Kamal Kimball
The Hand That’s Dealt

I try to blot myself out
in the blank of sleep
when the visions start
their nightly chatter.

A man with a face
scrambled like TV static,
sheriff’s aviators, a red
ball cap joins our table.

We’re courteous, distracted
with drink and laughter
so we deal him in.
Shoot the shit, forget

he’s there and bet
all we own ’til every chip
is in the pot. Before we
fathom, his fingers flash

to talons and he reveals
Ten Jack Queen King Ace.
We gape as his claws rake
in everything we’ve earned.

Kamal E. Kimball‘s poems have appeared in Zetetic, Literati Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Cincinnati DIY Writers and founder of Fresh Darlings, an online writing community. She is a reader for EG&J Press and an intern with Dos Madres Press. She lives in the Ohio River Valley. More at kamalkimball.com.

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Nina Padolf
Veterans Day: After the Trump-shit Blows

I think today of all of the people that “served our country,”
whom will they be serving now?
As the trump-shit blows—
and many feel like we’ve be slapped down
to some nasty trump job,
I think of the women who had to wear uniforms
in a world dominated by men.
Skirts and hose, glossed lips, painted fingertips
vulnerable legs exposed flesh.
Pants were for the men.
How do I manage to salute a man that fingers women
just because he can?
I feel violated, I can’t seem to sleep it off.
It’s a nightmare
in replay, his-story repeats
while the trump-shit blows.
I am raw, confused, and dazed.
He says, “Make America what again?”
I think today of all of the people who came here seeking freedom.
I think about the people who were here first.
Whom are we “serving” and what are we really being served?

Nina Padolf is the co-editor (with Deena November) of the upcoming anthology, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres, forthcoming from Six Gallery Press. Her poems have appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper and The Dandelion Review and her short stories for children have appeared in Carnegie Mellon University’s Project Listen. She holds a PhD in educational leadership from Argosy University, an MA in teaching from Chatham College, and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing from Carlow University. Padolf teaches writing at the The Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online.

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Chad Foret
Ngarong feat. The Autocrats

The stragglers are fashioned into borders by cigar
Light. This is how I romance erosion, rearranging

The republic until unrecognizable. When the mortar
Was depleted, poverty answered my prayers. Once,

A ronin would disappear around their other arm,
But I traded CDOs for honor, antiques in acid

Baths, so they shine in some capacity. Sometimes
It is easier to rage than admit you are a megalodon.

The details should destroy us, whittle loneliness
Into something tender. I’m awake as I can under

-stand, the baddest seed with everywhere to be.

Chad Foret is a PhD candidate in Poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi where he assists in the publication of the Robert Frost Review and teach composition. His work has appeared in Louisiana Literature, The Midwest Quarterly, the anthology Down to the Dark River, and was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Tennessee Williams Fest Poetry Award.

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John L. Stanizzi
New Year’s Eve 2016

…and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Fire-pit on the last day of the year,
same intensity as yesterday’s fire,
the heat, the flames in a luminous spire,
so there is nothing more for me to fear.

Smoke into black December’s sky a smear
through thoughts of pain and the next crossfire;
fire-pit on the last day of the year,
same intensity as yesterday’s fire.

So what’s the metaphor I’m seeking here—
—the crackling of wood is a prophet choir
singing staccato hymns, those hopeful prayers
that, in spite of diminishing, still flare?
Fire-pit on the last day of the year,
same intensity as yesterday’s fire.

John L. Stanizzi is the author of the poetry collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallalujah Time!, and High Tide-Ebb Tide. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, Tar River, and others journals. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. His newest book, Sundowning, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Coventry with his wife, Carol.

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Shikha Malaviya
Touchdown

She says she can’t stop crying
her heart in a holding pattern over Allepo
while she sips coffee in Atlanta
You’re overreacting I say
Thank God you’re okay
that you aren’t being asked
to prove yourself
by singing O Say Can You See
dawn’s early light melding into dusk
in a tiny room that quakes
as planes land and take off
the baggage carousel spinning
round and round
two suitcases unclaimed

Shikha Malaviya is the author of Geography of Tongues (The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, 2013). She is a co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a literary press dedicated to new poetic voices from India. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Water~Stone Review and other journals. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Learn more at shikhamalaviya.com.

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Ken Waldman
Republican Leadership

It’s the hypocrisy and shamelessness
that astounds. How can so many rich men
(and women) incriminate themselves again
and again? With wealth, you’d think they’d practice
restraint, or would mix the deviousness
with subtle smarts. But abomination
after abomination. God, how can
they not see they can’t pass judgment unless
they themselves act with dignity? They’ll stand
in front of a camera, a straight face,
no irony, and claim the opposite
of what they’ve said or done. I don’t understand:
have they all gone to theater school and aced
the same class: Smug Assholes and Crazy Shit?

