And it is written:
You belong to no one.
Yet the dead own me.
What am I to make
of this strange paradox?
I see faces in the bathroom
mirror. I think they miss
this house where I now
live. Perhaps they are
trapped? Who, after all,
can tell the difference
between longing and duty?
But when I look again, they
disappear as if they were
never there at all. And I
thought that was my story.

*

Michelle Brooks’ work has been published or is forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Make Yourself Small, was published by Backwaters Press, and her novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, was published by Storylandia Press.

Whispers, no assaults on my peace, equalizing of the large and the small. I once thought it pretty to lie awake in the night and hear the rain scatter on the tin roof. Tried to discover rhythms and patterns, till I realized it’s only what I put there I heard. Tonight I accuse the audaciousness of this assault. A man must defend his home.

There is fatigue in being embodied, whenever one contends with demanding tasks, like walking or sleeping. If this water won’t just flood us and drown us . . . if there is one good person in all of Sodom . . . Do you ever wake to the rain and ask, maybe I’m the plague?

Don’t get me wrong, that’s a liberation. If I’m patient zero, I’ll infect the city, waiting for the great evolutionary leap. Wood will rot, winter gardens wilt rubbery, but the bubbling out of primal stew cries for its tincture of blood.

*

Scott Branson is an anarchist living in Asheville, NC, where he writes, teaches, and organizes.

Machines of Flesh

He dreamed of what we have, sowing
fecund little seeds in consenting heads:
at night, wiping his furrowed brow,
leaning heavy on his walking stick,
spirals of wiry chest hair poking out
from under his tunic. Ungodly body,
ungovernable after all, blood and bones
soft and yielding. And every day
the same Olympian hammers to swing
and anvils to crush. He tinkered
with his tables to give them three legs,
crafted in his own damaged image,
golden legs and golden wheels
spinning on their own, moving
with no need of him. Freeing him
for more artful matters. The tripods’
steely hearts beat like drums, more
animal than human, all precious metal
and mechanism, slowly turning corporeal.
Ancient themes don’t rust or rot,
built to outlive our mortal technology.
The gods are rewiring our brains, writing
code, odes to modern monsters: half men,
half machine.

The Artificer

In his atelier he set about sketching
slim-hipped sylphs to assist day
to day, brought them to life on his
bellows. They made things easier:
sometimes he just needed to sit for
a minute, to rest his frail foot while
they packed his tools away in the
strongbox. Then there was the one
he made special for a VIP,
sculpting her form from water and
earth, burnishing her arms and legs
golden, endowing her well, charms
impossible to resist. All the gods
grinned impiously as they breached
her with their mighty aspects.
A beautiful evil. All-gifted girl,
manmade woman, crafted with
spite and skill. Given away at
our peril. She never had free will—
they made her like this, filling the jar
themselves. They even left a note as bait,
sadistic souls. So, who’s deceitful?

Creator of Many Devices

Enthroned in his workshop, a serene
shining studio guarded by frosted glass,
the idol takes up today’s task.
The worshippers are waiting for a new
place to store their faith. Jazz in the air,
twenty tables laid with cooled metal.
The room’s all white like heaven or a
hospital, a gateway. But he sweats
like a human, yells with mortal temper,
new age music in the background.
The old gods got their hands dirty,
their goddess wives did whatever
they pleased. You can read all about
it on the painted vase. Deities—
they’re just like us. But look what
he’s made: this object of pure beauty.

*

Alexandra Haines-Stiles is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, where she studied twentieth century literature and language. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, Clementine Unbound, and elsewhere. She lives in New York and London.

I feel it picking up again,
slow sibilance.

The air is moving.
The leaves are its hands
in my hair.

It will turn hurricane,
this breeze, clear blue
against blue sky,
so gentle now,
a solemn gentility—

how storms begin.
These gusts are
only breathing.

They want to exist.
They will learn of power
and proof, dragging
fragments across earth.

Not to let them grow, these
gasps, to recognize themselves,
I hunt them out of hiding—
before the branch sways or
the apple falls, before
the ship is wrecked at sea.

