Kanika Lawton
I Used To Live in the Stomach of America

Upon viewing “Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It’s The Sound of Inevitability, The Sound Of Your Death,” by Daniel Joseph Martinez, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 2017.

I used to live in the stomach of America,
sour the way I combed my damp hair.

I don’t know what happened;
green with greed and envy and

all the vomit pooling at our feet.
Emetophobia can’t mask this stench,

and xenophobia won’t stop the swimming
at your shore.

Nothing feels more like disembowelment
than twisting intestines into bowstrings

for hair I cut off with a butcher’s knife.
People say you have a man’s face,

my grandmother says I look like a boy now.
I didn’t want anyone to find me so I clung

to your insides so fiercely I left ulcers. It’s
been almost a year and it still feels like our

lungs are on fire. When I crawled out my hands
were stained with blood. I don’t think you

can blame me for that—
I never broke your heart.

Kanika Lawton is the author of the poetry collections SANTO CALIFORNIA (2017), Every Song We Could Never Listen To (2017), and Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018). Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Hypertrophic Literary, and Shared Horizons: A Rambutan Literary Anthology, among others. Founder and editor-in-chief of L’Éphémère Review, Lawton is a 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold and Silver Key recipient and a 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist. She holds a BA from the University of British Columbia and lives in British Columbia.

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Justin Shin
the poem that knows

itself
saw how its second line was already tainted
third line lost beyond the threshold of recovery
by the direction of a sleek black keyboard
augmenting to the poem’s list of imperfections
word by word,
digressing further and further
away from the ideal poem
god knew where this poem was going
and that’s bad, too predictable
he’d already lost interest in the first stanza

its hidden eyes
pass a disdainful glance at
his fingers
those clumsy, insensitive lumps of flesh
attempting to capture some essence in
the buzz of a nearby fly
or an inexplicable change of light

why not then
simply leave these ideas alone
to silence and perfection
where, at least
we will not mistake them as one

he understood
and decided that plenty other ripe prompts
wouldn’t be as discouraging

Justin Shin is a sophomore studying at the International School of Manila in the Philippines. He enjoys using literature as a tool to explore the many eccentric and beautiful facets of the world. He writes news articles frequently for the school publication Bamboo Telegraph. He also loves music.

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Diane Kerr
On the Occasion of Roy Moore’s Defeat

Been waiting, Roy, been waiting.
Been waiting sixty-two years

for your comeuppance, small man,
your annulment null & voidance
little Roy, your rejection election
defeat, as in Old French desfait
“undone” as in now you’ve done

become gone
for doing those little girls, Roy
the young stuff, you liked
that fourteen-year-old one, huh?
You would’ve liked me too

me too me too me too me too.
Just like you, he had a horse, Roy,
a stallion bigger than your
pinto, Roy, bigger than yours,
way, way bigger than yours.

Diane Kerr is the author of Butterfly (Cherry Grove Collections, 2014) and One (Parallel Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Pearl, Poetry East, Southern Indiana Review, The Diagram, and Zone 3, among others. She holds a MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and has received fellowships from the RopeWalk Writers Retreat (a program of University of Southern Indiana) and the Hedgebrook Writers in Residence Program. She has taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh and mentors writers through the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.

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Caitlin McDonnell
Nikki’s Question

Would you do that for us, Ms. Caitlin, 
asked Nikki, young dark brown eyes
lit as amber sap, lidded with gold shadow
like the end of a day. She was referring
to Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis’s act
of heroism, standing her 27-year-old body
between her young students
and the gunman. My students practiced
hiding in lockers that day at lunch,
laughing and flirting, pretending not
to open the door. Nikki, the first
in her family to be facing tenth-grade
without another life brewing inside her,
had asked me other pressing questions.
Would you send your daughter
to this school? My white skin thick
with rebuttal. It’s not our zone,
I told her, and she nodded, uh, huh.
And why should she trust adults
who drink cheap wine at night
to forget her world enough to sleep?
Why you always listen to this sad girl music?
Nikki asked me once, as I swept
the classroom floor, littered with
passed notes and undone worksheets
about the books only two of them
would read. Cat Power crackled
Losing the star without a sky
Losing the reasons why
Nikki, you were one step ahead of me.
I don’t know what I’d have done;
my own daughter looming like
an exotic flower. I do know
your question will carry you miles,
hang in the air like a body itself,
heart beating its own time.

