 Grandmother Fugue Stranger, I cross your room Daughter, you cross my room looking you over as I go overlooking me as you go-- to the window overlooking mulberries. the window, at least, sees Your will specifies ashes. how my will has beat this thing to ashes. I am never who you think I am. I am not, you think. I am. I wonder when I will have to arrange So make other arrangements chairs in the shape of a sonnet, for this chair that shapes me like a sonnet. hire a rabbi. It won’t be long. Hire a band. It won’t be long. The rhymes you sang to me as a child The rhymes I sang to you as a child I can only hum now, wordless. I can still sing. Listen. Previously published in River Styx and American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016). Jen Karetnick is the author of seven poetry collections, including American Sentencing (Winter Goose Publishing, May 2016)--which was a long-list finalist for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press--and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016). She received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami. Her poetry, prose, playwriting and interviews have appeared recently or are forthcoming in TheAtlantic.com, The Evansville Review, Foreword Reviews, Guernica, The McNeese Review, Negative Capability, One, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Prime Number Review, Spillway, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Waxwing and Verse Daily. She is co-director for the reading series, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami). The winner of the 2017 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2016 Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize and the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, Jen has previously won the Portlandia Poetry Chapbook Prize, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Awards and the “Piccolo in Your Pocket” Contest from the Alaska Flute Studies Center. In 2016, her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two "Best of the Net" awards, and featured at The Fourth River, JMWW, Yellow Chair Review, Red Bird Chapbooks and "Literary Death Match." She is currently writing a full-length spoken word play, set in Everglades National Park, with the help of an AIRIE residency. She is also working on her 16th book, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Miami (Luster, September 2017). Jen works as the Creative Writing Director for Miami Arts Charter School, teaching grades 6-12, and as a freelance writer, dining critic and cookbook author. She lives in Miami Shores on the remaining acre of a historic mango plantation with her husband, two teenagers, three dogs, three cats and fourteen mango trees.  Photo by Andi Crown June Since you’ve left, the rains haven’t stopped, running downhill after you, chasing you for your lunch. I’m smoking by that silver bench, drops punching the fug I blow from my pursed mouth. My fingers are stained with you. A tree-root strangles my ankle. I never want to see my father again, the disappointment mask he likes wearing. Your tongue catches that last drop of soju and my lungs constrict of their own accord, and breath is a far country with no visas, no passports. Previously published in Phantom Billstickers Café Reader. Ivy Alvarez's second poetry collection is Disturbance (Seren, 2013). She is also the author of several shorter collections, including Hollywood Starlet (Chicago: dancing girl press, 2015) and The Everyday English Dictionary (London: Paekakariki Press, 2016). A recipient of writing fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle and Fundacion Valparaiso, her work appears in journals and anthologies in many countries and online, with selected poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. She lives in New Zealand. www.ivyalvarez.com  Photo by Naseem Tuffaha Eating the Earth And to the flour add water, only a thin stream whispering gathered rains of a reticent winter. And to the flour add oil, only a glistening thread snaking through ridges and ravines of what sifts through your fingers, what sinks, moist and burdened between your palms. And in the kneading hinge forward, let the weight of what you carry on your shoulders, the luster of your language, shade of your story press into the dough. And to the dough bring the signature of your fingertips, stretch the canvas before you, summer linen of wheat and autumn velvet of olive oil, smooth like a map of silence and fragrance, of invisible terrains of memory. And on the dough let the green leaves fall, drenched sumac stars flickering among them shards of onion in their midst. Scatter them as the wind would or gather them in the center of this earth and fold them into the tender embrace of the dough, cool and soft beneath their bodies. And make a parcel of the dough, filled with foraged souvenirs, fold them in, and then again, let their silhouettes gaze back at you. Recall found treasures of hillside wandering; flint, thorn blossom and a hoopoe feather carried home in your skirt. And to the flames surrender the bread, gift of your hands. Grasp its tender edges and turn it as the heat strafes and chars this landscape you have caressed. Some grandmothers sing as they bake, others speak prayers. And let the edges bristle to the color of earth, let the skin of the bread scar. The song of zaatar simmering in its native oil rises up and time evaporates. You are young again, it is spring in the greening valley. *zaatar – wild thyme native to the Levant Previously published in Sukoon and subsequently published in Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017). Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American writer of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. Her book of poems, Water & Salt, is published by Red Hen Press. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net and her chapbook, Arab in Newsland, is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize. Most recently, has work has been published or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review, Diode, and the Rumpus. Lena is a Hedgebrook alum and an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. To learn more, please visit her web site www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com  Photo by Joe Carrow How To Detangle A Bird Caught In Your Hair First you have to have hair This trend toward baldness negates the problem Once you have grown a luscious mane Gather images on your lion tongue Ripe peaches, sizzle of bacon Crisp campfire scent of an almost winter night Handful of rain, feathers or marbles Details of sunset, sand and fast cars Weave your materials carefully Remember that birds like shiny things The colors and flavors you choose May affect the type of bird you lure Into your hair-nest It helps to know what you’re looking for The hummingbird is popular due to its size And general friendliness The swan is elegant but angry Loons, pelicans and ostriches Are obviously to be avoided With patience, you will eventually find a bird snarled in your hair It might not be the bird you initially had in mind Give it some time. This one may surprise you Protect your eyes and face As you attempt to pet the iridescent feathers Of your albatross or owl. Avoid wearing a hat In the event that you tire of this entanglement The following options are available: 1. Tenderly cut the bird away, like a piece of gum from a child’s hair 2. Start a small fire on the back of your head, and begin to run Previously published in The Common Online and subsequently published in How To Take A Bullet And Other Survival Poems (where the title of each poem has been appropriated from The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook by Joshua Piven and David Borgenich.) Hollie Hardy is the author of How to Take a Bullet, And Other Survival Poems (Punk Hostage Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Annual Poetry Center Book Award. She teaches writing classes at the SF Creative Writing Institute, SFSU, and Berkeley City College. An active participant in the Bay Area lit scene, she hosts Saturday Night Special, An East Bay Open Mic, and is a founder and core producer of Oakland’s Beast Crawl Literary Festival. Her website is www.holliehardy.com  Mary and the Commandments Sometimes there are ten. Sometimes more. They play for an audience of one. Mary and her cursive list of what not to do: Do not wear black lace with extra holes. Do not be the one to lift your silk slip over your head. Raise your hands at the elbow, never the wrist. Keep your interior pink and pleasing: the kitchen counter, the kitchen scissors, the rose-handled wedding gift knives. Never give a gift that is not wrapped--legs around neck, ribbon around box, Champagne in silver foil. When removing your heart for a lover, remember it is not a hat. Your organ should not be worn at the dinner table, is not a common bridal accessory, will not prevent sunburn. Keep the faith, keep a clean house, keep clean underwear in your hip pocket. Commandments as back-up singers, as anti-inflammatories. When following rules, think map. Rules are not maps, but you may still clasp your hands, fall to your knees. Previously published in Emerge Literary Journal. Jill Crammond is a poet/single mom/artist, funding her passion for poetry and feeding her children by teaching art and preschool at an independent school in upstate NY. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in such local community events as Bookmarks: The Memoir Project (Arts Center of the Capital Region), and Write Here: A Mini Conference for Writers (HVWG & Arts Center of the Capital Region). Her poetry has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including Fire on Her Tongue (Two Sylvia’s Press), B (Kind of a Hurricane Press), Thirty Days: The Best of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project’s First Year (Tupelo), Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems, Crab Creek Review, and others.  I Would Open I have nothing to do with explosions. But there are enough signs in the no-life of stars to make evacuation mandatory. I am as frail as smoke. a landscape of gas and shadows. Expansive. A mystery, unmendable. Previously published in She May Be A Saint by Hermeneutic Chaos Press. Sources: Title: C.D. Wright, a phrase from “Dear Prisoner.” Wright: Deepstep Come Shining, “My Dear Affluent Reader,” and “Dear Prisoner.” Sylvia Plath: “Tulips,” “Insomniac,” “Stars Over the Dordogne,” “Widow,” and “The Rival.” Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly Press, forthcoming, 2018) and She May Be a Saint (Heremneutic Chaos Press, 2016). She is also the co-editor of Thank You for Swallowing, an online journal of feminist protest poetry. Her poems and essays have also appeared in Queen of Cups, The RS 500, Rogue Agent, and Ekphrastic Review.  