kingsoftrain

A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet, artist, activist native to Southern California. Dare’s poetry has been featured in Cultural Weekly and elsewhere and is forthcoming in THRUSH and Bending Genres. An alum of John Ashbery Home School Claremont, he is currently working on his first poetry collection.

Twitter: Dare_Williams13
Insta: Rebelwithapen
Facebook: Dare Williams

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When Momma Was a Moth

she would light the home search for small slivers

could split silk warm with a glare electric a body

against the oven would collect dirt find the cracks would

shrink and dim herself for lovers only clean the house

in a way she would arrange for those heading over

to look wealthy and neat would heat the place

with a quickened breath would stay waiting

a loud footstep enters each room turning

the bulbs off one pull chain at a time a…

Erin Wilson‘s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Envoi, Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, On the Seawall, The Honest Ulsterman, The Adirondack Review, Natural Bridge, The Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Her first collection, At Home with Disquiet, is due out in the spring of 2020 with Circling Rivers. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.

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Five

i.

Delightfully, after you tug upon the curled white string
waiting for the prize to be set free from the hilltop
(that you perceive as a mountain),
leaf litter up to your knees,
you hold the tampon out before you
as though you might hypnotize me.
You are five pretending to be seventy,
“Now, just who might drink tea up here?”

Little misunderstood things like this are darling.
You are darling, whose cup runneth over with…

Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eight chapbooks, including She May Be a Saint (Porkbelly Press, 2019), and This is Not a Redemption Story (Dancing Girl Press, 2018.) Her poems and essays have also appeared in Five:2:One Magazine, the Ekphrastic Review, Drunk Monkeys, and FreezeRay.

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After My Mother’s Death, “Mother” and “Death” Become Predictive Text

My mother is
My mother was
My mother is nowhere

She is everywhere
In the predictive text of my tongue, she is

abandonment

My mother’s body is ash in
a blue marble box

I did not see my mother’s soul ascend to heaven
when she died

My mother is without pain now

My mother is gone

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After My Mother’s Death, I Eat at Chipotle

I take a seat in the back. The
lunch time crowd is thinning, and I
wonder if I can eat

grief…

Benjamin Biesek workshopped with the poet Christopher Soto in 2018 and resides in coastal California.

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My Sense of Self Floods the System

Hushed in the rift, the fountainhead of the codices
Obliterated; & generation is kept sideways as if dreamt.
As if imagination could ever manifest daylight, remnants
Of blight linger in complicated days, coma of
Those who asphyxiate: who await time between summers,
Muted chaos, all their violence. The intricate practices & means;
The edges of days, the tumult & unsighted faith in our registers,
Our automobiles, those who tell life wise & sideways
Glances approve-of. In the source ciphers,
In relics caged, some alternative way, try confidence
& Blind yourself with avarice, this day.

My sense of self deluges the system. I consider it,
The barren page or the child who swam away,
To surface the Moon, paint it brilliant in hue,
Enough of this masquerade, this…

Meteorites
poems, S. Brook Corfman
Doublecross Press, 2018

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Perhaps I feared they would vanish, the poems in S. Brook Corfman’s Meteorites.  Or that I would remember them incorrectly.  Or even maybe I feared that I would pretend to lose my memory so as to read them for the first time again, only to misplace the book and be left with my forgetting.  All of the above is also none.  As in, I fail to pinpoint.  As in, location is a failure of becoming.  Here is what I half-know:  reading these poems will stand you up, and rereading these poems will walk you to where they baptize gravity with birdthings.  As one who is so briefly present, and often late to insomnia, I am grateful for the alien commonalities of Corman’s verse as they survive earthly inquiry and require that one be either awake to humanness or be at…

Nude Male with Echo
poems, Darren C Demaree
8th House Publishing, 2019

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When I am mirrored,
I touch the mirror; that is my problem. #55

These entries of retraceable paucity, as they exist in Darren C. Demaree’s Nude Male with Echo, are funny, critical, and curious and may add years to a past life that’s revised its timeline to longer crowd-surf the silent audience. Both a broken actuality and a puzzled baring, the work is a triumph of constant brevity and a sanctuary of purpose for any person who’s closed a circle while knowing their loneliness is up for renewal.

Could it be I am
an apple in the river
& I will never be
eaten? #181

Being naked is not something one can practice, not something one can perfect, but Demaree is a tenderly invisible journalist whose reportage records equally the shy swallowing in a museum…

Sea Above, Sun Below
George Salis
River Boat Books, 2019

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In prose that avoids borrowing by way of returning, author George Salis summons verse from those revivals held by the plotless dead and places flowers on the shared grave of gimmick and novelty while shading the pallbearer’s hushed reverence for those beings who pray on land to those on earth. This work, however, is not niche nor is it pastiche, is not fragment nor is it patchwork, is not replacement nor is it erasure. Says our narrator and says his, to herself: If she is invisible, then none will know her only trick is to disappear. As such, whether allowing influence to create a trapdoor so that said trapdoor can be moved, or allowing beauty to jump rope in a dream might it forget itself as the encoder of sickness, this making of myth as Salis has it clayed…