Issue 1 — Spring 2019 Full Text
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Alexandra Teague

“Amazing Grace” (as American Rondeaux)

I.                   John Newton

Not without danger can mortal men be
all-powerful, de Tocqueville wrote, seeing
that God’s just wisdom must hold power up.
No electric wires, electric chairs yet—just
pure current of bodies. What beliefs run free

is the question—what is given the circuitry.
Was it God who made a “former slaver” kneel
on a slave ship for sight? His soul a salt-rinsed cup
not without danger (oh God!) 

of turning black again. He didn’t renounce slavery
yet. He was a product of history; the blindfolds of centuries.
As if his white eyes saw without seeing what
the deck was made of. The sails’ pyramids rigged up
to out-blind sun; the whips swinging gracefully—
not without danger.

II.                American People

are only excited really by themselves,
dT writes too. They are amused by waterfalls
and trees, but briefly; treat the ancient with distaste
and want a poetry of progress, of the great
efforts of man—what is-not-yet is not at all

impossible; just yet untried. Americans fail
to see the limits; their rivers’ lengths explorable
by men who drain them, give them names—
are only excited really

by what’s not here. They build skyscraper shelves
to hold the goods they build. Good means indomitable;
good goods are buyable. Pinecones are passé
and stiff as powdered wigs. If a tree gives way,
the riddle tells us: the men who hear it fall
are only really excited about themselves.

III.            TSA Scanner

This X-ray sight, Newton couldn’t imagine,
though redemption was security of a kind.
God forgave, so his fiancé forgave his trespasses.
As the TSA—if they’re beautiful—forgives our asses’
blunt, scanned nakedness. Hotel Papa’s not blind:

it’s code for Hot woman headed for security, get thou behind
a scanner’s sights. 67 of 70 guns aren’t scanned
as guns (statistics say). They’re too distracting: the masses.
This X-ray sight

is the clearest sight: if you see panty lines,
they’re there; then gone. Oh, you once were blind.
Hotel Papa, as in hot(el) and you can imagine, he says—
the agent who leaks this. Yeah, we looked at their pussies.
People didn’t know, so they didn’t mind
this X-ray sight.

IV.             Leading Strings

Each man in leading-strings wants to be free
and also led (dT writes)—it’s contradictory: democracy
as freedom from rule by rule by the people.
Who keeps any ball of yarn from being tangles
long enough to knit it into flag-striped booties?

Two centuries of being born leaves us babies
with apple-pie eyes and strange hunger, waiting
for Him or him or him to say: now crumble:
each man

for his own bit of crust. Freedom ain’t free
could also mean these chains of the hungry
too tired for soup lines, sleeping stiff cardboard-
bundled on the San Francisco streets. There’s mold
to the core, a man once told me—gesturing at the city,
each man.

V.                That Taught My Heart

We have no less time (and no desire) to sing God’s praise
in line for the line at the airport, so the TSA
has hired miniature therapy ponies to relieve
our impatience, our anger like ziplock leaks.
We spill over ourselves. Can we feed them hay

from our hands? We will make ourselves safe;
we’ll make ourselves safer to pet them: precious, trained
as first belief. We have nothing to fear but safety;
we have no less  

time to be saved. Our pocketknives confiscated—
seen clearly as our souls in confessional: our faces
blurred out. There are ponies the size of our griefs,
miniaturized, brushed to a gloss. Wretches kneeling
by Homeland Security. Bridled. Ticketed for today,
we have no less.

VI.             Battlefield Mall

Our wounds healed, Lincoln glows in fountains
by anchor stores, though the flags, half-mast again,
won’t wave. It’s a good day for Cinnabon—thick icing
like a bandage of sweet. dT said, if one digs deep,
Americans seek everything’s value in one question:

how much money will it bring? Here there’s Ambien
for the wretches who dream history. There’s home
on sale at Macy’s—sheets for your best night’s sleep.
Our wounds healed,

we can put on new running shoes, headphones
at Hastings. A life of joy and credit and peace. Gone
are the dead, once mounded like snow in the fields.
Now parking lots. Now presents our shield and portion be.
Night crews vacuum up wishes coin by coin,
our wounds healed. 

VII.         Blindness/Sight

We are made of glory and of refuse—
Pascal wrote—like plastic swirls from space:
flocked bright as oceanic birds, the trashy grace
of gulls diving in dumpsters. We’re hopeless
idealists, believing we cannot lose

as the hurricane hits. On slave ships, refuge
from storms and rape meant chains, abuse—
women, like dead-winged things, pitched into waves.
We are made of glory

each song alternates with—we are sinners, loose
from God’s reined sight. Blind but now less.
The plastic bottles bob the waves like faces—
caps for eyes. Something is trying to surface.
Give us your tired. How do we explain?
We are made of glory.

