*******And the mud again
*******ripped open

*******at the seams, silver
*******in afternoon’s glow-

*******ering shine.  Sunday
*******slowly implodes

*******into itself:  the hollow
*******of a vowel humming

*******under the surface
*******we strain to pull

*******our voice—
*******a voice—through.

*******We’ve endured
*******a certain dormancy
*******
*******and arrived in time
*******(out of time) to say it.

*******To imagine we’ve
*******said it, that it

*******could be enough.

***

Joseph Massey is the author of Illocality (Wave Books) and At the Point (Omnidawn), as well as many other books and chapbooks. He lives and writes in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

this is my moral
yard stick

I have the yard stick
I need

woman hits
a man

over the head
with an umbrella

how many no’s
make a never

the laughing man
is dead his brain

resembles the
red hydrangea

divided into
two parts

ring around
the cranium

she learns to sing

***

Nathan Kemp’s forthcoming chapbook, Gnomic Verse, won the 2014 Dream Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. His work appears in Columbia Poetry Review, Paper Darts, Cream City Review, and Hobart, among others. He is a contributing poetry editor for Barn Owl Review. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

A ventriloquist’s dummy, a wooden hack with a dopey, frozen, caught cheater’s grin: that’s how I often felt during my half-life as a conduit of current events suitable for attracting commuters’ attention and advertisers’ cash.

Like an tubular apparatus for prevarication facilitation, I would snake up to those famous, fatuous, almost and not, and each and every one, like avuncular Edgar Bergens would shake my hand and then slide their Crisco fists up my check-needy Charley McCarthy, as I, or rather, they, spoke to the world.

Sometimes, I’d mouth a meat clever quip of my own, but even those came from a sanctioned subversiveness, manufactured dissent, as Noam Chomsky would say, himself just another Edgar Bergen, with his activist arm and linguist fingers manipulating reality deep inside my butt.

***

-Nick Ravo is a Seattle poet, and former reporter for metro staff of The New York Times. His creative work has been published, often under pen names, in Open Letters Monthly, Treehouse, Poetry Salzburg Review, Evergreen Review and other journals in the United States and abroad.

*

**********************My pout constitution is devouring your sull through the written tongue.
*

In your hedge maze sanctarium*** your ice bath

cells such as it is

guarding such as it is

*
**********************You need purer regents to determine the composition.
*
*
*
*
The beast scratching at her rib bone guts a demand for a hostage * likely her core**** A veined
systematic fragile failure hardly a worthy hostage**** or adversary
*
*
*
**********************A deadfall well mannered petition.
*
*
*
*
Dare not follow me, I have unendurable tolerance like an undead sulfur rot
*

**********************As if she started off headless.

***

Brit Parks is a poet and artist. She is the recipient of The Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Emerging Artist Semi-Finalist Fellowship. She received both her Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is featured in the current issue of RINE and was previously published in after hours. She has exhibited her films at The Chicago Underground Film Festival and Chicago Filmmakers. She resided in New York for ten years and currently lives in Seattle.

The part of the pyx Eucharist Father did not

wash all down is in a safe place, but it is not

so small. It looms large still, squired

by the sudden, now ambling, all with real

names. I’ve become a junkie, too. When I was

a boy, I’d toad behind cream ziggurats that became

Daewoo and LG, tramping on feces out of animal

or human, it was hard to tell. It was not so easy

back then, when persimmons were mist, bazooka

ruth a lotus scent, Great Leader upstairs practicing

violin hopes.

***

Haesong Kwon, originally from Incheon, Korea, lives and works in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Home is return
Home is a familiar
end of the day, fireplace
screen-saver casting sleep across the room
Door closed when you return means safety
lights still off, as they should be
You beautiful human aglimmer in the flicker who
I know I don’t know
alone as I am hurtling through space
I splash water on my face in the tiny
bathroom, the door locked
There is a sound of pulling on the other side
I am returning home on a plane, unaware of myself
and washing my unexceptional hands
When I open the door, he stands there, pushes
me back
What are you doing, he says
What
What are you doing
I answer, Do you need the bathroom
He hears my voice, untenses
Where are you from
California, who are you
Where are you really from
I’m Latino, who are you
You went inside the bathroom, he says
and we can’t be too careful these days
Do you work for the airline
No, he says
It’s the beard, he adds, you look Muslim
I am cornered in the airplane bathroom touching my beard
But you are a police officer for the airline
No
But you work here
No
There is no end, the conversation continues
long after the plane lands, long after
I carry myself
back through the city
Returned home, what am I
but what I am to others
pushed against a turbulent wall, unaware of myself
To return means change
Our home and its new
layer of dust
even in its silence has shifted with the earth
What are you, beautiful human, piston
throttling inside your chest
Around you a barrier
divides the complex, trees
raise their russet branches
The warped scaffold raises its green against the sky
Bang
It continues, raised in the air
Everyone is a low-rise apartment
burning to the ground
I know I can never know
who you were to yourself, alone
as you were, hurtling through
the vision of people around you
as you walked through the middle of the street
The door is open
Your home is a silence
where we can only and at best
listen
untense, look beyond the sudden
noon sun blooming above
your tennis shoes, your letterman’s jacket
your irreplaceable dust

