YOU BLACK BALD CHICKEN by MARS.
Or a rebuttal to KM playing the Dozens
hair slicked in let’s jam & pulled into ponytail
flesh soaked in sun even in winter’s frozen stare
you shadow of a body
All we see is your teeth when you smile
you backdrop to everyone’s flashy gold wrist
you glistening black
blackity black black
turn to the brightest light of you
and see more black
black turned over and still black
hair so coarse they can’t miss the black
your black so absent they say you a peculiar ghost
ancestors laughing at your blackity black ass
How you so black you disappear black
did you wish your black was the palm side of your hand black
a black worth looking at twice black
you born after the my black is beautiful blacks
black born in the year of erasing blacks
black like the forest get black
black like a black that welcomes a star’s gentle glare
black and more black
You ever see a black so black black
- Published in Featured Poetry, Poetry, Uncategorized
ART by Anna Beth Lee

“Traffic Jam”

“Pool Table”
Anna Beth Lee is a rising sophomore at Drew University. “When creating, I ask myself: How can I make people think when they view my art? How can my art be like a fun guessing game? How can I bring that “A-ha!” feeling to viewers when they figure out the wordplay in my art?
“During a trialing school year of uncertainty, I sought to find the joy and humor in everyday objects. Using Homophones, I investigated creative ways to depict two words that sound the same, but have different meanings. This whimsical approach allowed me to shift the way that I view the world: There are endless connections that can be made between concepts and objects, and finding similarities and patterns in life cause one to realize that aspects of our world are more relatable than we may think.”
Here is a link to her online portfolio, which features her photography, dancing, and drawing: https://annaelizabethleetn.wixsite.com/myportfolio
- Published in Issue 23, Uncategorized
GATE by Grayson Wolf
Before I’m born, I’m in no hurry to be born. So I arrive
unhurried. A shape in the trees. Weighted, a fishing-line pinching
the water’s surface. A voice like the moon, wordless
but listening. I grow gold, then, slick as a raindrop, red
as a hen in a doorway rent by daylight. I arrive early. I arrive
laughing—an inside joke—a belly-laugh
inside my mother’s belly, laughing
and laughing.
A dog disappearing into a snow-pile, an elephant
discovering the ocean. I come to full-grown
with a child’s body, asking: who are you to tell me I’m not a bird?
I look (so they say) the way any baby looks.
The way my grandfather, quiet as a lamppost, looks
five floors down from the hospital window
moments before I’m born and just in time to witness
his blue Toyota stolen and slipping up 7th street.
Like a train to its uncoupled caboose, I’m born
no good at math but here’s Buster Keaton’s sad eyes
as his hat drifts down the Seine. I’m the hat
the train the caboose.
The coal going in the smoke coming out.
I’m lifting the ties behind me, running ahead and laying them down
different. A mill raising the river up in pieces until the same old
same old, electrifies the village. I lean
-in, hunch-over, a jockey at the start-gate.
Horse-tremble. Ear-strain. Like a hammer
coming down on a nail—Bang! I’m out
and into the hands of strangers, gamblers, horse-thieves. (You know,
“family.”) They lift and look me over. I look
at them, they look at me (it seems
like the thing to do). When they untie me
from the mother I was, I arrive asymmetrical and out
of sync. Odd as an em-dash
in the river of things. Like rain. A sudden breeze. Like blood
dappling the clear-veined light of an IV. When I wake
I wake as a building wakes, one
window at a time into the unfinished evening. I wake
as my grandfather does, partway
through the night, newly widowed, reciting
to no one but the ceiling: ‘I went to school,
I got a job, I met my wife…
‘I went … I got … I met …’
I come to in the middle of a shift and thinking
only of sleep, work the whole way through.
- Published in Issue 22, Uncategorized
DON’T CALL ME YOUR PRINCESS by Megan Culhane Galbraith
Once upon a time, there was a young girl who lost her mother too soon.
Cinderella’s grief was bottomless. Every day she visited her mother’s grave.
“Where is my great love?” she asked.
