***

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is a writer, mother, and first generation immigrant born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pinwheel, Buzzfeed, Epiphany, Southern Indiana Review, Apogee, Poor Claudia, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. She is the author of the collection of poems, Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017) and is currently pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Anchor Baby

FOR HOSPITAL USE ONLY

CHILD’S PLACE OF BIRTH                      Name of Hospital or Location McAllen General, the hospital I was born in

is no longer issuing birth

certificates to babies born to

migrants.

CHILD’S INFORMATION                          Time of Birth Had I been born today,

we would be transported forty am/pm

minutes north to Hidalgo Detention

Center to await deportation.

MOTHER’S LEGAL NAME                                    Along the way, discarded parts:

bracero arms line the crop rows Plurality

las pizcas split bone from flesh

our mothers

CHILD’S LEGAL NAME                             pick the fruit from

our mouths

to feed someone else’s

children.

MOTHER’S RESIDENCE                            A twinning of line

ages, our trailer on the lip did mother give up rights to the child

of the river is the first place they’ll look——

overturn each hunched back bronzing the field

MOTHER’S EDUCATION                          our bruised mothers wrap

us in broad braid and bone

already so disintegrated by

February cornblue

flowers on white sheets 8^th grade or less

IS MOTHER OF HISPANIC ORIGIN?     and yes I mouth

if yes see item 53                                         off to every suit and uni

form I fill out

because I also grew a spine in that

noncitizen womb

WIC RECIPIENT FOR BIRTH?                 each whorl of ache a kind of lotus

                                                                        eaten so that the return is a melancholy

                                                                        of forgetting and the country claimed

the country

that poisons us anyway,

this failure to remember this stake

in my eye does not stop the baby,

that bright arrival a relief

wall-swaddled

tight as a tongue.

PRESUMED FATHER’S INFORMATION           My mother missing her mother missing

sees my missing

country of origin unity with

mixed-up blood: acknowledgement of paternity

why is s/he so dark

is s/he really yours

denial of paternity

“People pollute, and too many people crowded too close together cause many of our social and economic problems. These, in turn, are aggravated by involuntary and irresponsible parenthood. As physicians we have obligations to our individual patients, but we also have obligations to the society of which we are a part. The welfare mess, as it has been called, cries out for solutions, one of which is fertility control.”

Dr. Curtis Wood,
Leader of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization
“Changing Trends in Voluntary Sterilization.”
CONTEMPORARY OBSTETRICS & GYNECOLOGY, 31-40. 1973.

At the scene of the crime the blooms shed their tongues
and other conditions of probation contingent upon

the edges of every clean driveway lit so night hot
the milkpod liberates its wild perfume to the state, calling

What wild Poor character and sexually promiscuous
delinquent in the dress you sold me, mister.

Offender, the public assistance oats you sew
do not open this cell. Look how sterile these corridors

And how clean this modern kitchen. Offender, you soil
this so-called body yours so-called and each egg bad!

Roll the good American tape back to that candy parked car
with the New research on synthetic oil and free blonde honey

Your wide so nasty it gets even wider WIC hips like beehives
swarming with dirty bad kids not contributing not like

Good boys and girls see, not doing that. Good babies.
And the jobs they deserve. Day laborer stock is for

ha ha ha In the garden, the laboring mother should open her mouth
and moan deeply from the throat to aid in the opening

of the cervix. Opening the glottis encourages the opening
of the body’s underground tunnel for the citizen escaping the knife.

***

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is a writer, mother, and first generation immigrant born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pinwheel, Buzzfeed, Epiphany, Southern Indiana Review, Apogee, Poor Claudia, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. She is the author of the collection of poems, Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017) and is currently pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

Make it fun! scream the billboards,
the ammo shop signs, the babes
flouncing their assets in fringe
bikinis. Who doesn’t love God’s country—

its condos and tennis courts, its acid rain,
its public shakedowns for total devotion?
Who doesn’t love the rhetorical skills
of a cheese grater? Or the persecuting spirit

of Cotton Mather? Who doesn’t love
a good patriot, venal and dewy-eyed, with a habit
of making fun an injunction? Who doesn’t love
to be hoodwinked, then flopped into a plastic

baggie world of gimmickry and tap water
spiked with methanol? Who doesn’t love a blade
at the back, a blindfold over the eyes, and an open
grave ten paces away? Who doesn’t love

a land that’s made into a stage for a tyrant’s
psychosis, a President who leaves democracy
on the cutting room floor, and commits
only to mannequins and his own demons?

Who doesn’t love an epitaph that reads,
Our beloved drank the Kool Aid and blamed
the underclass for her ills. She bought the lie
that the litter on the highway was a scene of crime

while the rest of us mined the earth dry.
What is redemption? If it is to be in charge,
then charter a sailor and jet skis
and private tour your way around my mind

too gaslighted by Sparkle the Racist, Boo Boo
the Homophobe, and Frisky the Sexist
to be any good to you now. But I feel triggered,
says the frat boy in the front row, as fun as a sarcoma.

