July 2019 | poetry
We are only asking them to leave, quietly and without making a fuss—
these men, here and elsewhere, who refuse their assent to laws
the most wholesome and necessary for the public good;
who make new laws about what we may or may not do with our bodies and our votes
but refuse any rules about what they may do;
who hide behind plastic shields and make us weep in the public streets;
who bring their guns into our churches and synagogues and mosques;
who under cover of darkness dump their coal ash and mercury and lead into our waters;
who argue without end that there is not enough money in any budget
for wages that would cover the rent with some left over
for a pomegranate or a bunch of the bright tulips in buckets by the check-out lanes;
who at last repair our leaking pipes and then raise the rent
so we must find a new apartment with the same loose tiles in the bathroom;
who quarter large bodies of armed troops among us
and spend our money on walls that separate butterfly from butterfly
without care for the swallowtails, satyrs, emperors, leafwings and brushfoots
that have always flown freely according to their inborn migration routes;
who spend our money to construct walls that separate parent from child
and lose even the memory of where each has been held
while we still need to rebuild our rusty bridges;
who send our children to distant lands
without telling them why, or teaching them the words to explain why
they must explode a bridge that others labored to build
so they could greet their neighbors across the river.
We could keep going—the list of offenses is long and growing longer.
But isn’t this enough?
We ask them just to leave, and to close the door behind them.
Susanna Lang
Susanna Lang’s newest collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 by Terrapin Books. Other collections include Tracing the Lines (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013) and Even Now (Backwaters Press, 2008), as well as Words in Stone, a translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s poetry (University of Massachusetts Press, 1976). A two-time Hambidge Fellow and recipient of the Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Bethesda Writer’s Center, she has published original poems and essays, and translations from the French, in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, december, Verse Daily and American Life in Poetry. She lives and teaches in Chicago.
April 2019 | poetry
We’re sitting in the Jimmy Johns
waiting for our foot-longs.
My father’s brand-new cane
a twisted length of black branch
that crack-cracks
every time he leans too heavy on it.
Outside a crowd gathers
around a Ford Mustang
with a kitten stuck
inside the wheel well, motor still
hot as black sand.
We ordered and paid
twenty minutes ago.
Two of the four teenagers
who run the place
stand outside wearing oven gloves
and one holds a box
to nest the kitten once she’s free.
My father peers
between window signage.
That’s a job for the fire department.
Someone call 911!
This music’s too loud,
my newly-diagnosed
mother says.
Can we go someplace else?
Each time the door opens,
I fingernail pinch
the delicate skin under my arm
—to stave away
the slice of kitten’s
reverberant meow-meows
from deep the metal gut.
Katy E. Ellis
Katy E. Ellis grew up under fir trees and high-voltage power lines in Renton, Washington and is the author of three chapbooks: Night Watch—winner of the 2017 Floating Bridge Press chapbook competition—Urban Animal Expeditions and Gravity (a single poem), which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry appears in a number of literary journals including Pithead Chapel, MAYDAY Magazine, Calyx, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the Canadian journals PRISM International, Grain and Fiddlehead. Her fiction has appeared in Burnside Review and won Third Place in the Glimmer Train super-short fiction contest. She has been awarded grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture and Artist Trust/Centrum. Katy co-curates WordsWest Literary series, a monthly literary event in West Seattle.
April 2019 | poetry
I. Water
Each time I meet my grandfather in a dream
he speaks only German—reminds me to speak
only when he’s a ghost. He hums between
the chimes of the Black Forest cuckoo,
takes the pick out of his teeth
when he looks my way:
Kennst du mich nicht? ::
Weißt du nicht wer du bist? ::
I want to bring him back to Chicago, but
we’re lost in fields, midwestern soybeans.
And when he fades I cry out:
Wo bist du? Wo bist du?
II. Aggregate
When my grandfather dies
his body deepens into the soybeans.
I try to excavate him,
but all that is left of his bones:
empty gin bottles that perfume his tongue,
model train tracks set in a circle.