One day her mother answered.
“Cinder, dear, your great love is inside you. You must be yourself, for it is only then that your great love can find you. They may dress you in rags, you may clean a fireplace, but you are exquisite. Look deeper, honey. Let the love radiate from within. Be yourself.”
Cinder’s home life was messy. Her father had remarried and her stepmonster hated her.
Cinder did the dirty work and kept her head down.
Her stepsisters hadn’t gotten laid in a while, and they were extra mean about it.
As she cleaned ashes day after day, her mother’s advice clawed at her. “Love yourself first.”
“But how, Mother?” she asked.
Just then, a flaming ember burned her hand and a white-hot heat lit up within her. She remembered the bedtime tale of the phoenix her mother used to tell her.
She rose from the hearth and gave herself a smoky-eye by slathering the dark ash on her eyelids.
Cinder heard of a fancy dance in town, but she hadn’t been invited.
She was tired of waiting to be asked. Meanwhile, her horrible stepsisters paraded their sexuality like marriage was an endgame.
“Fuck this,” she said, and she decided to crash the Prince’s Ball.
Her friends Pinky and Bluey helped her get ready.
Cinder had the best time at the Prince’s Ball by herself. She adorned her hair with peonies plucked from the centerpieces. She slurped oysters, wiped her chin with the back of her hand, and burped. She requested the chamber orchestra play “Free Bird,” then twirled and laughed and danced like no one was watching.
But her stepsisters were watching. They were wicked jealous that all eyes were on Cinder.
And the Prince was watching, because, you know, the male gaze.
She’d admit later to her girlfriends that the Prince was great in bed, but he sold vapid promises and empty charms to all the other girls. He had a wandering eye. She’d seen the texts to his ex.
Cinder wasn’t buying any of it.
“Don’t call me your Princess,” she said.
She went where her desire led. She was safe, not sorry, because girls just wanna have fun, too.
So, she ignored the Prince’s lame texts, tested negative for the STD he said he didn’t have, and bought herself a vibrator.
She did what she pleased. She loved who she loved. Fuck the patriarchy.
Best of all, she finally came first.
And she lived happily ever after.
- Published in Issue 21, Uncategorized
COME CORRECT by Erika Meitner & Traci Brimhall
If my lips are zipped—if I keep our delicious and contagious secret
—if I am amnesiac or too hungover to remember your mouth
on mine—if I forget the imprint of your body indelibly stamped—
if I search for you, call for you, lover, stranger, alien—if I offer up
gratitude to the air—if I rob you of your signals and energy (are you
battery-powered?)—if we fuck again and again all scorching night—
if we lock our power up to prevent a meltdown—if we twine ourselves
together like an interrobang—if we cross the imperial sea holding hands
or recycle our bodies into danger zones—if we do not yield—if I let you
come deep inside me (finally)—if we buy more time—if your body is a
snow-covered mountain—if your body is an emergency—if you sing
Karaoke (I will Survive? The Boxer?) under the stage lights at Tokyo Rose—
if our bodies become facsimiles or ghosts of themselves, like melted
snow or animal tracks—if you leave me—I need to say this, so listen:
if you go, do it quickly—the way a rabbit darts into the brush
emoji poem by Traci Brimhall / ‘translation’ by Erika Meitner
- Published in Issue 21, Uncategorized
THE HOUR OF THE WOLF by David Roderick
Often one of my daughters
howls me to her bed,
and like a trained victim I trance
to their denned room
to comfort a face
shaped by some dream
or another—eyes pressed shut,
lips in the nightlight
the shade of a dried peach.
Isn’t it absurd,
an old prince like me,
stirred by their delicate mouths?
I nuzzle my head into hints
of urine and Vick’s.
Then, too awake
inside the ticking, I gnaw away
at the latest tragedy
from Florida or Mosul
or simply dwell on
the wrecked condition of my kind—
wondering what I can do
about the rapidity
of my daughters’ heartbeats
and my own human
rapaciousness over their lives.
