Colin Dodds
No Apocalypse
An angel beats a gold mare
with a starry whip
and lets her trumpet dangle
The glass dome of the grand palace
shrouds the sunset
like an immense amoeba digesting a forest fire
Late afternoon has the black taxis of Paris
the men and women in black fall coats
run together like blood on the boulevard
actors in a plan abandoned but not replaced
gracefully bereft of any desire
for the world’s end
Oxidized green spattered with pigeon shit
the fountain Lucifer
is merely annoyed at St. Michael
and ready, already, to get back
to what they were doing before the saint
talked him into posing for statues
Copyright © 2017 by Colin Dodds.
About the Author
Colin Dodds is an author, poet and screenwriter. His writing has appeared in more than 250 publications, been nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, and praised by luminaries including Norman Mailer and David Berman. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. See his work at thecolindodds.com.
Gary Duehr
Kremlin Watch
Now is the time for elevators.
Now is the time for elevator watchers.
Everything depends upon
Who it is (and whom they’re with) as they disembark from yon
Black-windowed SUV, then wheel in the revolving door
To relax in the marble foyer
As 58 descends to One. What the boss upstsairs
Is thinking, no one knows, his immaculate hairs
In the shape of prayerful, folded hands
Across his forehead. Die-hard fans
Lean over concrete barriers lining Madison Ave.
They’d like to have
What he is having, all of it: the French-style mirrors,
The chandeliers in 24K, the ex-supermodel wife—without the terrors
Of being last or worst.
Whoever goes up the elevator, first
Must loiter there a decent amount
Before they whoosh back down. Whom to annoint,
Whom to exile, whom
To quid pro quo is the talk of the room
At the top. While TV crews at the bottom resume
Their Kremlin watch of doom and gloom.
Copyright © 2017 by Gary Duehr.
Reality Check
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
So what is false? How much is true?
At the bottom of the TV screen, a scrolling chyron
Checks for you. Everyone must try on
Some new 3D glasses: the sky’s not really blue.
Black is white, in some instances.
Torturers know the first step to extract
Any remaining resistance
Is to get their subject to contradict a fact.
Then it’s all downhill.
How far have we slipped to date?
Outside, the ground is sheathed in white. Which one of us will
Vouch that it’s really snow? Is it too late
Before all turns to mush?
Sometimes just the day-to-day becomes too much,
Never mind the nutcase with an AK-47
Who believes heaven
Guides him to the back room of a pizza place
To infiltrate a child-sex ring. Has everything been orchestrated to erase
CNN’s fingerprints?
How can anyone know what they know if in is
Out and up is down? Send in
The clowns, don’t bother they’re here. Fin.
Copyright © 2017 by Gary Duehr.
About the Author:
Gary Duehr has taught poetry and writing for institutions including Boston University, Lesley University, and Tufts University. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Journals in which his poems have appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Chiron Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Hotel Amerika, Iowa Review, North American Review, and Southern Poetry Review.
His books of poetry include SORRY (Grisaille Press, 2012), In Passing (Grisaille Press, 2011), Potato Chips for Dinner (Cobble Hill Books, 2004), Beautiful Bullets (Cobble Hill Books, 2003),Winter Light (Four Way Books, 1999) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press, 1999).
Laetitia Duler
images
what stuns you what tears into you
these images that make your eyes bleed
i can’t imagine going through
without having in my possession
the sight of you on monday mornings
your face open and floral,
pressed into cotton
every small death you have endured
melting snow and my back turned away from you in bed,
knowing what the light can do
to you, mythologized creature, unforgiving thing
silent night beneath contaminated skies
pure story of your touch that is
forever ungiving, too private and close to grief
so i turn away from you, over again like dead leaves
sinister rivers that flow incorrectly
the grain of your voice like stones in the water
images was previously published in The Blue and White, October 2016.
Copyright © 2016 by Laetitia Duler.
About the Author
Laetitia Duler is currently at Barnard College studying poetry with Saskia Hamilton. She is French-American of French parents who live in the Bay Area. She attended the Lycee Français de San Francisco and graduated with a French OIB Baccalaureate. She started writing poetry in 7th grade when she saw the boy she was in love with kiss her friend.
Sandra Fees
In Bevans Church
the sparrow sweeps
the outer pane as if testing.
Glass can’t be trusted.
You could break, like junco,
its feet quivering
then motionless.
In Bevans Church the sparrow
knows something about me:
I’m the one who convenes the dead,
heart weighed against a feather.
This evening, your conscience,
if you have one, is light as tea leaves.
In Bevans Church the sparrow
fans my hunger for glass.
Copyright © 2017 by Sandra Fees.
About the Author
Sandra Fees is a poet and minister residing in Reading, Pennsylvania. Two of her collections of poems were published in 2017 The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press) and Moving, Being Moved (Five Oaks Press).
Haley Wooning
1.
white gulls cull and mull
an insolent storm inconsolable
fish fin thin and weaving way
for each personal cyclone
a strict and sacred skeletal arrangement
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
2.
I wish I could be silent more often an ilex
the waiting is essential
spring of mute sadness. I miss so many things.
swig of feathered wing. And collapse.
there is unfoldable time
and there is no way to make use of it
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
3.
she is walking in the woods for something,
alphabet, assumptions,
residue of the blue
I wanted to sit down and write a love poem,
but empty turns to me and I give up
days seem more and more congealed
cataloged
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
1.
yes, all is change. I blur.
dim glow of words, like
weakness it bridles the
bloody hands the
murder
I lack myself
sit saxifrage and
wait for the
memories humming
down my limbs
to end
muddied, weighted body
to damp red earth I go
ossuary of blank despair
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
2.
we, in our true forms
remain otherwhere
in reeds red sweet
on coast foreign
and home
how time can
blank you of me
how my worry consumes
and pushes itself
into another monster
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
3.
stone endures not
simple or same
earth heaves me
forward shatters
heavy thick silence
red exhumed
swallow-shaped
living is a drugged
and dreamless sleep
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
4.
eros will derange you
a condition no rhyme can cure
how naked the pen feels
in my hand, blackbile ink
Copyright © 2017 by Haley Wooning.
About the Author
Haley Wooning lives in California, writes poetry.
Thom Young
Love
love came back
to haunt
us
with a gun
in her hands
we sat over
a bowl of cold cereal
and
laughed
at how the world
used to be
I never saw her again
after that
but sometimes
I hurt for no reason
at all.
Copyright © 2017 by Thom Young.
Monkey
see the circus
see
the monkeys
some in red, white,
and blue
a love that hates
and disagrees
monkey see
monkey kill
the glowing screen
says
yes we can
a future
to eat ice pops
in the metal sun
yes
we can
Copyright © 2017 by Thom Young.
About the Author
Thom Young is a writer from Texas. His work has been in 3am magazine, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, The Legendary, 48th Street Press, The Zombie Logic Review, Commonline Journal, and many other places.