***

Sarah Giragosian‘s poems have recently appeared in Ecotone, 2016 Best of the Net Anthology, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, The Baltimore Review, Blackbird, and Verse Daily, among others. A winner of the 2014 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, her first book Queer Fish was published by Dream Horse Press. She teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany-SUNY.

***

Sarah Giragosian‘s poems have recently appeared in Ecotone, 2016 Best of the Net Anthology, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, The Baltimore Review, Blackbird, and Verse Daily, among others. A winner of the 2014 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, her first book Queer Fish was published by Dream Horse Press. She teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany-SUNY.

The Tasmanian wolf, or tiger
from its stripes we can now
only see in black and white
like ribs along the haunches
or prison garb. The last
known, called “Benjamin,”
died from exposure in a zoo.
For a man to become
a wolf is a form of melancholy.
The wolf in its melancholy
becomes a man. Now,
they say, the search for them
thought extinct, is on,
as inconclusive sightings mount.
I want to believe some
remnants running—
their distinctive snout—
the cryptid, found, says nature
can withstand our unnatural
wasting, mankind’s beautiless,
dead-eyed wallow. Nothing
escapes, of course, and nothing
follows.

***

Benjamin Harnett is a historian, fiction writer, poet, and digital engineer. His works have appeared recently in Pithead Chapel, Brooklyn Quarterly, Moon City Review, and Tahoma Literary Review. His story “Delivery” was chosen as Longform’s “Story of the Week.” He holds an MA in Classics from Columbia University and in 2005 co-founded the fashion brand Hayden-Harnett. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife Toni and their pets. He can be found most days on Twitter.com: @benharnett. He works for The New York Times.

Tonite the Royals
************************************************play the Indians
****************************************and if
********************************************************they can sweep

************************************************them they’ll
************************************************************************be a
********************************couplethree

************************************************games back

****************************************************************in the AL Central

A cold front moves itself across Milwaukee lingering
like a bad thought

*************************************************************************One of the cats
****************************************************************took a shit
********************************************************on the mop
************************************************I was out
****************************************at the resale shop
********************************looking for clothes I
************************could rebuy

****************The shit ruined the mop

I hope the Indians lose
************************tonite we already lost
************************************************what’s another series

***

Franklin K.R. Cline is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, a PhD candidate in English–Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a member of Woodland Pattern Book Center’s Board of Directors, and the book reviews and interviews editor of cream city review. His first book, So What, in which you’ll find the poem above, is available via Vegetarian Alcoholic Press.

Integrated,                   automated

******************************** under these federal statutory mandates,

*************certain aliens may be required

to provide fingerprint scans,

**************************photographs, facial and iris images.

Entry               and exit,

*******************a system that records arrival and departure,

*******verifies, authenticates,

*************************a physical characteristic,

********************************an attribute collected, compared

*******against a previously collected identifier,

************in accordance with,                 as used in this notice,

a person.

Note: the text of this poem is taken from “Test To Collect Biometric Information at Up to Ten U.S. Airports (“Be-Mobile Air Test”),” A Notice by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection on 07/28/2015, The Federal Register.

***

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug, a book length documentary poem; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He founded the Chicago School of Poetics, holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

***

Leah Umansky lives in New York City and  is the author of The Barbarous Century, (Eyewear Publishing, 2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox 2012) and two chapbooks, the dystopian themed Straight Away the Emptied World  (Kattywompus Press, 2016) and the Mad Men inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press 2014). A graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, she is also the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in New York City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Magma Poetry, Barrow Street, Salamander, Pleiades, and Plume,as well as the anthologies, Plume 6, Misrespresented Peoples (NYQ Books, 2018) and The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019) Some of her Game of Thrones inspired poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali.  More at: www.LeahUmansky.com

after Blake

Oh, another landscape about the self, cuts the desire straight,
Forgets the sublime act before you, and the crooked crack of soon, of murder.

Take his prey away with horse, fox, plow. How low his delights. How very low and hovering.
You, with your sooner road, now, the truth is told, your sorrow, is the work of wisdom. Believe.
Really believe that each portion of this life frowns, then fruits itself into a greater spite.
And is the work of these times to right the wrong of excess? What tyrant fails in his greed?
Not ours, but let’s not be possessive. It is hell, this crumble and fall of his image. Let it fire.
This is what I hear: the weak in courage is strong in cunning. The self, a landscape of mischief.

(I’m not telling you a fairytale)

***

Leah Umansky lives in New York City and  is the author of The Barbarous Century, (Eyewear Publishing, 2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox 2012) and two chapbooks, the dystopian themed Straight Away the Emptied World  (Kattywompus Press, 2016) and the Mad Men inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press 2014). A graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, she is also the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in New York City. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as POETRY, Magma Poetry, Barrow Street, Salamander, Pleiades, and Plume,as well as the anthologies, Plume 6, Misrespresented Peoples (NYQ Books, 2018) and The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019) Some of her Game of Thrones inspired poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali.  More at: www.LeahUmansky.com