politics

When I was young I was told
Red and Blue makes purple.
Now I get it.
I see it first-hand.

~~~

Nicholas Bellacicco (n.J.bellacicco) was born and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. He attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and studied Medical Humanities. He is passionate about the art dimension of healthcare and has published and spoken on the importance of clinical empathy. Nicholas is currently a third-year medical student at LECOM-Bradenton. In December 2017 his debut poetry book, Pouring Echoes, was published.

The Song of Our Janitor

Every note of a song, alone, is nonsense,
and we students and even the faculty and parents
would laugh and whisper and bring up the time he would sing

25 Scotch boilers couldn’t save the Lusitania
with aching, honest pain and fear.

Sometimes he would show us that fear,
as when ordered to get rid of the squirrel nest
along the playground tree. What did you do with them?

we asked, and he said with his cap over his heart
a home was reduced to the atoms of ash.

There are people and things we know absolutely
only because we have stood far enough away
to finally understand them.

As he pulls the elementary school closet generator cord,
he admits: machines know exactly when they will die.

It was only today my car struck a dashing squirrel
on the back roads and, bracing for a sound, met nothing but silence.

~~~

Brendan Bense is an emerging poet out of American University. His work has been published in The Crab Orchard Review and Columbia Journal.  

Dream in Which I Am Wile E. Coyote

I am carnivorous vulgaris,
famishus-famishus, other fake
Latin terms for hungry,

all ribs and red-rimmed
yellow eyes. I know
only one desire.

My desert is vacant
apart from the road runner.
I am forever chasing,
wielding knife and fork, down highways
disappearing into orange horizon.
Every time I get close,
the music swells.

I think ACME can save me,
a better blueprint
could tip the topsy
turvy laws of physics
in my favor. I imagine
picking my long, sharp teeth
with a purple feather.

I know
there is no death here.
I plummet from cliffs, crush
myself with anvils, explode
and explode and explode and still
live to paint the next
perfect railway tunnel.

The train is always coming.

That blasted meep-meep
echoes in the rust red canyon.
I am strapped to a rocket.
I am lighting the fuse.

~~~

Logen Cure is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Still; Letters to Petrarch; and In Keeping. She’s an editor for Voicemail Poems. She curates Inner Moonlight, a monthly reading series at The Wild Detectives in Dallas. She serves as an English faculty member at Tarrant County College and earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Texas with her wife and daughter. Learn more at www.logencure.com