These grey daisies of sky, these clouds: Mary Lou,

Tyler, Barbara, Richard, Mary Jo, Dorothy.

Let these not only be names I lay down in a poem

 

on Easter Sunday. So I am one weed among many

dead flowers. I am where it is the hardest to be inside this

almost spring as one daffodil drugs a hummingbird

 

into kissing, and the ghost of my grandmother barefoot

in her front yard introduces herself to a maple leaf,

then another, reaching each leaf with a ladder so delicate-

 

orange, and touching each leaf to her cheek, and sticking

a tiny white name tag to each, even though we know

what’s coming, what the coming autumn will do,

 

how for these monumental deaths each year, we will

never receive justification. Kalamazoo, even now,

in blunt sunshine, a valley of cerulean overhead,

 

already among the neon joggers, each leaf is

being forgotten into a tree. Be honest with me.

This is how we save ourselves in the city: by turning away.

 

We are already turning away from silence,

that silence— the blood we are swallowing—

that silence of my father against the maple tree

 

the day his mother died, a poppy crushed

in his coat pocket, that silence after six people

shot dead in a city I’ve only begun to love.

 

Wait. That silence we will soon shoulder away

with noise is still right here. The world’s

engine has stalled, and this is a moment.

 

Let me stay inside it. There is a great cloud

which is standing before me in the center

of this room in the center of any city,

 

and I have been standing here trying to shout

that thing away (forgive me). Let me reach

for the harder thing, to have two full congregations

 

of teeth in the cathedral of the throat

and not to use them, yes, this must be my impossible

human challenge, to fill this newest loneliness

 

with silence, to lie down on my back in the lilacs

with my eyes open, and to live here, and to sing nothing…

but when the whole field falls again, we will wake up one day

 

and find ourselves responsible for the world. And what will we do

with this gift of having survived? Will we funeral each leaf,

and rub each leaf to our cheek, and then pin each leaf

 

back on the living tree? Will we re-build the red forest

out of dead poppies? No. We will do nothing. So every leaf

must be a field, then, every flower, an ocean, and the ghost

 

of my grandmother is a nation of fallen down starlings,

and the camera must be sharpening its focus on us, now,

and we weeds who are left standing, left wagging our heads,

 

left alive, again, my good green friends, again, out of all

that is tiny but valuable, look at the dead we’ve made.

 

***

 

Ephraim Scott Sommers is a poet and singer-songwriter from Atascadero, California. His book of poems, The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (Tebot Bach Press), was awarded the 2016 Patricia Bibby First Book Award. Recent poems, essays, and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Minnesota Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. For music and poems, please visit: http://www.ephraimscottsommers.com/

 

he lets the hot water run and brushes
Friday night teeth before the fogged mirror
that swallows memory backward and down the deep throat
of time: Cierra’s paisley strewn June dress, décolletage
at sixteen stained with the old man’s bilked grape wine.
lips inked purple, wet and shifting beneath the gift
of her mother’s quiet Parisian nostrils. he liked she
didn’t talk much, this silver coin fixed to the pond floor
of mutual reflections. she’s long gone now: hot water runs
and he spits her into the sink drain, and in a popped collar
polo hunts the strobe-lit-dive-bar-dance-floor for
fuller, more spirited noses and mouths agape
in unified gospel: please, pick me. he licks a neck
for taste. pinches cocoa-buttered hip fat for validity.
then whispers back, color means nothing.

even on these fresh breath Friday nights filled
with the ones who’ve mastered salivation—
he dreams his childhood ingénue drifts high plains
in cream-colored cowboy boots and ironic Walmart denim
thinking of him. really, she knocks back the daily pill
with shots of Knob Creek—bumps only the purest
up those refined holes—and touches the kind of men only
who swear to god they’ve no recollection of her
fractured summer dresses from an adolescent Ohio.
in his sleep he weeps, wakes wild and torn, thinking,
corn-fed fleeting whore. once the dark ones exit
and he’s calmed by morning coffee and cigarette,
during this light of day what he really means is this:
please, darling, come home so we can drink again
and be together merry beneath the burning sun.