I get there when and if I can
(I’m old as myth)
and even then, futility:

how childlike, men, storm-
tossed, inquiring. How like
the bag of wind a box of shells,
a brightening gun,
a grey-skinned bomb.

*

Alexandra Haines-Stiles is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, where she studied twentieth century literature and language. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, Clementine Unbound, and elsewhere. She lives in New York and London.

Ask for my connection. I’ll admit, it’s tenuous.
Something about a certain silence in a room

meaning gone, long gone. An uncle
who died young before I was born.

Of course he was beautiful, cocky grin,
laughter caught in his lashes. Black and white.

Airforce pilot. Vietnam. I know he fell
but not how far. But I am here

in the same land from which he vanished.
And here in the city where he was cruel

or crazed, or lost. I’ve grown into a woman
who has killed only by looking

away at the wrong moment,
who says atone and sacrifices nothing

but her sleep. Once I rubbed his name
onto white paper from a wall that held

my gaze, gave it to my father
who tucked it wordlessly away. My father

who never knew war, who draft-dodged
long enough to learn the ways his body

would betray him. In high school
a friend once told me he thought I’d die

young because he couldn’t picture me adult.
Sometimes I feel myself pale into the past

beside him, my face on the mantle aching
youth from my nowhere. Dead

or alive, we grow away from the faces
we flare. Ask the city

for a stranger. Ask the stranger
for the right. This room full of pictures

of what boys like him did
asks and asks: Do you think you are

kind just because you give
away your hands?

*

Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light, which won the 2015 Sixteen Rivers Press Manuscript Competition. She is also the recipient of a 2013 Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, and Ninth Letter, among others.

After the war vanished from the streets
it smoldered on in gibberish

of cells, in womb-spun flesh howled
into the trauma of living with what is

missing. A mother lifts an infant to the lens,
silently shows me what is missing

from its body, as if that’s all there is
to say. And it is. In every frame,

a being formed in a new way.
Such variety, it’s almost miraculous.

How stubborn, yet fragile
life is, a flame our hipbones cup

like palms. I’ve told myself there is no stoop
on which I would have abandoned you,

my twelve-week candle, no manger
flanked by sentinels of moonlight.

Now I wonder what your early exit
might have spared us. Should I thank

the evolutionary grace that made
my choice for me? Saigon keeps growing

away from the dead, from the past
that shimmers in the dust of the metropolis

cranes are tearing out of air.
But memory knits a kind of phosphorescence

in the genes. Yesterday, in a park
where tiny birds sing in cages

shaped like bells, a boy with a beautiful smile
and no lower half, flourished

an improvised genuflection
as I passed, his whole

body balanced on a single calloused palm.
And Saigon rises, hell-bent and ticking,

bulldozers perpetually digging
toward the ghost-itch

of a war that goes on
where we can’t end it.

*

Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light, which won the 2015 Sixteen Rivers Press Manuscript Competition. She is also the recipient of a 2013 Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, and Ninth Letter, among others.

All day the wild turkeys scavenge in snow,
the bulk of their bodies on twig-shaped legs. Bobbing.

They’re not so heavy as they look. I think of them like the plastic
pteranodon my son swings around the house, a fish in its beak.

These birds in my cul de sac are light: they fly, land four at a time
in the crab apple of Akbar’s yard. Twenty emerge from under

the pines, their eyes too small for me to see. I wish I could spend
hours just watching them, their awkward wobbling

and surprising grace in the juniper bushes, how they bend
a branch very little. Ten pounds, maybe? I try not to frighten

when I drive away to pick up my son from preschool.
He doesn’t want to come home, says I’m having a meeting

with Hugo. We drive back, slowly, past the turkeys still in the street,
me wanting to be one. I admit to romanticizing the lives of dumb

beasts who die more easily than I do. I admit to wanting
just to move my body when the turkey voice in my brain

says eat, says hurry, says fly into a tree. I admit it’s a stupid
desire, like most of my desires. I crock pot the dinner, finish

my emails, fail to work out. When finally the group recedes
into the trees, my children both home now from school,

we can find only the tracks, Ws with tails, like ski pole
marks on the deck. They were here, I tell my daughter, all day.

