Ask for my connection. I’ll admit, it’s tenuous.
Something about a certain silence in a room

meaning gone, long gone. An uncle
who died young before I was born.

Of course he was beautiful, cocky grin,
laughter caught in his lashes. Black and white.

Airforce pilot. Vietnam. I know he fell
but not how far. But I am here

in the same land from which he vanished.
And here in the city where he was cruel

or crazed, or lost. I’ve grown into a woman
who has killed only by looking

away at the wrong moment,
who says atone and sacrifices nothing

but her sleep. Once I rubbed his name
onto white paper from a wall that held

my gaze, gave it to my father
who tucked it wordlessly away. My father

who never knew war, who draft-dodged
long enough to learn the ways his body

would betray him. In high school
a friend once told me he thought I’d die

young because he couldn’t picture me adult.
Sometimes I feel myself pale into the past

beside him, my face on the mantle aching
youth from my nowhere. Dead

or alive, we grow away from the faces
we flare. Ask the city

for a stranger. Ask the stranger
for the right. This room full of pictures

of what boys like him did
asks and asks: Do you think you are

kind just because you give
away your hands?

*

Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light, which won the 2015 Sixteen Rivers Press Manuscript Competition. She is also the recipient of a 2013 Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, and Ninth Letter, among others.

After the war vanished from the streets
it smoldered on in gibberish

of cells, in womb-spun flesh howled
into the trauma of living with what is

missing. A mother lifts an infant to the lens,
silently shows me what is missing

from its body, as if that’s all there is
to say. And it is. In every frame,

a being formed in a new way.
Such variety, it’s almost miraculous.

How stubborn, yet fragile
life is, a flame our hipbones cup

like palms. I’ve told myself there is no stoop
on which I would have abandoned you,

my twelve-week candle, no manger
flanked by sentinels of moonlight.

Now I wonder what your early exit
might have spared us. Should I thank

the evolutionary grace that made
my choice for me? Saigon keeps growing

away from the dead, from the past
that shimmers in the dust of the metropolis

cranes are tearing out of air.
But memory knits a kind of phosphorescence

in the genes. Yesterday, in a park
where tiny birds sing in cages

shaped like bells, a boy with a beautiful smile
and no lower half, flourished

an improvised genuflection
as I passed, his whole

body balanced on a single calloused palm.
And Saigon rises, hell-bent and ticking,

bulldozers perpetually digging
toward the ghost-itch

of a war that goes on
where we can’t end it.

*

Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light, which won the 2015 Sixteen Rivers Press Manuscript Competition. She is also the recipient of a 2013 Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, and Ninth Letter, among others.

All day the wild turkeys scavenge in snow,
the bulk of their bodies on twig-shaped legs. Bobbing.

They’re not so heavy as they look. I think of them like the plastic
pteranodon my son swings around the house, a fish in its beak.

These birds in my cul de sac are light: they fly, land four at a time
in the crab apple of Akbar’s yard. Twenty emerge from under

the pines, their eyes too small for me to see. I wish I could spend
hours just watching them, their awkward wobbling

and surprising grace in the juniper bushes, how they bend
a branch very little. Ten pounds, maybe? I try not to frighten

when I drive away to pick up my son from preschool.
He doesn’t want to come home, says I’m having a meeting

with Hugo. We drive back, slowly, past the turkeys still in the street,
me wanting to be one. I admit to romanticizing the lives of dumb

beasts who die more easily than I do. I admit to wanting
just to move my body when the turkey voice in my brain

says eat, says hurry, says fly into a tree. I admit it’s a stupid
desire, like most of my desires. I crock pot the dinner, finish

my emails, fail to work out. When finally the group recedes
into the trees, my children both home now from school,

we can find only the tracks, Ws with tails, like ski pole
marks on the deck. They were here, I tell my daughter, all day.

And my son runs around and around shrieking as if to imitate
their calls, swooping with his small replica of history, catching

his prey, and then they’re back, twenty at least, and I shout Look!,
and my wide-eyed girl runs to the window but the boy says

I saw them already, I’m tired of them, Mom. Can I have a sandwich?

*

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of RUST FISH and YESTERDAY, THE BEES. Maya teaches creative writing for Central Washington University, edits fiction for Crab Creek Review, edits poetry for Scablands Books, and, with her spouse, raises two children. She lives in the Inland Northwest.

Let someone pay our ransom
now that they’ve sent the pieces on–
the tip of a pinky finger, a trembling ear.
This cellar, infiltrated by a mousy light–
surely we aren’t to live in here.

Illuminate us, frangible moon
who has surrendered pieces of yourself,
swarmed by tiny robot men.

All the green that we can see:
a crumpled bill they left us
and oak leaves plaiting the bars.
Mold shuttles our names like bobbin lace.