to miss america is to turn twenty-four with an ass that refuses to fit squarely into a string bikini. to miss america is to miss the point of each perky, each taut muscle rippling its way across a wheat field. or to miss the wheat entirely. it is almost an art: paring a strawberry into symmetrical slices for a midnight snack in front of the late night show. amazing how static can fill the mind, the gut. o america, i, too, have a stash of sashes, folded up & boxed, their ribbons too thin now for my frame. you don’t have to tell me: this body is nothing like yours—spindly tower that knows its saunter, knows its shake. you strut down a lit aisle & miss the brush of grass against your knees. god, you’re as smooth as they make ‘em—teeth vaselined like a slip’n slide, you are oil & bronze & glow. miss america, i, too, know about thigh gaps. i know what goes missing, the space between girl and grown. you miss dining room tables, fruit of your labor, warmth in your belly, warmth in your home. i am with you: dried flowers in my hand, the metallic sky dulling your tiara. look at this mud where a meadow used to be. Previously published in Banango Street. Raena Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017). Her honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, & a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. Her poems & reviews have appeared inBlackbird, Ninth Letter, Crazyhorse, & elsewhere. She currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she is the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry, & serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine.  a hunger that has two names All of us wading through stage curtains to find something true. There is nothing in the box, my darling, just candles. Though, we were the side-show, the lamentable trough of us bodies boy and bodies girl and bodies spirit. Our bodies were bred to lie. They said we were not of this world. We were on the Austrian news in the morning. We sweat baroque. We coughed up blood. There is nothing in the box, my love, just fabric. We were in beds besides one another, arms and arms and legs and legs wrapped and unwrapped and faking and faking. And the pink eye and the shared eyeliner and the champagne and the start again. Previously published in Vanilla Sex Magazine. Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She founded and edits Luna Luna Magazine and is the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks: Andalucia (Poetry Society of New York), War/Lock (Hyacinth Girl Press), and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Buy her books on Amazon & Small Press Distribution. Her poetry and other work can be or will be seen in PANK, Spork, Atlas Review, Tarpaulin Sky, the Tin House blog, The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Rogue Agent, Moonsick Magazine, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center and others. She has spoken on the topics of writing and publishing at Westfield High School, New York University, Columbia University and Emerson College. Her work was recently selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in the Best Small Fiction 2015. She got an MFA at The New School in NYC.  Photo by Hugo van der Velden From THE BOB PERELMAN QUARTETS II. OR WAS IT AQUIFER? Lagoon. Aquaphor. I made the fatal mistake of bringing two "civilians" to the reading, an anesthesiologist and a product designer, and now I am trying not to laugh, at Avik, the designer, sleeping with his head jerked back his mouth hanging open, and at Nick, the doctor getting more and more annoyed at the 20-year-old bespectacled poetry student rhythmically nodding (and not asleep) in front of him, and above all at the profound seriousness of this event, how we are all swept up with E=V=E=R=Y=S=I=N=G=L=E=W=O=R=D as an object of explosive meditation except instead of explosive its sort of a depressing deflating that makes my heart swell with pity, no never mind, that's just the beer I've been drinking since the morning, I am pretty sure I am going to get diabetes after the last 24 hours in which we've been drinking fancy coffees and eating rosemary doughnuts and doing all that stuff you're supposed to be doing in New York, taking only occasional breaks to see some pictures at the MOMA, which for me was far more poetic than sitting here with these vintage store blazers and facial hair and girls who can't decide if they’re hippy pixies or French cinema femme fatales, and I know that I look like a dentist on holiday in comparison but I can't help it, I grew up in Silicon Valley, played an instrument, did a sport, volunteered at the local retirement home, and I never did anything on the weekends because my mother was sure that if I hung out at the mall or wore shorts in public I would be raped or, worse, kidnapped by North Korean spies. No, I exaggerate, she only worried about North Korean spies when I was in college and did study-abroad in Europe. You know, the one time my father wrote to me years later when I was pregnant and again in Europe was when he saw the movie Taken and then, he said, he knew, he knew exactly how Liam Neeson felt. But now I’m ahead of myself. So my mother wasn't wrong that Kim Jong-Un was in Switzerland, but I was at Oxford, that’s where I had that cat lady as a poetry tutor, I can’t remember her name but she was championed by another poet whom I don't recall either, one of those guys the British get all excited about and the Americans feature in Ploughshares. Anyway, homegirl told me I should write about being Korean if I wanted to “market” myself as a poet, so I wrote a poem about T. S. Eliot riding the London Underground as my version of saying FUCK YOU. You can see I’m not really good at showing people what's what. Is this totally narcissistic to be thinking about my own poetic formation while being at this reading or is that what this nodding kid is doing too, composing his On-the-Road-in-“Post-Free”-Verse (“Aren’t we all post-free?”) with a section like 4. CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES CIGARETTES ARETES on yo' ASS! but I don't think he would be cool enough to end with ASS, alas, pigeons on the grass, I think that is my beer talking again, and then the next section would be about DNA sequencing because there's, like, all these converging registers in the bureaucratically determined code of language you know what I mean? And I'm not really sure his nods are aligning with the rhythm of anything being read aloud here, and Nick