A Roof Over Their Heads

By Brian Dunlap

Jorge has reached Mar Vista Park.
The bells attached to his
icebox on wheels announce
the popsicles and ice cream sandwiches,
enticing on a warm
Los Angeles summer day.

Older siblings and parents
chase children
whose giggles and squeals
permeate the jungle gym. Footprints
upon footprints imprinted in the sand.
Where Spanish mingles with
English and Mandarin. Sprinkled
with Arabic and Hindi.

Here, Jorge wanders, slight hunch
to his gate, silent. He only pauses
to state prices in broken English.
Smiles. Only talks to the parents
who speak his native tongue.
Who speak
Spanish.

Jorge sells ice cream for a simple
smile on a child’s face.
He does it to keep worry
and hunger from his sons’ eyes. For his sons
to stay children
a while longer.

As Jorge removes his Stetson
and wipes sweat from his brow
he thinks about tomorrow’s soccer match
between Mexico and Guatemala.
It’s at noon when children start to rush
and dollars finally accumulate in his palm.
But when a young boy runs up
with a soccer ball tucked beneath his arm,
Jorge sees his sons.
Sees them kick the ball
past the goalie’s
diving frame.

Standing beside his icebox
as his sons’ rec league game unfolds.

III

Tomorrow, if Jorge leaves early and departs
when the game ends
he can watch it with his sons
and still provide a place
where they can rest their eyes,
drift off
till light presents another morning.

Brian Dunlap is a native Angeleño who continues to live in Los Ángeles. He is passionate about capturing the L.A. stories that are hidden in plain sight. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fresno State and a BA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside, both in fiction. His work has appeared in Angel City Review, CCM-Entropy, Muse, California Quarterly, Statement Magazine and Dryland. He runs the blog site www.losangelesliterature.wordpress.com, a resource to explore L.A.’s vast literary culture.

Photo credit: Matthew Rutledge via a Creative Commons license.

Market Value

By Yun Wei

Monday markets egg-dropped
in the summer camp race,
and somewhere a global circuit grid
slowed, blinked, shorted.
Where did the treasure go?
I know I could never read this map.

Now at my desk on a Monday night,
drinking from a sweating glass,
I think of summer camps, of gathering scrapes
and grass on knees, of my bike crumbling
on hills when I misplaced gravity,
of how as I grew longer,
the distances became dizzier,
the way the ground shrank from
the constant state of forward,
my body in straight lines
walking through a city without maps,
because falling means crumbling
means dismantling, look
how I’ve learned to mark
every step with vertigo.
No one tells you then
that there’s no such thing as going back.

Yes the Monday markets fell
into a Chinese puddle
of oil, of iron, of copper,
but the only markets I knew
were those of cabbage leaves
crushed under sole,
and sidewalk glue from fish guts
even after they rinsed the street
and closed the stands,
after the woman selling salt-boiled peanuts
shook her barefoot daughter awake
to walk home and I walk home
by my father’s hand:
the only map I knew to read.

Yun Wei received her MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College and a Bachelor’s in International Relations from Georgetown University. Her writing awards include the Geneva Literary Prizes for Fiction and Poetry and the Himan Brown Poetry Fellowship. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in decomP Magazine, Roanoke Review, Apt Magazine, Word Riot, The Brooklyn Review and other journals. For the last few years, she had been working on global health in Switzerland, where she consistently failed at mountain sports. Visit her website at The Pomegranate Way.

Also by Yun Wei: “We the People Who March.”

Photo credit: Gianni Dominici via a Creative Commons license.

‘2017’: The Letter and The Review

By Miranda Outman

2017: The Letter, 1977

Tom,

Terrific to see you out at Montauk. A shame Helen couldn’t make it, but you managed to whip up a nice spread. Diane couldn’t stop talking about that fondue.

At any rate, Tom, I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’ve read through 2017. It’s different, it’s interesting as hell, it pushes the envelope right off the desk. But I can’t sell this one.

Now before I go on, Tom, you’ve got to know I think the world of your work. Hell, the day you stop writing, that’s the day Pan Am stops running those coast-to-coast flights. You’re the businessman’s traveling companion, and I couldn’t be prouder to be working with you.

But, you asked for my feedback, so I’ll tell it to you straight. With this new direction, your readers walk away. And when they walk, they don’t come back.

Thing is, the premise is solid. It’s a departure, sure, having the good ol’ boys in cahoots with the Russians and the longhairs up in arms. But you made it work, Tom, though I don’t know how you did it. The lady candidate, even the Black former president. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but you did. And the details—the toupee, the supermodels, that hulking Nazi with the gin blossoms—it’s a hell of a lot of fun, although I have to confess, I suspect you’ve been smoking something that’s not strictly on the up and up with the law. Not your average reader’s bag, of course, but he’ll forgive you for it.

It’s your president where you go out on a limb, Tom, and that’s where you lose your reader. What you’re saying, in the end, is America voted for this guy. This bloated, failed businessman with the runaway toupee. This fellow who, from your manuscript, wouldn’t know the end of a sentence if it bit him in the keister. Not that, not just America, Tom: You’re saying St. Louis voted for this guy; Phoenix and Raleigh and Dallas Fort Worth. Tom, where the heck do you think your books sell? It’s one thing to flip the script, make the Manchurian Candidate a red-blooded Republican. It’s another thing to lay the blame on the man who buys your books. And bad enough you make your guys the villains. But what you’re saying, and why I’m telling you this: You’re making your guys out to be rubes.

