Judith Terzi
The Punchman Takes Us Back

to commedia dell’arte. Back to makeshift
booths clothed in Neapolitan stripes.

Imagine the Punchman as he maneuvers
the strings of marionettes, one in his

very own image: Pulcinella. He is jester,
he is Lord of Trickery, he is Master

of Manipulation. He carries batons to knock off
nemeses: the foreigner, the diplomat,

the donkey, the ghost of discretion. And often
the devil & the dinosaur. “That’s

the way we do it,” squawks the Punchman.
Addio! È cosí che si fa, brutto maiale!

(People say he speaks through a kazoo which
limits his vowel capacity. And linguists

swear he practices glossolalia, which is hardly
equal to speaking in tongues.)

Audiences anticipate the wrath, the staccato,
the brio, they revel in the braggadocio.

They are “pleased as Punch” as the Punchman
dangles Pulcinella, jitters & jangles

& jumbos his strings in a digital delirium
across a slapstick stage. As he

choreographs a tarantella like no one has
ever dared to dance before.

Judith Terzi’s is the author of If You Spot Your Brother Floating By (Kattywompus Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Atlanta Review (International Publication Prize, 2015), Caesura, Columbia Journal, Raintown Review, Spillway, and in anthologies such as Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle); Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo); and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series). Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.

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Daniel Sokoloff
Coronation

I watched the boldest,
the richest fools our country had to offer
gather in their moot,
all to declare to each other, and maybe to us,
why they should lead us, and no one else.
Hypocrites and sociopaths the lot of them,
business as usual, but something unexpected happened:
a goblin snuck in.

Grey clouds gather,
and I try to tell myself
that they are just the envoys of winter.
All this, the freezing winds,
the threat of cities buried in snow like powder,
the absent sun,
it’s just winter as usual.

There’s a part of me that wants to relax,
just take it easy and ignore the news
the way so many ignored the election
but the politics don’t feel abstract now.
The goblin has dredged up the nastiest
ideas, set the politics of identity to war,
and now even looking in the mirror
reveals a complicated spiral.
I’m bisexual, but I’ve got white skin,
maybe that means I’ll make it through this era alive;
But then again, most Jews pass for white, until the men
robed like ghosts remind us that
no, we aren’t white after all.
I never thought I would be like this, so
political.

Fear is corrosive,
and we’ve all caught it,
even those who cheered as the goblin
shouted down the career politicians,
and danced the fiery dance that so many angry people
felt for their common man.
Fear is the reason we’re turning on one another;
I would say it’s like a wildfire, but that isn’t right.

It’s more like a catchy tune you hear,
one you hate, but it’s so simple and persistent,
so prevalent, there’s really no avoiding it, and eventually
you can’t get it out of your head, no matter how hard you try,
and before you know it,
when some goblin steps forward to accept
a crown that is far too heavy for his neck to support,
and they play that catchy tune,
you find yourself nodding along with it,
a touch of warmth.

Daniel Sokoloff is a poet from Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in The Basil O’Flaherty and Anti-Heroin Chic. For more about Daniel and his work, visit Lokepoet.weebly.com.

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Ada Limón
Killing Methods

Outside, after grieving for days,
I’m thinking of how we make stories,
pluck them like beetles out of the air,

collect them, pin their glossy backs
to the board like the rows of stolen
beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra,

where the waves broke over us
and I still loved the country, wanted
to suck the bones of the buried.

Now, I’m outside a normal house
while friends cook and please
and pour secrets into each other.

A crow pierces the sky, ominous,
clanging like an alarm, but there
is no ocean here, just tap water

rising in the sink, a sadness clean
of history only because it’s new,
a few weeks old, our national wound.

I don’t know how to hold this truth,
so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down
in case, later, no one believes me.

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California.

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James Diaz
Unnameable

For the longest time
we wont give him a name
he will be called “That Man”
or “This One”
like a burgeoning hurricane
we’ll never know
who spotted him first
what to call
his particular danger
washing up on the shore
like poisoned letters
in a bottle
addressed to too many
vague fears
all at once

this wall was always an interior one
an impossible construction
whose fierce
overly demanding brick
I’d tear out with my soul
if I had hands
translucent enough

the hate that you store inside of yourself
can be your story for only so long
translations will shake out the fire
we’ll leave buckets of water
at your door step
in the dead of night

we’ll not mark our houses
we have no fear
of your angel of death
our love & resistance
will carry us so deep
into your storm
the seeds that we plant
will explode
inside of your chest

we will not give you a name
the story is ours
and our pens
are already in motion.

James Diaz, an activist and author, lives in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Ditch, Chronogram, Cheap Pop Lit, Foliate Oak, The Voices Project, Pismire, Epigraph, My Favorite Bullet, and Collective Exile. He is the founding editor of the literary arts magazine Anti-Heroin Chic.

This poem is not previously published.