Caitlin Grace McDonnell is the author of Dreaming the Tree (Belladonna Books, 2003) and Looking for Small Animals (Nauset Press 2012). Her poems, essays and book reviews have appeared in Salon, Washington Square, Chronogram, and other journals. As a high school student in Boulder, she took classes at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, later moving to New York where she attended Bard College and studied with John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach. Caitlin won a grant to study at the Poet’s House in Ireland and was a New York Times Poetry Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She is an English teacher in Brooklyn where she lives with her daughter.

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Robert Farrell
Whose Streets?

Here
We gather—
Under duress
Yes
And so because
Together was
Made a decision
There
Is a choice
Of what the day
Will be.
A question
About tomorrow
Is enchantment
This moment
Caught
Or rather
Given place
Where
Our fates descried
If only for an hour
We meet.
The kairos—this singing
Is itself a song
We choose—
Is possibility
Bringing
Forth ensemble. And though
No is strong
It also ends and so
Puts us face
To face with a beginning.
It will be remembered
Like the sidewalk
That sustains it
And the unseen
Tunnels below the street
From which friends
Emerge. Unnumbered
We do not mean
Or say
But stand
Even when we sit and talk.
What we lose
We gain and a demand
Is more than a suggestion.
Complicity
Is sorrow
And courage is knowing
What and what not
To fear.
Is this not winning
(Or having won)?
Is this not power
When
Collectively
The in
Becomes outside
Showing
Us a vision
Sun-
Lit
And given voice?

Robert Farrell is the author of Meditations on the Body (Ghostbird Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and elsewhere. Originally from Houston, Texas, he lives and works in the Bronx, where he’s a librarian at Lehman College, CUNY.

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Katherine Kelaidis
American Carnage

On the Red Line late Sunday night, the empanadas
still warm in the brown paper bag. I take one of the dozen
empty seats and stomp my feet lightly against the cold.
It’s dangerous here I am told, but I know I haven’t
felt safer—Not since before the day at 14
when two boys about my age walked into the high school
on the other side of the highway and made it a byword.
Or when I sat in my London flat, a grown-up now
as the BBC broadcast pictures of the theater
where a boy kissed me for the first time
because of a man with a gun. No, I am not afraid
of the Red Line or North Lawndale or even the South Side—
Suburban high schools with big green lawns fill my nightmares;
central-lot-ready backdrops set on park lands;
movie theaters in the parking lots of shopping malls
too big for city blocks: They are my “no go zones”—
American carnage brought to you by boys
who could have filled an Abercrombie ad
if not for the trench coat or the Joker laugh
or the mother dead from pneumonia.
It’s cold here and too flat.
Far from where the columbines grow.
So I take an empanada still warm from the bag.
I take a bite. I’m on the Red Line and it’s Sunday night.

Katherine Kelaidis is a writer and historian whose work focuses on early Medieval Christianity and contemporary Orthodox identity in non-traditionally Orthodox countries. Her essays have appeared in Public Orthodoxy, Religion Dispatches, Offbeat Home & Life, and other journals. She is a visiting assistant professor at DePaul University and a resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago. Kelaidis hold a PhD in classics from the University of London.

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Justin Shin
Clocks

I have them in my home
quite a few actually
anything from the simple grey ring
and the ornate cuckoo clock
to the army of ticking watches
lying in some neglected drawer

they say clocks help tell the time
to measure the value of anything

a prolonged second
of sight and revelation
a chest crumpling with rage
or a minute’s waste
on a teacher’s meanderings
a glass wall of apathy
yet an hour too insufficient
between familiar faces
under the comfortable haze of warmth
and a year too long
to see them again

look upon the clock for guidance
on value and waste
learn the patience to bear
the universe’s futureward stroll
the clock’s impeccable beat will measure
—distance
—heartbeat
—loss

Justin Shin is a sophomore studying at the International School of Manila in the Philippines. He enjoys using literature as a tool to explore the many eccentric and beautiful facets of the world. He writes news articles frequently for the school publication Bamboo Telegraph. He also loves music.