Now I sure hope you don’t just tear this up, Tom, because there’s a heck of a lot of potential in this thing. We’ve all got big ideas, and you know better than anyone, they’re the devil to carry out. So keep your premise, keep the architecture of the story, but give us a president who’s handsome. Give us a guy who knows how to talk, give us someone with taste. A villain we can believe in. How’s that for a slogan? So take a week or so, get a little R&R. If you’ll forgive my saying so, take it a little easy on the drink. Work up another draft and send it my way. Dinner’s on me this time. Sheila can get us a table at a terrific steakhouse uptown. Drop me a line, and we’ll talk.

Rick

2017: The Review, 1987

In the dark days of 1977, the story has it, a master of the American thriller, alcohol-sodden, reeling from a nasty divorce, dashed off a manuscript that “broke all the rules.” The thing proceeded to gather dust in his agent’s filing cabinet for the better part of a decade until Paramount Pictures, with money to burn and a reputation to squander, brought 2017 to a theater near you.

If you find that difficult to believe, well, you don’t have the credulity for five minutes of this thing.

The thing begins reasonably enough. America has elected a Black president, there’s a woman campaigning to succeed him. That the Republican is a Soviet stooge, even that comes off as credible enough. Really, the acting and directing aren’t bad, if you take your popcorn and flee for the exits after the first ten minutes or so.

Because it’s pretty much a spiral to the bowels of Las Vegas from there.

In 2017, by Paramount’s lights, America will elect a seething and bloated mass of real estate chicanery as the leader of the free world, a slovenly rambler with a scotch-taped tie, victim of a most aggressive tanning parlor, topped by a runaway toupee.

Want more? Paramount thinks you do. Enter a cavalcade of Nazis—as in, Nazis with swastikas, whispering sweet nothings in the President’s ear, running roughshod over the silver screen. Subtlety? So 1986.

The unfortunate thing is, the conceit is rather clever. America has won the Cold War (though Paramount never sees fit to let us know how—or, for that matter, to share the apparent cure for AIDS). But wait, the Russians have been manipulating the U.S. electoral system, so look who’s sitting pretty now. We thought we won the Second World War. But the Cabinet is thick with Nazis in 2017. Given the profusion of Confederate flags on set, the outcome of the Civil War, too, is very much in doubt. From the intimations of global warming and a crazed addiction to fossil fuels (yet another half-developed subplot), even the dinosaurs win in the end.

But all that is buried beneath a welter of gold leaf, skimpy dresses, an overdone soundtrack, and a never-ending series of high-speed car chases. 2017 gives us a future drowning in our own worst vices: gilt, powder, and greed. It’s an indictment, with a side of bathroom humor, of everything we’ve become, served hot, beneath a dark cloud of contempt for ordinary Americans and the votes they cast.

There’s still more, if your tastes run to leggy blonds and enough gold leaf to bury Vegas in the desert for once and for all. Stick around long enough, and there’s some genuine, terrifying suspense. By the time the president dismisses the head of the FBI and whispers sweet-nothing nuclear secrets in the Russian foreign minister’s ear, you’ll be on the edge of your seat—if you haven’t stormed away from said seat an hour before. There’s a warplane, there’s the nuclear football, there’s a park ranger turned Secret Service agent turned savior of the Western world, but do you really want to shell out $3.95 to see this thing?

Miranda Outman is a writer and editor in the Boston area.

Photo credit: Dave Bleasdale via a Creative Commons license.

Waste, Land

By Elizabeth Carmichael

Now is the time we find out what we’re made of.
We have felt oil in the air for months but
imagined once the weather turned
we could wash it out—

and so we learn what stains.
Now locked out of the lab we must experiment
on our own conclusions: follow orders,
pull the levers, look away

(or do we jump ourselves?).
What will we become, with no respite
our hearts may turn to Sisyphus,
breaking every day,

only to be repaired again with the same twine.
Now is the time we learn if we face into the wind
or circle around and make our backs
curve into a shell and stay inside.

Stand tall, or disrupt the arrow’s trajectory?

Elizabeth Carmichael refutes biography as a form of identification. She is well-educated, well-read and well-travelled for an American. She was published, not recently, in The Cranbrook Review

“Heart and Arrow” by Scott Gressitt.

40 Strangers 50 Questions

From Brave New Films

On Wednesday, May 24 at 6:30 PM, 40 strangers entered a small photography studio near downtown Los Angeles. On the floor, they found strips of white tape laid out in large boxes. In a few moments, a member of the Brave New Films production team would stand in front of a blue wall facing the 40 strangers and what happened next really surprised us all.

Learn more about Brave New Films.

The Tao that Trump Won’t Hear

By H.L.M. Lee

When I take my younger daughter to school, I see the rush of her first grade friends running to hug each other and share head lice (much to the chagrin of every parent). My daughter’s BFF has a father from England and a mother from Maine. Another girl’s father is Muslim and her mother is— I don’t know. My own two daughters are Chinese-Italian. They have friends who are African-American and Hispanic. One neighborhood boy has a blended family with a mother and two fathers. I am seldom overwhelmed by emotion, but the morning drop-off often makes me choke up. To these children, unconcerned about the larger world around them, all that matters is the joy in shouting about their newest toy or the treat they have for snack time.

