This Has Everything to Do with the Tarantula Nebula

Even here, floating in 30 Doradus, my favorite
eight-legged clown face, I’m full of furniture.

My wife openly admits she wants to wear me
or shrink me down until I can eat crumbs off

a coin. If she was on my shoulder, I’d sit just
inside the shade, lean forward if she wanted

some warmth. I once spun a grape on her nose
like a basketball & gravity just stood up & left.

Out here you don’t need laws, just whatever skin
you want to celebrate in, a future to feed yourself.

Tired angels picture knuckles shaved by candlelight.
There’s nothing to do in space but think of family.

Before my father unicycled, he rose always like
crab traps at twilight, just blue king grins, shell

heaps. Everyone was young & could disappoint
anything. We were playing football on the KC

Hall levee when I entered orbit. It was early
October. The cold had its claws out. The sun

was always in your eyes. It came down exactly
like a dry beignet, thumb with a drill wound or

a flamingo kettlebell. My dad was in nothing
but these puke-colored pants with suspenders

hanging down & several giant zippers, the color
the sun is when no one is looking, the color also

of my mother’s eyes, which were also prosthetic.
It’s her frightening cough & indescribable small-

ness, her hands like flowers in an old photograph.
She caught everything even though she shouldn’t

have been able to. My dad was mostly standing
there smoking. I spiked the ball in the dirt when

I scored & to celebrate I turned into a tornado.
Bluish levee birches stayed dead like a crowd

of hands reaching out to a helicopter, or chickens
shot into the ground. Beautiful, the flood walls,

smooth like a killer in a movie where everyone
is in their underwear & doomed, & chalk lines

almost erased. There’s something to October
with its slow games. In space, there’s nothing

to do but dream of growing close to someone.
You always inflate, fly above a neighborhood,

squirming purple yards, like the very bottom
of the dream is boiling. You hear some voices

chanting, like a whisper in the sky, Chitter-
lings & satin pie. Chitterlings & satin pie…

~ ~ ~

Chad Foret teaches world literature and composition at Southeastern Louisiana University and lives on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, CutBank Literary Journal, Bayou Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, Flock, Barely South Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Bird Shadows

I

it’s the trail of dead goldenrod down dark empty hallways         it sends the howling wind into the snow, the hemlocks, the abrasions          it lives in broken library chairs, metal tech stencils, home games, cryptic jazz sounds—finger snaps, saxophones, drum brushes—haunting the attic like an infinite melody looping back and forth through space time          it’s there in the darkness, mourning inside dusty linen closets and storage freezers, stained bedding and frozen flesh, the places no one thinks of, or wants to think of, until it’s found roaming down hometown roads to where mothers bake apple pies and fathers clean rusty tools and sisters read Frost poems and brothers play football in the cold yard before supper          it breathes in the salt and it breathes out the smoke, the black, like a coffin atop a yellow grassy hill on a dusky road          it watches the school bus pass as day turns into night

II

it’s the northeast bonfire smoke, the night sky slipping underneath splintered doors and down dark chimneys while we sleep          it’s preserved inside the canned brambles, cranberries, maple syrup, and chestnuts on basement shelves as hunters wash their hands of blood in icy black streams          it’s the rock walls enclosing homesteads built centuries ago by calloused hand, blood beating hard          it lingers in the corners, screeching in the shadows, a cuckoo clock, an immortal call, a wildness, until it’s tossed into the murky black waters of deep wells and secret marshes, rising and calling, calling and rising          the mysterious owls, the crows, the ravens in the pines sense what’s hidden in the night, what we run from and are bound to, watching it come and go          it’s the premonition, the epiphanic fate          the ghosts of our ancestors can’t climb the hills fast enough away from it, and yet they don’t want to         they know it will follow, it always follows, and they know it’s coming for us

~ ~ ~

Jenn Powers is a writer and visual artist from New England. She is currently at work on a mystery thriller. She has work published or forthcoming in over seventy literary journals, including Spillway, CutBank, Witness, Gemini, and Lunch Ticket. Her work has been anthologized with Running Wild Press, Kasva Press, and Scribes Valley Publishing, and she’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Please visit www.jennpowers.com for more information.

