Joseph Felkers

Encounters with Strangers: Caledonia, Michigan

1.

Wayne has not slept a wink since
Mary Sue died so he spends his nights
waiting at the 24 hour gym off 37
He sits near the drinking fountain
in case anyone comes His new dog
waits in the car all night watching through the window.

2.

After Luanne closes the register for the night
she crosses Main just in time for
karaoke at the Family Tavern
She listens to younger women cover
Fleetwood Mac and she doesn’t
drink much this summer but tonight
she deserves it and will until she remembers
to forget Haley and Dale and what they did to her
and notices the bartender and how beautiful
she looks in that cowgirl hat.

3.

Emma says that we should get coffee again
sometime soon at the Essential
Bean on Cherry Valley
like it’s Drivers Ed again having now found
God she’d like to catch up
on what we’ve been up to and honestly, who knows
If she’s actually interested.

4.

Transferring out of Community next semester Tyler
drives hours with Chris with the bald head
to apartment shop and all she thinks about
is how badly Tyler needs a haircut
The way carwash sweat of July collects
between his glasses and hairline

5.

After four years of love Jeps finally
gives up
the chewing tobacco
These days the meds make him too nauseous
to work the gym counter, the smell of overnight
sweat too much in the early mornings.

6.

Ronie had her baby girl
Fourteen months was so worth it
Just seeing everyone’s reactions to the most beautiful
child Kent County’s seen in years Soon
she will return to the Ice Cream Express and make
the best dip
cones on Main St.

7.

Home for the summer, Josie’s
a liberal what a shock to see
the shortest student in the history of Caledonia High
nurse jetlag from a flight from California
for three whole weeks when she wakes
Megan and Lizzie will be there waving
banners in her face.

8.

Dan can’t quit the cigarettes According
to Kathy and their twelve girls he’s been off
for a year now but after dark, the nights when no one visits
he sneaks to the dusty pole barn It would kill
Sarah or Bridget or Constance and his hundreds
and hundreds of grandbabies to know.

9.

Felicia keeps carving her mom’s name
into the beams of her cottage
It’s been unfinished for two years now the drive north,
too much time to think.

10.

This is the first time that Sam with the two
first names has been home since
he tested positive how could this be the product of
years of a Christian education? His violin
Alarms in the dark.

11.

My father might kill Kylie
by the end of the summer
If she dumps her grass clippings
on his yard again
he'll raise high hell
To calm his temper he lets the dog
shit on her lawn, doesn’t pick it up.

12.

Chris can’t keep keeping
secrets from his kids
It hurts every time he misses aeroplanes
Has to tell them its
for work reasons reality is
this will never change.

13.

Just like when I was in fifth grade Todd sits
in his office chair and blasts
Journey​ for the kids to run
the dewey gym it is summer and the Emmons Lake
kids still melt to his screaming voice.

14.

Dawn
is still the blondest woman in the entire world.
She makes friends just to break them.
With her honey
British voice she enters homes and takes
things, so slowly

---

Joseph Felkers studies English at Harvard College. His work appears in Juked, Rust + Moth, Birdfeast, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by Harvard University, Princeton University, and The Poetry Society of Virginia.

Jessica Kim

Life lessons 

i. 

do not ever ask for an instrument 
on your seventh birthday
like the year you got an acoustic guitar and every 
day you had to drag it across its bridge and up 
into the attic to pluck its strings 
in the grotesque shadows of moonbeams 
but even the dust bunnies mushroomed 
on its maplewood skin 
before you could strum a chord. 

ii.

do not ever try to find your x 
in the flickering eyes 
of the imaginary black cat 
that stares back at you only during witch hour 
and there’s still thirteen unsolved problems 
in the real world that you can only tangent across 
so you don’t belong in our subsets
of our friend(x) and you have everything 
but a solution. 

iii.

do not build sandcastles on cloudy days 
when you clump the sand on your palms
that start to age with the blemishes 
of all the trips to the grocery store 
and balancing plastic bags full of instant coffee 
but even the tides cannot enclave you 
from its kinetic memories 
stored in houses of glass bottles 
so you have to bottle up 
your own messages. 

iv. 

do not forget your mother’s homemade dishes 
that dripped of saccharine courage 
in the steamy crooks of her kitchen 
where she hides pockets of spices 
shaped with the ages of her love 
and now you live by yourself 
but the smell of her mooncakes still 
palpitate on your empty stove 
and pulls you back home. 

v. 

do.  