Lately, when I sit alone in my office and stare at the computer screen, I find myself choking up for a different reason. I imagine the death of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. In my more cynical moods, I give up and accept a world where, for my girls and girls everywhere, their gender is an insurmountable obstacle to reaching their potential. The sadness strikes me like the loss of a friend and I fight tears, because a man who couldn’t pass the vetting for babysitter has been elected president.

It takes a team of architects, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, decorators and more to build a house, but only one person with a match to burn it down. The Trump administration is making a shambles of democracy, damaging the environment, perverting our humanity and turning from knowledge. He has fired James Comey, Director of the FBI. Whatever you think of Comey, the action of firing the man investigating Trump and those around him should ring every fire alarm in the country.

In this dispiriting time, I have been reading the Tao Te Ching and keeping it on my nightstand. A classic Chinese text of 81 short chapters, it embodies a philosophy of Tao (pronounced “dow”), which has been described as Path or Way, referring to right conduct. This interpretation, however, is only a shadow of Tao’s many layers of meaning, which underlie all we are and all we perceive. The second word Te (pronounced “deh”) is often translated as Virtue, but virtue from following the Tao rather than transitory social rules.

Attributed to Lao-Tzu, who may or may not have been an actual person, and originating about 2,500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching is the basis of Taoism, one of Asia’s major religions, though it mentions no deity.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

—Chapter 1

Tao itself is undefinable—even in the original Chinese as these first lines admit. Yet, the Tao Te Ching with its terse poetry and insight resonates for many across enormous differences in time and culture. For me it is now a needed source of perspective.

Lifted from their metaphysical context, lines from the Tao Te Ching sound like the epigram in a fortune cookie, but Lao Tzu’s advice to Chinese lords is as relevant in the age of Donald Trump as it was 2,500 years ago.

Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.
. . .
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow.

—Chapter 9

Can there be a better summation of Trump’s path? All his life he has crowed about his wealth and status. But creditors repossessed his 281-foot yacht in 1991 and imminent ruin forced him to take a $916 million write-off in 1995. He would have been richer investing his money in the S&P 500 and leaving it alone, instead of developing businesses and buildings. Trump Airlines was a bust. Trump University was a sham. Trump Steaks were greasy and tasteless.

The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.

—Chapter 16

“No drama” Obama’s steadiness during eight years as president contrasts sharply with Trump’s contradictory statements—often in the same sentence. Trump says that unpredictability gives him the advantage in business. Maybe, but it would be catastrophic in governance and we are seeing its harrowing consequences in real time.

Those who boast achieve nothing.
Those who brag will not endure.

—Chapter 24

Trump has the “best words.” He called the Trump Taj Mahal casino the “Eighth Wonder of the World”—before it went bankrupt and cost him real estate, the yacht I have already mentioned, his private plane, and his helicopter. Can anyone trust a man who masqueraded as his own publicist to bray about affairs with celebrities? Unlike the “fine tuned machine” that Trump touted, his White House lurches like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein from one self-inflicted crisis to another.

Easy promises make for little trust.
Taking things lightly results in great difficulty.

—Chapter 63

Trump pandered to supporters by saying he could “make possible every dream you have ever dreamed.” That’s not a campaign promise, that’s a skeevy pickup line. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody… great healthcare,” he vowed, “It will be in a much-simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.” Now that Trumpcare has passed the House—promising, instead, to throw tens of millions off health insurance and eliminate protections for those with pre-existing conditions—will his supporters finally take off their beer goggles and see, by the cold light of morning, who they brought home?

Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

—Chapter 71

Science begins by accepting ignorance then moves toward knowledge. That’s how we learned to launch rockets into space and harness electricity, how we developed the Big Bang theory and quantum mechanics, and why we cook pork. To curtail the study of climate change, Trump seeks to cut funding for NOAA weather satellites, which would hobble the ability to forecast tornadoes and hurricanes, and endanger lives in the process.

Why are the people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
. . .
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.

—Chapter 75

Superficially, these lines support conservative beliefs that people are taxed too much and government regulations are a burden. But the brevity of the Tao Te Ching requires delving beneath the surface. Two chapters later is a more expansive passage:

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give
to those who do not have enough.
Ordinary people act differently.
They take from those who do not have enough to give to those who
already have too much.
Who has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the wise.

—Chapter 77

If people starve, it is from taxation in the broader sense, from the wealthy taking too much as they fight the minimum wage and the social safety net, leaving the 99 percent to work more and more for less and less.

If people rebel, it is from interference with women’s control of their bodies; interference with civil rights and the right to vote; interference with the right to live, love and worship freely. These were the cries from protesters on Boston Common the day after Trump’s inauguration. My family and I were there, shouting with them, an official estimate of 175,000. But a number can’t convey the visceral punch from seeing broad patches of pink, like flowers, spread across the Common. The patches were masses of pussy hats and each flower was a woman, man or child gathered on that brisk, sunny day. I stood in awe, seeing that crowd filling the grounds in common cause.

Every morning I wake at 5:30 and lie quietly, a mundane start but one that prepares me for the day. At breakfast, I listen to the news and steel myself against yet another assault on government and society. The list of what’s at stake is overwhelming, but I find the will to persist in these words, implicitly reminding me that water can wear away stone—if it flows and agitates:

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.

