3 Champagnes Deep at a Wedding Reception

Kentucky fit like a thrift store sweater,
itchy against my skin, pooling at the wrists.
My eyes always searching for the fire exit,
the soil too dry for my tender seeds.

But I spent that first week with you
lapping up sweet lake air,
amazed at how different Minnesota tasted.

Your mom gave me a necklace,
a golden ring encircling a tree,
and I felt my roots grasp the ground,
growing toward you.

Your dad placed a drunken hand
on my shoulder and said he would only drink
Kentucky bourbon and that you and I
should move to Uptown.

I found a place curved into your collarbone
that I knew would fit smooth against my cheek.
I bought it without trying it on.

I open your bathroom cabinet and find
my mascara right where
I left it.

In a rush down the stairs,
my hand scraped the wooden railing and
I took a piece of you back, buried in my thumb.

The more I sit in airports, the less
it feels like coming home
and more like biding time.

My life is a series of intertwined highways pin-pricked across a map,
memories compressed in a small space between my fingers.
This longing is not to scale.

I find a server carrying another tray of champagne,
and wonder if my bank account could handle another plane ticket.

I cried seeing you in a tux.

By Kristian Porter

Biography:

Kristian Porter is a 23-year-old writer who just moved to Minneapolis from Cincinnati and is still adjusting. By day, she works as a copywriter for a marketing agency. By night, she writes poems about distance, alcohol, and all the places that feel like home. When she’s not writing, she’s probably watching cooking shows with her three cats or wandering aimlessly around a bookstore. She has been previously published by Words Dance Publishing and is currently working on her first poetry collection.

UNITY AND FAITH, PEACE AND PROGRESS?

A nation built on the tenets of
unity and faith, peace and progress,
has been ripped apart by tyranny.
What was white has now become red.
The very spirit of Nigeria is dead.

Trembling in mortal fear amid curfews,
never has being alive been this hard.
Taking to the streets for justice,
seeing the streets become graveyards.
Where is the unity?

Is it a crime to be young and modern?
Go ask the dead boy who drove an SUV.
Those thought to be guardian angels
turned out to be demons incarnate.
Where is the faith?

The rooster’s crow is no more heard,
as shrill gunshots beckon the day.
The protesting voices sang the anthem.
But now, their epitaphs are recited.
Where is the peace?

Sixty ripe years of independence
boiled down to mean little to nothing.
Enslaved by the colonizers, then.
And now, by a ruthless police state.
Where is the progress?

In memory of the victims of the Lekki massacre in Nigeria

By Adrian David

Biography:

Adrian David writes ads by day, and poetry and short fiction by night. His poems explore themes of society, conflict, peace, and everything else in between, from the mundane to the sublime.

Make America Great Again

The house is a shrug with cataract windows.
A wall surrounds it, broken with fears.
Out back there’s someone in a cage.

There’s an attic where a scream abides,
a grandfather clock chock full of secrets.
A mob is coming up the road.

Father Shotgun’s in his rocker.Aunt Shivers glares her hypodermic eyes
at the mourners she sees hiding in the mirror.

Rusted through, the stoveheart of this house.
The television glows in cancer blue,
the floorboards spreading red a stain.

The mother, pock-marked in hate,
sings Amazing Grace so she won’t faint.
Outside, torches chant the night.

The Deputy descends to the cellar,
his flashlight a halo in Hell.
The time has come, there’s no escape…

There’s someone in the doorway taking notes.

By Sean Lause

Biography:

Sean Lause is a professor of English at Rhodes State College in Lima, Ohio. His poems have appeared in The Minnesota Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Beloit Poetry Journal and Illuminations.

Early Morning in Mesquite Flat

Dawn rises hot, casting morning
so bright it sparks sharp
across the sand dunes,
each an excavation of passing night,
cut with the long belly-lines
of snakes hunting the dark.
Under a mesquite tree,
kangaroo-rat tracks meet
a serpent-curve in a thrash
of displaced erosion. Only the snake-line
slices away from the tree’s fine-boned
shadow. Out here, heat is rattlesnake-hungry,
biting against shade and satiation,
eating sky and sand until
they’re just as wanting. In 1931,
a movie crew found a miner’s corpse
near here, halfway between town and water,
compassed toward a spring he never
reached. Over the hill, that dead town
is time-eaten to a train station
and heaps of half-flat tin cans
taking on rust. A façade is all that’s left
of the newspaper building, blue hurting
behind empty windows.
Next-door sleeps the graveyard,
where ghosts of plaster and chicken wire
curve over absent bodies. One holds
the skeleton of a bicycle, head bent,
its paper mâché hollowness
only another kind of weight.

By Emily L. Pate

Biography:

Emily L. Pate is a writer, avid traveler, and collector/over-sharer of bizarre facts. Born and raised in California, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her poetry and travel writing have appeared in Funicular Magazine, Willawaw Journal, and The Northwest Passage, and Blending Magazine. She can be found at emilylpate.com.

all body love

imagine—
hers is a whole world and all body kind of love,
alive no matter what the world does. taking
up space despite what the world wants.
unafraid, authentic: undaunted by judgment.

after death.
beyond this atmosphere, this raw
and decaying earth, you are with her. she
is tinted in you like a soul stain by sheer force
of will and want. you must interrupt the still air
and speak these love truths now and then, form
each sentence from broken breath, and teach
your lips to breathe and speak the same language.

soon, even the worst night dreams will vanish
to cut the night open, spilling out old stars
our hemisphere blocked. these constellations
ordain our fate in pinpricks, spelling new
horoscopes in elegant prose untouched
by this earth and the people in it. more
lifetimes than most to make up for lost time.
still not enough. not nearly enough. still you must

believe—
hers is a whole world and all body kind of love.
at night when you trace the smooth curve
of her hips, when you say you love her,
even mad, and mean it, you will not be a lone
person. more than one. a soul-bond. timeless.

By Sara Boyd

Biography:

Sara Boyd (she/her) is a budding poet interested in exploring the relationship between the material body and the living earth. Her life is split between two polar regions of Appalachia: Tennessee and Pennsylvania. She hopes to understand the nerve-endings of Southern Appalachian identity in her work while finishing the final year of her undergraduate degree at Lehigh University.