ZENO IN AMERICA

by Dale Wisely

A Black teenager was shot in the head by a white homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., after showing up at the wrong house to pick up his siblings, lawyers for his family said. Family members identified the victim online as Ralph Pual Yarl, a 16-year-old high school junior. You can contribute to a GoFundMe to help pay for the boy’s hospital bills.

 

Imagine a bullet approaching its target. It may help to think in slow motion. Let’s say it’s seven inches away from impact. No, let’s say eight because it is important for us to be able to divide readily. No pesky fractions. Haven’t we had enough fractions? Eight inches and... slow that bullet way down. Before it reaches skin, layers rich in capillaries, then skull... but if you’d rather think of, say, a sheet of drywall, that will do. So do. Do think of drywall.

 

Before the bullet makes contact it must pass the four-inch mark. Then the two-inch mark; then it’s just an inch away from, let’s say, plywood. Sheet metal. Or a STOP sign on a rural road. We can’t avoid fractions after all. When we keep dividing, we get fractions.

 

Then one-half inch. Then a quarter inch. Almost there. But next is the last one-eight inch. Stop there. Or halfway from there to the target. It doesn't matter where you stop. Just stop. Wherever you stop, think of that as a place where nothing is struck. Where the space left to travel is nothing and everything. Where nothing is pierced, shattered, ended. Where everything is as it was. This is a place where things go so fast and have so little space remaining and so little time left. Where a thing is about to happen but never does. I’m trying to say that this is a place where the skin remains intact and blood is retained in vessels, and bone unshattered. 

Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, publisher of the journals Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unlost, Unbroken, duality, and first frost.

CINEMA INAUGURAL

by Alejandro Escudé

It isn’t power, but a podium levitating over a row of graves. You know you’ve heard the word, America. And you sense it, the birds circling over the dignitaries entering the Capitol, where the shadows played weeks before. Weakened, we bow before the ghosts of revolutionaries. It’s all cinema, really.

With the frigid heart of the laborer, I watch, sore yet awake, vowing to do this and that and to do it despite broken hopes. One can’t help the wicked who insist on wickedness, dopes who carry another skeleton body stuffed in their dirty Levis. I can’t help seeing the skull behind the sputtering speech,

lime-white, cracked, battle-bruised as an Apache warrior, porcelain daughters in little Puritan boots climbing steps, old senators making deathly eye contact, defiant smiles. Harrowing wind where Whitman once walked too, to aid the wounded with his round, poetic soul. I am aggrieved

by the last four years, shreds of history, the unholy present of mad insurrection. To see the Viking faces of blowhards storm mahogany chambers only to wander, stunned, hooting devilish battle cries, brandishing antebellum flags, vomiting half-baked theories, chanting croc-shit demands, whaling

creepy hide-seek queries up stairways, around sacred halls. Upward, democracy falls. We’ve been leaping sideways.

I mute the new President, turn to my laptop screen, mask laying on my teacher’s kitchen desk. My students are real; I’m not sure my country is. Even the sun needs a webpage

today and has to publicize the need for its warmth, its rising and setting. Devils wander the corridors having broken

the golden gates of heaven and beaten sword-wielding Michael with a simple, splintered stick. We step forward torn yet illumined. The exodus out of an exodus continued. 

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.

CLEARLY

by Barbara Loots





Clearly this explains a lot
about the president we’ve got.
For basement, substitute your bed.
Computer?  Say tv instead.
Every click of Twitter thumb?
Neurons in the brain go numb
until the whole damn thing is gone.
The skull is empty. Sad. Poor Don.


Frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com, Barbara Loots keeps an eye on the news from Kansas City, MO. New collection The Beekeeper and other love poems coming soon from Kelsay Books. 

QUARANTINED WITH THE DEAD

by Judy Kaber

Your boots sit
beside the door
as if you will

creep, turtle-mind    
full of muckage,
out to drink

from the stream.
Hope is nothing
but a skull now

& you at home
as much in roots
of foamflower

as anywhere.
Once we feasted
on pizza

together
drank sassafras tea
laughed at

ridiculous things
like death, like pockets
of earth that might

swallow us
that did swallow you
long before

I sequestered myself
in a quarantined world
long before

my poems fell
into books, into quiet
word-pools

long before
madness descended
uncalled

Judy Kaber is a retired elementary school teacher, having taught for 34 years. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, both print and online, including Atlanta Review, december, The Comstock Review, Tar River, and Spillway.