—Chapter 78

H.L.M. Lee is an electronics engineer with a background in English literature. While owning and operating a small high-tech company, he also writes web content and marketing materials, and develops video scripts for a peer reviewed scientific journal. He has recently finished a novel, Bleeding in Babylon, about the Iraq War.

Author’s note: All passages from Tao Te Ching were translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, with Toinette Lippe, Third Vintage Books edition, 2011.

Photo credit: Derek Gavey via a Creative Commons license.

Levels of Knowing and Existence

By Martin H. Levinson

Truth is a liar Trump says,
a smokescreen invented by gay,
black environmentalists who
sneak spics across the border
when the border patrol has its
back turned because they are
busy at work keeping Muslims
out of the country and pledging
allegiance to the flag of the
Divided States of America, and
to the Republics for which it stands,
two nations under Smog, inexplicable,
with liberty and justice for misogynists,
racists and science-deniers who want
to make America great again like it was
before Obamacare, the EPA and the
North’s conquest of the South in
the War Between the States.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

Image credit: U.S. Library of Congress.

Love Letter to Chicago

By Dein Sofley

Cook County Citizens, I’m writing this letter to you on behalf of my friend Dein. She loves you and wants you to love her.

I’ve never been to Chicago, but I’ve heard that it’s windy: a working class city with a heart of gold. Home to Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Muddy Waters, Kanye West, Richard Wright, Chief Keef, Li-Young Lee, Common, Chance the Rapper, Haki Madhubuti and America’s forty-fourth president.

Dein is sorry she left you. Heartbroken. Confused. It took her 2,104 miles—through winking lights and gasoline, by time’s appetite and dismembered memories—to figure out that it wasn’t you she was afraid of; it was her feelings. Lost to be found, she came back to you on Valentine’s Day, her wayward tongue thirsty for the taste of your wounds and the words she has yet to earn. The Centennial Fountain marks the shape of returns.

Her body needs you. The arresting rush of your winds, the roar of your trains, the screams of your ambulances, the murmurs of your lake, the slap of your gun shots, the impatient footfalls, the spasms of car horns, the scent of cumin and skulking lilacs find the humming in her ribs. She’ll abandon sleep to breathe you in. In your noise, a love-in-answer. But how will you hear her?

Her: the class clown, the orphan, the shape shifter, always moving, famished for meaning, looking for ways to be real. A foundling in your sanctuary, she wants to serve your storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed city. Soothe her unrequited ache for home, Chicago, please; put her back together again. You people: your misfit blocks of dark skinned cousins, bushy Slavic uncles, lining waving yentas, the vendors selling StreetWise, the paleta man at 63^rd Street Beach, the kids rolling across the green at Foster, the Army of Moms patrolling Englewood, the polar bears who jump in the lake midwinter, daring death for vigor.

You lent her: Gina Frangello, Megan Steilstra, Kevin Coval, and Joe Meno.

She lent you: her daughter.

Your jazz scabbed streets of tribes: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Polish, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Indian, Pakistani, Swedish, Ukrainian, Israeli, that pull her out at night like an addict unable to name what she seeks through thrumming engines that collide with the babel of languages. Behind the sounds is another sound. And another.

Your long shouts of avenues: candy-colored storefronts, Beijing ducks roasting in windows, nail salons, tattoo parlors, dive bars, bathhouses, used goods, gold coasts, magnificent miles, dry cleaners and good burritos. All no-bullshit propositions that allow her to keep the criminal feeling of sovereignty.

The tavern sign says: “$2 Shot $4 Pints.” The grammar might be wrong, but she gets the message. This joint’s here for a shot and a beer and a six-pack to go because like her, you keep moving.

And you give: public parks, social policy, scholarships, cultural institutions.

And you take: seven hundred and forty-seven homicides last year.

If only she were bulletproof. When fear left and she said “I’ll make my home here.” She adopted a slew of stray cats, gathered her band of banshees, and stayed. She’ll fight for your honor. She’ll scrape away the narrative outliers made to her extinction. No sissies admitted.

Because in your winter mornings when she sees one neighbor shoveling another’s car out of the snow or a woman in hijab helping an old Russian man navigate the slippery sidewalk in route to the bus stop, mornings when the goodness of human beings shine, she feels herself triumphing.

Dein Sofley teaches Syrian refugees English at Albany Park Community Center. She earned her BA from Columbia College Chicago and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction from UC Riverside’s low-residency program, where she also serves as nonfiction editor for The Coachella Review.

Photo credit: “Chicago Through a Cloud” by Roman Boed via a Creative Commons license.

November Ninth

By Mariana Llanos

November ninth, two thousand sixteen—
deception slowly, painfully sinking in.
I open my white French blinds; I look around
the cul-de-sac, the well-kept middle class
homes bounding mine.
I imagine neighbors still sleeping in,
not caring, not concerned what would be next
for some of us.
I wonder if all those times we spoke—
me, in my dark skin and thick accent,
them, in their whiter than pearls whiteness—
they thought this is where I belonged
or if they saw me as a foreigner,
a stranger,
a taker.
“Paranoid, paranoid,” I tell myself.
No. I refuse to think the worst of people,
even in a one hundred percent red state.
My children run in, worried faces;
they can’t believe what happened the night before.
Fear blasts like fire from their eyes.
“You’ll be fine,” I say. “You’re citizens, you’ll be fine.”
“What about you?” asks the oldest.
I sigh. I don’t know the answer, but I tell him,
“I’ll be fine, too.”
When I’m alone,
tears flow, like a child’s, without control.
Confusion plunges deep in my brain.
Fear aches in my stomach. It is hard to breathe.
“I’ll be fine,” I say wiping my tears,
picking myself up from the floor,
like I’ve done so many times before.
But I can’t help thinking about the guy—
the guy in the business suit, years ago,
when I was a waitress at a fancy restaurant—
the guy who walked by my side and whispered,
“Go back to Mexico.”
No one heard, while I stood frozen.
I thought of this guy, and knew
that today, he had won.

