Sand over brick the symbol is deceiving; then,
Not a tidbit too soon, an ambivalent twit
Parts an argument twixt equal texts—
Twining snake-song like a symbol
As a flagpole pegs my silhouette in shadow.
Second bell. It’s salsa night somewhere tonight,
I’m motionless, that takes a body, too;
Not two like Tylenol, but also, as in all’s well
For the teleologue stuck in the middle. Sister,
That’s not dialectics, that’s the plot of History
The Movie, with Guy Mount on Petty Cash
(I’d know that wallet anywhere) and Tom on props:
His taste is that touch of detachable class
The age requires to grace itself with Past.
Even the Martian was a Marxian by nomination,
A thirst so raggedy, the first come last—

In any light, astride his schnoz, he smashed
Depicting angels in the throes of whose
Clouds coyly cover his datura. Noted as
Dogears come unclasped, eventful eaves
At intervals throughout the paneled hall―
The breeze pries shadows from the wall.

The couple chose a song denoting faith
Which is impossible without itself, is faith:
A clammy surface doesn’t sweat the words.
A kind of self-styled stickler for results
Or ‘bling’ used incorrectly as a verb―
An ice cream medley seldom only melts. 

Christ on a spit the symbol is corrupt—
If it ain’t broke don’t try to break it. Mine is
Not up for adoption nor debate. Then, whenever
Possible, each denizen must do her mini-best
To stop Sneezy with a storebought dreadlock
Moving in; like bad lil’ Rimbaud
Was an only oogle, vying for a spare key
With the codeword ‘commune’ on his tongue—
And if you can’t host un poete maudit, why hire
Any artless stranger for the part of vector?
Crypto-fabulist in filthy denim, freshly
Mended by Tom in the part of Mom, hirsute
In cotton, naked in the shade; even the hair-shirt
Is a second-hand brocade. If it ain’t folksy
Fake it. If it was stolen, someone paid.

 

To the heart of the chintzy nativity―
Economy, fate willing, withdrew what
His mark intensity, skim useless, let
Dry to an ochre hue; graphs varicose
Gird nothing but the Grid as fantasy.
Eats birdseed but emits a subtle light. 

Transparency, nutrition, vintage, play.
I heard the sub-bass through the walls
Of mine and six consecutive dank stalls
Graffiti flattering my penmanship—
‘God’ left these digits to be pissed
Upon, to break the barrier. We Must.

*

CAM SCOTT is a poet, critic, and improvising non-musician from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty One territory. He performs under the name Cold-catcher and writes in and out of Brooklyn. A visual suite, WRESTLERS, was published by Greying Ghost in 2017.

Another crowd fired upon

nothing can be done so

a crew removes saplings from the margins

where is life supposed to go

a mother horse and a colt

face away from each other

tail flicking tail grazing

Ez calls for me in the night

falls asleep against my body

The creek is so dry

we walk where we haven’t ever

frogs leap from our steps

some kids I’m assuming

don’t have to learn as I did

not to crush them with rocks

Ez tripped and was covered

in burrs we picked off

and flicked on the asphalt

where is life supposed to go

Later listening to Dylan

Ez asked who the devil is

I said a Christian Hades

who he knows from a book

The man opened fire

on students learning history

on a crowd listening to music

I know it sounds random

The Raramuri I read

breathe intentionally to help

the dancers they are watching

We cannot offer anything

until there are wounded or dead

then our offering is heroic

and talked about for a cycle

with the hunger for motives

for a taste of that part of us

We chased the backyard rabbit

until it bolted under the hedge

Where is life supposed to go

a turtle shrinks in its shell

before it can hear the number

of rounds the shooter had

Ez says the dead opossum

is interesting (interesting?)

white fur, long hairless tail

the armadillo, too,

cracked open in a ditch

we rarely see it up close

just moving through its life

old man wheeling from church

young woman carrying a hose

child walking to school

*

Brandon Krieg is the author of In the Gorge (Codhill Press), Invasives (New Rivers Press), a finalist for the 2015 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing, and a chapbook, Source to Mouth (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, BOMB, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Iowa Review, West Branch, and many other journals.

