YES, THEY SOW GUNS INTO THE BELLY OF THIS WORLD

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker





You cannot sow leaves back to a tree,
unpluck the plume of an eagle.
When words begin to rot the tongue,
those words cannot be swallowed back.

There is a dish to hold the sea,
a brassiere to hold the sun,
a compass for the galaxy,
a voice to wake the dead.

But this is the silence between us.
And this is why there will be no nest.
Because this is a relationship
between a bird & a gun.

Shots burst out into a crowd;
and, we saw the red-hot glint,
watching & crying & asking
that question over again.

Talons fall from the sky,
settle, & turn to rust. I hate you,
I think, as you shoot me
to death with a rifle in my face:

Born to pull the trigger.
Born to light the match.
Born to see the blood.
Born to steal the hope.

You feel rage & there are bodies
on the floor, me, dying,
almost dead, knees stuck
together with feathers & blood.

One gun to hold the bullets;
one finger to pull the trigger.
Truth wears everyday clothes.
Tufts crimson as sunset pass us by.


Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

FUCK YOUR GUN!

by Scott C. Kaestner






Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a 6 year old child’s right to enjoy a festival with the family.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a family’s right to go grocery shopping on a Saturday morning.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede an adult’s right to enjoy a night out with friends.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a student’s right to get an education without having to attend classmates' funerals.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a believer’s right to worship the God they choose.

Fuck your gun, fuck the NRA, fuck your thoughts and prayers, fuck the cowardly thieves who represent us.

Fuck your gun!

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, dad, husband, and guy who never gets tired of sunshine or tacos. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

TO LIE IN STATE, AS USUAL

by David Feela

Years down the political road
an ex-con will be carried to the rotunda
by military men at taxpayers’ expense

though he never served a day in uniform.
Mourners will respectfully file past his remains
though never in his life did he lawfully

file his taxes, wash his hands at humanity’s
fountain, or recognize a truth before
wringing out a lie. A closed casket affair,

nobody certain if he’s actually in there,
his supporters aghast, as a democrat is
accused of raising the flag to full staff.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook Thought Experiments won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A collection of his essays How Delicate These Arches was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press released his newest chapbook Little Acres in April 2019.

BLEEDING OUT

by Lisa J. Rocklin

Let's just leave it down:

the flag—
half-staff.
Raise it high
on days when

no one dies
            like that. 

Declare a holiday. 

Thoughts 
make ineffective gauze.
Prayers 

absorb no blood.
Flags were not meant

to serve 
as tourniquets
or crucibles of
            patriotism.

Let's just kneel 
together
every time
our banner waves
for these days 
we share—
collecting grief like debt.

Let's mourn 
the self-destruction
            of a nation. 

Let there be rage for 
the addict we can't save
who shoots up 
skin that isn't his
triggered by . . . 
            it doesn't matter why.

As long as he's fed
as long as we're willing
to yield more dead
as long as we keep 
loading the chamber
let's just leave it down—
as a shroud—

star-spangled 

and red.

Lisa J. Rocklin is a writer, facilitator, community builder, and associate director of Women Writing for (a) Change, a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, OH, that offers supportive writing circles to nurture and celebrate the individual voice.

CHURCH OF THE HOLY GUNS

by John Kaprielian

Someday all poems will have to be
about shootings and killing sprees
It seems that's all that happens these
days and if we do not change our ways
there will be no time to write about things
like the first light of dawn that kisses the
treetops aflame against a carmine sky or
waves that wash dancing silver
fish across shell-flecked sand

No, there will be no time for that only
blood and fear and hate and tears
the sick sweet smell of gunpowder
that hangs in the air like incense
at some perverse Church of Holy Guns
while mothers kiss cold lips and
bleach washes crimson stains
from shell-shocked floors and walls

Who needs poems about nature
and love when there are elegies
and laments to be written thoughts
and prayers to be mouthed
and promises to be made
and forgotten until the next time
which will probably be the day
after tomorrow

A natural history photo editor by day, John Kaprielian has been writing poetry for over 35 years. In 2012 he challenged himself to write a poem a day for a year and self-published the poems in a book 366 Poems: My Year in Verse available on Amazon. His poems have been published in The Five-Two Poetry Blog, Down in the Dirt Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Naturewriting.com, The Blue Nib, The Blue Mountain Review, and Minute Magazine. He lives in Putnam County, NY with his wife, teenage son, and assorted pets. He is thoroughly sick of writing poems like this.

GARDEN VEGETABLES

by Joan Mazza

The garden blooms again in profusion,
offers snow peas and sugar snaps,
lettuces green and crisp. The tomatoes
have never tasted so good. Maybe
the heavy spring rain kept the ground
moist during  a critical window, maybe

it’s the usual cycle of the earth. Hands
in the dirt provide distraction,
the sense of doing something useful,
healthy, with an outcome you can eat—
most basic feeling of security. Logs
on the wood pile cure for winter
while you can tomatoes, pickle cukes.