All Good Things Must Come to an Erratum

Of course there’d be mistakes.
Fist fights at the silent disco,
every ‘I love you too, but’—
and how quickly I forgot
the correct way to play chess.
There were police sirens
in Georgia, lighting up the night
the way pet scans turn bodies
carrying tumors into Christmas.
There were men who never made it
to my bed and briars stuck to
shoe soles from walking through
the roses. I won’t lie to you.
It has taken too long to learn
how little it hurts,
being happy for other people.
And then there is the matter
of a stolen silver book pin
with his grandmother’s
name engraved. I hope
he’s not still looking.
To be alive and to wish
otherwise. To consider myself
a creature of empathy, only
to eat all of the meat.
Suppose a moment
that something can be
both beautiful and cliché.
The bird bouncing off
the windshield, the smell
of smoke when there are no fires.
The deer outside the barn
who stay so still they must be
listening. I’m sorry
for not knowing that beauty,
even the reoccurring kind
is enough to be thankful for.
And while it took some time,
the animals have forgiven me
my behemoth appetites.
My mother has forgiven me
for my junkyard years, the rust
I let settle on the spoons.
And all of my future mistakes;
the canned goods wasted,
the tower of half made plans.
Continuing to choose
poetry, even when poetry
refuses to choose me back.
I do not yet know who
will forgive me for these.
But I do know that while I regret
two out of three
of the piercings, I do not regret
any of my bloody hands.
The night spent stranded
on the roof
while the ladder lay
flat in the grass,
or how liberating it was—
owning up to where
it all went wrong.

~ ~ ~

Jessica Hincapie is a poet living in Austin, Texas. She is program director of the Writing Barn, a workshop and retreat space in South Austin. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Texas. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including semi-finalist for Radar's 2020 Coniston Prize judged by Ada Limón and a 2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee. You can find her work in print and online in various publications, including Narrative Magazine, the Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, the Southampton Review, the minnesota review and more. She teaches creative writing to young writers and adults across the country.

Jupiter, Desire, Hope

 5/26/ 2020

~ ~ ~

Joel Peckham, Jr. has published seven books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently God's Bicycle and Body Memory. Individual poems have appeared recently in or are forthcoming Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, The Beloit Poetry Journal and many others. Currently he is editing an anthology of ecstatic poetry for New Rivers Press, titled Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose. His newest collection, Bone Music, is forthcoming in 2021 from Stephen F. Austin University Press.

American Meditation, no. 25

July’s evening sky swirled with colors that made me think of a friend
who’s not learning the sex of the child that she’s carrying until December.

As I sprayed water over the hostas that line our driveway, I grasped a purple bud
between my thumb and index finger; I wondered what she felt.

My mother used to get so mad, but I loved the gentle puffs the bulbous buds
released when squished just right. The little whispered explosions.

And I thought of how perfect that Lady Finger fit inside that empty .22 shell.
How it rested inside the cigarette holder of that ashtray like it’d found its truth.

How it sounded—bang and ricochet—just like on Bonanza,
which I watched every morning with my father when he got laid off.

Then I thought of another time when I’d heard a different blast
while standing in my grandparent’s yard. How I’d known

it wasn’t from the nearby mine, even before the fire engines and ambulances screamed
through the neighborhood. How the description of the contraption—as it was relayed

over my grandfather’s radio—was too familiar. I squinted into the glare,
and tried to remember which eye that kid lost. How many fingers?

I couldn’t recall, but I did decide I’m going to pull up the hostas in the fall
because I never liked where the previous owner planted them—too much sun.

~ ~ ~

Jordan Tyler Temchack is a poet, folksinger, and cartoonist. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, and Red Flag Poetry. He lives with his wife and dogs in Central Pennsylvania, where they garden and wander around the Allegheny Mountains.