Night rider town
Trail of Tears town
Gold-rush-fickle rise & fall town

********Few precedents for rights exist in the state

****************[In a dream, forgotten upon waking:
****************the way she lifts her arms up
****************to take off her shirt

********Normal procedure, practice and custom to punish

****************shiverspot on her neck
****************where the hairs are soft and translucent

Two-for-one flag deal town
Don’t let the sun set on your back town
Run them out of the county town

********Taken for conversion by the sheriff

****************trace my fingers along the ridge
****************of her jawline meeting ear

****************sound a tongue makes across skin
****************sound of thigh between legs    hip against hip]

********If there is gay pride in Georgia please tell me where it is, what city?

There are books we read
books we burn
books we read, then burn

*

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), andAnnotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University, where she co-founded Gazing Grain Press.

 

amphibian brown water
tired moonlight through the pines

downriver, the banner of the free
stretched across a rotting truss bridge,
ruining and ruinous
the whole day through.

********I have a gun in my car,

along with alabaster cities
and entire pilgrim families
in salt and pepper shaker outfits,
husbands and wives
white and buckle-shined

********just for you.

two girls collect rocks to paint on—
flat-lined, shale-black and good for oil

********I wish

for a lifetime of nights
as beautiful as this

********I wish we could

sink into silt
scare off minnows darting away

********I wish we could
********ship out filthy homos like you to Uganda
********where they can kill you legally.

God hates
********the enameled plain
God hates
********the beer can floating by
God hates
********the little toads sleeping in their hollow rock pool
****************their filthy agenda

ruining this ruinous country,
a country in ruin—
********THAT’S RIGHT!!!!!!!!

II.

that’s right
we are in a war—and losing.

you need to look out where you go,

prepare for the day some older kid
explains “can” vs. “may,”
“can” vs. “should”:
********you can murder someone, it’s just not legal,

and the fear dawns on you, and you think,
may God thy gold refine        man
you better be looking over your shoulder

out in the small pools and divots
hidden systems inside the rock

gnarled stump reaching out,
moon rippling down the eddies.

********There’s nothing decent about

the girls with their buckets full of rock canvases and slag,
wading this river that stretches the ruined state—

if they stand still enough in the cold water
they think they can hear an old, sweet song
from across the music-hearted sea:

mercy more than life

********by foot and knee

*

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), andAnnotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University, where she co-founded Gazing Grain Press.

********-after Erika L. Sanchez

 

Incarnation of the escaped,

************************of the recluse

Tail tapered
by Thor

************************ray-finned                                           trout-brother

blue sheen mouth
********************************agape

Your small edible eye
seeking your birthplace                                   burdensome belly

****************ready with egg

Tail destined to push
Beyond a river’s crust

********************************To leave behind
********************************A pool                                     of waiting

Coastal dweller
****************your fry will find their mother
****************in her alkali slick

********************************to see their small faces
********************************at the mouth where river meets brine

********************************to witness their great unraveling

not recognizing their own features                                                                 in your visage

*

Danielle Susi is the author of the chapbook The Month in Which We Are Born (dancing girl press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Knee-Jerk Magazine, Hobart, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her full-length manuscript A River Always Ends at a Mouth, has been selected as a semi-finalist for both the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize at Persea Books and the Hudson Prize at Black Lawrence Press. She received her MFA in writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Utah. Find her online at daniellesusi.com

After our skin sheds
after the sea recedes
after moss turns gray and tongues of birch
peel into silence after
analogy breaks its logic
of a is to b as b is to c
who will wake to a world unmade in our image

Every web gathers, kills, and tears.
I will not rehearse the after, the re-
weaving that makes each day a new pattern
to die upon. The conditions have changed.
Trees no longer bear the weight of filament.
And my limbs are no substitute,
unwilling to wait, unable to still.

*

Kristin George Bagdanov holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Colorado State University and is PhD candidate in Literature at U.C. Davis. Her poetry collection, Fossils in the Making was a finalist in the 2017 National Poetry Series and will be published by Black Ocean in 2019. Poems in Boston Review, Colorado Review, and Zone 3. She is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine. kristingeorgebagdanov.com / @KristinGeorgeB

The privilege of having / to imagine // of can’t even imagining
The dream of children but also the fear
That nothing is / disposable because nothing can be
Our gyre / widens wider now it is plastic
Oracle that reads / in glowing teeth a future now // past
Orpheus singing into the ears of leaves / a song to re / wind eternity
As aphids conscripted to protect & serve / the surplus
After the emergency / resolution in bullet // points
As if speech were a carcass / mounted upon a wall
Were your caress a revolution that could // make a tyrant fall
When bodycam mediation / mediates no justice
West Coast waking up // crisis always in medias res
After the planes hit / the teacher told the class this was their war
And mourning would make a method // to take / from every / form

