Devon Balwit
Raisins Not Virgins, Quran Scholars Say

Martyred for your faith, you will get hur,
the pearl of great price, light shards shimmering,
white raisins, the fruits of your labor.

How could it be otherwise, the 72 pur-
ported virgins? How could rape be reward, suffering
commendation? It is one thing for you, my martyrs,

to offer your necks, but quite another
to take what is not freely given. My darlings—
white raisins are the fruits of your labor,

the hur that remains after sun-glare bur-
geons shoots sent skyward, distilling
cloud-stuff to sweet nubs for martyrs.

Leave the virgins to ripen, to offer
themselves to those of their choosing.
White raisins are the proper gift for your labors,
for your clamorous soul-hunger, my martyrs.

Editor’s Note: See this article and others you can easily find online for background on the premise of this poem.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, Oregon. Her poems of protest have appeared previously in What Rough Beast as well as in The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat’s Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, and more.

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Chad Parenteau
Open Carry Jesus

Open Carry Jesus
thinks if the first Jesus
packed heat back in the day,
he could have taught much more.

Open Carry Jesus
thinks wisdom could be
passed on more efficiently
if people were forced to listen.

Open Carry Jesus
always ends his sermons with
and then I shot them.

Open Carry Jesus
wants all his disciples
to have permits.

Open Carry Jesus
brings Judgment Day closer
one sermon at a time.

Open Carry Jesus
wants all his targets
to ascend.

Open Carry Jesus
confuses execution
with transubstantiation.

Open Carry Jesus
thinks every body bag
is a body of Christ.

Open Carry Jesus
wants to cut costs
to his crucifixion
and ascent ASAP.

Open Carry Jesus
knows his real last supper.

Chad Parenteau is the author of the poetry collections Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013) and Discarded: Poems for My Apartments (Červená Barva Press, 2008). His work has appeared in Tell-Tale Inklings, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine.

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CL Bledsoe
Blinking

Always, a camera pointed behind him.
Always, a crack to slip through.
When he comes out the other side, he won’t be able to hear
how bad everything is for everyone back there
anymore.
It’s something he was taught
to ignore.
He was taught he was the noise
that keeps everything aloft. If he stops staring straight ahead
for even a moment, the horizon will fall.
But he’s beginning to think it’s someone else keeping it up.
They are yelling and they are yelling and that is a form
of trying
and they are saying he needs to go outside and measure
the exact distance from sound to action, from water to concussion
grenade to oil to death. This is why everything glows,
they say.
It’s because the smolder is too expensive to extinguish.
He will go.
He will see if this thing they can’t spell is true.
And when he sees his name already carved into a stone
all he will know is how far it is to get back home.
This is how the night feels: like a nurse
with two hours to go in her shift. The night needs sensible shoes,
everyone to shut up and do what they’re told when someone
who knows speaks.
There is a list which accuses her of having a name, of trying.
She knows the best thing about ears is how easily lies flutter
into them.
They blink on and off and on and off.
This is the language of hope, sped up to match the seasons.

CL Bledsoe is the author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love (lulu.com, 2017) and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World (lulu.com, 2017). He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com.

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Susan Brennan
Education for Girls

the girls are being taken
from school desks
their lives soldering
to an old violence
swallowed and paid for

the fathers—out of their minds
walk nightly tremors
stones are thrown
mothers drape the earth
the daughters still gone

the gift of being a girl
of being threaded to mother blood
of leaving
trails of hair
long and lost

presidents keep speaking
as if her lips aren’t being broken
or as if they really can’t hear
the hot death worm
beneath words clicking facts

they are science geeks
they are building robots
they are in the coding and math club
they walked to school that morning
by dusk, their pencils, flip flops marooned in the dirt

tonight I’m shaking
I know tomorrow they will still be gone
I don’t expect men in power
to change the skin of things
but what of me

Susan Brennan is the author of the collections Blue Sirens (Dancing Girl Press), numinous, (Finishing Line Press), and Drunken Oasis (Rattapallax Press). She curated poetry programming (WanderWord) at Wilco’s Solid Sound Music Festival at MASS MoCA. With a circus arts company, she staged her poem Chromoluminarism about Georges Seurat’s final painting (RGB NYC). A screenwriter and activist as well as a poet, she has written film scripts and a 1-million-hit-plus award winning web-series, pitched film stories, and produced a short film, premiering at Austin, Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals. See what she’s up to at tinycubesofice.com.

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Mary Ann Honaker
Flutter

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, The Dudley Review, Euphony, Juked, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Lake, and elsewhere. Honaker holds a BA in philosophy from West Virginia University, a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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Kelle Groom
Natalie Said

at MIT they were talking about the flood.
A student said the problem isn’t
that our wall is too low,
because no wall
is high enough to save us.
Instead we should become like pearl divers like
mermaids, adapt backwards get gills
prepare
to go back into the water.

It was November in Far Land it was yesterday in the lab,
it was the harbor & light house, but you can barely see it
beyond one boat left under the clouds.
One night in Florida in a classroom
of students preparing to take a test,
I had to know the meaning
of there where the real subject
follows the verb: There is very little time.
I was nervous I wouldn’t be able
to hang on
to what that means.