is now staring into his manly cocktail drink, one of those cocktails that's just some hard liquor on top of another hard liquor, and I don’t get that because cocktails are supposed to hide what you’re drinking, right? So I had to order it for him by repeating each of the syllables I thought he said but apparently came back with the wrong thing, which he still likes. Vivisection of my rotundular enigma. I am not even sure these are words that were in the poem, I am forgetting all of them as soon as they are spoken, they are all so soft and round and abstract and don't cohere and I now think vivisection is probably too vivacious to have been there and the real problem is that I would probably like the poet if I knew her, she looks smart and earnest and not at all like these affected pixie bitches. I am even sure I just read something by her in an anthology and must have liked it because I don't remember hating it and felt a flicker of interest when I saw homegirl’s name on the program, so now I am imagining how all these words she keeps lobbing at us might be laid out in an interesting way that would make it make sense. Or maybe there's some procedural framework like she cut up Alberti's De Pictura into a bunch of triangles and threw them on the floor like an Arp collage. Yes, maybe that's the problem with me, I want it all to make sense somehow, but someone is trying to pull out their rolling suitcase from next to my leg, I think it's Jennifer Scappettone but I don't really know her, and since I am looking around I see Bob Perelman's bald head near the front of the room. Any normal person who knows Bob Perelman would just go up and say hello after the reading, but I am filled with dread, any unexpected social encounter fills me with dread, but I also know if I sneak out without saying anything I will regret it because what kind of freak who knows Bob Perelman and studies poetry and knows he is a nice man would not just go say hi to Bob Perelman? So I look over at Avik for reassurance, and he is practically snoring, and it's funny how he keeps saying "homegirl" for any woman whose name he doesn't remember and how he can pull it off even though he normally doesn't talk that way at all. I am pretty sure I can't pull it off now that I've tried a couple times. Phosphorescent illusion. Proliferate. Is summoning. Once there was a time when we were all in college that my friends thought I was as smart as them and even asked my advice on their papers, but now I am in my 30s and I am still writing those papers and watch The Office and feel jealous of these people with paying jobs and cubicles and benefits and know my friends are spending this Saturday afternoon in a small dark basement bar listening to experimental poetry because they want to show they are interested in my interests and happy to spend any kind of time with me because I just had two kids and haven't been doing any writing but managed to get out of the house for 24 hours alone in New York and now I want to cry. I want to stand up and say to the poet, It's not you. It's not your poetry. It's me. Me. Me. But everyone is clapping, and she is already gone, replaced by a girl in a flouncy embroidered blouse and blood red lipstick, the kind of girl you imagine riding through the East Village on a bike with a wicker basket, in which she stores her thin cigarettes and artfully arranged wildflowers, and Nick listens to her introduce the next poet and says, "What a bitch." Previously published in I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press). Mia You was born in South Korea, raised in the United States, and currently lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Currently she is completing her PhD in English from UC Berkeley, writing a dissertation on Gertrude Stein, and teaching creative writing at the Universiteit Utrecht. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Hairpin, Jacket2, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Offing. With Chloe Garcia-Roberts, she is the co-founder/editor of A. BRADSTREET. She is also on the editorial board of Perdu, an experimental literary podium in Amsterdam, and a contributing editor at The Critical Flame.  Broken Ghazal of Night Here This small city draws its hot wings near its body to perch inside itself. Night here soaks bodies in their own waters. Out on the porch goes everybody with cool amber bottles for forgetting, one by one out to meet the dark like a string of lamps turning on. All my life I thought hurt should split my body so I would know the body. When it did, bone gone from skin, gaze gone from body, street under body, metal into a body, I did not know it still. My friend was in jail at the crux of this city, his body mute as an unlit bulb. Not the body who sins, but punished, the body. My friend is free now (but the body is not free) and we go out on the porch at night. We wear thin clothes and our bodies shine. Somewhere beneath the current of talk in the heat is each person’s grief. As if beneath the babbling river a body. My old life is here like another body in a thin slip and beneath it the hairs on her body are grasses from the bristled plain of the past. She follows me down the street. Nameless, the body follows the body. The trees are withholding their green somewhere beneath the night. Previously published in MELUS. Shamala Gallagher is a Kundiman fellow and the author of a chapbook, I Learned the Language of Barbs and Sparks No One Spoke (dancing girl press, 2015). Her poems and essays have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, West Branch, Verse Daily, The Offing, The Rumpus, and many other journals. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. This spring she lives in Cortona, Italy. |
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