*

Kristin George Bagdanov holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Colorado State University and is PhD candidate in Literature at U.C. Davis. Her poetry collection, Fossils in the Making was a finalist in the 2017 National Poetry Series and will be published by Black Ocean in 2019. Poems in Boston Review, Colorado Review, and Zone 3. She is the poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine. kristingeorgebagdanov.com / @KristinGeorgeB

We buy all this food.
Thousands of acres of grapes and rolled oats before they are rolled.
We buy the banks of the Mississippi and the tundra between one Serengeti
and another Mojave.
Sometimes, on a whim,
I go out and get a shopping cart of bones and water.
The kids can’t get enough.
They eat and sing and fart and blow.
It’s endless.
That’s the one thing about being a parent
that no one every mentions. Massive consumption.
An endless loop of Western Civilization,
of American thievery and piggery.
Twelve acres of Ho-Hos.
Thirteen thousand bottles of Twitter tweets.
I am sure there are kids in other worlds that have no idea
the barrel of stuff, which lives in the front yard.
I want to go there. Wherever that is.
With my kids.
Sit them down inside the inside of a mud hut
or a stone building and say look.
There’s one dinosaur in the corner. That’s it.
Her name is Francois
and then there is the grass.
Hours and hours of grass, right outside.
Go to it.
Be in it.
Soft and quiet and wild.
Make boats and computers and oceans and blankets.
Then, when you come home hungry and tired
we will eat the same chicken and dates,
those and figs and moonbeams
and that will be everything.
No joke.
It will be all you get.

*

Matthew Lippman‘s most recent collection, MESMERIZINGLY SADLY BEAUTIFUL won the 2018 Levis Prize and will be published by Four Way Books in 2020. He is the founder of the web based resistant project, Love’s Executive Order, www.lovesexecutiveorder.com.

The kids walked out.
They walked out onto the driveway and the lawn.
They walked down the roadway and into the forest.
They found the guns and buried the guns.
They cried into their guns and the memories of their friends who had no time.
Time to sledgehammer and time to sex.
Time to talk against the wind and time to rest.
They walked into the forest and planted their eyes and their lips.
Dug up the ground with shovels made from guns
and planted their arms and their feet.
What else could they do?
They jumped over streams and their chests were torn up by branches and thorns.
They did not care. They were wet.
They were naked and there were no masks.
The Estee Lauder masks and the Aztec masks.
They ripped up the earth and buried their lungs and their eyebrows.
You couldn’t find a phone or a circuit board.
There were no computers or submarines.
They walked out into the forest and the forest opened up its forest arms
and welcomed them with forest spit and grime.
All the kids.
Every single kid and they buried the guns and next to the guns
they buried their fingernails and their joy.
They dug up their joy and buried it again
and their sadness anxiety
and the memories of their friends on rollercoasters
and their friends smoking dope.
They were naked and in the springtime
when the snow had melted and the sun was warm
the forest floor burst with caterpillars and ferns
and the kids walked out, back out, from the forest floor.
They were filthy and naked and
there was so much green it was blinding.

*

Matthew Lippman‘s most recent collection, MESMERIZINGLY SADLY BEAUTIFUL won the 2018 Levis Prize and will be published by Four Way Books in 2020. He is the founder of the web based resistant project, Love’s Executive Order, www.lovesexecutiveorder.com.

All I’ve ever really wanted to do is walk
down Madison with a full bush in a fur coat,
plus a clutch & a look
of Horror. I’ve wanted
my hair dark brown & full
as my bush. I’ve wanted to shake hands
with henna & hold forth in an Oscar
de la Renta. I’ve wanted my heels to sound
on the sidewalk like a pissed-off teacher
who already told you to write in silence.

I’ve wanted a smoky eye & nails forged
in a vat of molten copper. I’ve wanted
an attaché chained to my wrist & a tennis
bracelet & sense of ennui. I’ve wanted
to warm my thighs on the terracotta
& I’ve stared at stone & steel to steal
its glint & fortitude in the face of disinterest.

I’ve changed my address without telling you
& I’ve locked myself out & rattled the grates.
I’ve whistled through my teeth
for taxis & gone to bed petulantly
hungry. I’ve become walking blade & billow,
animal swathed in dead animal.

I’ve towered & clicked & connived & cooked
Stromboli because you said I Couldn’t.
I’ve been a plucked pea hen & now
I’m collecting skins. I’ll start with yours.
I’m walking toward you, nude in t-straps.
My full bush glistens with dew. I’ve felt
Dawn kiss my Temples with Flame
& you call this my Walk of Shame.

*

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.