Mariana Llanos is a Peruvian-born writer and poet. She has published eight children’s books. Her new work, Luca’s Bridge, is the story of a family who is deported to Mexico; it will be published in the Spring of 2018 by Penny Candy Books. Mariana studied Drama in her native Peru. She lives in Oklahoma with her three children and her husband. Find out more at www.marianallanos.com.

Also by Mariana Llanos: “Resiste / Resist,” a poem and translation.

Photo credit: Peter Stevens via a Creative Commons license.

What She’s Waiting For

By Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Texas. He 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 work has appeared in The Southern Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia and Glimmer Train, among others. View his gallery at Christopher Woods.zenfolio.com.

Violent Citizenship

By Sakeena Amwaaj

Existence stamped onto
flattened prison.
Fluid bloodlines dried
into lines invisible
on land. Lines prick us
without our knowing,
weaving fortunes
weaving curses
upon generations.

Sakeena Amwaaj is a pen name, used because of the political climate in both the United State and the poet’s home country.

Photo credit: perceptions (on & off) via a Creative Commons license.

In the Trump Era, Factory Workers Send Secret Messages

By Amy L. Freeman

resist

Last Thursday, I found that single word scrawled in black Sharpie on the cardboard inside a package of photos I’d ordered. Odd, I thought, turning over the first of my photos.

The pictures were of me with my children, holding signs at the recent Women’s March, smiling and determined amidst a sea of humanity. I glanced again at the word. Was it intended for me? Vendors don’t send secret messages to customers. And photography places aren’t supposed to look at the content of what I’ve ordered, are they?

I lifted the second pile of photos—me with my children at the March for Science, still smiling, still determined, still amidst a sea of humanity—from a second piece of cardboard. There, in the same hand, another word:

persist

Okay.

Got it.

The words were for me. A photography company’s employee whom I’d never meet had probably broken corporate policy in sending them.

Why, though?

When I was in maybe third grade, a teacher assigned our class to create messages in bottles. We were to take glass bottles, decorate them brightly, write our messages on scraps of paper, stuff in the messages in and seal the bottles as cleverly as we could. I used melted wax, rubber cement glue and a top coat of clear nail polish. On a subsequent field trip, we would toss them off a boat and wait to hear back.

Alone in my bedroom, I had written my message. In the quiet of the night, as I pictured the stranger who would find my bottle, the note was more than a school assignment. I looked out my window at the vast darkness, the far-away stars, the scale of the universe dwarfing me. Torn from my heart, my message was a plea to the unknown:

Hear me. Let me know you’re out there, too. I don’t want to be alone.

That stranger would read my message. Without even knowing me, they would care.

Weeks went by, then months. No one ever replied to my message-in-a-bottle and I eventually forgot about the whole exercise.

That is, until I opened the package last week, when I was suddenly again nine. Except that now, I can see what I could not, then: The power of the exercise wasn’t in the anticipation of an answer but rather in the hopefulness of casting my words out to the universe. The act of writing my message, of fantasizing that someone might find it, of knowing someone could find it, was connection enough.

In that spirit, I’m not going to try to find out who sent me the note from the photography place.

Maybe I’m not even supposed to.

I read that employee’s message, and without even knowing them, I care. Today, alone in my study, I’m typing this message. It’s to you.

Hear me. Let me know you’re out there, too. I don’t want to be alone.

Resist. Persist. Connect.

An attorney by training, Amy L. Freeman’s day job is working with people suffering homelessness. By night she writes. Recent works have appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post (featured content), Dogs Today UK and more. Visit her website at www.AmyLFreeman.com and connect on Twitter: @FreemanAmyL.

Photo credit: Carlo Villarica via a Creative Commons license.

You’re Nightly Run Down

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

By C. S. Guppy

Source: The New York Times evening briefings from February 13 – 15, 2017

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container][fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_2″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

Justin Trudeau of
Canada went
smoothly.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
returned home from
weekend golf outing
discussed response
to North Korea’s missile
test in full view
of diners

North Korea claims
its launch shows
the White House sent
mixed signals

On the homefront,
hitting a roadblock
in the quest
inside Trump Tower,
pressing on with
global deals

More harrowing details:
Canisters of chlorine
gas, a banned weapon,
were dumped
Russia, contrary to its
repeated claims, bombed
a major hospital

A California dam’s
Modern goddesses
come to life

The best and worst of
the American College of Physicians
Wait it out

Dairy industry
call on Congress to stop
makers of popular
plant-based alternatives

The 36 Questions
That Lead to Love
our latest
“Committed”
help

The resignation as President
Trump’s national
security adviser
was not entirely honest
—a new cruise missile

Mr. Trump
building relationships
with Arab countries
here
here
here

The police
assassination
found guilty of
murder and
kidnapping
the damaged
Oroville Dam