I have a problem with the early dark, I told Natalie.
Yes, she said, that’s a problem here. I wondered how cold
drowning would be,
how much would I fight
before I believed I was in bed
blanketed. The problem with believing we need a wall
is the problem of asking the wrong question.
What if everything is the wrong question? The moon
is five days old. In Alaska the seagulls all live in the trees.

Natalie’s looking for work, she’s working for free,
she’s been here 17 years, a decade in a barn.
I can’t talk to her, I said there’s nothing to hang
onto, except now, we have mermaids & pearl
divers, & the student from MIT
who is going to Japan
to learn from the Ama, to hold her breath, swim
to the bottom of the sea, who will let out
a long low whistle, & survive.

Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections: Spill, Five Kingdoms, Luckily (Anhinga Press), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals. Groom’s memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, an Oprah O Magazine selection, and an Oxford American Editor’s Pick. In 2014, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Groom is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and is director of the Summer Workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

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Vivian Wagner
Map of Creation

—For Diana Tillion

A woman captured
octopuses in the
cold, swishing pools
by her home,
injected syringes into
them, and pulled out ink to
paint sepia houses and glaciers,
spruce trees and orcas,
bears and berries,
waves and octopuses.
At a certain point, the
ink became the world,
the world the ink, and the
woman an invisible line
between the two.

Vivian Wagner is the author of the poetry collection The Village (Kelsay Books, 2017) and the memoir Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington, 2010). Her work has appeared in Muse /A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Eyedrum Periodically, 3QR, and other publications. Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.

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Emily Vieweg
My…

you said you felt bad for anything that’s had to live inside My Uterus.

I suppose, because I refuse to allow you access to police it. see,
My Uterus has nourished two embryos from conception to birth and
My Vagina has engaged several partners who have never had a bad word to say.
but your comment was not about the hospitality or room service of My Reproductive System.

you said you felt sorry for anything that’s had to live inside My Uterus.

does that include the semen I did not invite? does that include the
unwelcomed microbes infecting My Cervix? does that include the
fresh seeds french-kissing My Labia without my consent?

no.

you said you felt bad for anything I let grow inside My Uterus.

so, you just feel sorry for the children I bore of my own free will—children
who are learning to police themselves instead of others—children
who embrace difference and learn… instead of fearing change.

which is it? do you worship My Womb, or do you attack My Oviduct?
do you relish My Sweet Self or do you obsess over My Ovaries?

you said you felt sorry for anything that’s had to live inside My Uterus.

ahh! your comment was supposed to anger me! upset me! make me feel guilty!
force me to morph into the rabid animal you expect of all free-thinking independent females! yes!

you said you felt bad for anything I let grow inside My Uterus.

ahh, your comment was to force me to argue—force me to what, agree with you?
force me to deny My Truth?

what, it hurt your feelings, I guess, when I said I would still fight for your right to choose what you think is best for you, because we are sisters in this world—yes, you are woman, too—
ROARING—
and you could have thanked me for a spirited debate, you could have thanked me for having your back, you could have thanked me…

instead—you verbally ravage My Cozy, Nourished, Able Uterus?

your comment was not about My Uterus.
your comment was about your anger. your rage. your inability to accept the fact that
My Uterus is My Business.
and no matter how often you laugh, joke, berate or insult her—
I do not give you permission to police her.

Emily Vieweg’s work has appeared in Soundings Review, Art Young’s Good Morning, Proximity Magazine, Spillwords.com, and other journals.  Originally from St. Louis, she lives in Fargo, where she is a mother of two, a cat wrangler and an office assistant.

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J. Bradley
A New Arrangement

The Lord watches them play lepidopterist with His son in the town square. He doesn’t remember how He had a son or who His mother was or ever having a moment alone with His mother to manufacture Him. I will forgive them, His son says; The Lord never does.

J. Bradley is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer, the prose poem chapbook It Is A Wild Swing Of A Knife (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), the flash fiction chapbooks Neil (Five Quarterly, 2015) and No More Stories About The Moon (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), the novel The Adventures of Jesus Christ, Boy Detective (Pelekinesis, 2016) and the Yelp review prose poem collection Pick How You Will Revise A Memory (Robocup Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He received his MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.

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CL Bledsoe
2

The problem with following your dreams
is they usually end with clowns
with chainsaws for hands and your mother’s

face Pollocking chocolate sauce all over
the page, and that brings nothing but ants.
Just because I sell artisanal, locally sourced

nihilism, don’t mistake me for a capitalist.
I’m not even wearing sunglasses. We all know,
beneath the U2 soundtrack playing constantly

in the publishing houses, that money is as much
of an illusion as equality, justice, or our votes
counting. The reality is that everything looks

like leaves or a mistake if you squint enough.
The truest poetry is of compost. If we throw away
enough of our hours, we can pay for that reboot

of a sequel we never wanted to see, that pizza
that’s already making us sick but at least we didn’t
have to cook. Some asshole in a nicer house

than we’ll ever see will get rich. If we try
to rush him, our neighbors will never forgive us
for nudging his foot from their necks.

CL Bledsoe is the author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love (lulu.com, 2017) and the flash fiction collection Ray’s Sea World (lulu.com, 2017). He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.blogspot.com.

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