Jane McPhetres-Johnson
Growing up beside the continental divide

we lived on the eastern slope where the great slabs
of red stone tumbled down steep inclinations
above our heads and buried their sharp points
in the sandy soil where wild flower children followed
in the foothilly steps of Chief Left Hand’s canyons

barely aware of the other side’s western faces
except when we skied the highest mountain peaks
and got lured down “advanced-only” trails in error
or dare, ending somewhere over there where
great white mogul-ridden slopes tipped us over
and dumped us into summer fields of cantaloupes.

Who were these people anyway, staking out claims
to long straight rows of gain in their shiny tractor
cabs full of stereo talk-radio heads and cool A/C and
who were their followers, shadowy rows of fold-up
folks strung out behind, hands full of melons, eyes
peeled for another sort of slippery slope called ICE

and who are we in this country of pointless furs and
filtered glasses, one foot in salt of the earth-melting
fat cats’ oil and gas pipes fracking our own mother’s
bedrock and broken waters so we can keep the other
foot on the up slope, keep on truckin’ and flying free
sky high over the not-so-ancient great wall of Mexico?

Dying out incontinentally divided now, hanged, drawn
and quartered into states of red and purple and black
and blue, so bruised and beaten down and swollen up
we’ve lost our heads and now we’ve got a head that’s
lost his way, a bipolar chief for two polarized slopes
tottering, divided, forgetting how to lean on each other.

Jane McPhetres-Johnson holds an MFA from Goddard College where she studied with Thomas Lux and Stephen Dobyns. Working for the NEH via the New England Foundation in the 1980s and 90s, she created and coordinated literature and history programs in public libraries throughout the region. During that time she edited two readers, Consider the Source: Old Tales (New Eng. Foundation for the Humanities, 1989) and Encompassing Columbus: Five Italian Lives (New Eng. Foundation for the Humanities, 1992), both designed to facilitate discussions in library programs. She recently moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she takes daily walks on the Robert Frost trail accompanied by the ghost of Emily Dickinson.

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Anne Kenny
Alternative facts

Anne Kenny‘s poems have appeared in Equinox, South, Blue Dog Australian Poetry, Contemporary Haibun Online and other journals as well as in anthologies including Mirror Writing: An Anthology of Poetry by Common Room Poets (Categorical Books, 2009). She has recently claimed dual citizenship and is now the proud owner of an Irish passport and plans to remain European.

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James Diaz
The Arrival Never Ending

I dreamt you destroyed the world
and you weren’t even here to see it
something about the heat pressing in
and the planet was getting uncomfortable in its skin
and the people I loved
didn’t know what to do
with themselves anymore

life was getting small
words repeated like incantation of spirit

we cannot wash fear off

time being circular
hate follows its own tail
in the dark

and under the table
a tug of what-call-it?
Hidden light,
the atomic morning after?

I dreamt that all of that hate was turned into a garden
and there was no water to nurture something new
and I wept knowing how you didn’t even notice.

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Ditch, HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak, Pismire, Chronogram and My Favorite Bullet. His first book of poems, This Someone I Call Stranger, is forthcoming from Indolent Books (2017). He lives in upstate New York.

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Desiree Morales
Anthropocene

I remember it very specifically
as it’s happening
so I’ll be able to tell someone
how astonishing it was
beautyberries neon purple
the shaded trail I walk
the year summer was lethal
I mean the year heat
almost killed me
the year it seems like
everyone good was dying
the year earthquakes
were everywhere now
the year North Dakota locked
people like you in dog kennels
and wrote numbers on their bodies
to identify numbered bodies
even though people like you
have names
the year of lemons
so gold like daylight
I purchased them extravagantly
showed them affection
wondered how long
we would have lemons like that
the year Haiti flooded
the year we were horrified
the year we were angry that others
were not horrified, the year we sang
Redemption Song at the capital
at Black Lives Matter, a few yards
from men fondling their
semi-automatic weapons
the year of the Rain Room
the year I knew I’d have to fight
for drinking water someday
I mean the year
we fought for drinking water
the year I came home
from drinking wine with my
beautiful friends
saw the news
and sunk to the floor sobbing
I am remembering very specifically
as it happens
which is called bearing witness
which is called a kind of hubris
believing there will be someone to tell

Desiree Morales‘s work has appeared in Chaparral, Truck, and Conflict of Interest. She grew up in Southern California and lives in Austin, Texas.

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Lucinda Marshall
The Breakdown Of All Things

Priests of old gods tell us
that we need a moral compass,

while methodically laying
siege to political agency.

“Stop The Bloodless Coup!”

our protest signs implore
as the unthinkable becomes normal,

reality revised and televised—
the medium has always
been the message.

Scientists and archivists race to
safeguard knowledge from extinction,

lest truth become relegated
to the margins of collective memory,

and deceits of false omnipotence
metastasize into perverted epitaphs
of democratic delusion,

as the sound of jackboots draws near.