---

Jessica Kim is a writer based in California with works appearing or forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Semicolon Lit, and more. Her poems have recently been recognized by the National Poetry Quarterly and Pulitzer Center. She loves all things historical and sour.

Clare Welsh

YOUNG AMERICAN POETS

Our hearts like shelter dogs
slipped from cages of cool light.
Our run-on sentence of road dipping
into the valley of the shadow
of hope, who, these days, can be seen
smoking in a fur coat dragging
silver candy wrappers. To be
so glamour-haunted and hollow-boned.
To boil with an admiration hot
as jealousy.  Already we have
outlived The Greats like singing candles,
their mouths dripping wax
as they lumped themselves
into fire—They did that for us. 
Our gratitude wrestles the clever twitch
 in our irises. We never did 
sweep the honeycomb from the stage, 
sculpt idols. In a hotel room we pour vodka 
into water bottles. Text the moon
you up? Text heyyy to the jaw
of a fox laughing on a park bench, text
our country—which has no name
to kiss, or kill, but with a dry mouth 
bites our love songs into silence—
We’re coming for you.

---

Clare Welsh is a poet based in Pittsburgh. Recent poems have appeared in The Coal Hill Review, Salt Hill, and The Massachusetts Review. A graduate of The University of New Orleans writing workshop, her work has been nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. Her chapbook Chimeras (2015) is available through Finishing Line Press.

Ammar Aziz

Aliyah Daskal Prays In Quarantine

Aliyah Daskal starts her day by thanking God
For returning her soul to the body
After sleep,
What her mother referred to as momentary death.
This prayer is not supposed to have God’s real name: Adonai
For she has not washed her hands yet
And her mother deemed it improper to say His name
Before the washing ritual:
“Because you could touch something unclean,
Such as your genitals,
Or you could have impure dreams
While being asleep”, her mother had said.
So, once she’s purified, she will recite:
“Fear of Adonai is the beginning of wisdom”.
 
Aliyah Daskal goes to urinate
And later, she recites Asher Yatzar:
“Blessed are You, Adonai,
Our God,
King of the universe,
Who formed man with wisdom
And created within him many openings
And many hollow spaces.”
 
Aliyah Daskal makes chaye with a French toast.
She usually skips the prayers before meals
And says, ‘Bismillah’ instead –
A word her aunt had taught her in Lahore.
 
Aliyah Daskal picks up a random book
From her father’s sandalwood shelf:
‘You didn't sow a child in me by Celia Dropkin’ –
She turns some pages and puts it back.
 
Aliyah Daskal switches on the television
And surfs the channels fast.
‘News channels are good at reminding you
About your futile struggles to survive’,
She recalls her widowed colleague saying that,
Whose husband worked as a public health reporter
And died of the pandemic, he denied.
 
Aliyah Daskal makes lentils with rice 
And sits close to the window
In her 4th story flat:
People continue to commute:
Men wearing masks,
Women wrapped in scarves.
Everyone wants to reach somewhere.
 
Aliyah Daskal goes through her father’s diary:
Masala Dosa, Bhuna Khichuri, Kolhapuri potato curry  –
All recipes are vegetarian
Except one
That she fancies certain nights.
 
Aliyah Daskal does not like her father’s poems
And wonders, why would he not use rhymes.
Indifferently, she begins to read one page:
 
“I don’t consider this afternoon to be a new beginning –
 although that’s what they want me to believe
 for the priest has washed away my sins –
 what a drizzle always does to dusty leaves:
 it leaves the dust moist
 but never really washes it away.
The cacophony of my thoughts echo
 in the silent chambers of her body
reminding her of my ugly existence
which wouldn’t let her sleep.”
 
Aliyah Daskal flips through the diary
And finds another poem:
 
“My neighbors belong to a sect
which mourn every year
for forty days
and then, there are days
in between
when they mourn again.
In the courtyard of their house,
they take care of a horse
who is chained and covered in black.
On certain nights,
they walk on coals
and use swords to slash
and whip their bare backs.
And here, locked in my room,
I imagine her bare breasts
and dwell on the days gone.”
 
