#4.1 A Poem by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah
Cheat House
We’re always watching. Watching the forked pathway behind the hedgerow, we’re watching. Just watching. Someone has opened the outside door & we wait to hear how all these wounds started, we’re alive looking straight ahead into the future to see the predators. Suicide or madness overtakes some prisoners working on the field. & there isn’t a noticeable amount of repentance in their talks. We think they’ve created the burning. 57 sugarcane farms are burnt. 32 rice farms are burnt. A large grass field is burnt. Hundreds of tomato farms are burnt. Each family is here. Father, mother & children in groups. We’re trapped here. We’re scape goats. No arrest has been made. We’re the victims, we’re the clouts. I’m imprisoned & no one suggests that we can’t talk to one another though the guards are watching, looking at those who make any effort to talk. Or maybe they know something about global warming & that, fire can eat up anything, including the ocean at any time. & I’m glad maybe they know & nobody will be arrested. We want to know what they’ve for us. But I can’t trust them in this house with every carbon dioxide from the 7 villages. Are we here to be extricated? The television set is only a few feet further to the left, I barely glance its way when I sit on old plastic chair working for my escape. & outside the fireflies have inherited their properties & the moon seems to be full.
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Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is an algebraist, artist, and author of more than 200 books and works in mixed media. His most recent poetry chapbook is Kind Haven (The Operating System, 2020). His poetry, songs, prose, art and hybrid have appeared in numerous journals, including Constellations, Beautiful Cadaver Project Pittsburgh, The Meadow, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Rigorous, and many others. He lives in the southern part of Ghana, in Spain, and the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.
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#4.2 Two Poems by Susan Johnson
Ragged & Solitary
A woman feels pulled into winter woods, their rough bark & stubble, splintered logs, raw spackled mud,
as if she is being drawn towards the bleaker parts of her life, like a boat tugged by its painter through
rough portage & what a relief it is to slip into the dim breaks of light, away from the flash & click, into
the dull & dormant, like slipping into forgotten jeans, ragged & solitary, left in a bottom drawer to age.
No need to explain. The more barren the better, she says. The less to see the more I see & the less I am
seen. She strides round a reservoir, ringing it the way a beaver rings a tree, bite by bite to the core.
It’s the same path every day, but it’s never the same. Today bird nests, abandoned at the tips of branches,
reach out their small hands. How fragile they are, she thinks, & how strong. Needles & twigs plucked
& ferried, back & forth, back & forth, like so much flight gathered & delicately sewn then left to the cold.
Alone, she steps into steep shadows, into the desolate & familiar woods, to watch them fill with snow.
***
Beautiful Real News, A Found Poem Verbatim From the Rose Garden, 14 July 2020
“We have a great agreement where when Biden and Obama
used to bring killers out. They would say don’t bring
them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well,
they wouldn’t take them, come now with us, they take
them and someday I will tell you why. But they take
them and they take them very godly. The is to bring
them out and they wouldn’t even let the air planes land
if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t
let the buses back to the country. He said we don’t want them.
And we said no, but they entered our country illegally.”
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Susan Johnson received her MFA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she currently teaches writing. Poems of hers have recently appeared in North American Review, San Pedro River Review, Steam Ticket, Front Range, and SLAB. She lives in South Hadley MA and her commentaries can be heard on NEPM.
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#4.3 A Poem by Lisa Pasold
Crescent
we got by with an I-dare-you edge most of the time - I felt clearly myself and you very clearly didn’t want to be clear - spinning round outside that bakery near my crowded Temple apartment - we were longing for croissants - your fallen-angel eyelashes fluttering - the wind curled your hair all over like willing hands - I had on a skirt - an elastic bandage of gender that made my ass look fantastically heart-shaped - ugh even now I’m grasping at explanations when there never is one - spin me - the bakery cashier said to me, Oui Monsieur - said to you, Et pour Madame - a mean hard look on her face - you laughed - you knew there are never any good reasons - you gentled that hurt - so just now I prayed -you’d call it that - whirling a prayer wheel - wherever you are - I hope you still arrive unexpected on lovers’ doorsteps with a mouth full of riches - like that last time - I opened the door mostly naked without taking any pains at the altar of beauty - you were all shining in the darkness - your eyes caught at my mosquito-bit legs and splotched wooly socks - you dragged your gaze up again - said, Surprise - as if unsure of my reaction - I was so glad - love I should have said - whatever version of ourselves we may hold onto - whatever self we’ve given up - believe me - I would step back and swallow each one of your hurts like sour candy - I would remake this world so you are always welcomed in
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Lisa Pasold is a storyteller, journalist, and poet originally from Montreal. Lisa’s fourth book, Any Bright Horse, was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. Her poems have appeared in places such as The Atlanta Review, Fence and New American Writing. She sometimes takes photographs of flowers @lisapasold
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#4.4 Three Poems by Celina McManus
google, does the internet run under the ocean?
what is a cloud but another sea, and what does it mean
to store images into space and rain, and when we find out
that this cloud is only a cable car in the darkest parts of our
Earth’s unexposed body, how can we not fill ourselves with drink?
like astral wine that filters from abundant constellation
we take our fill, spit ash and tar into ozone
smog forms the belts of Orion and cable-layers submarine
their way to sky as we hurry away the earworm hiss of dial-up
we do not own these stars
however, someone pretends and how are we to know
what is holy and what is just? our fingers click and scroll
and then we discard— our forgotten screens, our old bodies
this corpse of cockle, the carrion trickles tap water drains to dust
each tear, all the juice from a rare steak becomes salt
becomes the salt we carry with us
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Celina McManus writes poetry and children’s literature. Her work is featured in Hooligan Magazine, Peach Mag, and others. She received her MFA from Randolph College and currently teaches English at Century College. She is from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains and lives in St. Paul, MN.