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Alexandra Teague

Because President Reagan Loved Jelly Beans

1)      our fourth-grade teacher loved President Reagan
2)     it was Citizenship Week at Fort Worth Country Day
3)     in America, one long sparkling Keebler path
led from we the little people to our leader
4)     (what was the presidency but the greatest treasure pot,
faces like his on its coins?)
5)     this was how a country grew: one bright, sweet seed
at a time: yellow, lilac, lime-green, red, white, blue
6)     we had fed the Hungry, Hungry Hippo its poker chips,
frisbees, flat plastic hippo-feed
7)     when the time came, a patriot was someone who cast
their purple-hearted life into this country’s mouth
at the moment it opened
8)     our grandfathers watched Stallion Road, where
President Reagan fed horses, gentle pats on the noses
9)     that was how a president deserved to be fed:
like a stallion; like a sky god eating rainbows
10)  in preparation for sacrifice, we’d each dressed
as a president or his wife (I brought lemonade
as teetotaling “Lemonade Lucy”) (I wore a white
cotillion dress a stranger had come to our door
years before and sold my mother)
11)  my mother said the woman seemed “desperate,”
“like she needed the money” (I heard this as fairytale:
the birds dropping a ballgown to Cinderella— not as
recession or addict)
12)  my classmates and I were middle-to-upper-class white;
we lived in “a more perfect union”
13)  no one said childhood obesity and diabetes; no one
said children in cages at borders
14)  if life gave you lemons, make lemonade; if life
gave you corn syrup and edible wax
make presidents
15)  he would write us a thank-you if we were lucky
(Dear Fourth Graders sounded a little like four score and)
(we were inside history)
16)  we were inside Candy Land:
(Due to the design of the game, there is no strategy involved:
players are never required to make choices,
just follow directions)
17)  democracy meant something like this
18)  even my economist, mostly Democrat mother believed
in trickle down (bright leftover raindrops);
choices sweet as green apple or coconut
19)  the government hadn’t yet explained AIDS;
Def Leppard hadn’t yet explained sugar,
our unending desire to pour it
20)  my friends and I dreamed a watermelon jolly rancher
big as the playground; one day, we’d climb it like a jungle gym,
lie on its slick red licking and licking
21)  we didn’t know the Secret Service threw out gifts,
messages in code—coconut, lime, blueberry, blueberry
22)  we were surely on his tongue when he said, our most precious
resources, our greatest hope for the future, are the minds and hearts
of our people, especially our children
23)  if we were sweet, we would never sell dresses for cash;
if we were Americans, we would never die
outside the borders of Candyland, in El Salvador,
in Guatemala
24)  I wore a stranger’s dress with small cloth roses
like drops of blood from a magic pinprick; like jellybean-
cherry blooming back to real fruit: our first President’s tree
he would not lie about cutting. (It wasn’t lies to pretend
we were Lincoln, Hayes, Grant, Jackson,
their pretty wives.)
25)  we stood in line to fill a squat glass jar
from our separate bags—our smiles technicolor
as the rainbow that arced from cereal box to bowl
between cartoons, as E pluribus unum.

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Alexandra Teague is the author of Or What We’ll Call Desire (Persea, 2019), and two prior poetry books—The Wise and Foolish Builders and Mortal Geography—as well as co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A professor at University of Idaho, she is currently on sabbatical in Wales.

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Chelsea Dingman

For a Thousand and One Nights

The field gives. The river gives before it ends
in the mouth of the sea. A woman

ends, collateral we scatter in the field
to bless what we’ve been

given. Thirst is a generation. How to be grateful
in the flesh of a woman. The fish

have poured forth from the river, clean
water from the faucets. Someone gave

to us, once, when we were hungry
& tired. Someone taught us

to give. Each morning I wake, & another
woman is dead. Suffering

no more of this world. Our houses, in turmoil.
Together, the river & sea mend, but among men

there is nothing as brilliant as light. As safe
as the dark. No one is born

unkind. Unking another war. Remember
what wars the water has passed through

to get here. It’s not yet nightfall. A woman
need not be harmed, nor saved,

nor reinvented by light, but by all
untold histories  

that hold us near abandon. By all hands
that refuse to hem the light.

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Chelsea Dingman

The Columbia River Taught Me How to Run

Past the frightened yards, the women.

Past the snowplows, the .22’s steel
barrel, snow falling through carcasses
of the deer dragged in from the hunt.

Past the northern lights disfiguring that black water.

Past skeletal swing-sets and merry-go-rounds.

Past my father, the arteries hardened
around his heart, fingers yellow with tar when his body was found.

Past my mother, the months she cleaned
rooms in a roadside motel on the night shift.

Past the children, sleeping off empty stomachs.

Past avalanches on the Roger’s Pass, a burnt mattress, bear traps
in the woods.

Past the woods, the tracks, the trains.

Past that steep hill with the cedar house that sat atop it.

Past warnings that a man hunted
there—a young hitchhiker raped, a runner abducted.

Past felled trees and crime scenes that taught us few people live
past forty.

Still, I hear the river, howling at night, outside my door.

Sometimes, I wake up drenched.
Sometimes, someone drowns
who isn’t a father.

Sometimes, women leave & never go back.

Sometimes, I spend my nights
pulling women from the river. Their children
tucked in their ears & the knots in their hair.

Sometimes, loneliness is all I have left of them.

Sometimes, I have been nothing
to anyone. The snow, falling through me in wonder.

