TABLE OF CONTENTS

Poetry

“Poem for Horses & Bayonets”
“An Ounce of Prevention”
“Vexillology”– Michael Robins

“Free Mumia Cheesesteaks” –  Leonard Kress

“were tempestuously agitated, and nodded thrice, as if bowed by some invisible wearer”  – Emily Bludworth de Barrios

“The Broken Testimony” – Daniel Borzutzky

“Curtain Design for Victory over Sun”
“Short Talk About Freud”
“Star Nemesis” – David Lau

“Profession”
“Proximity is the Greatest Motivator of Fear” – Joshua Gottlieb-Miller

“Missed Connections”
“Bonjour Tristesse” – Christopher Kempf

“Most Wanted”
“Mythos” – Phillip B. Williams

“Cheval de Frise and Gone-Sweetness at the All-Inclusive” – Elizabyth A. Hiscox

“College”
“A Briefe and True Report of  Tiananmen Square ” – Kara Candito

from “the Depression” – Mathias Svalina

Prose

“A Warm and Blue Day in Our Nation of Nations” – Charles McLeod

Work by Featured Artist Rine Boyer

“Camping”
“Pruning”
“Campaign Managers”
“Client Service Engineer“

Rine Boyer, “Client Service Engineer,” “Campaign Managers,” “Camping,” and “Pruning”

Rine Boyer graduated from Reed College in Portland Oregon where she recieved a liberal arts education. Deciding to focus her studies on people rather than books she moved to Chicago where she has found a variety of characters and neighborhoods. Eventually settling in Bridgeport, a neighborhood that has been home to many of Chicago’s politicians as well as a growing arts community, she set up her studio in the Zhou B Arts Center.  Rine participates in local shows, her most recent being solo exhibitions at the Old Town Art Center and ARC Gallery. Recognition of her work includes a juror’s award at the Beverly Arts Center and an honorable mention at the Rockford Midwestern exhibit held at the Rockford Art Museum. Reviews of her work have been featured in Newcity, Gaper’s Block, and SOBS.org.

For more information, please visit http://www.rineboyer.com

We woke & named insect, animal
& trees. We spent time in gardens

gardening, tending a tethered pet:
its manners informed our voices.

Pedigree, fine huntsmen we were
not. Many trophied prey, in fact,

were our friends. By their example
we prayed always our visions full.

Pulled in two, easily as wishbones
who were we kidding? A number

settled our dilemmas &, therefore,
was mutual loss. Our worst kinds

grew brawn, so we forgave spring
or forgave fall. Along a stone fence

we waited days to swim. Otherwise
the cards were stacked in our favor.

We bloomed with the yellow roses
& disaster. We were vespers for it.

No running nor fooling. No panic
nor effect for our town was a stage,

our bridges like stations of a cross.
Our ghostly streets like presidents.

*

Michael Robins is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Ladies & Gentlemen (Saturnalia Books, 2011) and In Memory of Brilliance & Value (Saturnalia, 2015). He teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

The soldiers hurrying past you
stow a leather briefcase. Inside

rests a file, thick, & bears names
like midnight towering a valley.

You swear for rabbits to come
& stretch the pedal down. You

borrow books & comb feelings
inversely to the heart, pillbox

flesh when pages buzz into rage
for weather mends accordingly.

In the file as well are the nights
old men leaned from their work

to hear the bugle sound. You’ve
injured those dearest, your hair

again the odd wing descending.
In the end you’ll be memorized.

*

Michael Robins is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Ladies & Gentlemen (Saturnalia Books, 2011) and In Memory of Brilliance & Value (Saturnalia, 2015). He teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Empathy rose like a series of icebergs.
Were we distracted? Linens needed

changing, we realized a few desserts
would go uneaten, remain untouched.

When we parked the truck, the truck
got towed (this happens almost daily).

We walked the tracks back into town,
otherwise we might be screwed. We

brushed imperfect teeth: we squeezed
big tubes of paste into the little tubes.

We were the seven o’clock numbers
& we were taking up air. We realized

women coming & going in narratives
paired, walked in bars toward a joke.