An influential
science advisory group
lent its support to
India as the
deadliest
in the world

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_2″ layout=”1_2″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

After trying
some
competing theories:
how to keep them
fresh—
Romantic
walk
at the Westminster
Kennel Club Dog Show

Finally,
set sights on
the White House,
nonpolitical

President Trump
could “live with”
a one-state solution;
anger and
bafflement among
Palestinians

Russia denied
repeated
contact with
Trump campaign

The resignation of
Michael T. Flynn,
the leaks from
American intelligence
agencies to the
news media,
a computer,
iOS device,
Android device

Andrew Puzder withdrew
from consideration

Our reporters make
a harrowing choice:
Here’s a guide to your rights

Throughout the
country, independent
bookstores
have taken on a new life
as centers of
resistance

Police in Malaysia
attack North Korea’s leader,
Kim Jong-un
Mr. Kim
has ordered
more
than
300
executions

For the second straight
year, traffic deaths were up

When all eyes were on her
Beyoncé won
at the Grammys

It’s never been
a next-generation

We are
alone
in the universe

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container][fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” enable_mobile=”no” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” margin_top=”” margin_bottom=”” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ spacing=”” center_content=”no” hover_type=”none” link=”” min_height=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”left top” background_repeat=”no-repeat” border_size=”0″ border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” padding=”” dimension_margin=”” animation_type=”” animation_direction=”left” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_offset=”” last=”no”][fusion_text]

[/fusion_text][fusion_text]

C.S. Guppy started out as a high school English teacher. That was so much fun, she decided to become a Sunday school director, then a desktop publisher, then a technical writer, then a graphic designer, then a copyeditor (for Ecotone literary journal), then a server, then a dog walker, then a mom, and most recently, an activist. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2012. Her essays have appeared in The Sun and Alligator Juniper, with one forthcoming in Ruminate magazine. She lives in northern Colorado with her family.

Photo credit: Jeremy Keith via a Creative Commons license.

[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Inaugural Bird Omens

By Annie Connole

inauguration (n.)

1560s, from French inauguration “installation, consecration,” and directly from Late Latin inaugurationem (nominative inauguratio) “consecration,” presumably originally “installment under good omens;” noun of action from past participle stem of inaugurare “take omens from the flight of birds; consecrate of install when omens are favorable,” from in– “on, in” (see in- (2)) + auguare “to act as an augur, predict” (see augur (n.))

“Keep your #eyes to the #skies tomorrow for the #inauguration for the #birds do no tell
#lies on how the #winds of change shall blow.”

– Maja D’Aoust, January 19, 2017

Signals Lost

The baby bird lay still in the sand beneath my gate. Open beak and neck, disproportionately larger than the rest of the tiny body, are stretched out, waiting to be filled.

Rain had been falling all through the final days of the last administration.

This story begins with the memory of hunger, depletion, lack. Signals lost when the landscape, the heart, and the head become waterlogged, and the scent, the sound that will lead home becomes obstructed by extreme weather.

There Will Be Blood

The rain keeps pouring.
In the center of the road, I find two perfect scarlet circles of blood beside a mourning dove with a wounded heart.

A Sacrifice, whispers the bird.
Of peace. Of love. Of messengers.

My heart bleeds next to the dove’s. My truck stalls before I go down the road to buy more paint so I can make a sign to say something about kindness and being awake and alive and powerful.

Prophesy

Why didn’t the coyotes take you?
I hear the story and prophecy.
Tell the village the dove is dead. Cries will be drowned out by the barking dogs.

I wonder, is it a relief to know what lies ahead?
Who will die this year? Will they be my father, mother, brother, lover, or one whose grace I have not yet seen?

Blood of roses disappears with the rain, an erasure of a life and death.

When does the blood of the bird
Become yours?

I do not pretend that this is anything but what it is.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Paces

Across the street lives a woman who is small with grey hair straight and curled under. Her skin is tan and taut. Her eyes, brown. Clothes hang on her bones.

She asks me to come inside. She needs help with her TV, with her doctor’s appointments. Calling her social worker. Figuring out how to get the physical therapy she needs to keep herself from falling over on her cement floor and cracking her head again.

A clear plastic sheet with a butterfly print separates her kitchen from the main room. In a single bed she sleeps there from late afternoon to pre-dawn. Through the butterfly veil, I see an elevated maze of several birdcages fashioned out of chicken wire, each containing one bird. Are they cages or just homes for birds?

Here in this house, I am asking if she has the card with the number of the social worker and I am looking at paperwork on hospital visits. Recommendation: Must wear oxygen mask when home. At all times.

The woman says, They want me to go to a home. But they can’t take me. I have my birds. I can’t go live in a home. What would happen to my birds?

I watch a pretty quail as she paces along the edge of her cube. Unlike the yellow cockatiel and the grey dove next to her, she appears free. Not fully caged. Three walls, not four. Wanting so much to touch ground. To go somewhere.

All the birds that live with the woman are broken in some way. For some, it may be just one wing that cannot fly. So they pace. She is pacing. Staying in motion. Stopping for too long would mean death.

Ancestors Speak

Down the block lives a man who voted for the new president. From across the fence he talks of jobs, global security, the price of everything.
When the man was very young, his mother took him to a Women’s March.
His mother enters. His mother, who has passed onto the other side, visits him as a hummingbird. She told him she would, and does.
The hummingbird flies over his head and back. Then stalls right there at the fence, fluttering in a cool hum in front of him.
Your mother is talking to you, I say.
I know.