Without TV or radio, without knowledge
of the height of children, you’d never know
the year. Gardens’ bountiful vegetables
are an annual constant, a salve.
In Dayton and El Paso, the experts
are closing out crime scenes, taking

photos, mopping up blood, notifying
next of kin. When you hear the number
of injured victims along with the dead,
you won’t know how their lives have been
altered to live with chronic pain and fear.
How many young men are cleaning their
guns and counting their bullets today?

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her work has appeared in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia, where she writes a poem every day and is working on a memoir.

CHEZ YESTERDAY

by Linda Lowe





If you’re hungry for the past,
there are choices galore inside,
and a coat check girl for starters.
Think fifties, think Marilyn.
The doorman is smiling
like he has for decades,
clinging to yesterday
like those who secretly wish
they could wear fur
and oh, for a Lucky Strike!

But there, across the street,
young men gathering like storm clouds.
We can only hope
they don’t light their torches,
will do nothing to incite rage.
Rage is everywhere these days,
wearing boots that stomp
driving cars that bully down sidewalks

like this one,
so narrow, so yielding.
Oh, the hurley-burley of it all.
Here comes the chanting
crossing the street.
There goes the doorman, shouting,
“We’re closed!”

Linda Lowe's poems and stories have appeared in Outlook Springs, The Pacific Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Gone Lawn, Dogzplot, Right Hand Pointing, and others.

STAGING AREA

by Mark Danowsky

News of another shooting—

This time folks in a Walmart in El Paso are unlucky

I listen to the hourly recap while I wrap my ankle—seems I rolled it
in the process of loading the U-Haul

Tomorrow I’ll drive the 15’ truck 300 miles from West Virginia to almost safe
suburbs 9 miles outside Philadelphia

9 miles is the space I’ve been driving strangers all over this mad college town
more than a year now

I’ll drive strangers in the new space, too, though I hope to avoid airport staging
in spite of the possibility for decent fares

While packing, I called the $20 Walmart coffee table and the $8 Walmart shoe rack
my “staging area”

We carried that staging area to the trash earlier

Now on NPR they’re talking about a staging area outside Walmart—
families trying to find each other after the terror
forced upon them by an active shooter

I don’t know if they’re still putting children in cages at our southern border but
the images I’m conjuring are horrific enough

A man with a gun enters a public space to disrupt as many lives as he can

Another man with a gun takes a child from his father’s arms because
he says the father failed to properly change a diaper on their endless journey

Remember when we started to build that bridge to nowhere? It’s hard
to think badly of a bridge when for years now there’s been so much talk of walls

After unloading the U-Haul at the new place I’m going to get a few necessities
at the local Walmart

I’m going to go because America gets back on the horse
even if we forget what caused us to fall

I’m going to go to Walmart because it can’t be like Aurora
when the cashier at the A-Plus says I look a little like the shooter and I don’t
enter a movie theater for the next four years

I’m going to go to Walmart because sometimes
going to Walmart isn’t about class or flag-waving or quality or luxury

Sometimes Walmart means America and we just have to nod and take a knee

Mark Danowsky is a writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, Kestrel, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

MEMORY OF PRAYER

by Christopher Woods

From left: Felipe Gomez Alonzo, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez and Jakelin Caal Maquin are three of the children who have died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Family photos via NBC News. “A group of doctors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins has urged Congress to investigate the deaths of six migrant children who were held in government custody after crossing the southern border in the past year, warning that “poor conditions” at U.S. facilities are increasing the risk of spreading deadly infectious diseases, especially the flu. The doctors, who wrote to Congress on Thursday, said autopsy reports show that at least three of the children—ages 2, 6 and 16—died in part as a result of having the flu, a far higher incidence of such deaths than across the general population. Child flu deaths are rare, the doctors said, and should be preventable.” —The Washington Post, August 1, 2019

for the American concentration camp dead

Children know so little
about prayer.
But they have seen
and felt
the devil's breath,
and how very rare it is
for angels to come
down to them
to rescue their bodies
from the devil's work.

Pray for them, won't you?
Even if prayer seems a forgotten tongue,
if supplication is just another word
on Dictionary.com.
Someone, somewhere
Might hear
Come down from on high
To make things right.
To cast out the monsters
That took our prayers away.

Christopher Woods has published a novel, The Dream Patch; a prose collection, Under A Riverbed Sky; and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His photographs can be seen in his gallery. His photography prompt book for writers From Vision To Text is forthcoming from Propertius Press.