Our friends had other, better friends,
convictions, frost advisories in effect.

Lamplight & rotgut, our days passed
without thinking once about that war.

*

Michael Robins is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Ladies & Gentlemen (Saturnalia Books, 2011) and In Memory of Brilliance & Value (Saturnalia, 2015). He teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

We’re always extolling the virtues of Philadelphia
To our kids, who grew up hundreds of miles away
In the Midwest, so once, with a bit of time free,
Driving home from the shore, we stopped for cheese steaks.
It was between Pat’s and Geno’s, both world
Famous, but it was mid-afternoon, July 4^th, fireworks

Slated, and if we wanted one with the works,
And didn’t want to be stuck in Philadelphia
Traffic, we’d have to merge quickly into the world
Of hunger and sloth, wending its way
Around telly poles, lampposts, construction stakes
To Geno’s, terrible choice, once we saw the FREE

MUMIA poster next to a Home of the Free—
English Only sign.  Here, among working
Stiff Italians who love their cops, who’d burn at the stake
A cop killer like Mumia Abu-Jamal, though Philadelphia
Police messed with the crime scene, refused to weigh
Exculpatory evidence, and lied.  The whole world

Knows he was framed.  Except in this world
Of  skived beef, cheese whiz, nothing carcinogen-free,
Where all’s devoured and nothing’s tossed away.
We know exactly how it works—
Even as a young teen Mumia was targeted by Philly
Cops, for trumpeting Malcolm X, each year the stakes

Raised, his file expanded, every day a new stake-
Out.  “Mumia, the only authentic revolutionary in the western world,”
Political prisoner 3 decades on Death Row, reviled in Philly ,
Lionized everywhere else, the empire will never set him free.
If he were to be executed, there would be fireworks.
“You can track ‘em, absorb ‘em, dilute ‘em” put ‘em away”

But you can’t let ‘em speak.”  We went away
Hating the greasy, sodden, gamy, steak
Sandwiches, disconcerted, taken aback by the work
Undone, crestfallen in this fallen world.
There’s no chance Mumia will be set free,
These days we rarely make it to Philadelphia.

*

Leonard Kress has recent work (fiction and poetry) in American Poetry Review, Barn Owl Review, Passages North, Harvard Review, New Orleans Review, River Styx, and Atticus Review.  Most recent poetry collections are Thirteens,  The Orpheus Complex, and Living in the Candy Store.  He currently teaches philosophy, religion, and creative writing at Owens College in Ohio.

You almost love the things you own.
With a fitful, envious love

like you love the implied lives of fashion editorials.  Brief and single-minded,
they have gentle cheeks and throats.

So candy and persistent (your inner lunge for thing).

It sounds made-up,
a human desperate in love with thing.

*

Note:  the title of this poem comes from Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.

There is a beat behind this writing

A nervous tap against a plastic-coated table

A body is trying to move forward

It is blocked by its insistence on movement

The performance of stasis played backwards

It disappears or its absence appears

You are writing on my back and I am heaving

You write:

I had a body once but then you made it illegal

Your hard hands inscribe justice into my blank flesh

You write justice into my flesh and I feel something

A clock ticking in the small of my back

I ask you to open the box in my skin, to remove the clock

And when you open the box you pull out a ticking clock and say this is your country

It is my nation, I say

And you tell me not to say things that I have already said before

And I say that I don’t say anything but that I can never stop writing

And you say it was your nation when all of our bodies were ravaged and you sit me in front of a window

You reproduce me and I watch myself watching a television show with a young couple kissing

This was how I learned to kiss, from studying this scene, and I remember quoting the hands, the eyes, the lips

I want to be like a dumb human, I said, too stupid to be scared

You are always annoyed {to the beat} at my insistence on beginning sentences with but