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Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (February, 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Her work is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and Triquarterly, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

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Christine Spillson

Ivan Ivanovich Descending

“Ivan resided, as such, in the uncanny
valley—a ‘phantom cosmonaut.’”
Megan Garber
 

Before auction and purchase
(by Ross Perot, business man,
billionaire), before
they filled the space around you
with space, around (the room between you and the wall
filled with a dog, her name
unpronounceable to me) you

with a dog, rats, between the rats, Guinea pigs, and they, too,
under your buttons, between your ribs. A metal
skeletal system, rubberized skin, stuffed with
Guinea pigs so you could be both
vehicle and traveler—like we all are
even if we never reach space.
They filled the space in and around you so that you could fill space.

They filled the silence, your silence and the rest of it,
with choir—multitudes thought to be less suspicious,
less concerning than the solitary. After all,
they would not –they knew America knew-- send a choir
to space, to orbit. But. A man, or not
a man, a replica in a suit with a dog, with
rodents—they might be suspicious of one voice speaking (a spy),

of one voice singing (a space-maddened spy) but many voices, an impossibility
(safe). Though a man with no nerves
or muscles, even if there are joints and limbs, when the villagers saw
your fall, they saw a body flail and jerk, took
note of its silence, its commitment to return.

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Christine Spillson

A Sign in Space (Midwest Edition)

I’d come back and there it would be in its place,
just as I had left it, simple and bare,
but with that unmistakable imprint, so to speak,
that I had given it.
--Italo Calvino

When my feet were six, they were sometimes feet
in cement, not stuck, marking it
with me before quick-dryingness became

permanent without me. My feet, my hands,
my sister’s feet, her hands, fingers and toes
pointing deeper into a southern Ohio backyard,

towards two trees—one the perfect distance
from the other to span a hammock, to echo the gap
in the wooden fence that sturdied rosebushes, guarded

tomatoes, rhubarb. Toes pressed deeper than shallow
curved heels, absent arch, show a body leaning
forward, pressing away—poised to run out to grass

not into house. The augury of movement
in the marks is easier than the memory. Done
with either giggles or disgust, the image

more construction than imprint—the image
of wet cement, of unfinished construction
waiting for imprint—a scene observed,

not experienced. They would stay forward
pointing rather than backward looking.
After I left, my family left, the house

emptied, was sold, refilled. I might now
circle back, looking for the sign that stood
for presence but became absence, a meaning

that slid while they rooted and smoothed,
holding smaller puddles in rain, in snowmelt.

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Christine Spillson is a recent graduate of the nonfiction MFA at George Mason University and teaches at Salisbury University in Maryland. Her work has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Diagram, The Rumpus and Portland Review.

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Anand Prahlad

Keeping Touch

Whenever it seems she’s turning inside out,
unraveling like a spool of thread from her belly.

Or when that x-rated hush falls like a cold front,
like snowflakes when she walks into a room. 

She takes the razor between cool fingers, trembling
and slices slowly backward like a surgeon.

The rivulets of blood staining her inner thigh
are surreal as carnival music, a silent

clown, popcorn, a Ferris wheel shadowing
an open sky, hashtags of scarlet lipstick

every which way across her mirrored face,
from corner to corner across the ugly canvas

of the mirror, the pinnacle of poppy red nail
polish smeared across disobedient fingers.

It reminds her of ink, indigo. It reminds her
of milk drops from a nipple, of sanctuary.

It reminds her of who she really is and keeps
her in touch with where she came from.

With slaves. With red light districts.
With hunger and asylums. With nappy headed angels

and black goddesses those people out there
could never imagine or ever hope to reach.

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Anand Prahlad

You Waited

i was so far away
for so long
and still you waited.

away on a pumpkin thistle
in a house of cicada.

1000 leagues below
in the belly of whales.

above the surface was the pain
i couldn’t weather.

it came for me like the chariot
to carry me home.

tumors are the grist
in the time machine
that takes you out of time

instead of backwards
or forward.

no t-model fords.
no slave or space ships.

no legacies. no heirs.
no ancestors.

you meet no one there
and should you accidentally

cross the border
you burst into tears.

you become the ghost
of flesh and bones
watching yourself
in a house on fire.

it’ll be alright
you learn to say to yourself.

and still
you brought me kale
and yams and bean pies
cold compresses

and spread your voice
over me like twilight
over a field of wild grasses

and laid beside me
long nights
that reached beyond the horizon.

in snow falls covering the fence
and silence covering the snow.

in brittle stalks and brown pods
and leaves the colors of plasma.

in streams of flooding in the yard
rain thick as sputum.

in the swollen light
tubers of pollen.

i know now that eros
is the shadow of birth
not of dying

no matter what the poets say.

death is its own shadow.