And my son runs around and around shrieking as if to imitate
their calls, swooping with his small replica of history, catching

his prey, and then they’re back, twenty at least, and I shout Look!,
and my wide-eyed girl runs to the window but the boy says

I saw them already, I’m tired of them, Mom. Can I have a sandwich?

*

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of RUST FISH and YESTERDAY, THE BEES. Maya teaches creative writing for Central Washington University, edits fiction for Crab Creek Review, edits poetry for Scablands Books, and, with her spouse, raises two children. She lives in the Inland Northwest.

Let someone pay our ransom
now that they’ve sent the pieces on–
the tip of a pinky finger, a trembling ear.
This cellar, infiltrated by a mousy light–
surely we aren’t to live in here.

Illuminate us, frangible moon
who has surrendered pieces of yourself,
swarmed by tiny robot men.

All the green that we can see:
a crumpled bill they left us
and oak leaves plaiting the bars.
Mold shuttles our names like bobbin lace.

*

Carol Alexander‘s work has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals, such as Bluestem, Boston Literary Magazine, Canary, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, Illya’s Honey, MadHatLit, Mobius, Poetrybay, Red River Review, and THEMA. Recent work appears in The New Verse News, CHEST,  South Florida Poetry Journal,  Driftwood Press, and The American Journal of Poetry. Her chapbook BRIDAL VEIL FALLS is available from Flutter Press. Alexander’s first full-length poetry collection HABITAT LOST is due out this year from Cave Moon Press.

****************I am the tongue transmuted—

the chatter of cousins
********I haven’t seen since elementary

when the world was more kaleidoscope
than anything else. In Xalapa

we ran games under corrugated roofs

********ran fingers through silver-fished rivers

****************ran mouths until they filled with pan con jamón
****************y sopa de fideo

during vacaciones at Tia Gracia’s, a bigger-than-most

home from Pa’s childhood
dreams, with long dirt driveways
and walled-fences that kept us safe. The same house

********Spanish wore me over-

********sized

at ages 4, 14, 22.

********How can one’s music can be another’s
********wreckage? Down the street

Felipe would mock
****************my accent
more American than having Jason Kidd’s on my feet.

********More American than our toothpaste suburb.

****************More American than sangre. Of 12

********siblings, Pa was the only who flighted north.

*

Alan Chazaro is a public high school teacher pursuing his MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco. He is the current Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow and a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley. His work has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and appears in Huizache, The Cortland Review, Borderlands, Iron Horse Review, Juked, decomP, and others.

an erasure poem based on George W. Bush’s 2001, so-called “War on Terror” speech which read in part “In the normal course of events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union.” 

normal
American people.
passengers,
rescuers, unfurling light    blood, prayers
– in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

We the people
strangers
citizens, enemies

to bring justice
rebuild communities

join together
enemies of war

Americans know wars
casualties of war — peace
freedom itself.
Americans have questions
evidence
crime.

Muslims Christians and Jews,
all Americans,
no distinction
military and civilian
women and children.
linked to many    different countries,
neighborhoods   camps   homes
around the world to plot      a great vision for the world:

respect the   human
condemn   the regime.

shelter
the unjustly imprisoned. journalists, workers
demand
a radical network      of support
freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to
disagree.
overthrow      government terror
end every atrocity, pretenses
murder
abandon    will to power —
lies.

will diplomacy, intelligence, law      disrupt and defeat the network of war?
no combat   lengthy campaign,
dramatic strikes, covert operations, secret terrorism
harbored by the United States.

announce the creation of a Cabinet-level position the Office of Homeland
reason.

be grateful organize respond
expect to live your lives,     hug your children.
be calm
patient,
creative

finally,
dramatically expand      hijacking
of the extraordinary spirit

the United States of America
our mission
The advance of human freedom
normal.
Thank you.

*

Floyd Cheung is author of the chapbook Jazz at Manzanar (Finishing Line Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in qarrtsiluni, Rhino, and other journals. He teaches in the Department of English and American Studies Program at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.