- Published in Issue 21, Uncategorized
ALL SAID & DONE by C.S. Carrier
I propose an elegy
the shape of
a cairn for my father.
with 63 wooden objects,
one for each year of his life
One object is the cube.
Some cubes made by laminating wood
with paper, fabric, tool dip,
tobacco leaves, eagle feathers.
Another object is the box.
Some boxes made into bird houses,
filled with neon fishing line.
White cotton bolls.
Some boxes made of twigs,
filled with broken bottles, shotgun shells.
Some as shadowboxes stuffed with
charcoal, shredded newspaper,
cigarettes. Random bones, maybe.
Most objects have language
on them via
carving, writing, painting, etching,
embroidering, burning, incense, spell.
Some have language on paper
floating on their surfaces.
The elegy is anchored by a heart,
a lump of stoneware
spiked with 63 nails,
that bubbles with red glaze
& rests on a shallow bed of ash.
- Published in Issue 20, Uncategorized
BATAAN DEATH MARCH AS TAROT CARD: NINUNO NG RATTAN by Hari Alluri
After Jana Lynne Umipig
Capitulo lullabye. I dreamscape mesmerized
by ruination sky. Inordinate and restful like
forgetfulness.
At wreck.
Catch me in the morning
and I fleck. As in, as shock,
the intro only
masquerades: we’re in the middle since. At play, at effervesce
glow-tide my destination, journey hurts my name:
don’t be questing me, don’t labyrinth my style. I pathway
like gamayan, macadamia frog-leg in a rice paddy with lime. In agarbathi
smoke—I float. Kalabaw-
English when I shop. Chop
because I’m hungry, chop chop like
the rendezvous’s the pathway and the crossroads
what you smuggle. I put this on your blood,
dapple skulls with ancestry and chime. Straggle, grandchild,
if you want to live.
- Published in Issue 20, Uncategorized
SING, O BARREN ONE, WHO DID NOT BEAR A CHILD
—Isaiah, 54:1
Her hand sharp in the small of Hagar’s back, Sarai, that barren
punster, pimped her handmaid to her husband, saying, “As I am barren
please consort (bo-na, in Hebrew) with her” by literally saying,
“I shall be built up (ibaneh) through her.” A barren
women can still be clever, though rabbis tea-leaved this to imply
a childless woman is a ruined structure in need of rebuilding. Barren,
however, was not a ruin forced on us, but a path my wife and I have chosen. A choice
not so much against a child as for other things—our art, each other: a life barren
only of all we’ll never know. God said, “I’ll call you
by a different name and your destiny shall change.” Sarai, barren,
had no children but Sarah did. Mom is a name I’ve cried times beyond counting,
yet is a name I’ll never be called—less a name than a state of being; once borne,
innate as DNA. “Wife” or “writer,” though, are titles non-familial,
vocational, requiring daily upkeep, a renewal of Yes, I will still bear
this—and be stronger for it? Who can say. Perhaps we’ll end up
most defined by what we are not. Yet bared
by the roof of our ruined structure, we count the countless stars, grow
our shared life in place of bearing
a new one. Because before Sarah and even before Sarai
was the first of the three names she’d eventually bear:
Iscah, whose root might be sakhta, “saw,” which would make her sight a prophet’s,
divinely inspired, or is sokhin, a duller lot, meaning all “gazed upon” her beauty: barren
Iscah—precursor to the name Jessica—like all women, torn between being a seer
and being the one seen. So, prophet, tell me: Is the only happy ending really a baby?
- Published in Issue 20, Uncategorized
FOUR POEMS by Rosalie Moffett
READ THE PAIRED INTERVIEW WITH ROSALIE MOFFETT
IN SOUND MIND
A jet drags its noise
across my side of town, trawling
for something. Its shadow,
a small black insect, crawls
across house after house. Up and up, over
and over, a lithe little dark thought. I, too
have had a weeviling-through, my sunny
sensibility bedeviled by a pest. Up there, sky-high,
do you, as you go, know the feeling
you slough? Here, when you heft a sack
of flour and watch it cough
into the air one brown moth,
is your knee-jerk reaction Finally!