 

for Fionah

 

***

AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY teaches writing at Columbus State Community College. A Pushcart Prize winning essayist, his work has appeared in Callaloo, Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, The Sun, Kweli, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere. He is currently working on full length book of poetry titled Get Funky.

Turn inward when the world begins to speak.

 

Listen to the body twitch, quick sparks on a hydrostatic plane.

 

Ignore the hexagenia sequined into stone.

 

Send the dogs before you into dusk.

 

Maybe this time they won’t slip off the skunked-out edge

 

of the field, maws full of musk and quills.

 

Maybe this time they’ll retrieve what they have seen.

 

***

Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI. He is the author of the books Brother Of Leaving and Fight Songs. His writing has appeared in many journals including Southword, Passages North, The Journal, Commonweal, Drunken Boat, and The Poetry Review. He is a recipient of The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes) and winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize; he has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. He teaches at Oakland University and regularly reviews collections of poetry for the radio program Stateside on Michigan Public Radio.

 

is nowhere if not a place

to wear ten gallons

of nothing on your head.

You’re swimming

in those clothes of yours,

Johnny. You know it helps

to buy pants that fit.

Wear the poem

pseudonymously like the hat

that is the custom in these parts.

Remove it once indoors.

Don’t speak of dust

settling in the vague future,

alimony and child support

coming through.

The horses kick up

clouds of it. Dust

on rein and saddle leather,

dust on martingale

and blinder brass,

faces talced-up

like the dead.

It is a fact of houses

their mothers decry

as their erstwhile fathers

become it—dust on glass

frames housing pictures

of broken family units

that look ridiculous

from this vantage point.

Dust’s the make-up

the furniture keeps putting on

like a child

trying to look older than it is.

Supper is a broken puppet

theater. The aliases

are endless as the horizon

seems to be.

 

***

Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI. He is the author of the books Brother Of Leaving and Fight Songs. His writing has appeared in many journals including Southword, Passages North, The Journal, Commonweal, Drunken Boat, and The Poetry Review. He is a recipient of The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes) and winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize; he has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. He teaches at Oakland University and regularly reviews collections of poetry for the radio program Stateside on Michigan Public Radio.

 

 

here are my best ideas / set down / more touch / more

consensual touch / communal living / assertiveness

 

training / save the men too not just women &children

 

because patriarchy putting the power of my love-losing

wishes beneath men’s wishes / is wrong / complete

 

integration mission / talk about death in accurate

 

descriptive non-hyperbolic terms / don’t force women to

have babies / to not have babies / women shouldn’t die in

 

childbirth / hospitals should not overbook to maximize

 

profit at the expense of lives / more women die in

childbirth / more black women die in childbirth / this

 

is not god’s will / more women die in childbirth / this is

 

wrong / more women die in childbirth in this country than

they did thirty years ago shame / shame / shame / shame

 

&shame on this sick man who shot me down / shame

 

shame / i wish i stayed home the day i will be shot / shame

on this society that broke and divided this man / his

 

emotional life ripped in pieces in exchange for the honor

 

of one day being called man &the promise of all that he is

owed / which is a lie / this broken man that will shoot me

 

down / our system is structured to turn our back / i would

 

rather sit with this broken man / &hug this broken man

listen to this broken man / &care tenderly for this broken

 

man / than have him shoot &kill me / or you / if that’s what

 

it bloody well takes / i will roll my gingham stiff sleeves

up &do more thankless intellectual &emotional &invisible

 

women’s work except visible because / set down here.

***

Zoe Canner is an angry, anti-racist, 3^rd Generation Holocaust Survivor. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SUSAN / The Journal, Chicago Review of Books’ Arcturus, Storm Cellar, Occulum, Indolent Books’ What Rough Beast, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles where she indulges in hilly walks at dusk when the night-blooming jasmine is at its peak fragrance.