SEESAWS AT THE BORDER WALL

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Two architects in the San Francisco Bay area are responsible for the installation over the weekend of the three seesaws that briefly graced a small stretch of the nearly-2,000-mile swath of land where the United States abuts Mexico. . . . Virginia San Fratello,  a professor at San Jose State University who designed the project with fellow architect Ronald Rael, said that the pair had made a conscious choice to combat the heavily charged politics of the border with a simple emotion: the joy of a child’s playground. . . . The seesaws were up for about 30 minutes on Sunday, San Fratello said, on a small stretch of border fence in the Anapra neighborhood of Sunland Park, N.M., about 20 minutes northwest of El Paso. The Washington Post, July 30, 2019

let there be pink
for play
and playground recess
where children are most themselves
let there be pink
people   look
at what make us great
again   look
imagination’s grace
to see grace
even here


Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News as well as in the anthologies The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannnan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker, and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recover for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published by Press 53 in 2015.

THE BIG PICTURE

by Devon Balwit

The destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining. —The New York Times, July 28, 2019. Photo: Deforestation in the Western Amazon region of Brazil.CreditCarl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times

The Amazon is ours, not yours, he says,
as if our fates could remain distinct, as if
his clearcutting didn’t squeeze
the air from our lungs, as if the surf

didn’t tumble trash from all continents
into the same vortex, as if our reefs
could keep their brightness despite vents
elsewhere off-gassing. It’s grief

I feel as he smiles and shakes hands with
his environmental minister. So happy
they seem to defraud the children of both
hemispheres of green. His economy

will rise but briefly before it fails,
as our shared earth sears and pales.


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.

SNAKES IN AMERICA

by Angie Minkin

Two days after he read this poem critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) before the Kern County Board of Supervisors in California, Jose Bello, a father, farm worker, and Bakersfield College student, was arrested by ICE. The ACLU sued. On July 29, 2019, PEN America filed a friend of the court brief urging a federal appeals court in California to immediately release Jose, arrested and detained for publicly reciting a poem. Visit facebook.com/FreeJoseBello for updates.

Snakes slither from deep crevasses
in harsh, gray dust.
The earth splits, shakes, and shakes again.
We lock children in cages,
tossed away like broken birds.
Is this our America?

Our skins shaded
by cloud forests, mountains, deserts.
We kneel in the dark,
seek light beyond clouds,
cry for our babies.
Dear America, what are you afraid of?

Hollow-eyed families abandoned on the streets,
old cans kicked down the road.
Our country in tatters,
our leaders hiss lies.

A poet arrested—
heed the oracle.
Take to the streets, America.
We are in battle for our souls.
                                                                                                                     

Angie Minkin is a writer currently living in San Francisco, CA. A Poetry Editor with Vistas & Byways Review, her work appears or is forthcoming in that journal as well as The Pangolin Review, Oh Mama, Bach in the Afternoon, and These Fragile Lilacs. Angie is inspired by the political landscape, poetry of liberation, and the voice of the wise woman.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2020

by Susan Vespoli





Lines of voters came in throngs, moved swift
in crayon box of skin hues, multi-pack,
to sing and chant, hold hands, cause seismic shift—
a tidal wave to take their country back.

Predictions flopped, the race not close in least,
‘cause Gallup erred, forgot the massive group
who came to speak in global tongue of peace
to rid the world of meanness, fear, and dupe.

When all was tallied, good prevailed. Love won.
Red ball caps flew off heads like birds unchained
and clattered crimson into sky toward sun.
Then buckets fell from clouds: baptismal rain

like water dousing evil witch in Oz.
T***p melted, disappeared, like he never was.


Susan Vespoli writes poems, essays, and dreams about the disappearance of Trump. Her work has been published in spots such as Rattle, Nailed Magazine, MER, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.

HOW LIVING WITH A CHIPMUNK IN MY HOUSE IN WHITE RIVER JUNCTION IS LIKE LIVING WITH T***P IN THE WHITE HOUSE

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

I’m scared. Something from another world
has entered the place I thought was safe.
I am nervous every time I open
a door, feel trepidation turning
corners. I have trouble
going to sleep. I think
about taking sleeping pills
so that I don’t have to think
about the intruder—seeing him
over and over again sitting on his haunches
in front of the refrigerator,
scurrying across the wooden floors,
(lying to news reporters,
his hair fur rustled by wind).
My house seems over-
taken—I walk gently
or at times stomp
with a new anger, a new
sadness, never know
what I will see or hear.
I look down all the time,
not up at the sky or at the art
on the walls of my house
that I love to see. I research
incessantly—how can I get rid of him—
open an outside door,
so eager for him to leave,
I am open for others to enter.
I bought a Have-a-Heart trap,
because I have a heart. I bait him
with things he likes to eat,
wait for the two metal doors to clang,
imagine driving him in the back of my car
to a faraway place where he cannot
ruin a human home. Or maybe
just chuck him & his trap
in the White River, see if they’ll survive
in that water world.
But he’s still here. Somewhere.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.