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Kanika Lawton
My Uber Driver Learns Her Nephew Has Been Shot While Driving Me to a Boba Tea House All of My Friends Have Told Me to Visit

I wonder if honey feels like blood, all
sticky and slick and I never learned how
to keep my fingers away from my hair.
I cut it short out of misplaced atonement,
shorn away sin with rust-bitten blade. Lived
up to my father’s name; tomboy and Tom’s
boy and being mistaken for boy cannot
save me. Could not save him, heel
turned left and bullet pierced right. What
happens when you don’t say the right thing?
When you say nothing at all? America
always finds a way to muffle everything
but lead, gun warmer than the hand
that holds it. Her A/C is too high but
I do not complain, grateful that I’ve only
made a home in hospitals because of natural
causes. Old age. Procession of time linear like
it should be. I do not think about his father
on the other side of the phone. Do not
think about his hands against mine, skin
as safe haven, protection, white enough;
first name be damned. I think about her ID
on the dashboard, security badge and all.
How she couldn’t protect him. How this
country couldn’t protect them. How it says
it’ll protect me, but only because I was not
born here.

Only because I am the right color.

Kanika Lawton is the author of the poetry collections SANTO CALIFORNIA (2017), Every Song We Could Never Listen To (2017), and Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018). Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Hypertrophic Literary, and Shared Horizons: A Rambutan Literary Anthology, among others. Founder and editor-in-chief of L’Éphémère Review, Lawton is a 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold and Silver Key recipient and a 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist. She holds a BA from the University of British Columbia and lives in British Columbia.

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Maureen Cosgrove
Lead Valentines

The time to act has come. Hand them in,
give them up, melt them down. The
massive smelting pot awaits. Another hour

simmers over. Great seething froths of
molten metals overflow. This brew will not
be cooling soon. Are you quite

sure you’re standing where the pelting rain
won’t get you wet? Know that when
you hear a clash and rumble, the

crashes won’t be thunder. Thick fog
fumbles the window. A view that was
see-through is now opaque. A fingertip

is fixed in place. A shooter’s standoff at high
noon. A reckoning mistake. Howling, the
living stand to claim the day-lit moon.

Loops of linking chains are being hung.
Formed from foraged arms. Suspended,
as a footbridge spans a breach. In

groups, the children stride. Hundreds at a
time. Stand back. Let them be—a singular-
ity. Outreaching outlived limits set by sky.

Editor’s Note: This poem is a Golden Shovel taking its end-words from “The Hour of Not Quite Rain,” by Micki Callen and Richie Furay, recorded by the American folk rock band Buffalo Springfield and appearing on their 1968 album Last Time Around.  You can learn more about the Golden Shovel form here.

Maureen Cosgrove is writing a series of Golden Shovels using song lyrics as her source material. She is a also a collage-artist and a retired tap dance teacher. For the past five years she has hosted the Poetry Salon of Boston, a monthly meeting where an invited poet reads and participants share their own work.

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Diane Kerr
Impala

Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?
—President Donald J. Trump, January 11, 2018

let our next president be
the shirtless You-Tube African guy
up to his belly-button in oozing mud
thick rope around his chest
wading into a vast watering-hole swamp
when he first reaches her and takes hold
of the floundering terrified
let the panicked animal kick him
deep in the gut
mud sucking and pulling
both of them down let him stretch his own rope out
wind it around her too
let him struggle struggle and struggle saying
nothing

then let him hoist her back-end her flanks
her legs heaving her lifting her
up again and again dragging her let
him inch his way to shore

let the onlookers watch and murmur
keeping a steady pull on the mutual tangle
hushed by what they see
this love this nobility

and when they finally reach dry land
let man and impala lie there a few seconds
exhausted and still

you and you and you

bring clear water enough
to rinse her eyes her nose her
muck-weighted body let
the man rinse his mud-slimed hands
loosen the rope let her rise run
return to her grazing.

Diane Kerr is the author of Butterfly (Cherry Grove Collections, 2014) and One (Parallel Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Pearl, Poetry East, Southern Indiana Review, The Diagram, and Zone 3, among others. She holds a MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and has received fellowships from the RopeWalk Writers Retreat (a program of University of Southern Indiana) and the Hedgebrook Writers in Residence Program. She has taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh and mentors writers through the Madwomen in the Attic Workshops at Carlow University in Pittsburgh.

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