Aliyah Daskal puts the diary aside
And recites: “Praised are You, Adonai,
My Lord,
And the Lord of my ancestors,
Who closes my eyes
In sleep,
My eyelids in slumber.”
She thinks if her mother had ever taught her a prayer
To heal the hollow spaces within.
 
Aliyah Daskal tries to sleep
And wonders
If the brain masala recipe
Her father wrote
Is, in fact, a poem      
Or can it be a poem
If she wants it to be a poem?

---

Ammar Aziz is a Pakistani poet and filmmaker. His work has appeared on Wild Court, Poetry at Sangam, Dhaka Tribune, Muse India, Narrow Road, among other places. His multi-award winning films have been screened at several prestigious film festivals around the world. He lives in Lahore. 

Dani Smotrich-Barr

Wallpaper

Turning fourteen without trying to,
or wanting that,
                  half-expecting to inevitably become               
the type of person you see on television,
     some woman who cleans the kitchen counters until they shine,              
                                         all off-air.
 
I think I’m finally ready to be young, I tell her,
now that it’s too late,
           now that the world looks something
like she promised. She says, of course you don’t remember
the day you decided to be alive
but you remember perfectly the ones that you didn’t. Because in the worst
of the middle of the night                  the house feels like a thing
you might have re-created
without knowing there was a prior floor-plan.                       
 
Of course, the poet drew it first,
dusted it. Even put a doily on it.
 
Crying in the car I’m trying
to explain what it feels like to have vanished
and then walked for days without having noticed
what you lost or when you lost it.                   
 
Of course, the poet wrecked it first,
like you see on TV, with a jackhammer and a broken toilet lid
and chrysanthemums growing out of the cracks.
 
The poet ate an orange. The poet drank a glass of whiskey.
I watched him, as if by replicating his motions I could pre-date him.
 
The woman cleaning the counters kept talking.
She had a lot of good points about how much oil to put in a pan
that I hadn’t yet considered,
and I envied her for that.
 
                    We all became un-hinged.
 
                                           The poet threw things on the floor. The woman covered the counters
in grease and writhed back and forth, back and forth. A chicken,
waiting for plucking.
The skin of the skin
of the thing.

---

Dani Smotrich-Barr grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and recently graduated from Wesleyan University. They have had work published by Vagabond City, STORGY, and Cease, Cows, and won the 2020 Dorchester Prize from Wesleyan.

michal 'mj' jones

Embrace

for Devonte Hart

I would have washed ashore, too,
If I had been in the car,
 
Returned as bruised bones to ocean face
Collected for headlines.
A body reduced to its parts.
 
But I will not,
Devonte, cannot invite the image
into my trained longhand, where my son
sleeps in peace.
 
Instead I find you.
Walking the grounds of Sequoia groves
in warm gilded sunlight, field
and fauna your domain. Without fear amidst
these giants, standing guard.
 
I will meet you there between coast
and vanished, with blackberries or whatever
sweet treat your heart and belly crave. We will eat
in the damp morning. There is more
than enough to eat here.
 
And if you ever get scared – I do mean ever –
I will wrap you in these arms,
hold you ear-over-heart close,
and believe you.

---

Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a poet & parent in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, & Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. They are an Assistant Poetry Editor at Foglifter Press, and have fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices, & Kearny Street Workshop. They are an MFA graduate fellow at Mills College.

Joan Glass

There is Nothing Else

Today, my friends had their first child.   During the pregnancy,
I had teased them, suggesting that they name her after me. 
July 14th is her birthdate, Bastille Day, day of revolution and new beginnings.
This is good, I say aloud, to no one in particular.
My nephew Frankie was born on the 17th of September, 2005, in Boston. 
His Germanic name means free man.  On the same day in 1630, the Puritans
settled on a name for their new home, after Boston, England. 
And on September 17th of 1862, at Antietam, more blood was shed
than in any American military battle since.  Frankie died on March 30th, 2017. 
All I know about that day is that it rained without stopping.  There is nothing else.
The bloodiest battles of our lives have been fought before, by our mothers,
or by strangers we have never met, in lands we may not recognize.  
The names of towns where we raise our children first belonged to others,
across an ocean, on land that for one reason or another, ceased to be home. 
Boston, Massachusetts, was first Boston, Lincolnshire.  
Birmingham, Michigan, the town where I first started asking too many questions,
and where my father fixed cars beside his father, was first Birmingham, England. 
When he left us, he wrote in his goodbye note, that he had to leave before
he hurt someone: I was going to kill my dad, or myself.  I remember reading it
and wondering, if he considered adding                                  or you but instead
put the pen down, before backing the Cadillac out of our driveway for the last time. 
My friends tell me that they came up with a name for their daughter that will
belong only to her.  Can that ever really be true?  I close my eyes and whisper
her name the way I used to say my prayers in the dark. 
Today in history, a child took her first breath.  She opened her eyes. 
There is nothing else.

