of the air

in someone else’s sky, and burst
the ears of strangers. Space-traveler,

beware: this planet’s jagged gravity
glues some folks to the rocks, while others leap

forever into clouds. Water here is pure and fresh
or laced with heavy metals. The atmosphere

is sweet or else a sour, stinging breath.
Depending where you land, the beasts

might creep around in fur, or fall like death.

Sam Collier is a playwright and poet originally from Washington, D.C. and currently dividing time between Chicago and northern Michigan. Sam’s poems have appeared in Sixfold, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Puritan, Mortar Magazine, Liminal Stories Magazine, Prompt Press, and Guernica. She is the 2017-19 Writer in Residence with the National Writers Series of Traverse City. Sam holds an MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa, where she was the 2015-16 Provost’s Visiting Writer in playwriting.

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Shana Ross
After the Election

While we were trying to remember how to chit chat
Cocktail conversation pinned under the rubble
I told a story that led to someone quoting
A comedian, a movie, a catchphrase, a running gag
Your consent is not required
And I said, remember last Monday, when that was still funny?

We laughed and did not cry, because we are better at being
Polite instead of honest with each other,
In the presence of nice clothes and a crowd.

We are mad, but we are also mad
To think our manners mean we are preserving some essential American self.

Shana Ross is a poet and playwright with a BA and MBA from Yale University. Her writing career has been dormant for 18 years for reasons both practical and best discussed in therapy. This decade, her work has been published in Anapest Journal.

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Zoe Canner
how many women murdered by their boyfriends over thanksgiving is too many?

drawing a line from
these terrible murders

and in one case
disembowelment

over our uncomfortably outdated
genocide family holiday weekend

to the outpouring
of women’s voices

in response to sexual assault
and harassment

is so obvious and clear
to a great many of us.

and others of us
refuse to allow

connections, and cultures,
and atmosphere and influence

to be real in a striving for
individual – ‘i had no idea’

‘he worked independently’
‘just following orders’

patterned event.
i draw a straight line.

i draw a straight line from
clarence thomas to trump

to ratner to singer to lauer
to ailes to nassar to horovitz

to the need for panic buttons for
housekeepers in the hotel industry

to all the men who murdered
their wives and girlfriends

over thanksgiving
last year alone.

Zoe Canner is an angry, anti-racist, 3rd Generation Holocaust Survivor. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Naugatuck River Review, The Laurel Review, and Arcturus of the Chicago Review of Books. She is an alumna of CalArts, Directors Lab West, and The Home School. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance.

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Sungyoun Jee
The Deer in Icheon

comes with the night in the shadows
looks for crops to fill its stomach with

digs and finds the peanuts the aged
farmers planted
all in silence

runs away

you wait for dusk, hoping to see it.
you struggle to open your eyes yawning
under the gleaming moon

as though it were a returning friend
as though it were a present from the forest

Sungyoun (Michael) Jee is a freshman at International School Manila. He has won awards in the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Writing Contest for his poetry as well as in the Scholastics Art & Writing Awards for his short story and poetry. He enjoys taking naps and eating pasta.

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Robert Crisp
Afterimage

An excuse for a man made a decision
that radiated outward like lines
of a lightning flash, inch-thick, pure white,
50,000 degrees arching across miles and miles
of heaven as the rest of us watched from below.

It was over in a second, but the afterimage
burned inside our eyelids for weeks, struck
our children with nightmares, and scorched the inside
of ancient caves where we huddled thousands
of years ago, explaining lightning as best we could.

Robert Crisp currently hides out in Savannah, GA, where he teaches English. He writes poetry as often as he can. Learn more at www.writingforghosts.com

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Dionne Custer Edwards
After War, The Peace Will Be Worse


After the bombs gather blood and treasure,
stew of limbs and howl, rhetoric unravels

in at least a dozen different languages.
The lengthening strife hollows out rock

and neighbor, buzz to brittle purr.
It took civil war to whittle down city

to bone. Collapse warm breath into exile,
unravel a trail of echoes and smoke.

It took bombs to scribble all kinds of sword
and chatter, all kinds of matter and gut punch.

What will we do with more rapid flash and spray,
more rubble and flame, more blow and ghosts?

Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer and educator working at The Wexner Center for the Arts. She created Pages, an art and writing program for high school students. She has a BA in English, Ohio State University and MA in Creative Writing and Arts Education, Antioch University. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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Kazimieras M. Campe

Late-night breaking news ̶
Spring fires March on Twitter.
April is worried.

Kazimieras M. Campe is a retired engineer whose poetry has appeared in Potomac Review, Metropolitain, Bitterroot, Innisfree, and Hot Calaloo.

He lives in Maryland.

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Sam Collier
The Daughters Go

Before you can count to one
hundred we are out the door, our long
toes claw mud, our knees split seams,

we crash from here our mouths
full of biting. No fairytale can hold us
in its quiet tower now. We’ve all grown up

and turned to witches. That sharp
and sure. That fond of wicked beaked
birds, murderous cats, the curl of smoke

a chimney in the wood makes.
Once we sang sweetness for the moon
faced boys; we even liked to listen to

their games of war and money.
To dream something coastal, something
green. We brushed our hair, we studied

courts and commerce, we slept.
Turns out what broke the spell was
stories. A boy staring, masked in dust,

a hundred children trapped in fire,
a baby wreathed in saltfoam, clutching
death. Like ancient divinations coming true,

the stories came for us. Now we go,
muscled and read, our wits and knuckles
honed. We know how lies can lure and gold

can vanish. If a girl’s belly
is slate where strangers scratch out
their beliefs, we have the bile and the teeth,

we have the law, the holy. If
a man’s dark shoulderblade is thieved
of breath, if even as he runs his blood

is stolen, if a woman traveling
is captured on the road, and dies
in prison, if boys buy sweets at night

and die in the grass, if bankers
poison rivers and soldiers empty
houses and kings anoint themselves,

we must kiss ourselves
awake. Bloody our hands on stones
of this castle. Carry our blades to the rooms

of our fathers. Enlist
their battled arms. Call up captains;
bid them turn the ships. Find the weather

wizards in their fortress;
counter their ocean-boiling curse.
Look: our mothers labor in the fields, their hands

are two thirds full of shadow,
the sun’s gone down, the sky’s gone blue
with ache. We run to tell them, tell them, tell them

Sam Collier is a playwright and poet originally from Washington, D.C. and currently dividing time between Chicago and northern Michigan. Sam’s poems have appeared in Sixfold, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Puritan, Mortar Magazine, Liminal Stories Magazine, Prompt Press, and Guernica. She is the 2017-19 Writer in Residence with the National Writers Series of Traverse City. Sam holds an MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa, where she was the 2015-16 Provost’s Visiting Writer in playwriting.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.