RITUAL

by Amy Shimshon-Santo

the year crawls toward an end 
sharp knife between its teeth
& bleeding tongue

a year of vowels

displaced from their consonants,
zipped together 

by a three letter word 
that is not good for children 
& other living things

I walk to the edge of language
thin stick between my hands 
holding a makeshift flag

colorless as the memory of water
scavenged from cotton 
clothing of the departed

it is time to place the year inside 
an urn, bury it in the Earth
lie down beside the unimaginable

hear the new year drumming
& dreaming itself into being, wanting
to be born

Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a warm-blooded vertebrate with hair. She writes  poetry, essays, performs spoken word, improvisation, and choreography. Read or listen to her poetry collections: Catastrophic Molting (2020), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (2020), and look for her forthcoming book Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (2024). Teaching and facilitating trans-local community arts projects have been central to her social practice for 30+ years. She is available as a guest artist, arts educator, coach, and editor. Dr. A has been nominated for an Emmy Award and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative non-fiction. She was a finalist for the Night Boat Poetry Prize, and earned a place in the U.S. Service Learning Hall of Fame. Connect with her at @shimshona / @amyshimshon

PLEASE

by William Aarnes

poetry makes nothing happen 

          —W.H. Auden 

 

poetry is never really part of anything 

          —John Koethe 

 

It can kill a man. 

          —Wallace Stevens 

 

                         It is difficult

to get the news from poems

          yet men die miserably every day

                                            for lack

of what is found there. 

          —William Carlos Williams 

 

Of course, there are other ways 

to kill—a knee pressed down 

on a neck; a quick, hard shove 

 

off a subway platform; a swerve 

onto a sidewalk; a brick 

dropped from a roof; the slow, 

 

sure work of something tasteless 

stirred into a sauce; a knife  

stuck through a partner’s heart... 

 

—but guns are so easy to have  

on hand they’ve help us fall  

into the habit of reaching for them 

 

to win lost arguments  

or end marriages or conclude 

our own lives by aimless firing 

 

into crowds.  Having guns around, 

has moved us to elect whoever  

will pass and keep in force  

 

permissive laws meant to insure  

we’ll need guns to defend each other  

from gunfire.   

 

                       So can someone  

 

please post the poem everyone 

(even readers who prefer 

firing guns to reading)  

 

will want to share with friends  

because the poem’s so compelling  

about how we need justices 

 

who think laws must meet 

standards suggested by the phrase  

“well regulated militia” 

 

and (in a brilliant burst  

of well-targeted words)    

about how it’s criminal  

 

not to make crimes committed  

with guns the responsibility  

of not only the culprits but also  

 

the weapons’ makers and dealers? 

 

Please, someone, that poem.  

 

Stop me from buying a gun. 

William Aarnes lives in New York.

AFFORDABLE CARE

by Megan Merchant 

Cartoon by Pat Bagley 

I’m sorry America, please have a seat.
By popular vote we are going to remove

your third rib
without a plan for replacement.

You should pray,
or at least mutter something biblical near a statue.

We are going to snipe the surgeon and replace
him with the homeless man

who is stationed by the automatic door
with his styrofoam cup, tipped with whiskey.

He has seen so many injured and sick welcomed
under the florescent lights that he must

be deft at holding a knife, understand how
to point the sharp edge away.

This is a beautiful approach, believe me,
do not underestimate periphery experience,

it is so close to precision, you won’t even know.

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016 Book of the Year), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017), four chapbooks, and a children’s book with Philomel Books. 

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.

THE BLANK BOWIE

by John Paul Davis




Don't say glam. Everyone always says that.
Neither say alien nor say stardust.
Invent a brand new vocabulary.
Say moonage. Say sula vie milejo.
Before heavy metal, before eyeliner
for rock gods, before electronica,
there was Bowie, self-named after the knife,
himself the blade, separating spirit
& the body, feminine from female,
mask from masculine. Androgyny and.
All of us & simultaneously
none of us. He went to hard rock's bombast
& distortion to find soul. To Berlin
to find the blues in a synthesizer
orchestra. Called himself the Thin White Duke,
thus freeing himself to write R&B.
He knew what everyone craves most of all
is a mystery. It's why our gods ask
us to carry what we can never hold
up some sacred, burning mountain, why love
comes laced with heartache, why such queer lyrics
keep us awake in the night, wondering.
He understood that to write a hymnal
for the spiritually dispossessed
he must himself become a borderland.
What is the sound a soul makes as it leaks
from its seams? Bowie. How keens the heartcry
of a person born out of place in time?
Bowie. How echoes joy on your second
wedding day, after you'd all but given
up on love? Bowie. Say the hot demon
of the drink or drugs still bucks in your veins,
say you think you can't leave the one who hurts
you, say you're harrowed by an old music
you heard once on an aging stereo
as a child. Say Bowie & he'll appear,
screwed up eyes & screwed down hairdo, well hung
& snow white tan. Saint Satellite, my dim
dreams need your code-switching & baritone,
my hetero tongue, needs your gender
bending & the high holy spark & howl
of your guitar, my weekday commute needs
your compact rebellion & scattershot
crimes of fashion. Let me borrow your mouth
& be beautiful, if not for a life
time then for just today, just one more day.


John Paul Davis's poetry has appeared in Muzzle, Rattle, Four Way Review, The Journal and many others. He lives in New York.