11.1 / SPRING / SUMMER 2016

It’s the making something smaller, see.  Shrinking it, paring it down.  It’s the less-than symbol disguised as simple adjective, trying to upgrade from coach to compound noun:  Date Rape < Rape. Gay Marriage < Marriage. < It’s the Pinocchio Complex, see.  Not quite as real as Rape, not quite as real as Marriage.

There must be something, I suppose, about a mother—is she a ship, or is that a battle I’m thinking of? We all learned about the Civil War in high school, one of the least civilized times in our history. You decide which. I thought I heard someone say herstory.

This is what I need from you.  I am not asking.

We live north of the docks she says, and gestures to the body (its smallness brushing the world like moth-wings on skin) with her fine-boned hands with her matchstick hands with her darting hummingbird hands but don’t quote me on that let me tell you about that night and all the dancing tranquilizers ransacking the

  after Eric Puchner   I know why you assigned me this poem, and it’s not funny. You might think it’s cute to ask the misfit girl to write about Emily Dickinson, but just because Dickinson writes about doom and gloom, that doesn’t make us kindred spirits.

    Montreux Rotholtz’s poetry collection, Unmark, was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the 2015 Burnside Review Press Book Award. Her poems appear in Prelude, jubilat, The Iowa Review, the PEN Poetry Series, Fence, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

How the land works against us. The border of animals divides your mother’s property horn to horn, breathing through holes in the ice through crusting hooks. This was all I could make from plenty this green velvet hollow eaten in the snow by the glacier’s milky water.

14. Abuela will paddle my hide an angry purple if she finds out. “Where’d you get it?” I twirl the stick in my hand. “Antonio,” he says. That’s his older brother. I fall into his black irises, into a deep Alice in Wonderland hole where everything is upside-down and topsy-turvy and never quite understood.

Ranger’s dad meets Rusty’s mom on the path in the park where the beech tree flexes over the little iron bridge it’s sunny, summer, sweet-grass time much like the day Rusty’s mom’s great grandfather bought at auction a sturdy girl who properly punished and penetrated gave forth a boy who lived to see a hope

AUDIO:         Len Lawson is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with poems appearing or forthcoming in Connotation Press, Mississippi Review, Winter Tangerine Review, pluck!, and elsewhere. He is a Callaloo Fellow and co-founder of the Poets Respond to Race initiative. He teaches writing at Central Carolina Technical College.

I see it already the frost coming toward me from the woods in the woods the trees bend over the river like parasols like nurses there are silver needles in the robins’ nests wild violets floating in the air I’ll breathe the frost then nosebleed into my lap my blood will pool feeling heavy as

from my hair mid-conversation, but certainly after it happened I felt moreso. P giggled—she knows I always provide a good show. I know I am not turning into a tree or a pinecone or anything else I have not already been.

a skull floats up from the pond and makes a sound like a gull shriek to warn me I have stood here too long      when it dies back into the water it leaves silence all around and reedstems   like boiled femurs leaning away      such provocation is needed to pull a man open to expose

[Two black guys walk into a bar.  One is light-skinned, and the other is bi-racial, but his skin is slightly darker.  The difference in hair texture betrays the racial distinction.  The light-skinned one is younger, about twenty-six.  He is wearing a hotel porter’s outfit unbuttoned at the collar.

Someone is defecating on the tiles of a bathroom on the fourth floor of the agency.  Everyone is talking about it.

like a clockwork, i function around the sadness that these ungodly hours are. i possess the stoicism of the metal that makes these hands. i call myself an atheist, i make myself blind to the power in my hands that point at every direction that needs to be addressed.                                                                                                                                                                                                  i am their savior.

I. Make? Dadaist postmoderns would say no. II. The ideal novel skirts around little truths with big words. III. If under a rock is the new Malibu Beach, Darfur is the new acid sky of Venus. Where we are, what can we do for it? IV.

  The blood trickled down. This was the first of many uncomfortable situations he would find himself in over the next few months. “I’m sorry, she apologized.” “It’s ok.” He whispered, searching his nightstand for a tissue, or towel or anything.

What if it would not bear fruit. What if it even would not simply flower. What if rain would only bead as from the feathers of an eider’s back. What if it would not even color from shadow or take light’s warming blanket. How can we then expect to name it or cure it.

What if—with the clean mouth of a woman—I welcomed you. What if the quiet math of who we are—not the calculations, not calculating, I mean—what if it adds up. Divides. On the phone one day I may tell you there are deer in the garden—but where there is a garden there are always deer.

  Insemination #1: We go with donor 4598.  He has good teeth, and mentioned Nietzsche in his personal essay.  Zoe holds my hand while the doctor inserts the catheter.  There’s a scraping feeling.  “Sorry,” the doctor says.  I close my eyes.  Zoe squeezes.

“There was one in particular the soldiers talked about that evening…a girl on La Cruz whom they had raped many times during the course of the afternoon, and through it all…this girl had sung hymns, strange evangelical songs, and she had kept right on singing, too, even after they had done what had to be

    Let’s hear it for the electric moments before the last apartment, winding all the way back past summers stacked on top of each other like lemons in a bowl, to eating crackers under the willow tree, showing you that I could still cartwheel.

Devon Wootten is a faculty member at Whitman College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, LIT, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Octopus, the tiny, Backward City Review, 26 – A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and The California Journal of Poetics.

If it wasn’t going to happen, We were not used to setting out At pains toward an arrival Out of state, past lunch, And her apron lacking a tie. The kitchen would have to be, In spite of the efforts Of Flumesack Fonda, Retiled. In our distaste, We had not planned for this.

He remembers when his Nana took him shopping and let him pick out three GI Joes, and they only cost three dollars each and he could take them home and play and feel like a real American hero, as though there was justice in the world, and he hoped that the existence of a live

  Caroline Catlin is a writer and artist from Lincoln, Vermont. Her work has been published in places such as GERM Magazine, TheEEEL, andHuffington Post. You can find her online at carolinecatlin.

I. When I told my father about my boyfriend and his boy, he screamed at me in some seraph-soaked tongue, his teeth live coals, his mouth a furnace firing Babel bricks, his tongue the fourth man in the furnace, the unbound shadow, like a son of the gods.

  when applying pronouns to chimeras remember that it is just the grotesque amalgamation of parts presented through the eyes of mythology science. nothing applied sticks because reality doesn’t apply to myth. in other words: it some bullshit.

Powerful hypnotists work subtly. He said, “You’re an elegant but understated flamingo. All the ladies in the club want to be you.” Boom, chk, chk. Boom, chk, chk. I’m a bird now. A big bird. After I saw him I bought a new dress on the way home.

“The Uganda Media Council has blocked the screening of the movie, 50 Shades of Grey that was supposed to be premiered in Kampala on Valentine’s Day.” ChimpReports 12 February 2015 1.