Some honesty! A thought can worm
and worm its own tangle of unseen tunnel
in the mind for years before things begin
to collapse. Before a word is allowed
out, flapping towards a lamp. Those dummies,
given the rotten meat up-teeming
with maggots, assumed spontaneous generation.
Now we know: flies. Humming thing aloft
in the air. Something descending
to seed a swarm of drear: what
even is the point or so what or what
have you: ruinous little voice-over. I drown
it out however I can. Once, I resorted
to a colander, accidentally fluffed
up a cloud as I sifted mealworms
from flour. Are you, like me, uneasy
with ruin? Do you feel a pity for the blue
your jet plane rakes through, or for me,
whose single-edition sky is getting striped
with white scrapes? Listen, I need to stop
making up gods to talk to
who can’t hear me. Sorry for conjuring you
too aloof, earmuffed and far—
I don’t know how else to be
authentic to my experience. Forgive
me my mind’s circumscribed
design of you, made quick in the shadow
of a small, harmless darkness. Sometimes
one bleak thought breeds in the mind.
No one actually knows, I was shocked
to learn, why moths spiral
towards artificial light—perhaps
they are making
the same mistake as me, desiring
just one moment to speak with
what ruins them.
ODE TO JESSICA
For Jessica Farquhar
If you’re ever in trouble,
find a mother, said Jessica
to her child, refreshing
my predilection for animal videos
where one is raising another’s young,
e.g. the cat with kittens
plus a duckling & the voice
behind the camera announcing
in wonder: it arrived right as she gave birth, like,
get the timing right, a mother
will mother anything. Like,
flip the floodlight & everything
lit up is up for nurturing. Thousands of videos
like this, I swear, exist, inadvertently or deliberately
buttressing her advice in a world
where it’s unwise
to find a policeman or CEO or comedian
or president. America’s
fertility rate is down, the daunt
of saving enough to stave off
progeny-debt is enough
to stall even the reckless.
I’ve a dim view, but it’s true
my brain’s been re-routing frustration
and bungling through a process
that, magic-8-ball-like, produces
the solution: have a baby. Little wailing
thing. When feeling low, I scroll
through online lists of expenses
for the first year of life. It never fails
to make everything worse.
Once, I read an article
about a woman who joined
a search party searching for her. For hours,
she looked for herself.
I am supposed to be finding a mother.
I’m staring at the blank in my bank balance.
God knows the best prayers
one can say in America are to the patron saints
of student debt, of Ca$h for Gold,
of the lowest of the low
deductibles. Oh, God knows
I know the last thing
the world needs is more
people, it’s so full up with policemen,
gun nuts, florists, pundits, artists,
landfills, Jessica, kneeling
face-level with her son, Jessicas
ready to kneel face-level
with anyone’s son.
TAXES, ICECAPS, CROCUSES
In the bank account, it is
unseasonably mild. The businessmen
who live there rarely break
a sweat, whereas it is, elsewhere,
unseasonably disastrous. Wildfire.
Flooding. Diseases unreasonably
rising up, little ghosties, from
the permafrost melt. It is everything
anyone talks about, though the seasoned
businessmen never go anywhere
near the copier, the water-cooler, the arenas
of anyone. Meticulous, they maintain
their distance and their coin
-colored comb overs coiffed into hieroglyphs
of I’ll be dead before any of this
shit hits the fan. By many accounts, an account
is a story, and thus money is a moral
available solely to an upper crust mostly
into fan fiction: Goodnight moon. Goodnight
congressman. Sayonara taxes,
icecaps, crocuses. The bank account can be
summoned by the right spell of two
point authentication—presto: see the men
gazing through the boardroom
window at the view, which is the mountainous
horizon, which is a jagged line graph.
X-axis: months. Y-axis: the accrual
of funds. In the bank account,
there’s a potted plastic palm whose leaves
shift in the manner of blades catching light
in a knife-fight. The businessmen take
solace in the view, they take
turns watering the palm, they take money
and turn back to the window. They keep
the money. They keep watering. Water outside keeps
rising. Inside there’s a weird black spot
developing on the carpet. They were told it was there
to give them a sense of the exterior world.
