Category: Issue 25
State of the Union
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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.
Night Flight Queen
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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.
Queen Midas
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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.
Oracle Queen
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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.
I Loved Him! I Killed Him!
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New Year’s Day
For Sean Thomas Dougherty
This year there were no parties. Our friends
Were sick with flu or busy caring
For family sick with flu, but we’d
Still stayed up late talking and drinking
Prosecco, the remains of dinner,
Arroz con pollo, left on our plates.
The next day, we planned to assemble
Ikea furniture, a desk and
Chair. I confess, the chair is still in
Pieces. Instead, we cooked black-eyed peas
And cornbread, which made me think of my
Friend Frank who died just a year ago
Because I’d always bring him black-eyed
Peas on New Year’s. Then, we read poems
From websites or posted on Facebook.
Sean’s poem about the editor
Who sent him a rejection on New
Year’s morning was particularly
Good. It made me think about the things
We decide should give us hope, this day
Chosen arbitrarily by some
Roman emperor or pope to be
The beginning of—what?—not the end
Of autumn or middle of winter.
Random as the throw of dice on an
Italian afternoon, a man looks
Up from his writing and says, “Yes, I’ll
Begin it here, not at solstice or
Equinox—the sun shall receive no
Primacy.” In January, the
Sky thickens with clouds thrown like pillows
Across an unmade bed. Where Sean lives,
Snow’s inevitable, but here in
Florida, winter is the good time,
Nights mild and cloudless, Orion and
The Pleiades visible as soon
As it’s dark, almost as bright as the
Fireworks we watched at midnight, showers
Of red and gold, falling on rooftops
And fences, bell curves of trees, unknown
Yards, and streets where the cars slow to stare.
So, for no reason at all, we cook
A special meal, open the wine we’ve
Been saving, sip espresso sweetened
With Kahlua and turn the pages
Inside of us, mumbling once again
Words we hope will grant wishes, protect
From harm. A new year begins today.
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George Franklin’s most recent collection, Traveling for No Good Reason, won the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition and was published in 2018. A bilingual collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas, translated by Ximena Gomez was also published in 2018 by Katakana Editores, and individual poems have appeared in various journals, including Matter, Into the Void, The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Pedestal Magazine, and Cagibi. A broadside from Broadsided Press is forthcoming in 2019, along with new poems in Sheila-Na-Gig. He also practices law in Miami and teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons.
Homily on the Obsolescence of the American One-Cent Piece
You are invited to the traveling exhibit of the thirties,
to eat rotten cabbage, breathe dust. Consider the 19th floor
of the Ritz-Carlton and the elevator operator like a hitman
in gravity’s mafia. Who dare step over a shimmer then?
They dreamed pennies into rain showers in 1936:
Bing Crosby in talkies, then on the radio he lacquered
the thick coats of his croon into a depressed Irish prayer.
There’s the story of four boys in Newark who snipped
a single coin with stolen tin shears to capitalize
upon a chain of grocers’ misprinted flyers—“2 pounds
ground chuck a quarter a penny”—such worth
and ingenuity in smallness, America itself a collection
of bits of fools’ gold. There must always be a soul
picking through the junk shops and county dumps
like the human residue inside the dust, the crying
of the elephant in the ivory keys. The professional piner
aches not for the object but the space
it once occupied. This is why longing so easily turns sacred,
why in the face of the commies Ike signed into law
our communal trust in god, 1956, a new national motto
set above Lincoln as though a divine manual:
“spend and be holy.” One can almost feel the weight
of every piece of specie like the gilded pages
of a book. Strolling down Fifth Avenue, late fall,
an Illinois tourist winces when something sharp
jabs him on the crown and tinkles to the pavement.
The Empire State, the penny, and for all of us he pats his head,
pulls down a streak so red the city dissipates
to a smudgy, grayed-up daguerreotype. Wager it’s been years,
eons since the impulse to taste blood struck you.
But it, too, is a soupçon of copper, it’s a few million palms
seasoned with salt. It’s one river pulsing for better
with what we accept as the smallest unit of hope.
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Colin Pope grew up in the Adirondacks. His poetry collection, Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral, is forthcoming in 2019 from Tolsun Books, and his manuscript Prayer Book for an American God was a finalist for the 2018 Louise Bogan Award and the 2019 St. Lawrence Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slate, Rattle, The Cortland Review, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Best New Poets, among others, and he’s the recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes. Colin is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University and serves on the editorial staffs of Cimarron Review and Nimrod International.
