I was about to…Rigoberto¹
López Pérez, serene, takes a seat
right next to me. I glimpse from the
corner of my eye that he is being followed.
The empty notebook he carries tells me that he waits
–for something worth the wait. Which is also clear from the linen
suit, the perfect English tie knot, the first communion shoes. I accept
that my turn to ask has come. An unsuspected calm makes us company.
I talk to him about Charlotte, about Cesar’s own child, about Sasha
Ulianov. What have they said to you? How many times can
one die in the same manner? There is a breath of fever in
the air, and the line between land and sea becomes less
blurry. The tide rises and ebbs, rises and ebbs and
rises until it turns into a spear; then, it punctures
the horizon from end to end. A shadow who
was staring down backs off; she has seen
something. In front of us the ocean is
parted; a golden canal, and a
sealed door, deep in the
background, a carmine
doorknob exploding
silently, a lone,
expansive,
slow,
flash.

 

[1] A poet, artist and composer. He assassinated Anastasio Somoza García, the longtime dictator of Nicaragua

***

Francisco Larios, writer and translator, has published three full poetry collections in Spanish: Cada Sol Repetido, (“Every returning sun”), Anamá Press, Managua, Nicaragua, November, 2010, La Isla de Whitman, (“Whitman’s Island”), Buenos Aires Poetry, Argentina, 2015, Sobre la vida breve de cualquier paraíso (“About the fleeting life of any paradise”), 400 Elefantes, Nicaragua, 2017.  A bilingual collection: The Net in Sight/La red ante los ojos, Rascacielos, Quito, Ecuador, 2015. A bilingual plaquette: Astronomía de un sueño/Astronomy of a Dream, Carmina in minima, Barcelona, 2013.  His translations have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation and other literary journals.  Selected and translated into Spanish Los hijos de Whitman – Poesía norteamericana en el siglo XXI (“Whitman’s Children—U.S. Poetry in the XXIst Century), Valparaíso, México, 2017, a sample of 109 contemporary poets.  Writes political essays and opinions in news media and on his own blog [“Ciudadano X”].  His poetry has appeared in numerous digital and print magazines around the world, and has been translated into Italian, Greek, Romanian, Estonian, and Arabic.

Zealous acolytes of twisted right angles. Bright-eyed

Young Republicans in brown-shirt fashion, disavowing

xenophobic motivation while marching side by side

with white nationalists and Oath Keepers into the booths.

Vacant young app addicts, doddering octogenarians, and that

uncle you thought you knew. Maybe your spouse, your child.

Three Percenters with one finger on a trigger and another

selecting a name that sounds like hump, dump, bump stock,

Rumpelstiltskin. End time eschatologists with full magazines.

Quick-change artists like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley.

Professional polluters, paramilitary police, Pompeo, Pruitt.

Obtuse advocates of abstinence, incel advocates of sexual assault,

nativist advocates for twelve million deportations.

Michael the Black Man and other candidates for radical

lobotomy. Chickens and foxes in the same damned barnyard.

Kanye, I suppose. And Cheney. And David Duke.

Judeo-Christian Zionists, evangelical Southern Baptists, and

initiates of the New Appalachian Cult of Resurrected Coal.

Heirs of McCarthy and Wallace and Thurmond,

ghosts of my father and his last Jim Crow generation.

Family men with cunt on their lips at the country club

every Sunday afternoon, looking for a bitch to trump.

(Did you know that forty-one percent of them—

cited in one poll, anyway—said they would support

bombing Agrabah, fictional home of Disney’s darkish Aladdin?)

All 62,984,828 of them casting their voices into the void.

 

***

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), and two chapbooks from Unicorn Press: The Use of the World (2013) and Of Air and Earth (2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and a previous issue of Matter, among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.

 

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**

 

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

 

***

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande 2009).  She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.