We the Lives Who Are Darker Than Blue

Beyoncé marries Jay Z; before tossing the bouquet... She sings:
All the Single Ladies / now put ya hands up

Busta Rhymes gets pulled over
for parking too far from the curb; the officer’s weapon
approaches the rapper’s vehicle with a warning:
Put ya hands where my eyes can see

Marvin Gaye lyrics (the Blues of Inner City) remain relevant:
Trigger happy policing
Make me wanna holler / and throw up both my hands

If your skin is darker than a brown paper bag
or your side-hustle is making Prime deliveries
and you get stopped for a broken “check engine light”
(or a THIS SIDE UP box that’s upside down), kneel
before General Zod and yell: Hands Up! Don’t—!
Shoot, messenger or not, 41 out of 50 times, we
(who are Curtis Mayfield-complexioned) get shot
and our killer’s conviction? it’s a long shot… in the dark

Justice isn’t always on the menu
so, develop a taste for meatloaf
two out of three ain’t bad
compared to 4 acquittals for 1 wallet
containing identification
insufficient for preventing
mistaken identity; it’s easy
mixing up the number of slugs with
Mozart’s final symphony or
Tom Seaver’s jersey; 41*****************************************shots
19 make contact—a hitting average
better than Cooperstown’s Ty Cobb
so, put that in your pipe
and try not to bust
under the pressure
applied to open wounds
suffered by Amadou Diallo
who discovered in 1999
a prime number bible verse (Psalm 41)
didn’t apply to an immigrant
from Guinea, slaughtered like some pig
who just read Charlotte’s Web
and was hoping for an ending
that was happy—a fate
that read like scripture:
The LORD will deliver him in time of trouble
The LORD will preserve him and keep him alive

~ ~ ~

M. A. Dennis is "a hilarious but also heartbreaking performance poet," according to Johns Hopkins University Press Blog. The New York Times, great weather for MEDIA, and Newtown Literary have published his poetry. Dennis' latest chapbook is Mistaken Identity Crisis (NYSAI Press, 2020). He lives in Shaolin Island, New York, with his pet rock.

The Day I Became Madonna

I put on sheer lace bra and matching leggings with a bundle of cross necklaces. Breaking the shackles and moving on—risk taking is one look at a time

life is short, shorter still if I linger over broken ties, like a prayer; and tether on the edge of a cliff sometime longer. So I pry from a bird-less nest

my three-score-and-two years and bundle them onto a train because it neither flies nor skids. I like that it skims the surface, dwell not,

and chugs along towards my belated dreams. From numbness onto field of play. Five months after my man was gone, I had practiced ‘the rasp’ in my voice

the landscape is in cahoots: flips screens, then blurs away. On my seat, I count. I’ve saved hurt sequins in heart locker, and pain, as badges,

ready to cut myself loose in a hundred forbidden ways. Outside my window, the sun is marking a corridor, away from the hemisphere of darkness. I map

the new terrain, catch a glimpse of a new birthing. Here in my soul. Unless you hear it scream, you don’t know if it’s born yet! I want to hover

around like a benign tyrant over people’s dreams. Like her! A Goddess or a loathed lover. Until your desire-planets

tied to my orbit, make endless colored trips. You’ll sway to my words, revere, scream all-lungs, ‘Bury her!’ but flock to

my palladium of smoke-and-mirrors. Tonight, when I’m arrived, I’ll be reordering the way of things, unpacking myself

onto newly painted shelves.  For the moment, I see the kite soar, dive, then soar again. I let go the bridle, let out some line, let it

break off the string. How I find the wind catch its pale-gold diaphanous tail! Do you know how high is freedom enough?

~ ~ ~

Mandira Pattnaik's first poem appeared in The Times of India. Her work, poetry and fiction, has since been published in Eclectica Magazine, Citron Review, Watershed Review, EllipsisZine, Splonk, New World Writing, Amsterdam Quarterly, Not Very Quiet, Passages North, and other places. Her writing has been translated and included in anthologies. She is a Best of the Net 2020 and Best Microfiction 2021 nominee. Mandira lives in India, and loves to embroider.