*

Carol Alexander‘s work has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals, such as Bluestem, Boston Literary Magazine, Canary, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, Illya’s Honey, MadHatLit, Mobius, Poetrybay, Red River Review, and THEMA. Recent work appears in The New Verse News, CHEST,  South Florida Poetry Journal,  Driftwood Press, and The American Journal of Poetry. Her chapbook BRIDAL VEIL FALLS is available from Flutter Press. Alexander’s first full-length poetry collection HABITAT LOST is due out this year from Cave Moon Press.

****************I am the tongue transmuted—

the chatter of cousins
********I haven’t seen since elementary

when the world was more kaleidoscope
than anything else. In Xalapa

we ran games under corrugated roofs

********ran fingers through silver-fished rivers

****************ran mouths until they filled with pan con jamón
****************y sopa de fideo

during vacaciones at Tia Gracia’s, a bigger-than-most

home from Pa’s childhood
dreams, with long dirt driveways
and walled-fences that kept us safe. The same house

********Spanish wore me over-

********sized

at ages 4, 14, 22.

********How can one’s music can be another’s
********wreckage? Down the street

Felipe would mock
****************my accent
more American than having Jason Kidd’s on my feet.

********More American than our toothpaste suburb.

****************More American than sangre. Of 12

********siblings, Pa was the only who flighted north.

*

Alan Chazaro is a public high school teacher pursuing his MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco. He is the current Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow and a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley. His work has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and appears in Huizache, The Cortland Review, Borderlands, Iron Horse Review, Juked, decomP, and others.

an erasure poem based on George W. Bush’s 2001, so-called “War on Terror” speech which read in part “In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union.” 

normal
American people.
passengers,
rescuers, unfurling light    blood, prayers
– in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

We the people
strangers
citizens, enemies

to bring justice
rebuild communities

join together
enemies of war

Americans know wars
casualties of war — peace
freedom itself.
Americans have questions
evidence
crime.

Muslims Christians and Jews,
all Americans,
no distinction
military and civilian
women and children.
linked to many    different countries,
neighborhoods   camps   homes
around the world to plot      a great vision for the world:

respect the   human
condemn   the regime.

shelter
the unjustly imprisoned. journalists, workers
demand
a radical network      of support
freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to
disagree.
overthrow      government terror
end every atrocity, pretenses
murder
abandon    will to power —
lies.

will diplomacy, intelligence, law      disrupt and defeat the network of war?
no combat   lengthy campaign,
dramatic strikes, covert operations, secret terrorism
harbored by the United States.

announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position the Office of Homeland
reason.

be grateful organize respond
expect to live your lives,     hug your children.
be calm
patient,
creative

finally,
dramatically expand      hijacking
of the extraordinary spirit

the United States of America
our mission
The advance of human freedom
normal.
Thank you.

*

Floyd Cheung is author of the chapbook Jazz at Manzanar (Finishing Line Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in qarrtsiluni, Rhino, and other journals. He teaches in the Department of English and American Studies Program at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

If I made a chapel out of Plaster of Paris and whitewashed its walls, installed it where my mailbox should be. If I stationed it at the end of my driveway. If I left small offerings each day—a handful of lavender, an untwisted Bazooka wrapper, an old to-do list all used up and nearly finished. If I painted its dome in Santorini blue, showed restraint and didn’t Bedazzle its doorway or graffiti a love note along the back wall. If I faced the Narthex eastward and captured what comes with the rising sun. If I left you a glass of cold lemonade on the hottest day. If I sat in a rocker wearing a black shirt dress and watched for your return. I could let my cat twist herself around the chair legs. If I bided my time enough to grow you a bed of heirloom tomatoes. If I shrunk to fit inside a palm frond’s shadow. If I recreated that swamp in Charleston, the one with the sinking tree and the alligators napping on dead logs. If I left you a camera full of someone else’s pictures. If I paid attention to the evening birds cawing what sounded like abide…abide…abide…

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos teaches writing and literature at Kennesaw State and Clemson University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where she was a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Laurel Review, 32 Poems, Waccamaw, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Phoebe. Stephanie lives in Atlanta, GA.

Past the old stone house with its teeth knocked out.
Past the highway through the northeast hills
and the grain elevators and tractors, the tires

bigger than my height. And past each town that stitches
the smallest corners of a farmer’s quilt: Marysville, Beatrice,
Alma. Past Big Blue River that crosses state lines.

Past the roadside high school with its outdated scoreboard.
It’s next to the only gas station for fifteen miles and around
the corner from the hotel, the back wall erect like a parlor piano.

Past prairie-fire and the ashing down on a late March morning.
The black specks on your forearm and brow as you walk through
the town’s main street. It’s important to nourish

the soil that will yield its harvest. Past the store selling blue jeans,
Betty Boop stickers, the shoes you would never choose to run in.
The toe-box doesn’t feel right. The footbed doesn’t provide

the right support. But you’d run anyway, darting the road past
its hairline cracks and to its last inch. You’d say that this can bring
you past your fear and seven minutes short of a cardiac arrest.