---

Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial (Korean/Caucasian) second generation American in recovery. She grew up in Michigan and South Korea, and now lives near New Haven, Connecticut. Her poems have been published or are upcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Fem, Rise Up Review, Black Napkin Press, Dying Dahlia Review, The Missing Slate, Vagabond City Lit, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Literary Mama, Easy Street, and Right Hand Pointing, among others. Her poem “Bathing Scene” was featured on the Saturday Poetry Series: Poetry as it Ought to Be, and her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Elizabeth Theriot

Warm blood around a spear

The wooden boards
press spinal
into her back. Achilles is
faceless, head                 disconnected
from the chest beneath it,
hair,     the curls of sky.
 
Briseis is           moonless. She slips
inside his neck
as the ship
carries her far from home,
beaten by the waves
into a crown of pain.
The joints between
her fingers slide and click like
two sides of a fastened breastplate,
his breath against her
wet with fruit.
The ship quakes, then
silence.
Warm blood around a spear.

In my apartment
Achilles pours
gas station rum
into a cup of root
beer. The condensation
wets his palms, drips darkly
on my skirt.      Summer
air presses my side and              each hair
on my arm sways
gold. When Achilles
smiles               I am gum peeled,
foil crumpled, spearmint
flesh                  chewed until
flavorless. I smile back,
eyes closing like a pair of fists.

---

Elizabeth Theriot is a queer Southern writer with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. She earned her MFA from The University of Alabama and is writing a memoir about disability and desire. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow and a teaching fellow with the nonprofit Desert Island Supply Company. You can find her work in Yemassee, Barely South Review, Winter Tangerine, Ghost Proposal, Vagabond City, A VELVET GIANT, Tinderbox, and others. She lives in Birmingham, AL.

Cameron Morse

Yet Again

Yet another impulse
toward the tenderness of morning
I borrow shade from wherever
I can—the minivan,
the portico. The summer is full
stoked. Full throttled,
I breathe easy in the coolness only
of stone, the low
key of water and welcoming breezes,
the lowly and the meek:
the meekness of maybe, the lowliness
of hello.           I borrow my shadow
from the daystar, thank you
very much, who are much, much
more than I deserve, beneficent service
dog of the sun, I am blind
led only by the tinkle of your collar, tufts
of your winter coat falling everywhere
about me. There is something homey here,
            homely here homey
something final, finial of treetops, the thud
of a car door.
Thanks a lot, Lucifer, for all the good
it got me. Lioness of never
Everland, pounce. Princess, pounce.

---

Cameron Morse was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, Portland Review and South Dakota Review. His first poetry collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press's 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020). He lives with his wife Lili and two children in Blue Springs, Missouri, where he serves as poetry editor for Harbor Review. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.  

john compton

when the street becomes our home

i wonder
when the stock market
will, so violently, crash
 
causing bank accounts
to pull back & swell –
     whose life
 
will the tsunami cleanse?
who will drown?
i lie in bed & calculate
 
ways i can't pay my bills. 
     what will be taken first?
the house - the car -
 
the knife i place on my wrist?
each item checked off
& carried out
 
until the only thing left
is my name. maybe.
though the government
 
will surely, lastly, take that.
the street will bleed my feet,
the cold will chap my skin.
 
who will give
the last of their change
when we're all fighting
 
for the corner to sleep.
for the cardboard box.
for the dry spot.

---

when holding war

we search the sky's
no moonlight –
charred black aroma. 
 
& in my arms
we decipher the difference
between life & death. 
 
the music is loud –
listen to the bass
of explosive songs
 
in the soundwaves, 
in the background,
in the walls of your throat.
 
your breath lifts
a tender missile
into the drum of my ear
 
& silence thereafter
ricochets shrapnel –
your hand no longer knows
 
its trajectory. 
your heart detonates
blood vessels. 

