If

If I made a chapel out of Plaster of Paris and whitewashed its walls, installed it where my mailbox should be. If I stationed it at the end of my driveway. If I left small offerings each day—a handful of lavender, an untwisted Bazooka wrapper, an old to-do list all used up and nearly finished. If I painted its dome in Santorini blue, showed restraint and didn’t Bedazzle its doorway or graffiti a love note along the back wall. If I faced the Narthex eastward and captured what comes with the rising sun. If I left you a glass of cold lemonade on the hottest day. If I sat in a rocker wearing a black shirt dress and watched for your return. I could let my cat twist herself around the chair legs. If I bided my time enough to grow you a bed of heirloom tomatoes. If I shrunk to fit inside a palm frond’s shadow. If I recreated that swamp in Charleston, the one with the sinking tree and the alligators napping on dead logs. If I left you a camera full of someone else’s pictures. If I paid attention to the evening birds cawing what sounded like abide…abide…abide…

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos teaches writing and literature at Kennesaw State and Clemson University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where she was a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Laurel Review, 32 Poems, Waccamaw, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Phoebe. Stephanie lives in Atlanta, GA.

All Poems About Hope are Poems About Driving

Past the old stone house with its teeth knocked out.
Past the highway through the northeast hills
and the grain elevators and tractors, the tires

bigger than my height. And past each town that stitches
the smallest corners of a farmer’s quilt: Marysville, Beatrice,
Alma. Past Big Blue River that crosses state lines.

Past the roadside high school with its outdated scoreboard.
It’s next to the only gas station for fifteen miles and around
the corner from the hotel, the back wall erect like a parlor piano.

Past prairie-fire and the ashing down on a late March morning.
The black specks on your forearm and brow as you walk through
the town’s main street. It’s important to nourish

the soil that will yield its harvest. Past the store selling blue jeans,
Betty Boop stickers, the shoes you would never choose to run in.
The toe-box doesn’t feel right. The footbed doesn’t provide

the right support. But you’d run anyway, darting the road past
its hairline cracks and to its last inch. You’d say that this can bring
you past your fear and seven minutes short of a cardiac arrest.

This is where you say you feel stronger. This is where
the sharp inhale spikes you past your doubt. Almost past where you find
the clarity to say there is a space in which you can love me.

Past the sweltering in your voice when you hesitate and admit
that your bayou stretches too far from my prairie land.
From where I stand, an epi-pen stabbing into the ground’s

allergic bump. A far cry from the easy night when we threw aside
bar chairs, pumped the jukebox with quarters, and danced
past that last Sunday. We laughed and slid our way

across the beer-splashed floor. Past the parade route
of your biggest festival. Littered gum wrappers and necklaces clog
the drain-grates. The whole neighborhood sleeps off the excitement,

takes a breather before the next big thing. And past the abandoned
thrift store with its woman who would hold up a skirt and think
about dancing to Patsy Cline, sliding her hand along the base

of some sweet man’s neck. They’d dance past the Holstein bar,
the campground with its bank of fancy picnic tables
and to the river’s edge. She’d hope that past the man’s plans

to leave with the sun and drive north of Sioux Falls, he could stay,
he could press his hand into her back’s low curve. Hope finds its own
currency, presses it into your palm like a chocolate coin

on Christmas Eve. It’s easy to unwrap the gold foil, smile at the sugar
when the room looks festive. It’s easy to believe in something good
when the holiday candles are lit. But there are seasons

with not enough grain stored away. There are days when my gas light
glows fifteen miles from everywhere. What will happen?
I’m littering this road with coins. I’m asking you to find me.

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos teaches writing and literature at Kennesaw State and Clemson University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, where she was a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as Laurel Review, 32 Poems, Waccamaw, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Phoebe. Stephanie lives in Atlanta, GA.

Demeter Searching

A nymph could have told her,
had it not been changed to water,
the belt in her hand was proof
of violence, violence, violence.
Unthroated, the water reflected
a murmuration of stars, blinking
their silent objection
as if to say, see the lilies spilled,
here the hyacinth, here the rose,
and I will give no more the fields,
and I will give no more the throat,
whatever the hunger. As it happens,
a girl can survive the dark so long
as someone sorrows for her, if there
are roots to climb so she might lie
face-up in a field, sun in her eyes,
parented by sweet grass and rain.
But when the cry came, no one
knew this, not her mother, not even
the daughters of Ocean who buried
themselves in the sea floor and waxed
anemone in fear and mourning.
So much could have been said, but even
the most public songs are private,
and the caves of our dwelling echo
only the sounds we shout. Years later,
the children of Eleusis would follow
the thread of Demeter’s searching,
from puddle to sky and death’s reunion,
in hope that they might too be sought,
that the gods might negotiate
on their behalf. They climbed hills,
objected to crushed flowers, prayed
water might open her mouth again,
and ears of grain in silence reap.

