The Orphan

The unweighted half
of a seesaw
balances skyward–

I have fallen
with stinging thud
in my alone–

the whole sky
fills
with vacant blue–

Born in Pennsylvania, David Anthony Sam is the proud grandson of peasant immigrants from Poland and Syria. For most of his life, he lived and worked in the Detroit area, graduating from Eastern Michigan University (BA, MA) and Michigan State (Ph.D.). He lives now in Virginia with his wife and life partner, Linda. Sam’s poetry has appeared in over 80 journals and publications and he has five published collections including Final Inventory, published by Prolific Press in October 2018. Sam’s chapbook Finite to Fail: Poems after Dickinson was the 2016 Grand Prize winner of GFT Press Chapbook Contest. He currently teaches creative writing at Germanna Community College, where he retired as President in 2017. He serves on the Board of the Virginia Poetry Society.

Predecessor

He walks several paces ahead of me,
forever saying what I want to say,
doing what I want to do: polite,
patient, adroit, proceeding in a state
of grace. And, because I can never
get close enough to throttle him, throw
him down on his damned red carpet
and trample on his twisted form, I try
instead, with varying levels of failure,
to content myself with tolerating him.
I shudder to think how he feels about me.

Kyle Heger, former managing editor of Communication World magazine, lives in Albany, CA. His writing has won a number of awards and has appeared in 58 publications, including London Journal of Fiction, Nerve Cowboy, and U.S. 1 Worksheets. He attended Washtenaw Community College in the 1970s.

Everything Becomes Silence

I am hopeless to the night,
praying for the silent,
yet drawn to its collection of noises.

———————————–Haunted
by the fingers of arthritic trees
scraping across my window screen,
forewarning:
———————————–It may be our time.

Alleycats find refuge
in the weeded growth beneath my sill—
their feral chants claw their way up
a creaking fire escape
———————————-towards a crescent-scarred sky.

I can almost hear,
hidden between the timbre of raindrops,
worms crawling from the earth,
left to flop hopelessly
upon the cement—a rudimentary dance
to a moon that will not reply.

Slowly these sounds are buried
in the dirt of the sky. I surrender my eyes,
and everything
———————————becomes silence.

Judson Simmons earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and holds a BA in English from the University of Houston. He currently resides in Brooklyn, and works at NYU. His poems have appeared in various journals, and his chapbook, The Hallelujah Hour, was published by Amsterdam Press.

After the Night Ended

A tide of weather and early hair
Morning splinters into shoal reefs
We waken to graves
Mountainous islands windowed in purple blue mist
A hoarse seal cackling near a large piece of driftwood
Awe is the loudest silence
Let’s go home, get a good grasp of water,
And then head out to the factory of souls

Michael H. Brownstein‘s work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, The Big Windows Review, poetrysuperhighway.com, and others. He has nine poetry chapbooks including A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004) and The Possibility of Sky and Hell (White Knuckle Press, 2013). His book, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else: A Poet’s Journey To The Borderlands Of Dementia, was recently published by Cholla Needles Press. (2018).

Empty head

Pity the empty head,
not one idea bouncing
around inside.

All still and dark
like a cloudy night,

no bats or owls
hovering on wind
that’s not there.

No sweet dreams
to remember

when the sun smiles
on the horizon
and whispers,
Wake up.

After a career in print journalism, Eric Chiles teaches writing and journalism at a number of colleges in eastern Pennsylvania. His poetry appears in Allegro, Chiron Review, Gravel, Plainsongs, Rattle, San Pedro River Review, Tar River Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Caught in between, is forthcoming from Desert Willow Press.

How We Live Now

 ——————–after Georgia O’Keeffe

A gas mask super-
imposed on
a desert landscape

a flat yellow-brown
mustard cloud
fetid as an olive-green
boil rising

bleached by the sun
deadwood branches
stark white fingers
pointing to the sky

Alan Catlin has been publishing for five decades. He has had work in some of the most obscure, way out of print publications of all time, and in some of the better, still extant, larger ones. His most recent book is Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press, which previously published his American Odyssey.  

The Scar

A small thin slit in a sea of perfect young skin
located just south and west of her belly button
I pause for a moment to kiss

please don’t she tells me
I hate it so much
not surprised I say I love it

someone made this lifesaving cut
now it’s a beautiful reminder
imperfect impermanent and incomplete

Sugar Tobey was born in Coney Island, Brooklyn, received a degree from the School of Visual Art in Manhattan, and now lives in NYC above a pizza parlor.

The Time That My Hometown Set Me on Fire and Ate My Loins

That was on Tuesday.
It’s every Tuesday.
Every Tuesday is every Tuesday.

And it’s when my guts burn.
They call it Christmas.
The Tuesday Christmas of burning.

The mouse in my mouth.
The rat on my lip.
The clouds, bone-colored.

I sing in the shower.
I shower onstage.
I used to strip.

I’d take my skin off.
The audience could see all my clouds.
I have a PTSD counselor.

I also have a PTSD chef.
And a PTSD janitor.
That’s me.

I’m the PTSD janitor.
I have a Ph.D.
and found out those are useless.

You use them less.
You get used.
I have a disability.

I have the ability to diss.
I complain a lot.
They say that’s what PTSD causes.

In China, 8 is good.
In China, I saw photos of the Tiananmen Massacre.
They looked like the number 4.

I’m a zombie.
I’m a weird sense of zombie.
My girlfriend wants me to go to sleep.

I’m also Saami.
It’s an indigenous group you’ve never heard of.
I’m extinct.

I’m an extinct janitor.
I write poems,
which means I’m even more extinct.

Ron Riekki’s books include And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes Best Regional Fiction), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book awarded by the Library of Michigan), and U.P.: a novel (Ghost Road Press).

A Hummingbird on the Bauhinia

On the lowest branch of a bauhinia
rests the aquamarine black.
Enduring hummingbird… Purple,
like edge’s pleasure, thirsty
like harmful willow root:

Nectar, Liquor, Hashish: like the origin
of fire. In America flowers
feed legions… Tadpole algae
emerging, cricket shaking out its flags.

The sun is a hermit, like corn,
and the spot where silence’s bird
sings. Enduring before iron,
coal, pirate steamships,
on the lowest branch of a bauhinia:

Western slavery, rats.
Here the hunting sounds
sicken and die… the damp breeze
emerging in circles of rebellion.

On the lowest branch of a bauhinia
rests the aquamarine black.
Enduring hummingbird… Purple,
like edge’s pleasure, thirsty
like harmful willow root.

————————————————————Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen

Juan Arabia (Buenos Aires, 1983) is a poet, translator, and literary critic. In addition to publishing three books of poetry, he has written extensively on John Fante and the Beat Generation. He has translated Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, and a book-length anthology of Beat poets, among many others. He is the founder and director of the literary journal and press Buenos Aires Poetry. 

Katherine M. Hedeen is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. She specializes in Latin American poetry and has researched and translated numerous contemporary authors from the region. Her translations appear extensively in prestigious American and British literary journals. She is an associate editor of Earthwork’s Latin American Poetry in Translation Series for Salt Publishing.