I look for a way to bear him back—but I find
myself wandering to his old house,
burrowing inside the fireplace,
pulling logs he had chopped around me
like blankets. When his ghost comes to light the fire
—the only way he knows how to heat
the house—I let myself burn with it.
III. Cement
The Embalmer haunts my grandfather back to the South Side of Chicago,
where he beat me for building with my left hand instead of my right.
I extract each cluster of edelweiss, de-construct each petal a tomb.
Clay: quarry and kiln—let it sharpen like an eyetooth.
Brick: measure weight in hand—consider its flight
through the window :: a way out.
Rough-hewn stone: walls built up in Chicago,
then hidden between fields of soybeans.
Nested in each hard, scarred pod is one of his bones.
The Architect shoos the Embalmer away
—lets me sleep—gives me the time to turn back
to stone dust or the silky powder of soot.
Erin Kae
Born and raised outside of Rochester, NY, Erin Kae is a proud graduate of SUNY Geneseo. Her poetry has been featured in Vinyl, Sonora Review, Crab Fat Magazine, and Fugue among others. She was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Aster(ix) Journal, and was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Locked Horn Press Publication Prize for their issue Read Water: An Anthology, 2019. Her first poetry chapbook, Grasp This Salt, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2019. She currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts.
April 2019 | poetry
Normally, we celebrate the holidays,
exchanging gifts, delighting each other
with the latest gadgets. Normally,
we believe in how life always improves,
gets more convenient, easier to live.
Normally, we don’t’ hunker down.
Normally, we don’t have occasion
to use that phrase—hunker down.
Normally, we replace the windows,
rebuild that demolished interior wall.
Normally, we have work to do, relatives
haven’t vanished, and friends haven’t fled.
Normally, the toilet tank refills.
Normally, we change our clothes.
William Aarnes
William Aarnes has published two collections with Ninety-Six PressLearning to Dance (1991) and Predicaments (2001)—and a third collection, Do in Dour, from Aldrich Press (2016). His work has appeared in such magazines as Poetry, FIELD, and Red Savina Review.
April 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
The latest research calls it misnaming, says
I likely look
nothing like her. Insists
it has nothing to do with aging, assures me
that the fact that both our names
start with K
is unimportant. In a half-
second, I learned this Scorpio dragon
shares the same semantic network
inside one man’s brain
and something else
located in an organ I won’t try to name
since I might say heart
when I mean penis, both
smoking, catching fire, and I guess
this happens
to everyone at some point:
you get excited, you get
confused, cup your hands to drink
from the same big bucket of love.
Kasandra S. Larsen
Kasandra Larsen’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2012, Burningword Literary Journal, Under a Warm Green Linden and Into the Void, and is upcoming in The Halcyone Magazine’s/Black Mountain Press’ 64 Best Poets of 2018, among others. Her full-length poetry manuscript has been a finalist for the 2016 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, and a semifinalist for the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her chapbook STELLAR TELEGRAM won the 2009 Sheltering Pines Press Chapbook Award. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a poetry reader for the journal Bare Fiction (UK).
April 2019 | poetry
On a good morning
I am the shaman
on a great morning
I am all thirteen of them
a conclave of fire and feathers
atop the Sayan Mountains.
I practice divinations
while sipping coffee
and braiding my syllabic chants
into crows’ shouts
I call the words gather
they descend the World Tree
I lead ancestral heroes
to the island of my page.
This morning
I am a correspondent
fumbling with my camera
to document this Siberian ritual
or worse an ill-fated Yakutian bull
bellowing centuries
as I surrender to the blade
palpable and mute.
On a good morning
I am both the knife
and the warm bowl of cow’s blood –
on a great morning
I am a poet.
Candice Kelsey
Candice Kelsey’s poems have appeared in such journals as Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Burningword — recently her nonfiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An educator of 20 years’ standing with her master’s degree in literature from LMU, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