And I fall asleep at the window and start dreaming

Which is to say, I start writing

I am writing about a girl I went to school with

She lived up the street from me

She was killed at age 16 by her boyfriend with a sword

After she was stabbed to death, visions of swords

Swords in her neck, coming out of her back and belly

The boyfriend stabbing himself with the sword

The performance keeps playing itself backwards, and in the present tense

Helicopters circle above the crime scene, searching the woods for the boyfriend

He is stuck between some shrubs

He cannot move his body

He is writing his body into history

He inscribes his body into the trees

With a pistol he shoots himself in the head

There is a constant beat behind this writing

The helicopter lights shine into the thicket

The body of the mutilated girl in the woods

The body of the boy who has blown his own head off

It is often impossible to remember what I like about myself, just as it is often impossible to remember how to portray what I like about myself to others

Ravishment and silence and ravishment and word and the writing continues amid the boom of the beat behind us and it is always and inevitably about me

You see:

Today I wrote a novel about a village of cadavers

There was no one left in the village excerpt for one man who witnessed every resident get murdered by the police

Meet Eduardo

He is extremely paranoid

He thinks that at any moment the dead bodies of his neighbors will awaken and stab him in the neck with a machete or an ice pick

He steals their passports and wallets

He lies on top of a dead neighbor and hears a voice inside her

He prefers the word carcass to cadaver

He thinks:

I will be thrown into a river to be mauled by the engines of motorboats

A headless paraplegic floating to the bottom of the water

Sinking into the mud

Sinking beneath the floor

Down, down, into a world of shrieking cadavers who look just like me

Surplus meaning in my nose in my hair in my broken Jewish eyes

I am writing about a mouthful of diseased tongues that won’t stop licking each other in horrible deadly ways

I dream/write that each tongue in my mouth is a member of the proletariat and they are destroying themselves with their horrible licks

The best dictators don’t kill their subjects rather they make their subjects kill each other

I have never fired anyone, says the owner of the plantation, I have always managed to make the undesirables leave by their own volition

But it is fair to ask of a person just what they want from you

And it is fair to assume that she did not want me until she saw that I was wanted by someone else

And it is fair to assume that I did not want myself until I saw that someone else wanted me

And it is neither fair nor unfair that each of our bodies is sinking in the tar to the beat of a traditional song in which the speaker is ravaged as much by love as by its absence

Dead dog barking in the bushes to the beat of this beautiful song

Dead girl screaming in the shrubs to the beat of this beautiful song

Dead writing screaming from the page to the beat of this beautiful song

And you look up at me from the screaming page and I see your face falling from your sunken body

You are jammed into the street in a tar pit on a flaming August day

This is on Montrose Avenue, on the North Side of Chicago

Your mutilated body is jammed into a tar pit on the middle of the busy street that is now empty except for a few scavengers searching for bodies they know

The helicopter lights overhead

The creative consultants waiting to turn this misery into poetry

And there to the beat I decide to stretch out over your tarred-up body

The tar I put on my clothes forms an inseparable bond between us

You, tarred into the pavement, on your back in the tar, looking up at me

Me, tarred into your body, looking down to the beat permanently into your eyes

A glob of tar on your cheek and a glob of tar on my cheek and our faces stick together and the helicopter lights shine down on us

Take us to Kindred Hospital on Montrose Avenue, you say, to the beat of the hovering scavengers a few blocks east of California Avenue

A scavenger has a shovel and I write him into our faces

He takes the shovel and tries to pry apart our faces but they are stuck together and we cannot move and the end of his shovel is caught between my cheek and your cheek

My face {to the beat} relational to your face {to the beat} relational to the tar that holds us together relational to the tar that binds you to the earth

Our silent faces stuck together

Or

The broken testimony of the broken beat in the broken rhythm of the crumbling excess of my

broken mouth and my broken face in the crumbling cadaver of this night

*

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011); The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007) and Arbitrary Tales (2005). His translations include Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love (2010) and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008).  His work has been anthologized in, among others, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years (Fence Books); Seriously Funny (University of Georgia Press, 2010); andMalditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA (El billar de Lucrecia, 2010). Journal publications include BOMB, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, and many others. Chapbooks include Failure in the Imagination (2007) and One Size Fits All (2009).   His poems have been translated into Spanish, Bulgarian, French, and Turkish.   He lives in Chicago.