W.M. Lobko

ANTHEM           

[Negative]

We first suspected you wanted more absence

when an occlusion ended too soon, a blunder

of light, the day’s live origins spreading

into these eagles silhouetted by the sun.

Fiber optics lengthened our reach, but our uncertainty

increased.  How does one lay a foundation?

Toddlers from the plains ran laps around us.

We were in the past: oblivion, billions.  You are the era

of emails from the moon colony which remind us,

after stitching a star in our eye, that we’re captured.

Your nemesis sketches of some stranger keeps us 

quiet, smarting still from being mentioned.

W. M. Lobko’s poems, interviews, & reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Kenyon Review Online, Sixth Finch, Hunger Mountain, & Boston Review. New work is forthcoming in Slice Magazine. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His MFA is from the University of Oregon, & his home is New York City, where work on his poetry manuscript Kin Anthem and his novel The Quick Brown Fox doggedly continues.

Stephen Danos

John Findura

from RITUAL

1.            Echo - Re/echo

The world is white and moving 

Birds play with a twig of millet
I make signals with my fingers
No one understands what I say
This is the way I want it, I get it

2.             Evaluate The Broken Things

Your hands make me dirtier
than I was at the beginning
I do not mind that at all, love
Luck provides me many things:
I have your cleansing mouth

3.             Re/Evaluation of Movement

There has been little, and only
on one side – meaning both
sides, but independent of each
other, yet obviously showing
the causal effect of your words

4.             Re/Evaluation of Motion

One of us is a defective clock
and the other is a boomerang
You think you know which
is which but I have promised
the silent cuckoo I’ll never tell

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, his poetry and criticism appear in journals such asVerse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Stacy Kidd

Oklahoma in Winter

is no place to live

not tonight.

We carry, we name our own.

Pebble

underfoot

bothers

             cold, cold water

and we roll our pants up,

carry the pebble home.

Stacy Kidd’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia, Eleven Eleven, WITNESS, and The Iowa Review, among others. Her chapbooks About Birds and A man in a boat in the summer were released this fall from dancing girl press and Beard of Bees.