*

Christina Mengert‘s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, New American Writing, Tarpaulin Sky, and Web Conjunctions, among other journals. Her book of poems, As We Are Sung, was published by Burning Deck Press in 2011; she also co-edited, with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, the anthology 12×12: Conversations in 21st century Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press). She currently works as faculty and Assistant Director of College Programs for the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that offers a liberal arts education and college degrees to inmates in New York State. She also edits Dial 2, an online arts and culture magazine.

Sotto Voce

Here is the top of my head shaved off,
unbeautiful, the skin of a plum spit
into a paper bag. Here is Vermeer’s
Woman in Blue reading its contents.
The plum fits in the palm
of an invisible hand, yours, I think,
a sweeter meat, juice sucked
into aperture. Here is the wick
of a brush licked to a fine point,
telling a story like a map dipped
in ocean. Here a girl postures
street-side, excavated pit
tossed and landing in bordering
fields. And it’s raining. Here is
her thumb peeled slow and soft,
signaling a ride from a passer-by,
as if offering a poppy to a driver.
(Are you slowing? Have you slowed?)
The lady in the frame considers, hungrier
than most, she has something to say,
once she’s finished her letter,
though the thread of the painter’s
brush stencils her pale mouth
shut. I’ve told her the fruit is heavy
on the vine, and I imagine she hears me.
In a blank room down an unpainted
hall, a cavernous clock-tick, a train
patient on its tracks.

*

Christina Mengert‘s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, New American Writing, Tarpaulin Sky, and Web Conjunctions, among other journals. Her book of poems, As We Are Sung, was published by Burning Deck Press in 2011; she also co-edited, with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, the anthology 12×12: Conversations in 21st century Poetry and Poetics (University of Iowa Press). She currently works as faculty and Assistant Director of College Programs for the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that offers a liberal arts education and college degrees to inmates in New York State. She also edits Dial 2, an online arts and culture magazine.

Continuity of the System

My subject is silent assent, and my thesis states that winter is mostly night for a reason. Behold the numbed mind, its unquestioning patience. A condition of the lockdown is that we can’t open our eyes. I hear bells across the city diminish and in this way know time. When the streets reopen, we hold a vigil in remembrance of all the other vigils we have held. Into history escapes the once unthinkable. Snow obscures roofs, sidewalks.

*

Elizabeth Onusko is the author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor (Red Paint Hill, 2016). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Best New Poets 2015, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Fugue, Southern Humanities Review, and Redivider, among others. She is the editor of Foundry and assistant editor of inter|rupture. Her website is elizabethonusko.com.

Mad in America

–adapted from Google News headlines

 

America prays more for pharmaceuticals than other countries

Single-payer health care crashes and burns in America’s most literal state

Will America’s economy get drugged into recession?

Middle-aged white Americans are lying faster

Americans aren’t doing enough to protest their privacy online

5 facts about rage in America

The decline and pall of white America

America’s next doom towns

America and its mellow executioners

Countdown to America’s coup

*

Elizabeth Onusko is the author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor (Red Paint Hill, 2016). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Best New Poets 2015, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Fugue, Southern Humanities Review, and Redivider, among others. She is the editor of Foundry and assistant editor of inter|rupture. Her website is elizabethonusko.com.

Moth at the Window

I read he had been killed
bomb in the desert . didn’t believe
the Prince of Shadows
will not . cannot . can never
started looking
in newspaper folds . condoms . empty
holster milk carton laundry drums
cold metal keyholes
behind gilt-frame mirrors
coded late night
stubble . lavatory snapchat
tanks half full . he has no smell . takes
shape of those seeking
jet streams across oceans
a son’s anger . insult
at work against coworker
twined like a dragon round a spire
rumored aspirations . squadrons
in the blush . in bed
turned backs
an angel breathing . a man
who’s jumped . selling soap
to a girl with no hands
black beard . hand on the blade
shadow darkening shade
black field calculating . hot wind throat
divines Prince of Shadows in a sutured
suit of aces fitting
loose sand priority through open spaces
frequencies of doubt . airwave . toxic burn
unlearning more than you can learn
a horn scraped out
makes a horn
Prince of Shadows
the deeds are with thee
born here in a manger
raised under national
overpass canal and demonstration
the world belongs to you
as it negates you . no essential
mysteries . what is actual
but actuaries measuring the mutual
where is God’s child sitting at his table
and time rhymes
eternity in another
language . there’s no why about it
when you are yourself the writing
no home no homage
outside of echo a rose unfolds the common
the Prince of Shadows vacates
a refugee of meaning
grief kidnaps fear
and kills it in the morning

*

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poetry, including The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013).  He is also the editor of At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (all from Chicago).   His most recent book, Berlin Notebook, prose about the refugee crisis, was published by the Los Angeles Review of Books (2016), and funded by a Guggenheim fellowship.  His poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The American Scholar, Harvard Review, The New Republic, Brick, and elsewhere.  He is professor of English at the University of Maryland, and lives with his family in Washington D.C.

Owed to Accountants

He tells me that accountants are the gods of the current young millennium, the next heroes.  They make things happen or crush plans and projects in their place.  By seeking out obscure references and lines hidden in the ink black clouds of ambiguous paragraphs, they justify creation or dissolution.  The large or small company or government proceeds or laments on his or her say-so.  He is bridge-builder, she a supportive servicer who enables the poor and homeless.  She is a corporate Svengali creating profit out of despair, and destroying loss with the tap of a key.  He finds the legitimacy in some inane code, forgotten by nearly all.  Humble, this professional requires neither titles nor public recognition.  But we know these gods are behind everything good or bad, omnipresent and invaluable in destruction, when it is, of course, deemed necessary by the figurehead, or by someone of greater rank, or with a formidable title.  And when leaving work each night, just to be safe, just to be sure, each of them checks the label in his/her respective coat in order to ensure a fashionable propriety and to confirm his/her name.

*

Anthony DeGregorio: One of his essays recently appeared in youandmemagazine.com, and he had a lyric essay published in the Eastern Iowa Review this summer.  One of his poems was a finalist in Naugatuck River Review’s annual narrative poetry contest, and two of his poems also appeared in The Aurorean and on the DECASP site. Three other poems are scheduled for publication in The Westchester Review. He has a master’s degree in Writing from Manhattanville College where he teaches expository writing.  In another life or two (or three) he worked in various capacities for the Department of Social Services for too many years.

Tide of the Century

Gravity fastens itself to each ankle

& pulls me from my bed, to the window.

Across the street, a small boy clutches

an icicle. Fluid leaks from his palm.

In the fog-dense evening, he’s an eclipse

of reality. Somewhere in the U.K., water

rises in an estuary, & I’m afraid it will

never stop. Is there order here? Can we

protect it? My grandmother was cremated

& my mother, hating the notion, sealed

the fireplace & buried candlesticks

in the garden. My father offered, Maybe

we don’t have to die cold. Place the word

trust on your tongue—does it dissolve

like a pill? Can you swallow it whole?

The ocean swells. With the surge comes

a crash—I’m afraid of falling. I’m not afraid

of heights. Each night, I ascend towards sleep

then slam against my mattress & explode.

I sit up. I fuse myself back together. Remember:

memory is a sundress hanging at the edge

of darkness, & death is nothing but

a bloomless sky. But the danger of being

swept away is not up for debate. We know

there aren’t enough spotlights to track

the rising tides, & if truth is what can’t be

unsewn from the stars of a flag, then honesty

is this boy in the street, clutching an icicle—

which is really a shard of glass. Blood seeps

from his palm, & what I thought was fog

is really two thousand snow geese, falling

dead from the sky                 

*

Jenny Boychuk’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2016, Salt Hill, The Pinch, Prairie Fire, Room, Birdfeast, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she is currently a Zell Fellow.

Themis and the Front-runner Approach the Gates

Affirmation is the prize—I see you
burning for it. The sweat-stained neckline
of a cashmere sweater is neither a beginning
or ending—the point is, too close,

some pairings are damned to ripple.
One of us knows it’s not shameful
to flinch. The river said. In one version
I’m blindfolded & your voice is a flood

that swells every throat, so I follow
like a heartbreak when you promise the way
to higher ground. I clutch a tarnished
brass scale balanced with affirmations

& smoke, the delicate joints of its shoulders
shifting in a flick of wind. The most sacred part
of my spine bends towards navel, heavy
with the wings of too many frost-shocked

wasps, bodies long gone—this is to say
I also obsess dangerously over the most
beautiful part of a wrecked thing. You say
I should fear the gates. Look how tall

they are now that we’re closer. But what if
in this version we encourage each other
to watch the sky instead? We could slice
this light into segments & last

for days on it—I could drop this sword
I never wanted to use, double-edged
like your words, pointed towards the already-
severed earth. Soften. In this version

I can see. No comfort here. Your blistered
feet, familiar syntax—but I’m learning
to refuse mimicry. Go ahead. Did you know
I also hold my breath when two people begin

to dance? The tall grass bows to you. Come
closer. I want to tell you we’ve shared cities
without knowing. You turn away & I’m torn
between lifting a match to the edges

of your desires or insecurities. I turn & you
singe the ends of my hair. Enemies say fire
when they cannot articulate what they need—
but what if we aren’t enemies? A match

struck on a tooth won’t take. You’re afraid
your world will tarnish like unpolished silver,
that the cat you love will bring back another
squirrel, dead & soaked, shrouded in rain

& puncture wounds. I think we’re all
most afraid of the people we trust to the bone,
which is to say: I don’t want you to stop
being a flood. Take everything except

this scale & the spells that flare on my
tongue. My body can bend into a bridge—
who do you love enough? Come closer
so I can tell you: even blindfolded

I’ll still look up—

 

*

Jenny Boychuk’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2016, Salt Hill, The Pinch, Prairie Fire, Room, Birdfeast, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she is currently a Zell Fellow.