Five Poems
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These crumbs are from so many places
yet after every meal they ripen
sweeten in time for your fingertip
that shudders the way your mouth
was bloodied by kisses wrestling you down
with saliva and rumbling boulders –you sit
at a table and all over again see it
backing away as oceans, mountains
and on this darkness you wet your finger
to silence it though nothing comes to an end
–piece by piece, tiny and naked, they tremble
under your tongue and still sudden lightning.
*
It had an echo –this rock
lost its hold, waits on the ground
as the need for pieces
knows all about what’s left
when the Earth is hollowed out
for the sound a gravestone makes
struck by the days, months
returning as winter :the same chorus
these dead are gathered to hear
be roused from that ancient lament
it sings as far as it can
word for word to find them.
*
Before its first grave this hillside
was already showing signs
let its slope escape as darkness
mistake every embrace for dirt
though one arm more than the other
is always heavier, still circles down
bringing you closer the way rain
knows winter will come with snow
that was here before, bring you weights
till nothing moves, not the shadows
not the sun coming here to learn
about the cold, hear the evenings.
*
Though you can’t tell them apart
your tears came back, marked the ground
the way leaves go unnamed to their death
as the need to follow one another
one breath at a time, face up
and after that the rain and warmer
̶ you weep with your collar open
make room for another grave
near a sea each night wider, further
no longer heard the way now and then
comes by to close the Earth
with buttons and sleeves and tighter.
*
You open this jar the way each raindrop
breaks apart mid-air, stops telling time
when struck by another, head to head
as streams ̶ your hands stay wet
let you gather the hours that are not
the bottom stones mourners use
for water though this lid is still circling
where you listen for those nights
on the way back as the puddles
water makes when trying to breathe
into a place on its own and empty handed
the glass shatters all at once.
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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at http://www.simonperchik.com.
To view one of his interviews please follow this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8
TERMS OF ALLEGIANCE
(poem inspired by work as a “namer” for advertising)
My product needs you. Watch the silver surfaces, the waving waters, wonder why the woman is humiliating the man—hold that anxious thought. We have you now; pledge unconscious
allegiance to us. The words reverberate: aim, aptitude, authority; you are not sure you can measure up. Hold that feeling of self-doubt: we will bring authenticity, balance, direction, a compass for your life. Now, buy Boson (never mind what it means, it is a solution).
We are anodyne, access to numbness and a world without doubt; we are the antidote. Buy
Allele (the sound alone is uplifting, lulling). Buy Asana (our sharp penetrating products are as
beneficial as yoga). Watch: we offer you a bright shore, an ascendant future, halcyon nights, a
champion for your battles, a compass in the fog, clarity, concord, electric force.
In your indecisive world, you are on the cusp of a decision: leap! To buy is action, affirmation, connection; the diagram of your life is finally here! We are your doctrine and domain, your
emergent path to an elemental, firsthand, and entire existence. We are your focus, your formula,
your fulcrum. The world is frightening and ridden with woes; you are daily subject to death by
a thousand cuts. We are your lightship, your sure haven, your journey’s landing, your way through the matrix’s maze, your locus, your hope.
STOP: Your problems, which are legion, cannot be solved outside of the mercantile world. We
control the immaterial and will share its aura if you buy. Without us, you are a zygote, small and unformed, without viability, validity, or worth. We are the membrane through which you must
pass. Listen: you have problems you have never dreamed of which we alone can resolve. Buy
Synergy, buy Thoughtfulness, buy it all and survive. Watch the silver surfaces, the waving water, the woman humiliating the man, and buy.
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Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters , In Paran , A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. Please see more about Larissa at her website www.larissashmailo.com
The News
for Anthony Bourdain & Kate Spade
I am a stupid and simple soul
for if love can be addressed on the path to Paradise
or shift the sheer being of material things
on the bed stand, in the kitchen, in the garden;
if love can speak of crowns and cowardice,
or cows moaning on the way to slaughter
entrails and organs, brains and offal–
how is it this paradox still stands before me
like the headline of the suicide
of a celebrity chef or a designer
who were clearly loved and left a child
to imagine the world without them;
and if love can lay drunk and moaning
on a hotel bed for the chance to sleep
when the beloved is miles away and the one
so desired is sleep and sleep and sleep,
how can there be no sex can cure this,
no taste bedevil this, no colorful handbags of
promises to bring one back from the brink,
and though I have come back many times,
how could I be one of the lucky ones
neither famous nor infamous
but in comfort nonetheless
as I know whence my next meal will arrive
and my beloved will prepare it
and I will wash the dishes and sweep the floor
and the dark will settle upon
our house as if it were not a call to enter
which I hear whispering still beneath
her voice telling me we are not yet done,
come to bed anyways and sleep my love
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David Mura’s newest book is A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing. He has written four books of poetry, the latest The Last Incantations, and two memoirs, Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory.