ALL IN THE FAMILY

by Alan Walowitz

Maybe you wake up cranky again, 

and the sun’s unwelcome as ever

through the broken slat in the blinds.

You holler across the hall, 

You’ve got to make something of your life.

Then, he hardly stirs when you go to shake him, 

but he tells you of his plan to kill you.

There’s no use talking it out.

No coming to some understanding.

He means it this time 

 

Sometimes, I get crazy thoughts myself—

I’m too old for this. 

What’s left of my youth

has leached out slow like air from a tire. 

How murder is where we come from, 

Cain and Abel, the Flood, and then the Golden Calf—

which was only a sign of our shared impatience.   

 

So, you take him to some tangled place

and it all unwinds like a movie,

part of you watching, and part of you 

present in a way you’ve never been.

Maybe you’re hoping some voice intervenes.

You’d gladly call it God, if the script requires, 

though you’re probably considering the headlines, 

the generations to come who might never understand. 

Or, perhaps, there is no voice. 

and it's just you, come to your senses. 

 

No matter. Chances are he’ll only remember 

a trip to the country, just a kid and his dad.

A nice enough day, the story might go, 

except for maybe this cheap device

that never would solve anything: 

the bleat of another innocent animal,  

caught in the brambles, ready or not,

to take our place.

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook  Exactly Like Love  comes from Osedax Press.   The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

TAKING MY OWN ADVICE

by Joan Mazza

Stop arguing with crazy people,

the anti-vaxxers who don’t believe

viruses exist, but believe in the power

of prayer. Don’t try to inform

the stubborn, the disinterested,

and the know-it-alls. You’ll come

off as another arrogant know-it-all.

Never mind your science education.

Give up all hope that people will

take the time to learn the facts

or acknowledge them when they are

presented clearly. They don’t respect

experts and you aren’t an expert.

Don’t name the logical fallacy.

Don’t explain confirmation bias.

Don’t say sampling error,

anecdotal evidence, or placebo

effect. Stop arguing with the dead,

who had no interest in your welfare

when they were alive. Give it up.

Let it go. Any response reinforces

the crazies. Poor souls, they need

attention, even negative attention.

Don’t celebrate All Trolls Day.

Joan Mazza has worked as a microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops  on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia. 

PEOPLE LIKE US AND THE DAY YOU WERE BORN

by John Hodgen

Heading in to the Quickie Mart I can tell right away something’s wrong, 

the kid behind the counter with the plexi-glass wrap-around going at it  

with a customer, giving him a piece of her mind, or more. I think perhaps  

she caught him stealing, or worse, but he’s a business guy, gray suit, gray tie,  

and when I open the door it’s not anger at all, it’s passion I’m hearing,   

passion in a Quickie Mart. She’s just a kid, early 20’s or so, hair pulled back,  

masked, oversized glasses fogged up. She’s saying, …when even we can see  

what’s going on, us average people, people like us, then you know something’s wrong.  

And the man doesn’t speak, just nods and turns away, goes past me  

like a broken ghost, back to the world again. And I turn to her in this  

tiny temple where we all come and go for milk and tickets and cigarettes  

and gas, and ask her what it is that all of us should know, all us average people  

who gas and gulp and come and go. She says, …the Capitol, what those people did. 

And I tell her I agree, it’s a sacred place, that they call it the People’s House, 

that Lincoln ended slavery there with the 13^th Amendment in the Capitol,  

that when you’re actually there it feels more like a church. And then I can’t stop.  

I tell her it’s good what you did, speaking up like that. I tell her Siddhartha  

says your birthday isn’t really the day that you’re born. It’s the first time  

you stand up to your parents, to anyone with power over you, and tell them  

the truth. That’s the day when you’re truly born, when you first come alive.  

I want to say she was smiling, gleaming like a newborn held up to the light,  

but she was wearing a mask. I gave her a twenty for pump number five. 

John Hodgen, Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University, won the AWP Prize for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press). His new book is The Lord of Everywhere (Lynx House/University of Washington Press).

THE VISIT

by Devon Balwit

The first days pass in delight. Then
comes irritation, the rift between wish
and world, lacks that leave us too often
lamenting our birth. We are childish,
throwing tantrums because it feels good
to yell and kick our feet. That it disturbs others
is a bonus. It’s worse when it’s understood
that we, ourselves, are the problem, our mothers
and fathers not to blame for who and how
we are. Then, a glance at the calendar
shows the visit’s almost up. Now
a rush to reconcile. We grow fonder
of each other, of the ordinary good that surrounds
us, but there’s scant time to enjoy what we’ve found.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in here as well as in Jet Fuel, The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, and Rattle among others.

AFTER THE SCHOOL SHOOTING, HE SAYS

by R. Riekki

Image source: Benny on Twitter

"The killings in Dallas are one more reminder that guns are central,
not accessory,  to the American plague of violence."

—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, July 8, 2016

"More police officers die on the job in states with more guns." 
—Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post, July 8, 2016

After the school shooting, he says
that the cure would be
more guns
and more schools
and more psychopaths.
If we had more guns
and more schools
and more shootings,
everyone would be safer.
He says the way that we stop
school shootings is with more
school shootings and more death
and more brothels and more spaghetti.
He says that you cure cancer
with more cancer.
That the way you prevent a cold
is by injecting yourself with the cold virus.
He says he has an Associates degree,
so he knows what he’s talking about.
We tell him to move on, that he’s made
his point.  He tells us that if we don’t want
to listen to him talk, that we should all
just shout over him.
The bartender pulls out a gun,
tells him to shut up.

R. Riekki's non-fiction, fiction, and poetry have been published or are upcoming in The Threepenny Review, River Teeth, Spillway, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Canary, Bellevue Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, Little Patuxent Review, Wigleaf, Juked, and many other literary journals.

SCENE UNSEEN

by David Allen Sullivan

“Searchlight” (2008) by Dorothy Cross at the Kerlin Gallery.

1.
Drugstore neon LIQUORS the men’s reflected faces
as the coat unsheathes the knife.
The argument has come to this. No going back.
Fingers grapple wrists, teeth become weapons,
and soft points of entry: groin, eyes, jugular, wrist-pulse,
are surveyed by the breathless
geographers of flight and fight.

2.
Every day we are here.
We put on each other’s clothes,
teeth the air before our faces,
taste the bitter spirits—stand ins for death—
burning down our throats.

3.
Who would retract their steps
from this point of violence?
Resheath the blade? What we’re given to experience
we do not return. Each of us holds the weapon,
each of us pulls back the safety,
de-pins the grenade,
hefts the scimitar,
douses ourselves with gasoline…
Each of us feels the blade and bullet, burn and blister
tender our skin.

4.
What aggression sears back my lips?
What maniacal laugh takes over my body?
What demon wears my skin as a cloak?
I am not this person I am,
the doppelganger in the upper flat
whose footsteps plague my brain.
What will come between us?

5.
We have been chosen.
With Isaac we lay ourselves athwart the stony altar.
With Abraham we wetstone the blade.
Each risky thing awakens the dead
already inside us, breathing with our breath.
We step into the spotlight
and the LA helicopter’s searchlight
pins us to the squad car roof
while the cop rifles through our pockets.
We are nothing but our choices
and we have no choice.

6.
We slip our feet into their shoes
laid by our beds.
We walk into the other room to do whatever is required.
The other has made off with our life
our lover
our clothes
our future.

7.
We walk into the other room
and we never come back.

David Allen Sullivan’s books include: Strong-Armed Angels; Every Seed of the Pomegranate; a book of translation from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet; and Black Ice. Most recently, he won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his family.