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Anand Prahlad is the author of two books of poems, Hear My Story and Other Poems, and As Good As Mango, and a memoir, The Secret Life of A Black Aspie. He has also published critical articles and books on black folklore and proverbs, including Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music and African American Proverbs in Context, and he edited the three-volume set, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. Prahlad is a professor in the English Department, at the University of Missouri, where he is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

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Claire McQuerry

The Nature of Debt

I returned the TV today. I won’t
use it, now that you’ve gone back
to your other life. I thought
I might keep it—
but what would be the point?
I lived without one for so long
before you almost moved in.
The customer service guy
was nice about it, in his
oversized employee vest. He took
a knife from one pocket and opened
the box—just to know everything was
back inside: screen, cables, remote. That
was that. When I drove away from the store,
I thought I must have left my lungs
back at the register, or else all the air
had gone out of my car, so I rolled down
a window. Eventually I wound up
parked in my driveway, the tree there
dropping its fat, pollinated bombs.
What to do with your T-shirts, still
hanging on the line? The air, motionless
and lukewarm, felt like nothing
against my skin when I carried the groceries
inside, where there was no longer
a TV. “The credit will go back
on your card,” the kid had said
when I’d signed for the return.
A baby wailed in the cart behind me.
Sometimes I don’t know whether
I’m building something
or taking it apart. I had to ask him
to repeat that last sentence
about the credit. And then
I’d thought, well, maybe it’s all
just a rearranging of different
little empties anyway.

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Claire McQuerry

Who has seen

 …when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.   –Christina Rosetti

I don’t sleep in such wind—
the doors guttering
in their jambs, shutters
tugging their hooks.

On the way from Indio: a ridgeline of tall, white poles, their propellers always harvesting & a sun
rises behind the turbines, as if to say
even in exile, a home.

A wind witch may catch fire
& fly, a wind-lifted
torch, destroying soy fields, corn.
This is the West I know.

 I’ll huff and I’ll puff—

The fairy tale frightened me
more than others.
House of paper, house of sticks.

Sky turning
thick & yellow, grit sifting
noses, ears, the unsealed
lip of a window ledge.

The winds are everywhere right now, says Marie.

Gusts that sheared the locust tree
off at its base.  Mother said
the garden was crushed beneath it:
young dogwood, tool shed, nest
of raccoons. 

Stillness
before a twister descends:
its chaos a focused column
in which a semi, a double-wide might rise.
                        When you hear the sirens,
                        run for cover.

Windbreak: a frame of poplars at the farmstead’s edge.

At a picnic, when the air
darkened & a wind picked up,
mother caught the tablecloth, egg sandwiches
scattered, her friend
slung my brother into the car, lifting
me, kicking, under the other arm.

Who has seen the wind? the poet asks,
all night its whining
a presence,

a world gusting around that cabin, tent,
sheltering structure,
wherever you hope to rest your head.

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Claire McQuerry's collection Lacemakers won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize, and her poems have been published in Tin House, Western Humanities Review, Fugue, Poetry Northwest and other journals. She is an Assistant Professor at Kutztown University.

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Matthew Woodman

The Man with the Stick

(after Rufino Tamayo’s El hombre del bastón, 1966)

the first Saturday in June designated
World Atlatl Day
                             the Aztec chert-tipped
projectiles could not penetrate Spanish
steel plate armor but pierced the mail leather
and linen most soldiers armored themselves

against the harsh elements glory be
to the left standing
                                the Coso mountain
range current Naval property steward
ship
           weapons training guided tours by
advance reservation
                                  weather
permitting
                   scholars disagree on who
and when and why
                                representational
design motifs alternate with abstract
rectilinear curvilinear
figures chiseled through the desert varnish

summoned
                    and summoning history art
criticism
                 increase rites
                                        who will sift
my lines
               my launches
                                     my I put that there

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Matthew Woodman teaches writing at California State University, Bakersfield and is the founding editor of the journal Rabid Oak. His writing appears in recent issues of Storm Cellar, MORIA, Central American Literary Review, and Puerto del Sol and more of his work can be found at www.matthewwoodman.com.

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Lisa Compo

Driving through Yuma, Arizona

A call from 1.5 billion light years within–
quiet and daunting like monsoon wind in early August,  

with promise of a sweetened
throat. A signal of sorts. A code

of aliens dwelling to the far reaches
of her core, bursting

with the strength of twelve suns seen only
as the strangest flicker, a candle lit on an altar. An offering

for a god made of prayers sent from those with no intentions
of praying. The call a low frequency humming

against the vein– one radio channel is here
in the middle of this red mud prairie

and she glances to the would-be lights in
the sky hoping for some glimpse, met only  

with ever-distant Venus, the ever-constant
vastness, and what of wonder? She craves tradition

and thinks: this must be religion.

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Lisa Compo

Monsoon Sun

Ghosts don’t like freckled girls, you’re peppered
iron. The sky is so open, your lungs

want to suck up it’s empty. The old
backyard saguaro has always been 10 feet tall, I am

waiting for its first arm to grow–
it may be another 50 years. There

is a ghost in my backyard too, a man– he likes
to pace between two large stones, he is

sand-yellow, a scorpion left behind. I think
he’s waiting for the arms

too. Lightning touches the far-away, not
the here-now. I like to watch it, the orange

electric that flickers there. I’d live
in distance, inside the thunder sound–

the toads rebirth
from the ground, their cacophony of clicks

reminds me of the here-now, and the rain
wetting dry smells

like dog and home– here,
I pick goat’s head from the carpet, and watch

the separated sky, the here-sun
and the far-away iron clouds.