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#4.5 Three Poems by Dion O’Reilly
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Dion O’Reilly's first book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Narrative, Sugar House Review, New Letters, New Ohio Review, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She facilitates ongoing poetry workshops in a farmhouse full of wild art (now on Zoom) and is a member of the Hive Poetry Collective which produces radio shows, podcasts, and events in Santa Cruz. (dionoreilly.wordpress.com)
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#4.6 Three Poems by Emily Ahmed
Polaroid Photo Reel
1. the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge cliff where kings were known to fall 2. the same cliff face but from another angle 3. Stoneybatter from my window, the green and the brick and grey skies 4. he and i roaming northern streets before we kissed goodbye after making promises we couldn’t keep 5. the selfie taken in the Greek restaurant, my best friend turned away so I wouldn’t get stage fright 6. my cousin and I at Khan Al Khalili smiling in winter coats 7. my cousin and I at the pyramids on her birthday squinting through the sun 8. my parents sitting on the balcony in Giza almost exactly a year later 9. my cousin eating pumpkin pie for the first time days before her next birthday 10. us on the footsteps of the National Art Gallery in Washington DC, you blushed when I said I brought the camera
***
Portrait
Speaks to your shadow, forgets you under the stars cuts the wood but never lights the fire. Looks like a homeland, an island, and you’re a lonely museum. Tries to paint you with one color, one brush but never quite pictures things the same as you. Says you speak in waves, like you can’t quite decide on which language, wants to blow smoke in your face on his cigarette breaks.
***
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Emily Ahmed (she/her) is an emerging writer recently published in Sienna Solstice and was a finalist for the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize in 2019 for her chapbook manuscript On Distance.
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#4.7 A Poem by Madison Blask
There are squirrels in our walls.
I’m not very curious and I’d be easy to kill. There is a lot that would kill me on the spot. If I opened the kitchen cabinet at any time of day expecting to find labeled jars of granola and turkey jerky but instead a squirrel jumped out at me I would die. If a squirrel fell from the ceiling and into my bed while I was sleeping or awake and wishing I was sleeping I would die. Most of the things that would kill me right now are squirrels related. But that’s only because there are squirrels in our walls.
Soon the squirrels will cease being my problem because I am being evicted by a seed that does not know about me. It does not hurt my feelings that the seed doesn’t know about me, because the seed does not know about anything. Maybe it knows it is floating, swirling in goo, docked to a woman who will teach it all it will ever need to know the moment it is ready. She’ll tell it about me, too. When the seed has grown its limbs and lungs and it’s sense of humor enough to see the comedy in our situation.
When I moved into my room a few months ago I knew that this day would come eventually, I thought it would come quicker than it did, even. But fertility is fragile, or maybe not at all. Maybe fertility is focused and controlling. Either way I am spending the afternoon packing books into a wheelie suitcase and stuffing sweaters in a garbage bag.
I’ve spent my life listening to tales of women whose lives were changed, improved, worsened, molded by what did or did not grow in their wombs. I have a womb too, but whenever I open my mouth to tell its story the squirrels get on their skateboards to practice kickflips and I have to go find the broom.
If I have good broom aim soon the kickflipping will stop. Soon there won’t be squirrels in my walls at all because I will not have any walls. Soon after that there will be a small person here who doesn’t care about squirrels or walls or my womb. But I’ll cut them some slack, they just got here.
______________________________________________________________________________________ Madison Blask is a writer and amateur baker currently living in Upstate New York. She received her MFA from The New School and her writing has appeared in publications including The Hoxie Gorge Review and HASH Journal. She is currently at work on her first novel and has a lemon bundt on a cooling rack in the kitchen.
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#4.8 Three poems by Eva Mary Hooker
*Note: “Wild and dusky knowledge” and “tawny grammar” are terms Thoreau uses in his journal.
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Eva Mary Hooker writes “In my first book, Godwit, I traced the migration patterns of a bird, collected wildflowers for semblances, and rooted around in the testimony of women mystics. I like to wander in places strange to me. I like to explore without linguistic obligation. My second manuscript, Portion, leans up out of the shade and explores the compass of the world. I use a long rake, narrow-tined, to explore in Margaret Cavendish’s voice, the invention of a self. I am professor of English and Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana.”
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#4.9 A Poem by Cameron Lovejoy
THE LIGHT OF GOD
—after Joshua Wheeler’s essay of the same name
Look, a shaft of light—
a pillar of glitter cascades
in late day. God is near.
The divine arm reaches
into His picnic basket
to grasp a few loose grapes.
The lotion of numen.
I can see the light.
Twilight’s eye lashes
sinfully lifting. In latin:
crepuscular rays—crisp.
A stairway to deafen.
I can see the light
saber shanking the belly
of the stratosphere. A saint’s
unsmoked cigarette.
The firmament turned
Murphy Bed. A mid-90’s
alien abduction with that
spiffy green beam-me-up
secretion. I can see the light
yellow of America’s eagle
pissing on a distant desert.
This is not Amazon’s
Top Ten Best Selling Drones
list. This is the welfare of war
heroes hidden in warehouses
some 7,000 miles from the theater.
This is state of the art laser
targeting technology marking
the very tree we’re barking up.
Check your night vision:
a bright spire descends
before the Hellfire missile
strikes—like a flag
stabbed in the moon.
Do you see the Light
of God? —Over.
I see the light. —Over.
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Cameron Lovejoy is the creator of Tilted House, a small press in New Orleans, LA, and edits Tilted House Review. He hosts Rubber Flower Poetry Hour, a monthly reading series currently on virus hiatus. His work has appeared in Poets Reading The News, among others.
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