Poetry
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Five Poems and Photography by Leslie King
We. The(m) People.
They killin us. Dead.
My Mama is dead.
Killed her, too.
Them CIA drugs.
Them “projects.”
Them homeless shelters.
I am an experiment.
Black life in America is a science project.
Like welfare.
No acres. No mule.
No real liberty.
But plenty-o-methadone
laced with signatures
on bills that act.
Soothe them with
pseudo freedom.
Kill ‘em with
Black claustrophobia.
Black desperation.
Black plagues.
Black plaques
for Corrupt Cop of Year!
Slaughter the best of ’em. -
I Can Usually Beat the Bus Home by Keri Smith
biking from work Sunday night
since they have repaved Myrtle Avenue
while my friend has been dead for two weeks
I pass by the park full of couples
and retired men sitting alone
and I call out to children crossing the street
please be careful, I want to say
please make it home safely, aren’t they beautiful
and my friend has been dead for two weeks
yet everyone has done their job
the busses continue their cross-Brooklyn routes
and I worked through another weekend
I missed the blood moon and the eclipse
and I missed the thunderstorms and the day at the beach
the summer has continued
without my friend, -
“Danger” with Artwork by Sally Doyle
Underneath this room is danger. You can feel it when you walk across thefloor. This evening you feel it as you sit in your small chair reading. But stillyou cannot name it. The other members of your family who are staring attheir phones don’t appear to be concerned at all. You stop reading to listen,and rumination turns into trance. Right at the moment when you are thinking,“Someone has been abandoned,” a woman wearing a surgical mask enters theroom. -
Three Poems by Peter Spagnuolo
Above: “The Repast of the Lion” by Henri Rousseau
Cartographer
The monkeys scold that I lost my way, I’ve gone
mad on the march through you, a hand on the whip—
your impenetrable wild I leave undone,
and tame your jungle waste—but wrecked my ship,
so I must spread you open, with no way back.
My rivals tell I’ve grown too old to play
the boy explorer, yet at that perfumed crack
where wells a secret font of youth, I lay
with my discovery, -
“26 Letters Refuse to Whisper” by Lynne Jensen Lampe with Artwork by Carrie Wilmarth
Above: “UNTITLED,” 2020. Oil on Wood Panel, 9 x 12″
As for saying goodbye, we don’t know how.
Shoulder to shoulder we keep on walking.—Anna Akhmatova
_As for saying goodbye, I know howbut don’t want to surrender to thesechanged lives & cautious moments. COVID-19,death-o-matic, that’s what I call you. A period jabbed into the heart of a sentence.Each day I look out my window & -
An Unobservable Force Will Never Reveal Its Face by Brianna Noll
I thought the invisible
hand of the market
a velvetine fist,
viridian and calculable
like vectors of rain
in a dark winter.
I diagrammed its force
on the bedsheets
when I couldn’t sleep
so it was always
with me—a flutter
of huge wings
that would block
out the sun if they
weren’t so invisible.
I began to listen instead
to the wings of the hand
of the market,