VIEW OF EARTH FROM SPACE THROUGH THE DSCOVR TELESCOPE, AND A FEW WORDS ABOUT TERRORISM

by Bill Meissner

From a million miles away, it looks too blue:
perfectly rounded, haloed with graceful spirals of cumulus,
its continents drifting away from each other
like lovers that long to touch again.

But on its surface,
someone drives into a crowd, detonates a bomb, or lifts a weapon,
cradles it between a thumb and index finger,
contemplates the black hole
at the end of its long, sleek barrel.

The motive is always a little cloudy, yet the incidents repeat themselves:
in malls, in theaters, in schools, in dance clubs, on bridges.
No one can explain why. It’s something
to do with whatever it is that spins,
so red and angry, inside the skull.

There is no sound in outer space.
But here, some days, you can hear it, so close to you,
in the electronics aisle of a Wal-Mart.
Employees in the stock room look up, startled
by what sounds like a hollow box falling from a shelf.

From a million miles away, the earth looks blue as gunmetal—
it’s that same color we see from our back yards
when we tip our heads to the afternoon sky
and stare beyond those swirling clouds
that hide so much pain.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry. His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.  His 2008 novel Spirits In the Grass won the Midwest Book Award for Fiction/Novel.

USE ME INSTEAD

by Jay Sizemore

Photo of Rev. Joy M. Gonnerman. “The idea originated on a closed Facebook group for Lutheran clergy, where pastors were discussing how North Miami Beach’s police department had been caught using mugshots of actual people for target practice. Let’s send in our own photos for target practice, the pastors decided. The target-practice story had come to light after National Guard Sgt. Valerie Deant saw bullet-riddled mugshots of black men at a police gun range. One photo was of Deant’s brother.” --Elahe Izadi, Washington Post, January 25, 2015

The dark silhouette of a dark silhouette
threatens you with its darkness,
asks you to draw your pistol
and find your aim,
this darkness has no name,
is not a body full of words
like “mother” or “beginning,”
is not a tributary of stars.

Before you put holes in their faces,
before you forget their most human traces,
shine a light,
see the mirror beneath the flesh,
see that every shadow is a man holding his breath,
and every target is a heart inside a chest,
and if you must practice killing
these mortal likenesses,
please, use mine instead.

Punch your fears through my brow,
fill my nostrils with blood,
the scent of burnt nitroglycerin.
Build a hallway through my skull
to carry the wheelbarrow
of everything you never learned
about everyone else in the world,
adding my smile to the stacks upon stacks
of mouths never to show their teeth again.

I am a walking bullseye,
imagine my limp carcass on the street,
imagine stepping over puddles
to keep the red off your feet,
imagine pulling a trigger
before ever speaking to me,
looking down
and seeing your own son
being covered with a sheet.


Jay Sizemore dropped out of college and sold his soul to corporate America. He still sings Ryan Adams songs in the shower. Sometimes, he writes things down. His work has appeared online and in print with magazines such as Rattle, Prick of the Spindle, DASH, Menacing Hedge, and Still: The Journal. He's never won an award. Currently, he lives in Nashville, TN, home of the death of modern music. His chapbook Father Figures is available on Amazon.

GEORGE BUSH PAINTS

by Louise Robertson

Putin by Bush

This is what we artists and open mic 

worshipers have hoped for

all this time with our journals

and rants and sketches, to see

someone so Republican at the altar of

art. One sees the scratchings, 

like our own attempts at the cave wall.

Hands stained red. The trick

of dimension is like a whole extra grade

level. The trick of expression--

however easy to start--

so much harder to get exactly right.

I want to take him to workshop,

talk to him about getting the bones

of it down first. What could this man know of bone

and muscle and ligament

having ignored so much gore in his path:

the scraped and scalloped wartime bodies,

the skulls looking like so many bladders

emptied of their gray and red and black,

the rubble made out of parlors and

kitchens? If that introspection

can come from making art,

if that is one of life's most elusive gifts, if that

is the divine in the human coming out,

I have to say, George: finally.

Louise Robertson has earned degrees (BA Oberlin, MFA George Mason University), poetry publications (Pudding Magazine, New Verse News, Parting Gifts) and poetry awards (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Columbus Arts Festival Poetry Competition -- twice). She is active as a poet and organizer in her local Columbus, Ohio poetry.