Ken Waldman is the author of Trump Sonnets: Volume 1 (The First 50 Days) (The Ridgeway Press, 2017), his seventh full-length book of poems. His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Beloit Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and Massachusetts Review, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. See kenwaldman.com for more.

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Aaron Belz
To Avert Calamity

Someone needs to unthrone this jackalope
but quick! Already tinier beasts gather
in the woods, under cover of the news,
to appoint themselves a this or that. I say.
Back in our day, if a large, unwieldy
sales-monster came lumbering through the yard
we knew why Mama kept a broom
by the front door and where Papa kept his gun;
yet this, our civilized horde of like-minded
so-and-so’s, can’t seem to raise its sight
to the King Harlequin that’s taking it
from behind, and maybe that’s why! No good
angle on the beast while it huffs. No
clean shot at it. Already smaller offspring
(are they offspring?) fall from its pouch
like alien spawn, their eyes opening
wide upon the sunlit greens of our Fair Capital
their wet and tender loins unfurling,
drooping to the sod, ker-plunk.
I know the midnight meetings well enough,
my friends; I’ve been to them before.
I know what they decide at them,
and it isn’t right. Someone needs to get
the feathers and hot tar and send this P.O.S.
back to Vegas or wherever his glittering
suit will be at home, to man whatever sideshow
he’s best at barking for, draw them in:
Draw those patrons in, not these. Not us.
This ain’t a lowdown show of barbarousness.

Aaron Belz Aaron Belz’s books include Glitter Bomb (Persea, 2014) and Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010).  His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The Washington Post, and many other places. He lives in Hillsborough, NC, where he owns a bicycle shop with his son.

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Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios
Alternate Truths/Stoned Soup

A good soup starts with a good pot.
A good pot is one without a hole.
A good hole is filled with onions.
A good onion does not look like a rusty carrot.
A good carrot is not celadon, or green
A good green is unknowing and softer than a stone.
A good stone will not thumbprint the water.
Good water is as hard to find as empty pockets.
Pockets that are full of makeshift music are a good gnaw.
A good gnaw begins in a junk shop.
A junk shop is filled with winged secrets.
A good secret starts with a cockamamie lie.
A good lie starts with a knock-kneed veil.
A veiled need starts with hunger.
Hunger starts and ends with soup.
A good soup starts with a good pot.
A good pot doesn’t have a hole.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios is the author of the poetry collection Special Delivery (Yellow Chair Review, 2016). Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Stories of Music, Volume 2; Love Notes from Humanity: The Love, Lust & Loss Collection; and Happy Holidays. Her poems have appeared in the journals The Poeming Pigeon, Clementine, Kentucky Review, Unsplendid, Scissors and Spackle, MockingHeart Review, Noble Gas Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, Folliate Oak and Cumberland River Review, among others.

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Liz Ahl
Fake Ghazal

The narcissistic man-child points and blusters “fake news!”
during his most recent spew and blather to make news.

Just when I think my despair has touched its limit,
the creature’s maw unhinges, finds more of me to take. News

to no one: his voice chews at the frayed ends of my hope.
To no one with an ounce of heart or sense is this ache news.

The relentless pixels of his thin-skinned cruelty might break me,
break you, break the world, even, finally, break “news.”

I know I’m meant to find some inch of ground where vigilance
and sanity can coexist. Or maybe I should forsake news.

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds, forthcoming in 2017 from Hobblebush Books. She has written four chapbooks: Home Economics and Talking About the Weather, both from Seven Kitchens Press in 2012 (the latter as part of the “Summer Kitchen” series); Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), which received the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader’s Choice” in Poetry Award in 2011; and  A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration, Atlanta Review, Able Muse, Measure, Cutthroat, and Rappahannock Review.

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Ned Balbo
The Dark

Each day, we wake to crisis,   Is
the likelihood of treason   reason
a charge impossible   possible,
to counter or ignore.   or
A small light, like a star   are
behind us, shadowy,   we
flares brightly for a moment,   meant
grows dim… What should we do?   to                                    
The dark provides no template—   let
We’re caught beyond our power,   our
some unknown destination   nation                 
awaiting us… In free fall,   fall?

burned by the atmosphere,   Fear
will we survive? With what   what
scant payload, what supplies?   lies
What quake or thunderhead   ahead,
will follow when we land?   and    

Hold on, and brace for impact.   act.

Ned Balbo is the author of Upcycling Paumanok (Measure Press, 2016), and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press, 2010) winner of the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. Recent poems may be found at NewVerse News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle: Poets Respond and in Ecotone, First Things, New Criterion, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

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