He was not yet married to Georgette.
He was on his own, uncertain where he’d sleep or if he’d eat
Before tomorrow. He sauntered nonetheless through galleries,
Staring at paintings, sculptures, while winter turned the sidewalks to ice.
His shoes felt thin, his suit the best he could make of it.
He tried to stay dry and look like he belonged.
If he had conversations with God, who spoke Spanish with a Peruvian accent,
He had them quietly. And, when he could afford it,
Had them over coffee in the cheapest café he could find.
The coffee was cut with chicory, and there was no sugar.
God, he thought, was someone’s senile father, seated close to the oven
In a hut in the mountains. The news took a long time to reach him,
And when it did, there was nothing he could do but nod his head, mumbling
“That’s too bad. There’s so much sorrow there. So much.”
The monsters who tore out the intestines of children were real. He’d felt
The damp walls in prison, and he’d seen the glass eyes of the fox and badger
Taxidermied in the ratcatcher’s window, their mouths open to show
Their teeth. February rain caused icicles to slide from
The windowsills and smash like empty bottles against the pavement.
He knew it was stupid to argue with God, but he did it anyway,
God who couldn’t give him a proper pair of shoes.
He pulled up his collar and stared into the light that shined
Through a restaurant window above the elegant diners
Eating chicken and potatoes.

*

George Franklin is the author of Traveling for No Good Reason (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press), and Noise of the World (forthcoming Sheila-Na-Gig Editions).  Individual publications include: Into the Void, The Woven Tale Press Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Pedestal Magazine, Cagibi, and The American Journal of Poetry. He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons, and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores). 

I don’t know what a city is supposed to resemble
Anymore. This one is just a collection of buildings
Sticking their fists up at the sky, architectural
Anger reflecting the sunlight or lit up at night in
Neon colors, electric blue, magenta, mouthwash green.
My friend Frank once had an apartment here that faced
The water. Each morning, the sun burned through his window,
And he’d stand on his balcony with a cup of coffee or
Tea and watch the early sunbathers or the birds diving for fish.
Sometimes at dawn, he’d see a cruise ship elbow its way
Into the channel to dock before the passengers were awake.
The parking garage underneath his building
Used to flood every time there was bad weather.
Cars that weren’t moved in time were destroyed by saltwater,
Smells of leaking oil and mold. I had an office a few
Blocks away, and we’d meet for lunch
At one of the restaurants where we could sit outside,
Eat sandwiches, and talk. What would we say to each other now,
Sitting over French pastries at a table on Lincoln Road?
Even with repairs, the streets here still flood when the tide’s
Too high, the Atlantic curls and breaks on the other side
Of the seawall, and the lost cigarette lighter in the sand is washed
Toward Europe or Africa. The black outlines of cargo ships
Still move east, then north—not like ships at all, just cardboard
Boxes painted and set adrift—and tourists in rented sports cars
Still drive back and forth, looking for a place to park.
What can I say, Frank? Not much has changed.

*

George Franklin is the author of Traveling for No Good Reason (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores), Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press), and Noise of the World (forthcoming Sheila-Na-Gig Editions).  Individual publications include: Into the Void, The Woven Tale Press Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Pedestal Magazine, Cagibi, and The American Journal of Poetry. He practices law in Miami, teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons, and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día/Last Day (Katakana Editores). 

Stay home if u sicc/Come over if u thicc

What if you are sick and thick, the virus
sweating from the pores in your beautiful ass,
round as a crystal ball,
the future bright within?

What if you are neither sick nor thick
but waifish, breakable, balanced on an impossible
dancer’s toe for weeks, afraid to move?

What if you are sick, but it is a heartbreak
kind of sick, the kind that makes you cry
as you watch a live video
of a celebrity couple
cooking with their children?

What if you are thick, but thick with longing,
thick with the need for touch,
for hands on your body, the longing
so swollen in your throat, you cough
to force it out?

Stay home, the posts insist. The photos,
the thick male arms reaching
for sailboat railings and beers
and the waists of smiling women.
The lull of the swipe– don’t like, don’t like,
like. Come over.

*

Hadley Franklin‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Boiler, Palimpsest, Narrative, and others. She holds an MFA in fiction from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. She is a dean at a special education school in New York and lives in Brooklyn with her son.

vi.

11 years old, seventh grade,
green book bag slung over right shoulder,
old-fashioned hand-cranked streetcar ride
to Eggleston Station, then
bus to Huntington Avenue, then
sleek automatic streetcar ride.
Finally
after an hour
Girls Latin School.

Two years later
GLS moved to Codman Square.
One short bus ride away.
But missed the culture
of the Fenway
and the BLS boys.

v.

So naïve, cosseted in Jewish Dorchester.
GLS unveiled life beyond.
First black girl to be my friend:
Lillie White.

Junior year. 1957.
Confrontation in Little Rock
jumped out of my TV
into my living room.
Girls who looked like me,
but for skin color—
dressed like me,
carried books like me.

Angry white mob
blocking their way
taunting them
hurling filthy slurs at them
spitting on them.
All to bar them from the simple act
of going to school,
something I blithely took for granted.

These images etched into my heart and mind.

iv.

Diagramming sentences – ugh!
Yet here I am mincing words, parsing phrases.

“Girls! Girls! Stop this nonsense!
You think I want to be here?
You’ll all be gone soon,
off to college to get your MRS degrees.
Your ship will come in.
Mine never did.
So here I am stuck with you.
Get back to work!”

iii.

No physics class?
In the Sputnik era?
Because we’re . . . ‘just girls’?
We organized, pestered, cajoled –
finally, got it in our senior year.

ii.