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Lisa Compo attends Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she studies creative writing, works as a writing center consultant and is currently the poetry editor for the campus’ magazine, The Scarab. She has work forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Bluestem, Natural Bridge and SLAB.

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Rodd Whelpley

Something about a bridge

that each time you cross,
you look down, unsure the water
will still be there.
Or else as if to gauge whether today
the pool finally swelled
to leaping depth, for falling
to what end you never know.
God didn’t trouble these waters.
People did, upstream,
choking the flow,
leaving here inches–
barely atmosphere
for Jesus bugs
and crayfish.

Like those living
under that other bridge,
a different creek, the water
you caressed, moving a stone
but not its mud, revealing him.
Insinuated your hands below the surface,
perching one abaft, the other in front,
then closing like a stern curtain
before his eyestalk, his flailing
antenna, until that champion
of backward propulsion shot
into the gentle hand he
had no sense to sense.

Today, in the thinning trickle
shadows of things thrown over:
a set of tires, a Remington–
typewriter, not a gun–
the refuse of ways
those before you
tried to go. And also,
as under every bridge,
that unseen old crustacean
you once held, a pet
in your childish grasp.

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Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, 2River View, Star 82 Review, Barren, Menacing Hedge and other journals. Catch as Kitsch Can, his first chapbook, was published in 2018. Find him at
www.RoddWhelpley.com.

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William Bortz

How I love those enchanting things

like a moon swallowing a bay at twilight
the rocky outcrop of hills cupping this gleaming body in its palms

or the vibrant shade of green that melts through leaves when the sun bites into them
these things, beautiful, but their progression leads to loss

I could never forget their names, but the mechanics of pronouncing them—
the way I am supposed to cradle my tongue with my lips—this will escape me

and I will be but a blubbering mess discussing some puddle becoming hollow
or those shadows delicately laid across the lawn like persian rugs

no, this beauty requires a language rich enough to also cradle its impermanence
it needs rows of ivory to indicate in what direction to eulogize its imprint

the clouds, how they blush before tucking their head beneath the blanket of night
aswoon in the lust of longing—I, too, have been there

in that moment before it grows quiet

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William Bortz is a writer and editor from Des Moines, Iowa. His work has been published in Luck Magazine, 8 Poems, Folded Word, Empty Mirror, The LOVEbook, forthcoming in Honey and Lime and others.

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Ella Flores

Instructions for Potentiality

1.

In a skeleton of a building
that doesn’t yet resemble a hospital, 

you scrub the bloody urine and pus
off cot linens. Wall-less rooms

shudder for use. You attend the wounds
of the dying town, work quickly to stop

its bleeding––hemophilic, profuse––
you can’t stop the stream of midnight

headlights. The roundabouts
full of autumn and hydroplane

3.

A winter light nervous system strung across
downtown helps me    check your vital signs, realign
your vertebrae,                        unpuncture your spleen.

With one hand I wipe the gravel         off your eyelids.
With the other, hold your liver, feel its tender
cirrhosis. Your crushed limbs sew my fingers

back onto their knuckles.        Your teeth embroider
back together the lengths of my arms––and when your eyes ask
if you can press my toes to your lips, I say nothing

2.

and let it happen. And here is all this happen––poorly postured
mountains overlooking a seasonally-depressed lake––how you take my hand
on a seat of a metro, unzip your jeans with the other, keep your eyes fixed
ahead as you guide my fingers down and down, and no one sees the bomb
but you. Except you don’t know it’s a bomb. It’s in the shape of a child.
And when it goes off, the station reels. The blue above blooms with metal
and human, all fireworked,     all calm,          all cloud curl.             

0.

Here’s how you/          I/          no one survived.

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Ella Flores

Subject, Impermanence

A soft-shaped pool made of high tide
has a name, I’m sure, the way the water
swirls with shell-bits and sun-ripples, not sure
what side to splash up on will tell you he is

a he today. The pebbles freckled
along his body feel compelled to split
to the sounds of approaching and leaving.

If he asks you to stay and watch the horseflies
settle on his sheen, un-be yourself to wish him

best, to be a thank you. And if today she is a she,
you’ll see her still, become a mirror, your breath
will want to hold, as if her being were something

you could participate in. You’ll learn this
best if you lay an ear to her surface
and memorize each lap, after lap, after all
because it’s all happening. Today, the edgeless
misty overcast will you tell you they are  

they. If they put the horizon on as a movie,
look for their smile in the ending credits, your hands
holding. And if they can’t even be sure they exist,

you could wait until they evaporate, see what’s left
between you. But if they say tomorrow  

he’d like to see you again, they’ll let your fingertips go,
not yet pruned from her body, and leave you only
the tension of drops on skin.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ella Flores is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University and is an associate poetry editor for Passages North. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Radar Poetry, RHINO Poetry, Plume Poetry and Hayden's Ferry Review.