Here amongst glittery crushed cans
and painted cigarette butts
someone mentions Stephen Miller.
In the single New York Times article
this black girl browsed, he reminded her
of a high school crush, the balding
pale punk Guatemalan who said
she had nice feet after gifting him
a Howard Miller for his collection.

Her liberal friends smile as she prattles
admiration, calling his truculent
janitor critique a teenage quip,
his Machiavellian stance on immigration
conservative charm, concluding
the Duke three lucky someone
so reasonable came to their defense.
She knew girls like Crystal:
They deserved the pestilence of jail.

 

***

 

The poet Iyana Sky received her BA in English from the University of North Texas. Currently, she lives in Columbus, OH. Her work appears and is forthcoming in joINT, Duende, Superstition Review, and Glint Literary Journal.

 

As the beggar with the battered face limped along the long line of cars, driver after driver looked away, disgusted, afraid, wishing, like me, the light would hurry up and change, but, no, he arrived, clutching his cup, and, for all my alleged intelligence, I still didn’t know what to say, so I just said hello.

 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&

 

Walking along the dissolving shoreline, head down, shoulders hunched against the cold, I’m just about to past the lifeguard shack, boarded up for winter, when the gull on the roof, windblown envoy from an extinct nation, makes a noise like “Ha-ha!” as if finding in our shared surroundings something roaringly funny of which I am unaware.

 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&

 

How much easier it is to start a war than end one. Three-thousand protesters singing while lighting candles is beautiful. Some of you might hear distinct words, but others, only sobs or sighs. This place will burn.

 

***

Howie Good, Ph.D., a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of  I Am Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submission Press, both published in 2018.

After Babel people speak as if what they said

were an imitation of themselves saying what

they say.  Not insincere, but knowing a thing said

is all there is now, a sound they hope stands for what

they mean or want or where they hurt.  Like what Jeff said

in his HookMeUp profile: I want to know what

the real thing’s like.  But Jeff’s missed the memo, which said

the real thing from here on is a word thing, is what

we’re meant to hear, a thing about which the more said

the better, or more bitter, depending on what

your real thing is or isn’t.  But that being said,

or having sounded like something one might say, what

to do with these washed-ashore dead, of whom it’s said

they’re real and mean something, but we’ve not been told what?

 

***

Steven Reese’s most recent book of poems is Excentrica: Notes on the Text (BlazeVOX, 2017).  He teaches at Youngstown State University in Ohio, and in the Northeast Ohio MFA program.

What barbed the curse

was not the sixty-

nine new languages per se;

worse

was instant fluency.

The way we spoke that day

 

couldn’t know the slow

labor of agreement,

sound bound with sense,

by which we grow

into what we’ve meant,

that difficult balance.

 

What we’d become

were mere tongues: rash,

quick to blame,

given to gibberish

like children

or fixed on distinction—

 

but on saying hell-bent,

the words stabbed at

like a best guess.

We mouthed our present

tense to an inarticulate

hum, like locusts.

 

 ***

Steven Reese’s most recent book of poems is Excentrica: Notes on the Text (BlazeVOX, 2017).  He teaches at Youngstown State University in Ohio, and in the Northeast Ohio MFA program.

That winter, snow dusted the hemlock, each spiked cone.

Snow salted my hair—it was that long, that winter.

A black bear cub curled beside me, hers a dark honeyed sleep.

If this were a fable, one could sleep the whole winter

 

without interruption, that’s how long it felt as the bear cub

and I kept each other warm. She had no clamp, no shackle

or trap marks in her fur, of course I checked. Carefully,

I peeled fat gray ticks from her back, but I was gentle

 

then. Sometimes it was my turn to wade

waist-deep into the river, and that was fine. If we were

lucky, there were fish, though no fish would

consider this luck. Sometimes the bear cub seemed to stalk

 

a smell, sniffing, I assumed her mother, but it could

have been anything, that winter. You wonder what

there is to learn here, other than this isn’t a fable.

Other than, whenever I woke, the bear was a bear again.

 

***

 

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New York Times Magazine, upstreet, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day, and Verse Daily. He teaches at Hampshire College.