***

Paul Hlava is a teacher and poet who has been awarded a Poets House fellowship, Cave Canem workshop and was named a Best New Poet 2012 by Matthew Dickman. Poems of his have appeared in Narrative, BOMB, the LA Times and PEN Poetry Series, among others.

On a beach writing about a basement window, can’t you read me like crying
What flows thru her animals

Medusa
they
of
manuscripts
or sings
of debt flowing
thru her animals
not completely
human
Shake the tail
to shake the frog loose
newborn

government
termagant
Darger girls inroading
on-a-tear
Can’t you read me crying
I have really good
credit

They amazon
name u hellcat
They recorded

They monster
hideous
viewers

I don’t resent the stones I’m born up
I don’t fear a rented
death
What does lash mean
Imaging ur on the whale
surface
Air
Valentine Air
They
sign
Holidays of the mind
Holidays

Newborn govt
I cradle you in a mushroom of the
mind
You cradle me in the sliding chasms
of my fracking heart

Bank accts unfolded AS THOUGH this INDIV cld be
reconstructed in a long wave
AS THOUGH to wave to the voice of the
snakes

are
they
form
blurred
we party soon
ONE SNAKE
keep the Form posted
keep it shared and
stupid

so we’d BREAK its subtle surface
and breach for undocumented reasons
WE DROP TO OUR KNEES
WE ARE EXHAUSTED
WE ARE AT THE MAGIC HOUR
WE WEEP WITH GRATITUDE

***

Brooke Ellsworth is author of the chapbooks Thrown (The New Megaphone) and Mud (dancing girl press).  She currently lives in Queens, NY.

The golden fowl starts first thing. My whole life depends on you, I prayed like peach pits lined up on the porch, to dry […] thread into a torc or

in the network of Historia Animalium the animal runs alongside human invention.  This is what

*****************************************anachronistic

*****************************************Me trying to turn you on with song

*****************************************I am chicken mad

*****************************************What more would you know about me

*****************************************if you knew about my fantasies (going to Hell w/ my dog)
*****************************************[…] My, the summer drags

*****************************************As I write the uk Prime Minister is suspected of having
*****************************************ordered destruction of journalist’s hard drives

***

Brooke Ellsworth is author of the chapbooks Thrown (The New Megaphone) and Mud (dancing girl press).  She currently lives in Queens, NY.

at night we fall asleep
to the drumbeat of fire
bullets ricochet off sand
dunes, mountains echo
and we wonder: what is the size
of the future?
the maps here are forever
unfinished, every phone call
a grenade, we forfeit
festivals and beach time
while mothers measure the space
between the towel and the bomb
shelter and fathers hang their bullet
proof vests out to dry, soldiers
on buses trade stories
about corpses, smartphones
the newest form of rumor
mill, sirens sound in our dreams
and we see plants growing
in windows and shoes, hanging
from rooftops and lovers who sleep
undisturbed in the same beds
dreams like chandeliers that
shatter crystal shrapnel
hold me down, my love
under these impossible stars
press your dirty mouth to mine
the cedars cost too much here
and there is never enough water
to wash anything away

***

Rena Rossner is a graduate of the Writing Seminars program at The Johns Hopkins University. She also holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin and McGill University. She currently works as a literary and foreign rights agent at The Deborah Harris Agency in Jerusalem, Israel. Her poetry and short fiction has been published or is forthcoming from Carve Magazine, Midwest Quarterly, The Mayo Review, Thin Air Magazine, Rattle, Chicago Literati, Arc 23, JewishFiction.net and more. Her cookbook, Eating the Bible, has been translated into 5 language and is published by Skyhorse Press.