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Matty Layne Glasgow

Lady Caribou Is a Badass

Deal with it. How she grows antlers
just like the bulls—soft velvet crowns
that harden into sharp-boned flames.  

Zoologists say antlers are weapons
that bulls use to control harems.
Lady Caribou says I can run my own crew,

fuckboy, says I know these antlers ain’t
forever, but I’ll show you what I’m made of.
Zoologists say antlers are objects of

sexual attraction. Lady Caribou says
We all want to be wanted, says We’re all
drawn to the fire. Some zoologists say

Lady Caribou’s antlers are smaller &
less complex than a bull’s. Most of those
zoologists are men. Lady Caribou says

Fuck you guys, says I’ve got a goddam crown
on my head & a calf in my belly. Yes, Lady
Caribou wears a crown just like the boys,

except she carries it through winter, even
as a calf stirs within her, even as her body
knows the weight of two lives. When she

lowers her head, two hearts quicken.
She says This was never just about me, boy,
says You don’t fuck with a mother or her flame.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matty Layne Glasgow

Fairy Drag Mother Reads Cinderella For Filth

My child—Time, like men, is an unrelenting spell.
One moment, you lift your gown down the steps
of your carriage life. The next, you lie here dirty
in your tragic rags on the remnants of some broken
gourd. Get yourself up out of the pumpkin. There,
there. Where is the other slipper? Do you know
how long it took to find a size twelve in this
prince-foresaken kingdom? Nevermind. Keep it.
Hop around on a lone glass heal. When you fall,
wipe your eyes with a fraying hem. You have
so many to choose from. Stop crying. We can’t
return to the spent spell. What is lost is lost—
a ravaged dress may shine anew. Bibbidi bobbidi
boo fucking hoo. I wore a crown once, too. Oh,
how I hovered lustre-drunk in palatial light. Look
at me now: all magic & apparition for my girls
ill-frocked in despair. What I learned, I’ve already
told you. No man or hour can unleash what is yours
to show. I saw vested birds & mice clad in every color
drape & sew a gown for you. What power remains
in my ancient bones that you do not possess?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matty Layne Glasgow's debut collection, deciduous qween, was selected by Richard Blanco for the 2017 Benjamin Saltman Award and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in June 2019. His recent work appears in or is forthcoming from the Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Grist, Houston Public Media and elsewhere. Matty lives in Houston where he teaches with Writers in the Schools.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Lassell

Attic

A landscape of insulated moths,
scotch-tape bloom, and wild-drift
humidity. Here, a summer.
A winter. A cavern of put-aways,
eternal off-seasons.
And who among the beams
wills light away from light?
Through a tiny hole, rainwater
navigates to blur, into colors
like an autumn of the underworld.
Another entry. Another closure.
And far off, a mouse emerges
from the floor’s pink fluff,
in search of crumbs or to lick up
the widening puddle. Allow this mercy.
Inside this cage of odd-folded laundry,
hobby loiter, flowerbed bramble,
find also a gathering of talon, tooth,
slow whittle. Could this be an ending?
It is a place where bones are placed,
hallowed in paper-wrap, bubble,
plastic popcorn—yes. But also,
this place can be where from corners,
the tight-lipped barriers
that uphold a home are home enough.
A wing where an arm can push forth,
up from a floor-bent doorway, a song
of nature vs. nature-found,
as if by foundation, one thing upon another,
maybe even a smallness unnamed can find
a thinning, unknowable truth. And so,
put your hand into this bowl, this
tinsel. Twine. Tombs of cardboard,
a place where now storage becomes
new dwelling, and the wood is thick
with insect life. And if carried
on the clippings of scrapbooks,
moth-holes, feces, then consider also
this wedding of unwanted and forgotten,
vigil without lightbulb, smiling darkness.
Take place among this stagnant,
this smallest of hallelujahs.
Move only when to go.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Lassell is the winner of a William J. Maier Writing Award and Agave Magazine's 2015 National Poetry Month Haiku Contest, as well as runner-up for the 2016 Bermuda Triangle Prize and Sequestrum's 2016 New Writer Awards. His poetry has received nominations for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and can be found recently or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Frontier Poetry, Yemassee, Hotel Amerika and Post Road. He grew up on a llama and alpaca farm in Kentucky and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

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Giles Goodland

Surfaces

The wind sharpens against the road
the blood mills in the finger
the animals square in the sun 

antique insects dip and skim
piece together the moon, evidence
spoken through the night. The witnesses
are credible, but the judge sleeps.

We want all the words at the
same time, we want no
words, just language’s long rain.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Giles Goodland

Look Away

Under the infant nail is spurt of
future. The wheels in the eye turn;
a crack opens in him
like a tunnel in a hand. 

We’re certain he’ll cry when he sees
light, with one tooth he’ll
bite his way back to us.

He lands blows upon me and I enjoy
their fruitlike bruiseless fall.

For a moment or year a head or arm
is lost, but then he fits the grammar
we’ve been fixing on his skin.

What he sees he enacts, the cracked
clock in the sun and the light
describing the
smallest thing he ever touched.
Thoughts loosen from him
like dandelion seed.