---

john compton is a 33 year old gay poet who lives in kentucky. his poetry resides in his chest like many hearts & they bloom like vigorously infectious wild flowers. he lives in a tiny town, with his husband josh and their 8 dogs and 2 cats. he is the author of trainride elsewhere (Pressed Wafer/Rouge Wolf Press, 2016), that moan like a saxophone (kindle, 2016), ampersand (Plan B Press, 2019), a child growing wild inside the mothering womb (Ghost City Press, 2020), i saw god cooking children / paint their bones (Blood Pudding Press 2020), burning his matchstick fingers his hair went up like a wick (Black Heart Press, 2021), and to wash all the pretty things off my skin (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2021). he has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Amee Nassrene Broumand

Visitor

The air is grey and spiny today, filled with billions of bright pins. There’s a thump on my window. I look out. A drab bird sits in the tree beyond. The bird reminds me of something I can’t quite place, or perhaps someone I refuse to place. Electric fog seeps inside my head and infects my brain, which crackles and zings, choked with a tingling veil. There’s a thump on my window. Tattered and spare, the bird has fallen down from a dream. I look at the bird, the bird looks at me. Light is inexorable even as it appears to waver, relentlessly lapping away at the edges of life. Careless. The bird doesn’t sing, the bird thumps on my window. I’ve known my share of shadows. Thump. I’ve known my time of sickening. Thump. Stars and starlings wheel above, though I see nothing, though the dark is closed to me. What are you, anyway? The bird peers in through the pane, eyes keen. I’m afraid to open the window. 

---

Amee Nassrene Broumand is an Iranian American writer from the Pacific Northwest. A Best of the Net nominee and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in numerous journals including Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Rust + Moth, Barren Magazine, Sundog Lit, and Empty Mirror. Find her on Twitter @AmeeBroumand.  

Carly Madison Taylor

Milk Route

Even if I am somewhere, I am wishing for there:
that sway of life through a torn-down town, charred
& dripping bones of a rumor on Cherry Street in the dark
of the first trumpeted Thursday, the end of summer.

Some places become homes by habit. This accidental habit.
I am predisposed to long always for a stillness I cannot attain.
I am never anywhere but wishing & I tighten my train whistle
crown & I know which light takes longest on Kellogg. I know

what it is to stand dwarfed by a city of hot air balloons
on the cusp of goodbye, which is agony, which is not goodbye
except in waking. One morning I’d stayed up all night.
One morning I’d heard poem after poem after poem.

Someday I will be somewhere, & I hope it is there.
Someday I will become the fog on its cat feet, this habit.

---

Carly Madison Taylor is a poet, songwriter, painter, and essayist living in Buffalo, NY. They earned their BA in Creative Writing and Dance Studies from Knox College in 2016. They serve as Art Editor for Variant Lit. More of their work can be found at Poke, Crêpe & Penn, Boston Accent Lit, and elsewhere. They’re on Twitter @carma_t and Instagram @car_ma_t. 

Alex Dang

Earl Sweatshirt Drops An 8 Minute Music Video

here, we have an opening shot of the boy sitting on the floor
with his back against a mountain of chairs, so, we have a boy,
 
leaning against all the different ways he could get off the ground,
and he’s looking up like he’s going to find all the answers there,
 
now Earl’s hair is longer and so is mine and the score is tied to an old
record that his dad probably played and didn’t my dad play guitar?
 
Earl takes off his sweatshirt and I let my hair down and my dad
digs deep into the earth and these roots are long and gnarled. now,
 
an open casket filled with hands. my dad is getting older.
before he left to work he patted me hard on the back, Earl lost
 
his dad, we got our daddy’s hands though, and my dad’s
palm presses into me, determined, and I almost fall into his
 
fate line. he works so hard, the crags in his knuckles are gorges.
when my father moves his arms, he moves canyons. gorgeous.
 