They were informed that it was, for their safety
decorative. This was about the palm
whose faux trunk pokes down into styrofoam.
But in the bank account, they don’t listen, which is
corporate policy, which is for their safety
and to maintain their equilibrium in case
a message weasels in from the gate
intercom re: some faulty product, some leaky
lifeboat in the polar ice cap
melt. Despite that, and also though
they were sure they’d made, as young men,
strict provisions against such an act,
they were beguiled
by the idea that they might
nurture one quiet thing. They keep
watering. The mold loves the moisture, the micro-
fiber playground, it throws its personal confetti
of deadly spores. Even now, it advances
over the carpet, army-crawling
towards the loafers with the slit at the toe
where, tucked, is a hundred dollar bill. Suppose
this is a fable. Moreover, suppose there is a moral
to be made from the world
anyone can imagine, a lesson, a hinge
between it and the inside
of the mind. Suppose you entertain
this idea for your own comfort
in the manner of tending
to the kind of plant that, turns
out, grows more and more
suspect the longer
it neither blooms nor fruits.
NEST EGG
Logging in to check the pie graph
of one’s 401K: boring miserly pastime
of the 21st century. No lovely clunk
of a gold doubloon, just Scrooge
and his TIAA CREFF password.
Just Scrooge McDuck and his new bird-body.
My first time in Georgia it was August
& I was aghast at the snow
floating in the blue sky. (Hide your eyes,
McDuck, each time we find ourselves
driving in the wake of a chicken truck.)
Point is, most miracles
can be pinned on other people
amassing money in offshore accounts.
Once, I saw rocks light up on the bank
as the surf crashed in: true phenomenon
of phosphorescent plankton. Once, the power
went out in a packed stadium,
and the ring of stands fired up with that exact
blue-white plankton-light from flipped
open flip phones. From above, there must’ve been
one shining eye in the pitch black
of the rest of Dakar. The pie graph
is a joke: it shows only what you have now
as if that’s enough to illuminate enough
of a patch of the quiet dark
of the future. Ah, Scrooge, I know
the balm of a tall stack of coins. I, like you,
have a nest of fear. I like you best
as a bird. I read how domestic ducks
neglect their eggs, which must be
electrically incubated. Warm bulb which nursed
current from the wall-socket to make you
take form, made you take all the currency & hold it
to the light to see if it could be changed
from coin to mirror, from mirror to periscope
to peer into the unknown. Ah, Scrooge, it feels
like it works, doesn’t it? You were the first
duck to dip your spatz into an olympic pool
of money—even as you dove, even as the children
rubbed, in disbelief, their fists across the dollar signs
in their eyes, someone watched
the scales shift, felt the digits of the budget
loosen their chokehold.
- Published in Monthly, Uncategorized
INTERVIEW WITH Rosalie Moffett
READ THE POEMS PAIRED WITH THIS INTERVIEW
FWR: In my first read of “In Sound Mind”, I was struck by how you play with sound throughout the poem (such as the lines “Up there, sky-high,/ do you, as you go, know the feeling/ you slough?”). Can you speak about the growth of this poem? How does consonance (and dissonance!) influence your process– if at all?
Rosalie Moffett: I think I’ve been gravitating towards letting sound lead the way during this particular political period, and this pandemic—I’ve been angry, sad and with something overly simple to say stuck in my craw. Which makes a boring poem. A hallway you can see the end of from the beginning. But to let sound in as a guide gives that hallway some doors, some new avenues. There are then things behind doors that I have to shift in order to see. It opens rooms in my thoughts I didn’t know were there. Which certainly happened in this poem.