I read that the Giant who made us
is dead and his sadnesses were
bones, mountains, but what, he asks, that night,
what were made from his eyelashes?

Birds surround us with suggestions
of depth and sing away their chances
under frosts of eye.
In their world is no turning,

worms of sound surge
under the tiles and endless
floorboards between families.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Giles Goodland was born in Taunton, was educated at the universities of Wales and California, took a D. Phil at Oxford, has published a several books of poetry including A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001), Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012) and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). He works in Oxford as a lexicographer, teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University's department of continuing education and lives in West London.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Clark

A Railroad Town

for Headrick, Oklahoma, a town whose placement on the
railroad spelled the end of the nearby town of Navajoe,
which the railroad had bypassed by only a few miles

Headrick is a fixed table set in 1902 for those chased by hunger for the railroad.
Deep oceans of wheat in Navajoe brush what horizon they forfeited,

a raw road combing through weeds into a fenced cemetery, where a train
wouldn’t come. We dream a long ways away and walk over to it. We are working.

We are one hundred men welcoming ties. We lay rails, and we nail the rails down,
until a long, slow weight tells us we are formidable—even then, ending.

There is a vanished view of room that our stories collect and people in faces
covered against the wind, the bent palm over brow shoving dirt out of eyes

establishing an idea to stay for. Here is a train, a wall of people begging for home
at a sign saying Headrick station. The desperation sapped Navajoe of its feet,

its arms searing in June sun, and in this a vein, a nerve, withdrawn—
to move or not to move. In adding what a road is, we said here is growth,

itching, inching, eating, on schedule, in need, enough. The freight turned off the track,
gathered site, tethered it to shore, meaning it became a bordered faction of

we are located causes of movement. We junction, let the word
haul us over centrally, the need to return a foam on gums, all of the tongue

a song that the house sways forever. Might the present location shield us,
take us in with enough track to end here.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Clark

The Hext Ranch

for Hext, Oklahoma, no longer a town

Begin by receiving a Texas rancher.

Root him as a sound even after he relocates.

A chosen land knows others.

Hext, open your range when the railroad comes;
show where we fail to realize the empty view
of a schoolhouse fast returned to earth is not a ghost, or a seal.

Turn off at the Hext exit, an edge so moved away from,
to touch the switch of brick and farm, of town
and name slid into a haze of weed and stick,
like the boring union of history.

Nail a will to jut out into a sky until home peels away
and the rot of articles leaves an uncertain noun.

Never find enough of a map to hold onto, for you are
white space reestablishing its point among order.

Rescind as the post office did a way to exist.

Claw home out of you like an inverted word
for what this area means.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Clark is obsessed with puns and writes much of his work through a unique method of homophonic translation. His poetry has most recently appeared in Glint, the museum of americana, riverSedge, Flock, Menacing Hedge and Homonym and his first book, How I Pitched the First Curve, is forthcoming from Lit Fest Press. He is a winner of the 2018 San Antonio Writers Guild contest and his work has been nominated for Best of the Net. He currently teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Iowa.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Yarnall

Alone Again, I Turn Twenty-Five

In a month, I’ll be a quarter,
and I’d like to spend myself
on something my younger self
would think is cool— like
a jelly bracelet, or a plastic capsule
from a cheap machine;
one w/ a yellow lid
and a single temporary
tattoo curled up inside.
Now how grown-up am I? Standing alone
in my kitchen w/ a wet sponge
pressed to my forearm until I grow
a tiny heart there,
until a small pool of holy
water forms on the linoleum,
and my dog begins
to drink from it. Here, alone,
I get to water this heart
until it starts to peel. I get to pray
to the patron saint of empty
Doritos bags; the saint
of Bravo reality TV; of absentmindedly
masturbating and then crying
afterwards—shit, I get to
be that saint. How many times
have I martyred myself? How many times
have I Googled what it takes to be considered
a saint? And how many more times
will Netflix ask me if I’m still here
so I have to pick up the remote, aim
and click, yes, I’m still watching
and yes, I’m here?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Yarnall

Love Poem

All yours—a love like documentary.
I’m kept on one foot standing—my love,
flamingo, swallows whole: blue-green algae,
a dozen shrimp. Erupts into pink. Love
adjusts its lens, inspects the plume. Unsees
me into plastic fact: some females lose
their song. Love tucks us at the knees
and sinks us into lawn, can-crunch of booze.
Love, in his lawn chair, strong-
backed and still—I blush beta-carotene.
I make my quiet mine: my practiced wrong,
my afterwards. My seeping into scene.
This unmoving bird, ready to feed.
Its no-song, a handshake. I never agreed

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Yarnall is a third year Master of Fine Arts candidate in Poetry at the University of Idaho, where she also works as the Editor in Chief of Fugue. She is from Ellicott City, Maryland and received her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Salisbury University. She is a Centrum fellow and Pushcart nominee, as well as a Best of the Net nominee and finalist for Yemassee's 2018 Poetry Contest. Lauren's work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Waxwing Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere.

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Bruce McRae

Pause for Thought

Watching evening eat itself.
Nursing a harsh liquor.
Thinking of Nietzsche’s moustache
and what a piece of work is man.