Lucinda Marshall‘s poems have appeared in Sediments, One Sentence Poems, Stepping Stones Magazine, Columbia Journal, Transition on indolentbooks.com, Poetica Magazine, Haikuniverse, ISLE, and elsewhere. She blogs at Reclaiming Medusa. Lucinda co-facilitates the award-winning Teen Writing Club in Gaithersburg, Md. She is a member of the Maryland Writers’ Association and Women, Action, and the Media.

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Howard F. Stein
Welcome

Welcome to the land
of no hope, but dread;
of no listening, but shouting;
of no love, but hate;
of no safety, but cowering.
Welcome to the unwelcoming land,
where trust is shipwrecked
on the craggy shoals
of bitterness and revenge.

Good morning to a bloody sun;
good evening to a crimson moon;
and good night to weeping stars.
The universe no longer knows
what to make of us—
nor do we, as every stranger
fears assault from those
who feel assaulted
by every kind of stranger.

Who will extend
the first arm of reconciliation,
to bridge the trenches
we have dug
with our shovels of contempt?
The hour is late,
but dawn is always possible.

Howard F. Stein, an applied, medical, psychoanalytic, and organizational anthropologist, is professor emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, where he taught for nearly 35 years. He is now group facilitator of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center in Oklahoma City. He is the author of 30 books, of which 9 are poetry collections. His most recent poetry books are In the Shadow of Asclepius: Poems from American Medicine ( Dog Ear Publishing, 2011), Raisins and Almonds (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and Light and Shadow (Doodle and Peck Publishing, 2016). He is poet laureate of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology.

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Carla Drysdale
Inaugural Haiku

Damp Geneva seeps
into our cold feet marching
to protect women.

Stone sky tablet for
black calligraphy of trees
writing history.

The new president
says he’ll get rid of columns
when building new rooms.

The new president
says he’ll protect you from them
and then the rain falls.

The president’s mouth
puckers when he peers at us:
“I love you all now.”

Carla Drysdale is the author of the poetry collections Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Spiraling, Public Pool, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, LIT, Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, Global City Review, and Literary Mama, among other journals, and in the anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo. In May, 2014 she was awarded PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize for her poem, “Inheritance.” Born in London, Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France.

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Vivian Wagner
Better Red Hat Slogans

Make Art
Make Time
Make Space
Make Peanut Butter Cookies
Make Pussy Hats
Make Way
Make
Just Make

Vivian Wagner is an associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Creative Nonfiction, The Atlantic, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Eyedrum Periodically, 3QR, and other publications. She is also the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington, 2010).

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Andrea Wyatt
Return of the Kraken

To Ana Mara Saunders

When Kraken wakes waves whip the depths,
the dark abyssal plain,
turns up the Vulcan boulders on his stretching shoulders—
past the knotted sea wrack strewn
the Kraken lumbers ‘neath the moon,
lumbers through the surf and onto shore—
smashes all the fairy lights, the barques, the boats
devours stoats and tiny babes
sends all reeling to their graves—

but here resides a brute invited in,
no Norse creation come to slake his thirst
but worse, the wild-eyed butcher boy—
spawn of Mammon’s crook and slag,
husband to a winsome hag who takes him at his word,
his empty, yawning space—
homegrown monster, mad with schemes,
apocalyptic end time dreams,
here, disordered reason in this withered season,
welcome in the Kraken.

Andrea Wyatt is the author of three poetry collections. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copperfield Review, Gargoyle and Gravel. She works for the National Park Service in Washington, DC and is associate editor of poetry journal By&By.

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Kelley White
Is it finished?

Cars were parked along the narrow road overgrown with weeds
by the abandoned waterslide. That place of silence where ghosts may raid
dust-filled tunnels to never-swept roads. And cars were parked up
and down the hills beside the forgotten bumper boats shifting
in the wind against each other’s soft rubber bodies and the asphalt climbing
wall, its harnesses clanging like empty flagpoles. I looked down the hill
and saw a satellite dish where none had ever been
and police lights flashing. Cries of people, pushing strollers,
unloading children from cars. I was afraid. Do I need to say that?
I had forgotten when to expect the sun to go down but I was certain it would not set
in that direction, that the people were heading away from light.
The lake lay gray as old meat in its harbor. I turned away,
hoping that the line of cars pulled at odd angles from the road would end
before my own road huddled into the heavy woods. It did. But even home, now
sitting at my kitchen table, I hear a kind of rumbling. I am singing to myself
to drown it out. Songs I’ve forgotten. Singing, opening envelopes, statements
from empty bank accounts, small papers with tomorrow’s news.
If you were here you might be able to recognize my songs. This is no time
to be alone. Banks of lights whir on, lighting up my woods, my trees, my wind.
A man at a bank of microphones. No.

Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire as a pediatrician. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are waterslide (Boston Poet Publishing, 2008) and Two Birds in Flame (Beech River Books, 2010). She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

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