And (if you forgive me my wandering into some more conjectural territory) back in high school when I was obsessed with the weird experiments conducted in service of psychology and sociology, I remember learning about cognitive dissonance. In one study, participants were asked to either hold a pencil by pursing their lips, or in their teeth, like a rose. Rough approximations of a frown and a grin. They were then told jokes. Those with the pencil in their teeth found the jokes funnier. In short, the brain said “I must think these are funny, I’m smiling.” The brain likes to follow the body’s lead. Out loud, the mouth makes a rough smile in weeviling, feeling, bedeviled. Makes a rough frown when saying I don’t know, No one knows. I say all this not to claim my poems are smart enough to play these sounds like an emotional piano, but to offer that the sound of a poem might be working on our cognition in ways that are deeply layered and complex. I trust it to lead me through a poem.
FWR: There’s sly humor in these poems, particularly in “Nest Egg” with its addresses to Scrooge McDuck, that carves a new path to the emotional heart of each poem. It serves to buttress the associative leaps you make through the poems and expand on the emotional surprise. How do you see humor in your work?
Moffett: Humor is the PPE gear my mind wears, the way I can make something dark harmless enough to look at. There’s that old chestnut: tragedy + time = comedy. Often, when you’re too close to something, you can’t see the humor in it. If you train yourself to see the comedy, it’s like instant distance. (Instadistance™) You can see how humor could serve as a survival tactic, a jetpack out of actually facing something–and I think there’s a danger of that to be aware of in writing poems. But it’s also, I think, a useful way to gain perspective. Make something funny, and you can look down at it as if from a great height. What is also true is that this training (if you’ll let me call it that) makes a 2-way street. You can zoom in and see the tragic in something that, at first, seems funny. Scrooge McDuck? A duck obsessed with something he can’t eat? Swimming in coins? Oh, honey. What have we made.
Some of my zooming-in involves digging into granular and aspects of things populating my poems. Little of my “research” ends up in the poem (and I defy any algorithm to make sense of my internet searches). For this poem, I did a lot of reading about the character of Scrooge McDuck (yes, his was the first depiction of a swimming pool of money) and got to feel kind of close to him, a kinship. At some point in his history, he changed–someone took pity and shifted him from a miser (clinging to what he couldn’t even make use of) into a philanthropist. I wish that same hand would take pity on me.
FWR: I love your last images, whether Jessica kneeling with “anyone’s son” or the plant that neither “blooms nor fruits”. How do you know when you’ve ‘stuck the landing’ in a poem? Are there poems that you admire for their endings?
Moffett: If only, like in gymnastics, one could look up and see the score from judges!
I think what I look for is that feeling that my mind is standing, so to speak, on a new patch of land. A new vantage point. A poem, uniquely, is a negotiation with white space, with absence. Each line and stanza break are little perches from which to consider that absence. And that last line is where the reader stops, as if at the edge of a cliff, to look out. If there’s something still ringing, something hovering in the mind’s eye, demanding attention, OK. Good.
The cliff came up suddenly in Carrie Fountain’s poem “The Jungle” and then there I was, looking over the edge, ringing.
- Published in Interview, Monthly, Uncategorized
ISSUE 19

POETRY
COMMENCEMENT SPEECH, DELIVERED TO A HERD OF WALRUS CALVES by Matthew Olzmann
TWO POEMS by Melissa Crowe
TWO POEMS by Ariel Francisco
BALIKBAYAN FILLED WITH THEORY by Dujie Tahat
TWO POEMS by Keetje Kuipers
IF YOU ARE READING THIS by James Hoch
SIX ECCLESIASTICAL LOVE SONGS by C.T. Salazar
A POEM WHERE GOD IS A PARABLE by Jay Kophy
VENUS DE MILO WITH DRAWERS: SELF-PORTRAIT MADE OF MINK & PLASTER by Caroline Parkman Barr
MEMORIAL DAY by Chelsea Dingman
I USED TO PRAY by Yuxi Lin
TWO POEMS by Jessica Johnson
FICTION
EXCERPT FROM THE HISTORY OF LITERACY by K-Ming Chang
MONSIEUR REYNARD by Holly M. Wendt
ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS SWIM by Jon Bohr Heinen
ART
FOUR WORKS by Suzanne Koett
- Published in Issues, Uncategorized