A few days later, a woman tells me, our ancestors are always
Here among us, trying to reach us.

Let her in.

The Hen is a Hunter

I am at the neighbor’s farm, watching a baby alpaca dance, when a red hen runs through the stable, stealing something away.

As I watch her streak by, I look close to see what’s in her beak. It is grey. It writhes. A tail? A … mouse?

Yes, the hen will take the mouse and beat it until it is dead and smashed and she will peck at it …

The hen is a hunter? I had forgotten. For some, brutality and survival are one in the same.

Annie Connole, a Montana native, is a communications professional and multidisciplinary artist now based in California. She graduated from The New School with a B.A. in Arts in Context, and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at University of California, Riverside.

Visit her website at www.AnnieConnole.com.

Night Falls Before Morning

By Erica Gerald Mason

On Sunday night I began to read news on my phone,
after an afternoon spent fighting a chest cold
and watching old episodes of
new television shows.
I scanned three headlines with escalating
alarm and concern,
turned the phone off, and returned to the glow
of the larger screen.

Blinking away outrage like a hangover,
I closed my eyes to the world,
as information slipped under my skin.
I turned the phone back on and sought
dear friends at the familiar campsites
of profile pages and news feeds.

Her dog slept in the sun.
He had tacos for lunch.
She said Positive Vibes Only.
He said he never discusses politics.

Am I crazy? I thought.
I typed words of resistance.
But the right ones wouldn’t visit my mind.
Wouldn’t dance across my skin.
I sat in silent frustration for five minutes, ten.

Then:
All of this won’t happen if we don’t let it – I wrote.

I felt Sunday slipping away
as Monday waited outside my door. No more words came.
I turned off the light, placed the phone on the nightstand and
made myself as comfortable as possible in the dark.
Said goodnight and goodbye to
familiar campsites.
I closed my eyes and began to sleep
but I knew I wouldn’t again for a very long time.

Erica Gerald Mason is an author, poet, and speaker living in Acworth, Georgia. Erica writes about creativity, happiness, love, feminism, pop culture and current events. Her work appears in several publications and journals, and she was a featured poet in the 2016 and 2017 Sundance Film Festival Indie Lounge. Her book of poetry, I Am A Telescope: Science Love Poems is available on Kindle and paperback on Amazon. Find her blog and poetry at www.ericageraldmason.com.

Photo credit: Chetan Sarva via a Creative Commons license.

Inaugural Haiku

By Carla Drysdale

Damp Geneva seeps
into our cold feet marching
to protect women.

Stone sky tablet for
black calligraphy of trees
writing history.

The new president
says he’ll get rid of columns
when building new rooms.

The new president
says he’ll protect you from them
and then the rain falls.

The president’s mouth
puckers when he peers at us:
“I love you all now.”

Originally published in What Rough Beast, Indolent Books, 2017.

Carla Drysdale is the author of Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in LIT, The Tower Journal, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, Literary Review of Canada and The Fiddlehead, among other journals. She has work forthcoming in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, to be published by Lost Horse Press. In 2014, she won PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize and was nominated in 2015 for Bettering American Poetry. Born in Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France. Visit her website at www.carladrysdale.com.

Photo credit: Mahmood Salam via a Creative Commons license.

Moscow Mule Recipe

By Neleigh Olson

Ingredients

yellow hair

golden showers

systemic misogyny

an angry base

James Bond villains (Russian)

Twitter account

Directions

First, respond bigly, and I mean in a number one way, a terrific way, with the best words, to the number one tricky to our great nation. DO NOT COMPLETE SENTENCES. Keep one foreign friend under wraps, because you have so many friends it’s incredible, and these are the best, I mean smart, powerful people who. EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! Raise the temperature with coal we’re bringing coal back in big way, let me tell you, then beat the angry base with the idea they’ve been beaten long enough while sitting on a golden throne. TWEET ABOUT THIS. Declare the Russians good friends, tremendous friends. Shake well the foundation of democracy, decency, and international security. SAD! Distract!

Serve lukewarm, in a steady stream while your wife eats strings of diamonds. Pairs well with the most beautiful chocolate bomb cake.

Neleigh Olson is a fiction writer in the University of Kentucky’s MFA in creative writing program.

Photo credit: Kim Alaniz via a Creative Commons license.

Mother

By Noah Leventhal

the desert smells like Mother       stones
sundial their way across the dunes        reeking
of dust and blood and evaporation     a lizard

skitters across the scattered sand
each wretched bump in its thorny skin
a testament drooping brittle grass

reaching up and down with thirst
when the ground shakes when the wind
dies when the heat digs deep below

the seas of crust and dust and age
you know Mother cries her paper
eyes out Mother of blessings says time

is an illusion this is why we rebuild cities
this is why the night markets churn
an ancient air with sugar yeast and charcoal

smoke     beneath the rubble a Mother
sings her children out of memory       the markets
an illusion       the Mothers and their songs

of time     the wind       the stillness of the desert
Mother of capability knows        there are no
blessings       only candles that flicker and winds

still enough to let them       sunsets across the beige
expanse       rare things of beauty       curtains
in the window frames     woven in their likeness

houses return to sand       Mother
of capability doesn’t sing at night       she eats
and sleeps to meet the sun       Mother of sadness

rubs shoulders with Mother of peace Mother
of wickedness trips across Mother of good
will Mother of gentility interrupts Mother

of gaping wounds       Mother of dearth and poverty
gives to Mother of the rich       Mother of sunrise
lies with Mother of the night       Mother of your wishes

warms Mother of your fears       a million little deaths
descend       a future Mother’s mouth       raining upon
the mother                                   of all bombs

