LIZARD DAYS

by Alejandro Escudé

A lizard, small, on my walk along 

the largest airport in the country,

dead, curled, fetus-like, so swift

they are as they shoot back toward

the ivy mounds. At times I imagine

how many trash bins would the 

lizards fill if they were all collected

from the overgrowth—so I take

with my iPhone a photo of him,

Cretaceous little being, extinct, 

and think about the latest warning

issued to all Apple users, a hack

where they could take control,

absolute control, the newscaster

asserts, of your phone. I yearn

for a return to those lizard days

when I couldn’t carry around

a sea of digital pirates, both legal

and illegal, a neon mind-maze,

yet enough data to assume society’s 

panoptic perch. I choose to keep 

from running another space race

with my phone, contemplate

the deadness of a dead lizard

on the sidewalk as monolithic 

shadows of planes, like the foot-

prints of a dinosaur accelerated 

in time, mesh onward to the west.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

FLASH NEWS

by Angelica Whitehorne

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping, the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour. And I imagine how these readers of past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready, aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals. And how sweet it must have been to read the typing of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it—now the news envelops us always. I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12-story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes, and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again. The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the message away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation have lost our ability to put the paper down, and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our name in it. 

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

KARMA PLUS

by David Radavich





See what pure narcissism
brings forth: a great rot
in the communal apple.

The body politic
spoils top to bottom
and back again.

Every inequity
becomes deadly
as a snake.

We have long since
been thrown out
of the garden.

We roam streets
like zombies
in search of medicine
and care.

How can we be
one family

and not hug
our neighbors
as ourselves?

Pathogens know
our vulnerabilities
and strike
with clear knives.

In the dark night

we become
what we do
for one another.

David Radavich's latest narrative collection is America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery (2019), companion volume to his earlier America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007). Recent lyric collections are Middle-East Mezze (2011) and The Countries We Live In (2014). His plays have been performed across the U.S. and in Europe.

ADAM SCROLLS THROUGH HIS APPLE

by Katherine Smith

“‘How do I feel about Trump? I’ll tell you’ he said. He punched up an app and held his phone to display the digits 26, 447.” —"As Suburban Women Turn to Democrats, Many Suburban Men Stand With Trump," The New York Times October 13, 2018

He notes a murder in another zone,
unwraps his turkey sandwich, smiles
at the Dow rising on his phone.

He eats his lunch in his car alone,
this ancestor of SUVs and wiles.
His thumbs flick: murder, bone

saws, Kavenaugh, He grins.
He won that round. Meanwhile
the Dow is rising on his phone

like pride’s origin. Damn right he’s done
well by his kids and wife. The dead guy’s
only some hack for the Washington Post.

The words that Moses wrote on stone,
are numbers he no longer dials,
replaced by the Dow Jones.

Before the apple, there was testosterone
and oil. The price of crude is undefiled
by fingers severed at the knuckle bone,
and the Dow is rising on his phone.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

AUTUMN EQUINOX

by Howie Good

Image source: Country Wives

A swirling cloud of rocks & gravel
sweeps along the ground,
& before I have time to develop
a plausible theory about it,

the woman staggers up to me,
an eye missing, a hand gone,
a brittle blue flower tucked saucily
behind her remaining ear,
& I suddenly know of what the future consists:

a certain unrest in all there has been,

the desire to rescue scrap
& then serve celebratory champagne
to saints & alcoholics,

an unpremeditated encounter
at the breakfast table with an apple, pears,
a heart cut with a cake knife.


Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press.