In my unenforced solitude
I consider the soul of the fly,
no larger than a poppy seed
and as black as a Sunday hat.

The fly in its wretched paradise
of rotting fruit and corpses.
Battlefields its relished nirvana.
Valhalla down a sewer.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,400 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), An Unbecoming Fit of Frenzy (Cawing Crow Press), Like As If (Pski’s Porch) and Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Mceldowney

The Believing Brain

Today again
            there are meteor strikes

—before they were meteors they were someone’s city.
They were somebody else’s light.
They were the kiss that opens
everything.

I thought the earth owed me time,
to accept one loss before hitting me
with another.

I should’ve known—

real love is destructive.
Why must I
keep learning that some things can only be taught through pain?

Does the sky, after it’s come apart,
still search for love, still hold, or does it
say “Here is my grief
like it or not—”

            sometimes a woman falls from the sky.
How could I

            continue
to write to the living

            when what echoes the rock is deep time—
the things time killed mean
nothing to the looped reloop of thought.

I used to believe that there was something
the earth was trying to tell us—
            I thought I was owed that
at least—

as if the earth owes me anything at all.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Mceldowney

Dream Tree

We are in it—the swimming pool
hot, glittering, a passage
            opens between us and that place
where the pulse is taken.
We are playing that child’s game of guess what I’m saying underwater,

a game of who can stay
submerged longest,
            who could listen longest to the voices of the dead.

You say: “Give me your watch. I’ll time you. How long can you hold—”

how precious is time,
how long wine waits to peak,
how long love waits to set fire to our lives.

How long do we have
            before time fills our love with blood?

I look up at you across the swimming pool and I should not be afraid—
          I can see the bottom of the water
and it is safe and blue and clear—
but already you are beginning to blur.

And that’s not only because the edges of my vision are dimmed by chlorine—

time takes everything.

The ones we love the most         
we wound
the worst. I can see it—

one of us will give the other
            a wound the body’s ice was never meant to ice.

We will do it
because we say we love each other.

Wait with me, wait
for fingers of ice to climb you
the last possible moment—
before rising
for air or to leave—

But how could I ever
leave you?

Who better
            knows my gravity? Who will love me knowing
the cost of love is love? Who else
loves me blackout
            drunk, out of my mind, vicious

with this rare, never want this night to end,
with this leave your life,
kind of love?

You bring me wine for my hangovers,
to call me back from
my blood on the brain
            when I inhale too much water.

Time long stops the heart
This place
            is the place. This is where you leave me:
skull. teeth. Genesis.
I can’t tell what you are shouting into the water
            but the question never was what are you trying to say

it is how long will you stay
knowing all that we are promised is loss.
Promise me

when you think of me
            you will think of me
as a circle of light you would do anything to cross.

Promise me I will see you again
            even though I already know

 I will never

see you again. We will never repeat

            this night—not in the same way,
not exactly,
not when there is more
            than a swimming pool standing between us.

Each time the dream comes after

I will have less
of you.
I will to go back
            to before I saw the sky. I

will untie you.

I will take you with me
I will take you back

into this water. I will never move from this where,
this water where
             always

there is you.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jill Mceldowney is the author of the chapbook Airs Above Ground (Finishing Line Press) as well as Kisses Over Babylon (dancing girl press). She is an editor and co-founder of Madhouse Press. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Muzzle, Fugue, Vinyl, the Sonora Review and other notable publications.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brennan Sprague

Elegy for the Exit

We are grieving everything always—
yesterday, I grieved for yesterday—
for the baseball field ignited by spotlights,
Exit 8 wished to the bloom of your skull.

The doctors and their tools scalpel your
thoughts and leave you bloodless. I am
grieving every twisted limb gifted to us
like they were jewels from a twilit ocean.

We are closer to dying at this very second.
Even the moon is dying. I am inconsolable.
I don’t know why the world keeps on spinning.
Asteroids are devising an ambush into our bones.

We can dive into pools, snort those bumps,
roll the windows down, feel the wind from
the spun wings of an extinct bird. But it remains—
we are grieving these moments without realizing
they are always vanishing, that we’ll cry out for them
in our speckled hours of loss. Nothing lasts—

When our suffering cradles us like babies,
cooing us lullabies while the breeze through
the curtained window croons her lonely song,
we will grieve for our dead distant mothers,
for the dead white sugared stars shimmering,
for the love we wanted but were never given.
And always in my grief I wish I were powerful,
a god—and if I was, if I ever could be—
I promise I would never make you suffer.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brennan Sprague (he/him) is a student at Monroe Community College majoring in creative writing. His work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Ink & Nebula, Barren Magazine and Gandy Dancer.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Maggie Delaney

Art

________________________________________________________________________________________

Maggie Delaney is a multimedia artist based on the eastern shore of Maryland. She earned her BFA in painting at Salisbury University, where she focused on representational artwork of humans and nature. She currently works in oil paint, pyrography and relief printmaking and is also the visual arts editor for The Scarab, Salisbury University’s student-run creative writing journal. She will be working toward her MFA in painting in the fall.