Earl’s dad was a poet and his son is a musician and my dad tells me
about the musicians and poets from his fatherland, tells me how they
 
lost fathers and sons and he did not lose but gained sons in this land,
told me, I was an artist like you once, and I hear the hollow song
 
he plays reverberating off my fingers, he holds a hammer and I hear
the strings turn ballad turn lesson turn let me play the family record
 
for the record, Earl records off beat, I get off beat, yet often we
beat records, and there’s vines around a statue, and now my father,
 
and now a tree, and the boy is swinging off the branches, there’s a
phonograph playing jazz, a tire swing, my father is tired, I get in,

the wind pushes me forward, guiding me, then the gust is breeze is whisper
is breath, leaves, and now there’s stillness and I can’t feel my own hands
 
and how do you build momentum if the pendulum has no father time
to hold on to, no hands to grab, just the sound of empty through nothing,
 
I reach my hands into the air and Earl is a basketball coach and he
tells his kids to keep their hands up, outstretched, keep jumping,
 
higher and higher our hands extend, like we’re past the ceiling, like
our past was sealed and now look, we’re open! we’re open! I’m not
 
sitting on the bench anymore, I’m on my feet, I’m taking my stance,
here, I’m singing my story and I’ll write it in the key of my father,
 
he hands me the keys and says put your signature here, it’s your name,
Dang, who in time, I became my dad, who at one time, was me.

---

Alex Dang is an internationally performing poet, TEDx speaker, and slam poetry champion. Featured on HuffingtonPost, UpWorthy, and EverydayFeminism, his work has been viewed on YouTube over 2 million times. Dang has performed in over 50 cities, 30 states, 6 countries, and wants to know what your favorite food is.

Zebulon Huset

Health Care 101

Your ring finger waged a martyr war at Mount Car Door
then played the part of a chubby kid pouting at Christmas
    —as so many wounded things do.
 
Held near halogen, four haloed digits likened lava—lightsaber—
    but, retaining blood, the fifth piggy remained opaque.
Less brat than burnt out bulb on the outdoor Xmas string.
 
Gobbling all of your Pac-Man pellets with ghost-hunting panache,
    we claimed we feasted as if we'd fasted for a fortnight
because while giggling it sounded like Martianspeak—eventually.


Undaunted—Karl Popper’s penguins lectured on falsification.
    Hand to halogen—the churlish song of hand hair slowly singeing.
Still, a knot annexed the knuckle in a darkened enclave.
 
Doctor! Scalpel! We have a patient in need. Then violets—violets.
    A rainbow coalesced in the centrifuge then dissipated.
“Someday, the gate will open—” You chucked another acorn.

Unresponsive—I was choking on smoke, or vapor—ether…
I could never keep those noble gasses partitioned
    —like three distinct gestures in the dark.

---

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. His writing has recently appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Louisville Review, Fence, Rosebud, Atlanta Review, Texas Review and Fjords Review among others. He publishes a writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily and is the editor of the journal Coastal Shelf.

Steve Merino

The Onion Closed Before I Had the Chance to See the Wild Win the Stanley Cup

What a thing to miss, dirty
floors & cheap drinks like
I couldn’t find this in 
many bars, in any town, 
but none of those places 
would know how, at 21, 
Ashley drank vodka cranberries 
from a beer pint & puked 
in the bathroom then 
we all got kicked out
or how we bought shots
when the Wild, down
0-3, rallied to tie it up
in the second, first
Zucker then Parise then
Granlund only to lose
by one in the third or
how we screamed
as they lost the series
to Chicago, winless
again. When the Onion 
turned off the lights that 
final time the sign hung
outside for weeks
before someone finally
cut it down.

---

Steve Merino (he/him) is a poet from Saint Paul, MN. His work can be found in perhappened, the Under Review, and others. A list of full publications can be found at https://linktr.ee/steve_merino. Follow him on twitter @steve_merino.