We started with love—
Amo. Amas. Amat.
Swiftly on to war and conflict.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon taught us
sometimes there’s no turning back.
Alea iacta est.
Virgil warned us to be careful who we trust.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
And a bit of philosophy from Cicero
prepared us to grasp the idea
that a soupcan could be art.
De gustibus non disputandum est!

i.

60 years gone.
The threads we spun together
endure in the tapestry of my life.

*

Arlene Wilgoren Dunn is a lifelong number cruncher turned latter day word wrangler. Other than occasional fits of haiku, she made her first foray into writing poetry in 2018 at 76 years young. Arlene’s poems tend towards free verse in organic forms on topics that mix memoir and social commentary with empathy and humor.  Arlene was introduced to poetry-making in a workshop conducted by Christopher Twymon, an art therapy associate at the retirement community where she lives. The workshop included a cohort of fellow residents and required writing a new poem every week for 15 weeks. Subsequently, she has been mentored by poets Laura Mullen and Virginia Konchan.  Arlene had a distinguished career as a financial analyst in the airline industry and has been a tireless advocate and activist for racial, social, and economic justice. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Brandeis University and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Arlene and her husband Larry live in Oberlin, Ohio. They are avid fans of adventurous music and support many artists and ensembles. Together, they are contributing editors for the website I CARE IF YOU LISTEN and audience-perspective bloggers for the International Contemporary Ensemble.  
 

Settle down if you can be
still at the mouth
and let water, let bread

Take to furling upon sills
while counting rice and radio
stations tucked behind knees

Coffee rings of theory,
the pantry of chapped hands
by bottled, burnishing wind

Were there another way to see
you than rounded by sticking
pixels, beads suggesting face

Of course, this is forever.

This, the press of petals between
fingers, the popping rhyme
of flame and flesh

Vesper dangs at noon
but birds
wound to branches like letters

May your god in mint ropes visit
for only a week, however those are
counted, by sand or stair

Through glass, paper, or shock
a wave passes
until onto the next

*

Annie Goold is from a small rural town in Illinois. Her work has previously appeared in Matter Monthly and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine. She lives and writes in Olympia, WA.

I am no longer her promise – only
a wasteland of irony, house sketched
in fire and envy. My solitudes and fortresses

my sounds of extinction
carried home. I am an abstract

of secrecy, scurrying chair
drifts towards the corner,

loose landscapes crowd the mirror
centuries sprawl across the couch.

I lay upon this coarse earth –
poise –
convict –

*

Cindy Savett is also the author of the chapbooks The Story of My Eyes (Dancing Girl Press), Battle for the Metal Kiss (H_ngm_n Books) and Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer (Big Game Books). Her poems can also be found in the anthology Challenges for the Delusional (Jane Street Press) and in LIT, Margie, Heliotrope, The Marlboro Review, 26 Magazine, Cutbank, and other print and online journals. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives with her family on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where she teaches poetry workshops to psychiatric inpatients at several area hospitals.

An ache in their bellies for Rachel’s
earthy touch that weaves rough
sorrow among each breath

and bears their moist sighs
risen above fire, feeds the mewling
air. They are scrapers who strip

broken stones from her hair,
carve their names on fences
that surround her, blame

fermentation hiding in her shoes
for their singular
fall.

*

Cindy Savett is also the author of the chapbooks The Story of My Eyes (Dancing Girl Press), Battle for the Metal Kiss (H_ngm_n Books) and Rachel: In the Temporary Mist of Prayer (Big Game Books). Her poems can also be found in the anthology Challenges for the Delusional (Jane Street Press) and in LIT, Margie, Heliotrope, The Marlboro Review, 26 Magazine, Cutbank, and other print and online journals. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives with her family on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where she teaches poetry workshops to psychiatric inpatients at several area hospitals.

You remember the Israelites who said, “If
only we had died in Egypt, or even here
in the wilderness!” They were not
standing on the bike path by the Santa Fe
River, as I am, bounded by lizards,
prairie dogs batting at thin leaves
of growth like little punching bags
before gallantly swallowing each whole.
They run nearly parallel to the soil,
unaffected, it seems, by the sun,
the stubbornness of the old bicycle and
its slippery chain. A luxury to sit in
the sweaty foam seat of my own choices,
in which no one else is required to pool.
I have just come south from a summer
in which people were forever vanishing
into and despite the woods holding tight
around the city, finding their own portals
out of this time. There’s no purpose in
temperance, I said to myself, evenings
at the desk supporting my habitual
glass of red. Be scorched or be gone.
I rode the bicycle in the summer
afternoons with no hat, a radical hoping
to reveal my root. The prairie dogs
and I shared no concern for the coyotes
(unrevealed but promised close at hand),
the little ants in their skyscraping
humps, ample amongst the low brush,
prickly and broad. Like them, I prefer
to complain behind closed doors.
I had not come all that far, just beyond
the evenly-housed streets and across
the river bridges. I have not starved
for a little tendril of my own.

*

Kate Partridge is the author of the poetry collection Ends of the Earth (University of Alaska Press, 2017), and her poems have appeared in FIELD, Yale Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from George Mason University, she is currently a doctoral fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.  

My emperor
is shameless
beauty not
bounty the
unquantifiable
eye more
keen the form
inimitable so
though we
have little we
marvel at all.
I’m circumspect
about night-
shade and glare
will seize
focus lift
your face as
accidental
colors simulate
the midday sun
in the arctic
circle a scrim
of white
gold across
the visible
spectrum.
I don’t want
an illusion a
distraction no
matter how
astounding.
Tell me
about the
banal I
can’t
imagine
what that
looks like.

***

Brianna Noll is the author of The Era of Discontent, forthcoming from Elixir Press in 2021, and The Price of Scarlet (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), which was named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. She is poetry editor of The Account, which she helped found, and her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals, including the Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, and Waxwing. She lives in Los Angeles.