Noah Leventhal is a recent graduate of the classics program at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico who currently lives in Los Angeles. As the grandson of a holocaust survivor, he was raised on the poetry of hope and resistance. Even on her deathbed, as other thoughts faded away, his grandmother’s tongue could recite Pushkin with perfect precision. Words stick with us, they become a part of who we are. The way we speak changes the way we think, and the way we think is everything.

Photo credit: Seniju via a Creative Commons license.

Take a Knee

by stephanie roberts

for Colin Kaepernick

Uncle Wade (that stubborn mule), grumbled
“Round them up!”
In what direction? I wondered.
The cane teams of the Caribbean?
or way back
to the cup and knuckle
of Gold Continent and trace origin.
“He’s half white.” I say, spitting cherry seed
against our worn bleached deck
a hard tear dark
hungry for soil’s soft capture.
Tired of the clip of this luxury of bile speech
tainting purple mountain
like the flagrant
spread of fall manure.
I knee down my throat lump of protest
thinking what is more American than that?

stephanie roberts has work featured or forthcoming, this year, in Reunion: The Dallas Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Room Magazine (Canada), Shooter Literary Magazine (UK), Burning House Press (UK), Rat’s Ass Review, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, The Thing Itself, Nano Text an anthology published by Medusas’s Laugh Press (as a contest finalist) and elsewhere. In 2016, she was a top ten finalist in Causeway Lit‘s fall poetry contest, and her work was featured in The New Quarterly, Blue Lyra Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Breakwater Review. She grew up in Brooklyn, NY.

Photo credit: Miyukiutada via a Creative Commons license.

The Kindness of Jolene: a #MakeOurPlanetGreatAgain Parable

By Dan McClenaghan

There’s no telling how the frog got into the lettuce. Hopped up out of an irrigation furrow just prior to harvest is the best guess. What is certain is that he ended up in Jolene Rivard’s salad, a rainbow of raw vegetable matter collected by Jolene herself at the salad bar. She didn’t see him hiding there until three bites in, when she stuck him in the butt with her fork.

This minor harpooning sent the small amphibian into a high hop that arced across the table and terminated in a landing, with a splat, on the top patty of Jolene’s husband Frank’s double cheeseburger, momentarily unbunned for the addition of condiments.

Frank tilted the ketchup bottle back and gazed into the eyes of the frog.

The frog returned his gaze and let out a feeble chirp. The melting cheese had entrapped him.

Jolene looked across the table as the frog struggled to free itself from the orange goop. Her sudden awareness of having possibly eaten some frog slime salad dressing made her stomach churn. She took a deep drink of water to rinse her mouth, then spit it back into her glass, as Frank nodded at the salad bar and said, “They got a crock of these guys up there? Wriggling around next to the radish slices?”

This frogs-in-a-crock image ramped up Jolene’s incipient nausea. She jumped out of the booth and strode, with extreme urgency, to the restroom, while Frank lifted the frog from his burger—strings of cheese stretching from each of its four little feet—and dropped him into Jolene’s water glass.

Jolene returned, pale and shaky, and slid back into her booth, as the waitress approached with the iced tea pitcher.

“Oh shit!” the young woman said upon spying the frog, which was swimming the perimeter of his new home.

“Got him at the salad bar,” said Frank. “Then he jumped onto my burger.” Frank pointed at the frog indentation on the cheese.

“Here, I’ll take him,” said the waitress, reaching for the glass.

“No!” Jolene shouted. She’d waitressed in her younger days, and she was pretty sure that a frog going back to the kitchen was destined for a ride inside the garbage disposal. “Bring us a to-go cup.” she demanded. “We’re taking him.”

Frank knew better than to protest. He drove. Jolene navigated. She told him to go to Guajome Park, to the small lake there. Frank carried the frog to the lake and poured him out of the to-go cup. The frog swam off.

It turns out, he was a she and, upon maturation, she laid eggs. Tadpoles emerged. Hundreds survived to adulthood. And on a warm spring evening they formed a choir, to sing a croaking ode to the kindness of Jolene.

Previously published by Excuse Me, I’m Writing.

___________________________________________________________

Dan McClenaghan writes stuff. He began with his Ruth and Ellis/Clete and Juanita stories in the early 1980s. At the beginning of the new millennium, he started writing reviews of jazz CDs, first at American Reporter, and then (and now) at All About Jazz. He’s tried his hand at novels, without success, although he has been published in a bunch of small presses, most notably the now defunct Wormwood Review. This was in the pre-computer age, when we whomped up stories on typewriters, then rolled down to Kinkos to make copies, which we stuck in manila envelopes, along with a return envelope with return postage attached. Times have changed. Aside from the writing, Dan is married to the lovely Denise. They have three wonderful children and five beautiful grandchildren; and Dan is a two-time winner—1970 and 1971—of the Oceanside Bodysurfing Contest. Kowabunga!

Photo credit: Marc Dalmulder via a Creative Commons license.