This is where you say you feel stronger. This is where
the sharp inhale spikes you past your doubt. Almost past where you find
the clarity to say there is a space in which you can love me.

Past the sweltering in your voice when you hesitate and admit
that your bayou stretches too far from my prairie land.
From where I stand, an epi-pen stabbing into the ground’s

allergic bump. A far cry from the easy night when we threw aside
bar chairs, pumped the jukebox with quarters, and danced
past that last Sunday. We laughed and slid our way

across the beer-splashed floor. Past the parade route
of your biggest festival. Littered gum wrappers and necklaces clog
the drain-grates. The whole neighborhood sleeps off the excitement,

takes a breather before the next big thing. And past the abandoned
thrift store with its woman who would hold up a skirt and think
about dancing to Patsy Cline, sliding her hand along the base

of some sweet man’s neck. They’d dance past the Holstein bar,
the campground with its bank of fancy picnic tables
and to the river’s edge. She’d hope that past the man’s plans

to leave with the sun and drive north of Sioux Falls, he could stay,
he could press his hand into her back’s low curve. Hope finds its own
currency, presses it into your palm like a chocolate coin

on Christmas Eve. It’s easy to unwrap the gold foil, smile at the sugar
when the room looks festive. It’s easy to believe in something good
when the holiday candles are lit. But there are seasons

with not enough grain stored away. There are days when my gas light
glows fifteen miles from everywhere. What will happen?
I’m littering this road with coins. I’m asking you to find me.

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos teaches writing and literature at Kennesaw State and Clemson University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where she was a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Laurel Review, 32 Poems, Waccamaw, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Phoebe. Stephanie lives in Atlanta, GA.

A nymph could have told her,
had it not been changed to water,
the belt in her hand was proof
of violence, violence, violence.
Unthroated, the water reflected
a murmuration of stars, blinking
their silent objection
as if to say, see the lilies spilled,
here the hyacinth, here the rose,
and I will give no more the fields,
and I will give no more the throat,
whatever the hunger. As it happens,
a girl can survive the dark so long
as someone sorrows for her, if there
are roots to climb so she might lie
face-up in a field, sun in her eyes,
parented by sweet grass and rain.
But when the cry came, no one
knew this, not her mother, not even
the daughters of Ocean who buried
themselves in the sea floor and waxed
anemone in fear and mourning.
So much could have been said, but even
the most public songs are private,
and the caves of our dwelling echo
only the sounds we shout. Years later,
the children of Eleusis would follow
the thread of Demeter’s searching,
from puddle to sky and death’s reunion,
in hope that they might too be sought,
that the gods might negotiate
on their behalf. They climbed hills,
objected to crushed flowers, prayed
water might open her mouth again,
and ears of grain in silence reap.

*

Christina Mengert‘s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, New American Writing, Tarpaulin Sky, and Web Conjunctions, among other journals. Her book of poems, As We Are Sung, was published by Burning Deck Press in 2011; she also co-edited, with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, the anthology 12×12: Conversations in 21^st century Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press). She currently works as faculty and Assistant Director of College Programs for the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that offers a liberal arts education and college degrees to inmates in New York State. She also edits Dial 2, an online arts and culture magazine.

Here is the top of my head shaved off,
unbeautiful, the skin of a plum spit
into a paper bag. Here is Vermeer’s
Woman in Blue reading its contents.
The plum fits in the palm
of an invisible hand, yours, I think,
a sweeter meat, juice sucked
into aperture. Here is the wick
of a brush licked to a fine point,
telling a story like a map dipped
in ocean. Here a girl postures
street-side, excavated pit
tossed and landing in bordering
fields. And it’s raining. Here is
her thumb peeled slow and soft,
signaling a ride from a passer-by,
as if offering a poppy to a driver.
(Are you slowing? Have you slowed?)
The lady in the frame considers, hungrier
than most, she has something to say,
once she’s finished her letter,
though the thread of the painter’s
brush stencils her pale mouth
shut. I’ve told her the fruit is heavy
on the vine, and I imagine she hears me.
In a blank room down an unpainted
hall, a cavernous clock-tick, a train
patient on its tracks.

*

Christina Mengert‘s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, New American Writing, Tarpaulin Sky, and Web Conjunctions, among other journals. Her book of poems, As We Are Sung, was published by Burning Deck Press in 2011; she also co-edited, with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, the anthology 12×12: Conversations in 21^st century Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press). She currently works as faculty and Assistant Director of College Programs for the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that offers a liberal arts education and college degrees to inmates in New York State. She also edits Dial 2, an online arts and culture magazine.