Waiters

July 2019 | poetry

Two Indian waiters in snug tuxedos

sit on steps a few doors down from

their deserted restaurant—I just passed it—

sharing a smoke and quiet talk, talk that could

be about the coming end of their run there,

about what other jobs might appear, about

whom they should call or visit:

a strategy session.

Yet so spare and emphatic is their conversation,

its silences inhabited by blue clouds of smoke,

that between their middle-aged declarations

of determination they each may be feeling

an unsparing circle closing in; feeling the

dread approach of the night they fear most:

the night they take their tuxedos off and

never have cause to put them back on—

no more trips to the dry cleaners, no more

updating the bow tie; instead, back to wearing

the loose, patterned shirtsleeves of cab drivers

pulling 12-hour shifts spelled only when parked

to eat curry out of plastic containers from the Bengali deli;

hours logged making drop-offs at trendy, Pan-Asian restaurants

whose young, stylishly dressed doormen—the age of

their own sons?—come right to the cab to open then—

after the fares step out—turn away while

slamming the door.

Mark Belair

Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East and The South Carolina Review. His latest collection is Watching Ourselves (Unsolicited Press, 2017). Previous collections include Breathing Room (Aldrich Press, 2015); Night Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2013); While We’re Waiting (Aldrich Press, 2013); and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2012). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times. Please visit www.markbelair.com

A New Declaration of Independence

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.

The Wait Is Now

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.

Recipe For Concrete

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.

Normally

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.