Cathy Allman

PREDICAMENT

I text my dentist about my toothache.
At our last visit, she advised
I have three impacted wisdom teeth
and need to make a plan. That was weeks ago.
Now she’s closed per shelter-in-place orders.
She homeschools her fourth grader. She’s not
a teacher, but has to be. I ask for antibiotics.
The place my mouth hurts is the only place
a wisdom tooth had been removed. I slip
into the rabbit hole of pictures
with my granddaughter dancing. I visit MOMA
via my laptop without ever leaving the chair.  
In The Persistence of Memory, Dali melted
watches in a dreamscape. I’m warped too,
like his surreal portrait of self and time.
If the governor opens the state tomorrow,
will I be okay leaving the house? Is my lack
of crystal ball-reading ability a blessing or a curse? 
Same question about my 20/20 hindsight.
I swab the gum with a Q-tip and peroxide—
can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong
with me, a problem I can’t solve. I should be writing.
I watch a clip of Kate Hudson telling Jimmy Fallon
that if he’d made a move when they were in Almost Famous,
she’d have dated him. He blushes and scrambles
to answer, Life worked out perfectly the way it is.
I shake my head. We’re all Kate Hudson and Jimmy Fallon.  
Tomorrow a man with a new business venture
will visit our house—should I take his temperature,
give him a mask? Will it again be safe to return home
to Connecticut, where I have grown kids, and granddaughters,
and a wardrobe for a colder climate?
Yesterday morning, my husband sat in a chair
by our bed. I watched him watch a YouTube spoof
on his iPhone; he kept laughing. Still in bed
with the dog, I sipped my coffee, asked him,
What’s so funny? Because he’s hearing impaired,
what he sees on his phone sends sound
directly into his ear via Bluetooth. He can’t hear
me when his ear is plugged with sound.

---

Cathy Allman’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Blue Earth Review, Bluestem Magazine, Broad River Review, California Quarterly (CQ), Free State Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Maudlin House, Talking River and Terminus. Her poem “Not in the Wonder Box” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Paul Lieber

Three poems inspired by photos in Anarchy, Protest & Rebellion by Fred W. McDarrah

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HEBREW NEW YEAR

Photo p.283 Pretzel vendor,
Allen Street at Delancey, December 2, 1963

printed on a building
with letters the size of windows
and windows divided
into four squares. The man
selling pretzels waits for customers
in a long coat and hat. 
Those youthful salted-pretzels
stack vertically
on his tilted cart,
the size of a casket.
The body of the vendor
has gone the way bodies go,
the way pretzels go—consumed.
Split by the lens,
half of a person crosses the street,
now on the island that divides traffic;
part of him heads toward
BREW PUBLISHING COMPANY. 
The “HE” before “BREW,”
swallowed by the elements.
From the photo I can’t tell if
the Williamsburg Bridge
is to the left or right and
which way Ratner’s might be
with the bakery as you enter:
hamentaschen in rows,
black and white cookies not
far behind the piles of rugelach.
Walk further to the service
section where waiters are waiters
with no visible hobbies.
I’m seated at a table with
my mother. She’s speaking
Yiddish to the waiter.
I suddenly understand
every word. She orders
blueberry blintzes
with sour cream,
tells me she used to scrub
the floors and change sheets
in Aunt Jenny’s cathouse
on Bleeker Street.
The Jenny who was raped
by a rabbi in Rumania.
Mom says she worked in that
whorehouse when she was
a curvy 15 year old,
says “things happened,” then
whistles, “When the Saints Go
Marching In.”

---

SLOW RETURN

Photo p. 67 
Tomkins Square Park, 10th Street and
Avenue A, Feb 13, 1964

Covered with snow,
the swerving walkway,
semicircles and bare trees.
Stripped, weather beaten,
a people-less photo,
a eulogy to the park, minus
concerts, murders, gangs,
homeless—and the celebrations. 
Allen Ginsberg lived on its border,
the 10th street side.
Kristen Linkleter, a voice teacher,
walked on my back in her ground floor
apartment on the Avenue B side.
We weren’t intimate, the park and I,
until I collapsed on its bench,
coming down
from LSD.
It was then it held me in its bosom,
rocked me between A and B,
softly chanting: You belong.
Sit as long as you like---
until the trees are trees
the leaves, leaves,
buildings, buildings
and people just people--
until everything
settles back
into its name.

---

GUILT

Photo p. 16 Funeral, Sept. 25,1971, for victim of Attica
State Prison riots where thirty-nine inmates died
in the uprising           

Nine men carry the casket
where the body rests
where religion starts
or stops.
Feel the weight,
the strain.
The woman in the rear of the photo
sticks her head out
from behind a wall
and almost smiles
for the camera.
The pallbearers
carry rage…silence.
These are not prisoners.
They knew the man.
They move the casket   
into my dining room,
drop it on the table.
There it remains.                                                                  

---

Interrupted by the Sea, Paul Lieber’s second collection of poetry was published last year. (What Books Press) His first collection, Chemical Tendencies, (Tebot Bach) was a finalist in the MSR poetry contest. He also received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Contest. Three times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Paul produced and hosted “Why Poetry” on Pacifica radio in L.A. and Santa Barbara. Guests included Poet Laureates, National Book Award Winners and many known and lesser-known poets. Paul’s poems have appeared in The Moth, N.Y. Quarterly, Patterson Review, Askew, Poemeleon, Alimentum, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught creative writing at Loyola Marymount University and facilitates the poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque, the oldest literary institute in Los Angeles. Paul works as an actor. He currently teaches at AMDA. paullieber.com 

Rodd Whelpley

Lido

I can never not remember water.
Never once a time I did not trust
a pool or pond or Lake Erie  
 
to faithfully displace my weight,
welcome me like a set of cold bedsheets
growing warm and calm, familiar
 
as the dream wears on – the one
where breast stroking the air just higher 
than my parents’ arms is flying.
 
Every summer, mother on the beach,
oiled and brown against her doctor’s orders.
On weekends father too – too skinny – 
 
but a knife blade in the surf to catch me
on my side stroke plunge toward Canada,
pull me back, as if a body has an undertow,
 
which, now, since they are gone, I realize
it has. The long sheesh after never ending sheesh
of waves reclaiming pebbles from the shore,
 
calling as Demosthenes, it’s time and time and time.
Each morning at the office, I float
a grain of TetraMin to my fan-tailed friend,
 
the lonesome king of his aquarium,
watch him steal to the surface, poise,
snap, as if predation is the only atmosphere. 
 
Someday, we will know each other well enough.
Then I will ask him to recount his guppy-hood
the wild, the first time he went swimming.

---

Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shore, 2River View, Star 82 Review, Kissing Dynamite, Barren, and other journals. Catch as Kitsch Can, his first chapbook, was published in 2018. The Last Bridge is Home, his second chapbook, will come out in 2021. Find him at www.RoddWhelpley.com.  

Chisom Okafor

Walrus

In response to Francisca Bell’s ‘Love in the Time of COVID-19’

An explosion off the crest
of a distant highland ─
and a flight of pigeons
migrating swiftly into a fist
of clouds overhead, to safety ─
is how I learn to love
in the time of mourning.
I read Baldwin’s rugged
letters in the noonday sun
stopping time after time,
to clutch
an uncorked silver can of
grey goose vodka
like an archipelago
of my own thoughts. Sheltered
under an aging maple tree
in a sun-burnt garden,
I pretend its slippery trunk
is my lover’s body, bare
and fallow. I pretend
we’re two walruses
learning a new act of
remote loving.
I take swigs of rum,
shut my eyes
to the fire surging through
the firs of my throat
for this is the taste of
displacement in the time
of a great pandemic.
And when the longing
becomes a river
that threatens to consume
my shipwrecked body.
I whisper in lieu of supplications
to a river god I barely know,
to spare us one more round
of loving;
a chain of words escape
my mouth’s hollowness,
in tendrils of red moist
twinkling lights
like cries strung together.

---

Chisom Okafor is a Nigerian poet, who has worked as a nutritionist, dietitian, bartender, accountant and night auditor. He was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2018 and the Gerald Kraak Prize in 2019. His work appears in the Indian Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, SAND Journal, 2019 Gerald Kraak Anthology, The Rising Phoenix Review, Kikwetu Journal, and elsewhere. He presently works as Chapbook Editor for the Libretto Chapbook Series.

Cheryl Aguirre

Quarantine

Hands rubbing the driver’s wheel,
A slimy pearl plucked from deep beneath,
Your fingers cross my knuckles,
Spread tentacles, tender octopus,
Our aquarium ferries us from apartment to seashore,
We gaze opalescent from foggy windows and
Applaud the clouds and cars speeding by on currents unseen
Untouched by our willowy palms,
A sonorous wail gurgling from below,
Bellowed from a hollow beneath the car seat
A cavernous chest illuminated by our bioluminescent eyes,
Milky and white, meet the o-gasp of my mouth
And laugh when my lungs collapse from the pressure.

---

Cheryl Aguirre is a poet and recent graduate based in Austin, Texas. Their work focuses on queer and biracial experiences in a red state. You can follow them at @drowsy_orchid on Instagram, or @wheat_mistress on Twitter.